缅北禁地

Text as delivered*

First of all, I would like to thank Madame Duarte, the Under Secretary-General Special Advisor for Africa, by convening this Africa Dialogue Series. She is fulfilling on of the key role of her office, which is advocacy. And the advocacy today, carry the message that yesterday Africa has been left behind, today, Africa is still left behind.

If we are not careful, tomorrow, by this digital era, amidst the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Africa will be left behind, will be again be a continent of despair as we were during the 80th year. But fortunately, Madame Duarte and other participants are saying, that there is a way and that way is through education, STEM education.

If we follow STEM education in Africa, then we will close the gap and we will move our continent away from the top. This is the essence of the message. Promoting STEM education and enhancing Science, Technology, and Innovation capacity is a crucial ways for changing and for authorizing Africa to move away and be really global player. Furthermore, major policy refund scale up investment must be implemented to fully harness Science, Technology potential to structural transformation of our continent.

Enhancing the resilience and effectiveness of national education and promoting human capital development is a cornerstone to building a solid foundation for African-led and own development processes that align with the continent's population priorities. This is essential thing to do. Let me recall to underscore how vital from now is to creating decent jobs and to tackling inequalities including income inequality that 2050 will be one of the big problems we have to face.

African countries must scale up investment in education infrastructure, including improve educational facilities, and facilitation the training of millions teachers. We must also bridge the digital divide. Excellencies, we must seize the opportunities offered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Africa, we must insure that our educational curricula and human capital developement strategies are all contextualize and focus on levering innovation and technology advance to boost productivity, manufacturing, value addition, economic diversification, and structural transformation.

This is key, how we must see the momentum creating by the establishment by the African Continental Free Trade to create more decent jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector. The free flow of goods and services offers massive opportunities for promoting economies of scale and regional values. This will help create and enable an environment for sustainability including industrialization, investment, and also entrepreneurship.

Excellencies, let me first emphasize that our esteem African leaders, that we have listen this afternoon, they know the value of education and we hope that at the national level they will continue to channel resources through the education. This is the key. Second, the US systeme always possess all the necessary ways, in term of advocacy, in term of mobilizing ressources in order to help Africa to implement Agenda 2063. Above all, we have also the young people in Africa, we also have our diaspora. This the time for them to come back to the continent, fully, in order to bring back what they have as experience, knowledge, and know-how during their stay in others parts of the word.

What we need now is people not working for Africa but people who work with Africa. What we need now is not anymore Think Tanks and not thinking on the table, what we need is to stand, let them bring tools from the tank, and let us simply move, fastly, gradually to make our continent what the founding fathers of the Africa Union have said in the agenda 2063, a driving force in the world toward the horizon 2063. These are the remarks I want to make again. I commend Madame Duarte for offering this possibility. I hope that after taking her office has an outcome, advocating the all priority of Africa and to making her office an authoritative source of key advice to Africa's citizens and systems.

One day when she invited us here we should simply use tools tanks and encouraged her to look at those tools tanks as way as during the meeting we used all the tools. No more talking but more acting. Thank you.

*This text is an AI-generated transcript of the statement, which was obtained from an archived video recording of the event. It is not an official text of the statement.