缅北禁地

Excellencies, 
Distinguished Colleagues,  

I thank the Chairperson-Rapporteur of the Social Forum for the kind invitation to address this important Forum.

The financing for development is indeed a critical enabler for the most vulnerable countries - the LDCs, LLDCs, and SIDS to achieve the 2030 Agenda and SDGs, and uphold human rights for all. 

These countries are grappling with the lingering impacts of the pandemic, further compounded by a worsening climate crisis and global financial instability.  

The upcoming Fourth Financing for Development Conference – FFD4 - offers a unique opportunity to move beyond the discourse of meeting ODA commitments and ensuring that bilateral donors and multilateral financial institutions meet environmental and social safeguards. It is an opportunity to address structural inequalities and tackle root causes that hinder sustainable development.

I wish to share four key points to get the best out of FFD4 and other upcoming global Conferences, such as the WSSD, for advancing human rights and development.

A first, and perhaps an overarching issue, is the urgency to tackle debt sustainability and reform of the international financial architecture.  

Crippling debt burdens – reaching up to 70% of GDP in some cases – divert essential public funds away from health, education and other critical SDGs.

FFD4 must chart a course towards a sustainable solution, addressing the underlying architecture that has contributed to this situation in the first place.

Building on the progress made in the Pact for the Future, FFD4 will afford a further opportunity to catalyse significant reforms in the global financial system.

Secondly, the scale and magnitude of investments required to achieve the SDGs in the most vulnerable countries far exceeds what public resources alone can provide.

FFD4 provides an opportunity to create enabling conditions for the private sector to mobilize investments, both domestically and internationally.

We must address factors that hinder investments: high perceived risks, small project size, high overhead costs, lack of data, underdeveloped markets, and weak infrastructure.

It is also imperative to protect against human rights abuses by third parties, including businesses, and promote corporate responsibility to respect human rights, through policy commitment, due diligence, and remediation and redress.

Thirdly, the most vulnerable countries are suffering rising loss of lives and livelihoods from climate-related disasters, diverting development funding for emergency response and reconstruction.  

Climate finance must be scaled up rapidly, with improved accessibility.

The upcoming COP29 – the finance COP – must deliver an ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), ensuring concessionality, direct access where possible, and minimum allocation floors, while fully operationalizing the Loss and Damage Fund.

Finally, the Doha Programme of Action for the LDCs, the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS, and the Gaborone Programme of Action for the LLDCs, to be adopted at LLDC3 this December, represent renewed partnerships between these vulnerable groups and their development partners to address their specific challenges.  

These Progammes of Action support the realization of human rights to food, health, a clean environment and resilience against climate impacts, and other fundamental rights, upholding the principle of international cooperation, and have dedicated priority areas on the means of implementation.  

Human rights are an important part of all three Programmes of Action - mentioned 33 times in one of them, while “the right to development” is explicitly mentioned in two.

Urgent implementation of these Programmes of Action will simultaneously help the most vulnerable countries address their structural impediments, achieve the SDGs and uphold human rights.

I am confident that the deliberations over the next two days will generate important momentum towards an ambitious FFD4 next year and contribute to the advancement of sustainable development and human rights for all. 

I thank you.