UNITED NATIONS - WORLD leaders start a week of meetings on Monday facing a global financial crisis which could seriously hurt UN efforts to generate billions of dollars to help fight poverty, especially in Africa.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said last week he was deeply concerned that the current economic slowdown and turmoil on Wall Street could have a 'very serious negative impact' on the ability of rich nations to help achieve UN goals to improve the lives of the world's poorest who live on less than US$1 (S$1.42) a day.

Before the US financial meltdown rippled around the globe, Mr Ban asked world leaders to arrive a day early for the annual ministerial meeting of the UN General Assembly to focus on Africa's development needs - and to interrupt their speech-making on Thursday to make new commitments to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals.

'We are experiencing a development emergency,' Mr Ban said in an AP interview. 'This is one of the triple crises that I have termed - climate change, development emergency, and global food crisis.'

'This week, with the help of all world leaders, I would like to really mobilise necessary resources and galvanise political will to as high as possible as I can,' he said.

The leaders are arriving in New York as the US Congress starts debate on a US$700 billion proposal to buy a mountain of bad mortgage debt in an effort to revive US credit markets. Whether world leaders are prepared to make fresh commitments to help the poor remains to be seen.

The week-long meetings begin Monday with a high-level session on African development which 106 of the 192 UN member states have signed up to attend - including 34 heads of state and 11 heads of government.

Undersecretary-General Cheick Sidi Diarra, Mr Ban's special adviser on Africa, said he was concerned about the world economy's downturn - but he still expected developed countries to keep their promises of increased aid.

At a summit in Scotland in 2005, the major industrialised powers agreed to increase yearly aid to developing countries by US$50 billion by 2010 compared to 2004, and to channel US$25 billion of the increase to Africa.

But Ban said in a recent report that rich donor nations have failed to deliver on their promises and must increase aid by US$18 billion a year - and of that, US$7.3 billion would have to go to Africa.

There is also serious concern that international assistance to help the badly struggling Palestinian economy is in jeopardy.

The main donors are scheduled to meet Monday morning on the sidelines of the Africa session, and ahead of that meeting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a tete-a-tete with Mr Ban on Sunday afternoon and then with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

The General Assembly's annual ministerial meeting opens on Tuesday with speeches by Mr Ban, US President George W. Bush, making his last appearance before the world body, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, also representing the European Union.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - whose nuclear program will be discussed on the sidelines of the session - is scheduled to speak on Tuesday afternoon along with Sudan's Vice President Ali Osman Taha.

Mr Ban met Sunday with African Union chief Jean Ping to discuss the slow deployment of the 26,000-strong UN-AU force in Sudan's conflict-wracked western Darfur region.

Mr Ping has urged the UN Security Council to discuss freezing the International Criminal Court's prosecution of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir for genocide and crimes against humanity related to the violence in Darfur - an issue certain to be a hot topic of discussion in UN corridors.

Mr Diarra, Mr Ban's special adviser on Africa, said that while most of Africa's economies are now growing more rapidly than they did a decade ago, the continent remains 'off track' to achieve the UN goals.

They include cutting extreme poverty by half, ensuring universal primary education, and halting the HIV/Aids pandemic, all by 2015.

A new report from the secretary-general said a number of countries have made notable progress on some goals - but not a single African country is likely to achieve all the goals by the target date.

According to the report, two-fifths of Africa's population still live on less than US$1 a day, the continent has 12 per cent of the world's population but accounts for just 1 per cent of global gross domestic product, and its volume of external trade represents just 2 per cent of global trade.

Mr Diarra backed a proposal by World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick to have sovereign wealth funds - huge pools of capital controlled by governments - invest one per cent of their resources in Africa.

With almost US$3 trillion in these funds, Africa would get US$30 billion to promote growth.

'That's very important,' Mr Diarra said last week. 'It's a source of mobilising resources in order to meet the resource gaps of the continent.'

But whether governments, mainly in the Middle East and Asia, who control those funds see Africa as a good investment also remains to be seen. -- AP