Social Summit Ten Years Later

The Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action adopted in 1995 at the World Summit for Social Development marked a defining moment in how the world addressed the key challenge of building "a society for all". The era of globalization was will under way, yet its benefits were bypassing many, of whom more than a billion were living in extreme poverty and hundreds of millions were unemployed. A growing number of societies were experiencing deepening social fault lines, with the gap between the rich and the poor widening. To address these challenges, Copenhagen sought, at the most fundamental level, to make development more people-centred. In doing so, it triggered a significant shift in the way world leaders thought about the social ills of the day and their costs to human security in the broadest sense.