Broadcasters across the Asia-Pacific region and around the world are being offered satellite interview opportunities via AsiaSat 4 with World Bank president James Wolfensohn, UNDP administrator Mark Malloch Brown, Asian Development Bank vice president Geert van der Linden, UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot and others.

"This is a conference on how to take successful programmes and scale them up; how to enable poor people to be the central force for change and not an object of charity; and how to manage programmes and policies over time to achieve results that truly make a difference in people's life," says the World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn.

Co-organised by the Government of the People's Republic of China and the World Bank, the Shanghai Poverty Reduction Conference will be structured as a dialogue in which key decision-makers will share their insights on what has worked, what has not, and why, within various economic, social, and institutional contexts as they defined goals, designed programs, experimented and learned during implementation.

"By actively giving access and participation in this international conference we are ensuring regional and national participation to a very important global dialogue," said ABU secretary-general David Astley. He added "Our objective here is to make international news as accessible on local, national and regional television and radio as it is through the international news carriers, and to make such knowledge and information more accessible to local audiences."

Among the six hundred participants invited to attend, more than 500 represents international and local registrants, representatives of governments, civil society groups, U.N. agencies, multilateral development institutions, bilateral aid agencies, and regional development banks.

"We are very pleased to work with both the ABU and SARFT on this project. The high-powered region-wide C-band footprint of AsiaSat 4 facilitates the dissemination of regional news and events to audiences around the region and beyond. We are honoured to play a role in the global dialogue on poverty reduction," said Sabrina Cubbon, general manager marketing of AsiaSat.

By providing interview opportunities and access to information generating from the global conference, the ABU and AsiaSat seek to increase regional participation in the global economic development dialogue.

This first-time collaboration between the ABU and the development organisations in reaching local and national broadcasters attempts to address information access issues for countries generally unable to participate in such events, adds the release.