UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon highlighted the essential role of South-South cooperation in accelerating achievement of development goals.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday highlighted the essential role of South-South cooperation in accelerating achievement of development goals and called on developing countries to further make efforts to boost wealth and knowledge.
“South-South cooperation offers real, concrete solutions to common development challenges,” Ban Ki-moon said in his message to mark the United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation Thursday, Xinhua reported.
“Sharing best practices, funding pilot projects in far-flung locales, providing the capital to scale-up successful projects, supplying regional public goods, developing and adapting appropriate technologies — these are the opportunities that the international community needs to better leverage,” he said.
The UN chief pointed out that South-South cooperation was particularly important as the world approached the 2015 deadline of the eight anti-poverty targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Agreed upon by world leaders at a UN summit in 2000, the MDGs set specific targets on poverty alleviation, education, gender equality, child and maternal health, environmental stability, HIV/AIDS and malaria reduction, and a global partnership for development.
In many developing countries incomes are up, poverty is declining and hope is rising, said Ban Ki-moon citing examples of some developing countries that are turning to each other for lessons on innovative policies and schemes to address pressing development challenges.
“China’s emphasis on infrastructure development in other developing countries has resulted in improvements in electricity supply, an increase in railway connections and reduced prices for telecommunications services,” he said.
In spite of the progress, the UN secretary general noted that there are still 1.2 billion people living in conditions of extreme poverty, and stressed the importance of defining a post-2015 agenda that will galvanize development efforts in the years and decades ahead.
“As that agenda takes shape, the international community is already united around the idea that South-South cooperation should remain an integral part of the global partnership for development,” he said.
On the occasion of observing the UN Day, “I call on all partners to redouble their efforts to harness the wealth of knowledge, expertise and development thinking in the Global South, ” the UN chief added.
-IANS
