UNITED NATIONS — President Obama on Sunday committed the U.S. to a new blueprint to eliminate poverty and hunger around the world, telling a global summit that a sweeping new development agenda is “not charity but instead is one of the smartest investments we can make in our own future.”

It was the first of two addresses Obama is making at the United Nations. His second on Monday morning, to the annual U.N. General Assembly of world leaders, will be a broader examination of world issues, especially the ever-more complicated conflict in Syria and the related refugee crisis.

Obama offered a powerful defense of a 15-year development agenda that will require trillions of dollars of effort from countries, companies and civil society.

He told delegates that 800 million men, women and children scrape by on less than $1.25 a day and that billions of people are at risk of dying from preventable diseases. He called it a “moral outrage” that many children are just one mosquito bite away from death.

And, with a possible nod toward his address on Monday, he noted that “military interventions might have been avoided over the years” if countries had spent more time, money and effort on caring for their own people. That line drew applause.