I thank you Madam President for giving me the floor.
I also thank Mr. Segone and Madame Keita for their presentations.
We highly value the role of south-south and triangular cooperation as a driver of sustainable development. We welcome the report of the UNFPA’s Evaluation office as well as the management response on its approach to South-South and Triangular cooperation.
Based on the presentations, I would have some specific comments and questions:
First, we are happy to see that the evaluation report recommended UNFPA to establish centers of excellence on South-South and Triangular cooperation. And the management response accepts this recommendation. Bangladesh supports this idea. We wish to see effective contributions of such centers of excellence to UNFPA’s work. For that, it will be critically important to transfer required technologies and expertise from the global north to global south. We need to also leverage on the wide knowledge and networking within the broader UNDS family. How does the UNFPA plan to enhance the cooperation between the global north and the south for effective technology transfer? And how can the existing mechanisms like UN technology bank for the LDCs could be utilized for this purpose? How do we encourage private sector to join this important initiative?
Second, the current pandemic has upended lives and livelihoods everywhere. Despite such challenges, many of the countries in the global south have done quite well to fulfill the mandates of UNFPA as compared to their counterparts. How does UNFPA plan to share the good practices and the lessons learnt during this pandemic to enhance crisis preparedness and response capacities among countries in the global south? And how those lessons can be better integrated in the next strategic plan of the UNFPA?
I thank you Madam President. And once again I thank the entire UNFPA team.