President Granger attends financing conference in Ethiopia — to support implementation of post-2015 Development Agenda
PRESIDENT David Granger will be attending the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The conference themed ‘Time for Global Action’, begins on Monday and ends on Thursday.
President Granger left Guyana yesterday and he will be accompanied by Guyana’s Permanent Representative to the Unites Nations, Ambassador George Talbot and Guyana’s Ambassador to Suriname, Ambassador Keith George.
Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo has been sworn in and will carry out the functions of President of Guyana, in Mr Granger’s absence.
The Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Ethiopia gathers high-level political representatives, including Heads of State and Government, and Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs and Development Cooperation, as well as all relevant institutional stakeholders, non-governmental organisations and business-sector entities.
It will result in an inter-governmentally negotiated and agreed outcome, which should constitute an important contribution to and support the implementation of the post-2015 Development Agenda.
According to the United Nations, in resolution 68/204 of December 20, 2013, on “Follow-up to the International Conference on Financing for Development,” the General Assembly decided “to convene, in 2015 or 2016, a Third International Conference on financing for development.”
COMPREHENSIVE AGENDA
The conference will have a comprehensive agenda “to assess the progress made in the implementation of the Monterrey Consensus and the Doha Declaration on Financing for Development, reinvigorate and strengthen the financing for development follow-up process, identify obstacles and constraints encountered in the achievement of the goals and objectives agreed therein, as well as actions and initiatives to overcome these constraints, and to address new and emerging issues, including in the context of the recent multilateral efforts to promote international development cooperation, and taking into account the current evolving development – cooperation landscape, the inter-relationship of all sources of development finance, the synergies between financing objectives across the three dimensions of sustainable development, as well as the need to support the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015.”
The United Nations said in the same resolution, the General Assembly requested the President of the General Assembly “to convene, as soon as possible, inclusive and transparent inter-governmental consultations, with the participation of the major institutional stakeholders involved in the financing for development process, as appropriate, on all issues related to the conference, including the date, format, organisation and scope,” and requested the Financing for Development Office of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the Secretariat to provide secretariat support for the consultations.
CO-FACILITATORS
By a letter of January 31, 2014 addressed to all member states, the President of the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly, John W. Ashe, appointed George Wilfred Talbot, Permanent Representative of Guyana, and Geir O. Pedersen, Permanent Representative of Norway, as co-facilitators to lead the inter-governmental consultations on his behalf.
A total of 10 informal meetings, held during the period from March 10 to June 5, 2014, resulted in the agreement among delegations on a draft resolution on key issues related to the modalities of the conference and its preparatory process.
The World Bank has reported that Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) signalled plans to extend more than US$400 billion in financing over the next three years and vowed to work more closely with private and public-sector partners to help mobilise the resources needed to meet the historic challenge of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The institutions – the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank Group (referred to as the MDBs), and the International Monetary Fund – had announced their plans in the lead-up to the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa.
According to the World Bank, the SDGs are ambitious and demand equal ambition in using the “billions” of dollars in current flows of official development assistance (ODA) and all available resources to attract, leverage and mobilise “trillions” in investments of all kinds – public and private, national and global.
ODA, estimated at US$135 billion a year, provides a fundamental source of financing, especially in the poorest and most fragile countries. But more is needed.
The bank says investment needs in infrastructure alone reach up to US$1.5 trillion a year in emerging and developing countries.
