With efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals focused on the target date of 2015, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announces the appointment of Graça Machel and 25 other civil society, private sector and government leaders as members of a new high-level panel tasked with outlining a vision of the post-2015 global development agenda.

Graça Machel has been appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to a panel that will advise on the global development agenda beyond the 2015 target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The 26-member panel is co-chaired by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Indonesia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Sierra Leone and David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It will hold its first meeting in September during the UN General Assembly, and is expected to submit a report to the Secretary-General by June 2013.

“I have asked my High-level Panel to prepare a bold yet practical development vision to present to Member States next year” Ban Ki-moon said in a press release yesterday.

The panel will collaborate closely with the working group tasked by the Rio+20 conference to design Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“It is essential that the processes on SDGs and the post-2015 development agenda are coherent with each other, ” Ban said yesterday in a briefing to the General Assembly. “This will enable Member States to define a single global development framework with sustainable development at its core.”

At Rio+20, The Elders welcomed provisions for the drafting of global Sustainable Development Goals. They hope that this new tool will help galvanise efforts to grow economies in ways that tackle poverty and inequality while protecting the environment.