Speaking in the Human-centered Development and the MDGs conference, she added that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been very active in meeting its own development goals through the 25 Year Perspective Plan and the five-year development planning frameworks, which also target MDG type indicators. She stated that many of these indicators for Iran are now well on track. She stressed that Iran’s absolute poverty levels are extremely low and around the 1% figure, and that child and maternal mortality rates have fallen significantly over the last few decades. Ms. Vidal further said, 'The latter indicates the pro-active social development policies and resource allocations over a long period of time in Iran – and the international community well appreciates this.'

Referring to the challenges, she cited environmental standards, urban development, access to cheap health services and perhaps HIV-AIDS progress as hurdles ahead; however, she stated that she believed these are resolvable in the Iranian policy context.

The UN Resident Coordinator said that the concepts and values of the Millennium Declarations is a statement of rights and policy intentions, and that the MDG’s are its framework of public action. She listed strengthening economic growth, quality investment, creating job opportunities for increasing incomes, ensuring the economic growth rate through job-rich policies, sustained spendings on social services and basic social infrastructure, strengthening social protection, reducing persistent gender gaps, ensuring financial inclusion and improving macro-level planning and coherence, better inter-sector coordination, more effective decentralization, strengthening of regulations and operating procedures, the generation of better data,  raising of standards and quality, and also increasing accountability and participation as the most important factors in addressing the challenges ahead.

Ms. Vidal underlined, 'Fortunately, Iran seems well capable of undertaking the above requirements and meeting the programming and resource allocation conditions that can ensure MDG type outcomes.'

In conclusion, Ms. Vidal said that she was delighted to realise that the Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences was critically involved in improving the health and social outcomes of this nation and wished the Academy the best of success in achieving its goals and in contributing towards development and MDG type outcomes.