WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM TEAMS UP WITH UN TO NAIL DOWN PRIVATE SECTOR SOLUTIONS TO DEVELOPMENT

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM TEAMS UP WITH UN TO NAIL DOWN

PRIVATE SECTOR SOLUTIONS TO DEVELOPMENT

NEW YORK, 10 May (UN Department of Public Information) -- The non-profit that organizes the famed global policy forums in Davos signed a memorandum of understanding today with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, on a joint effort to define policies that will maximize business contributions to development and the fight against poverty.

The one-year project will take advantage of synergies prevailing at the 2002 global summit on financing for development in Monterrey, Mexico, and the resulting Monterrey Consensus.  The “FfD” process was built not only on North-South dialogue on bedrock policy issues, but as well on collaboration between governments, finance and development institutions, the private sector, academics, advocates and popular organizations.

“The World Economic Forum is a skilled and respected organization with as much experience or more than anyone else in bringing business people into fruitful dialogue and collaboration with governments and intellectual leaders”, Oscar de Rojas, head of the United Nations’ FfD Office, told government representatives from all regions of the world at a briefing today at United Nations Headquarters in New York.  “We are looking forward to enlisting their aid in helping the UN to bring to the fore new or improved policy responses to some of the main development challenges and bottlenecks laid out in the Monterrey Consensus.”

The memorandum was signed this morning by Jose Antonio Ocampo, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, and Richard Samans, the World Economic Forum’s Managing Director of the Global Institute for Partnership and Governance.

Analysis of two specific issues and a debate on policy responses will serve as the organizing principles for a series of workshops of experts from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, from June 2004 to June 2005:

-- Many developing countries have effected significant policy reforms designed to attract international investments.  But limits on capacity to strengthen institutions and perceived high levels of risk are constraining capital flows.  A vicious cycle of impoverishment and lack of investor interest prevails in many countries.

-- The importance of private-public partnerships has been widely hailed.  But “this new consensus on the indispensability of partnership is not yet matched by a capacity in the international system to develop and successfully manage them”, according to a précis prepared by the UN FfD Office.

At its High-Level Dialogue on Financing for Development, held in October 2003, the United Nations General Assembly mandated the Secretariat to convene multi-stakeholder discussions on key development issues.  The report on the results of the FfD/World Economic Forum-organized workshops will be presented to the next General Assembly High-Level Dialogue on FfD, in late 2005.

“The private sector has yet to be fully integrated into the search for solutions to problems that inherently require a public-private response”, Mr. Samans of the Forum said in today’s briefing to United Nations delegations.  “This is what we intend to help accomplish with our project.”

The UN FfD Office, drawing on a trust fund built largely on government contributions, will pay for one third of the costs of the programme.  Switzerland is donating another third, and the Forum will cover the remaining costs.

For more information, contact Tim Wall of the UN Department of Public Information, tel: 1-212-963-5851; e-mail: wallt@un.org.

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