About 140 world leaders on Monday kicked off a three-day high-level meeting here to accelerate the implementation of UN anti-poverty goals, or the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

By "adopting the most ambitious program ever launched to combat poverty, we demonstrated that all the peoples of the United Nations form a single community and no one had the right to remain indifferent to the abject poverty and suffering of others," Joseph Deiss, the president of the 65th General Assembly (GA) session, said at the opening of the high-level meeting.

The high-level meeting is being held to take stock of the progress so far towards the MDGs, including slashing poverty, combating disease, fighting hunger, protecting environment and boosting education, and to determine what else needs to be done to reach the goals by 2015.

With just five years to go before the deadline for achieving the MDGs, the leaders will discuss how and where they can do more in the remaining period to defeat poverty, reduce hunger, stop environmental degradation, improve education, boost maternal and child health and reach the other remaining targets.

The MDGs, endorsed by world leaders in September 2000, set out eight targets which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015.

"We must achieve the Millennium Development Goals. We want to achieve them. And we can achieve them," Deiss said.

"Eight goals, 15 years to achieve them: one of the merits of the Millennium Development Goals is that a clear program was established, with targets and deadline," he said.

"We must do it. We want to do it. And we can do it," the GA president said. "We do not have the right to fail. The eyes of the world are upon us, let us not disappoint them."

Also addressing the opening of the high-level meeting, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also voiced his confidence that the MDGs are achievable.

"Despite the obstacles, despite the scepticism, despite the fast-approaching deadline of 2015, the Millennium Development Goals are achievable," Ban said, calling upon world leaders attending the high-level gathering to turn what he dubbed "a blueprint for ending extreme poverty" into reality by providing necessary investment, aid and political will to help the most vulnerable.

"Ten years have passed since the adoption of the Millennium Declaration and the historical commitment to cut extreme poverty by half through the implementation of eight measurable and time-bound goals: the Millennium Development Goals,"Ban wrote in a report earlier this year. "This vision and those measures remain relevant today."

Ban said one of the keys to success was "making the smart investments in infrastructure, small farmers, social services... and above all in women and girls."

On Wednesday, Ban is expected to unveil a global strategy for improving the health of women and children, with study after study indicating that a boost in this area will have an enormous multiplier effect across all the MDGs.

"There is more to do for the mother who watches her children go to bed hungry -- a scandal played out a billion times each and every night. There is more to do for the young girl weighed down with wood or water when instead she should be in school," Ban said. "And more to do for the worker far from home in a city slum, watching jobs and remittances disappear amid global recession."