Invitation represents a coup for the prime minister who has stuck to the government's commitment to increase overseas aid
David Cameron has been asked by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to chair a new UN committee tasked with establishing a new set of UN millennium development goals to follow the present goals, which expire in 2015.
The invitation, accepted by the prime minister, represents a political coup for Cameron, who has stuck to the government's commitment to increase overseas aid to 0.7% of UK GDP, despite the recession.
Cameron's agreement makes certain that he will resist any rightwing efforts to cut UK aid, but it may also mean a significant reshaping of the millennium development goals.
The goals decide the international targets of global aid channelled bilaterally and multilaterally through organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF.
The current eight goals range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/Aids and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015. Many will be missed.
They were agreed by a UN conference in New York in 2000 and have formed the basis for galvanising and directing all international aid since that date, with follow-up conferences every five years.
It is likely that Cameron will try to rethink the basis of the new goals and will draw on contemporary thinking about the best way to improve development. The prime minister and his experienced international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, have wanted to shift the debate towards economic development, rather than providing funds to help the education of women and children.
The UK is also more likely to want to reintroduce concepts such as conditionality on aid, as well as to emphasise the role of the private sector in helping development.
A government source said: "We want to refocus the goals to put economic development at the heart. The current goals focus on kids' right to education, levels of infant mortality and so on. They are fine, but does an exclusive emphasis on them really help development? What about new goals to give people property rights or economic rights?
"Andrew Mitchell thinks there needs to be a better debate about what drives development, and that economic factors need to be given much greater weight than they are right now in the current millennium development goals.
"It's economic development, not aid, that is the reason 700 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China."
Mitchell recently explained that he had set up a "private sector department in the Department for International Development as the crack SAS troops who will help put private sector development and engagement with private enterprise at the heart of everything we do".
Ministers are also eager to see if aid should be more dependent on issues such as progress on human rights, free press and equal treatment of gay people.
Ministers are likely to want to talk to aid sceptics such as Bill Easterly, the American economist and author of the Elusive Quest for Growth.