Trade and Development Board, 61st session (Opening Plenary)
15 September 2014
Excellencies,
Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I welcome you to this regular annual session of the Trade and Development Board, which takes place only a few months after we marked UNCTAD's 50th anniversary together. I would like to thank you for your participation, support and encouragement during our celebrations. I congratulate all those who took part in the various events and would like to express my particular gratitude for the wonderful cultural performances, music and food provided by Indonesia, Russia and Qatar.
As Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon underlined when he addressed our special 50th anniversary TDB Session, the international community is at a turning point. We in the multilateral system have a lot on our plate. Between now and the end of 2015, we must step up our efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals, while at the same time agreeing on a far-reaching sustainable development agenda for the period up to 2030.
UNCTAD has an important role to play in the post-2015 agenda. "Prosperity for all" will become a reality only if the Sustainable Development Goals due to be adopted next year result in real improvements in the livelihoods of people everywhere. UNCTAD must be fit to contribute its utmost to these efforts across the three pillars of our work. Here at the TDB, we have an opportunity to define and hone UNCTAD's contribution through our preparations for UNCTAD XIV in Lima in early 2016. The Lima Conference will be among the first international gatherings after the planned adoption of the SDGs, and there it will be essential that we are poised to act on the ambitious and transformative agenda, which we expect the SDGs to encompass. Under my leadership, the Secretariat is committed to mobilizing all our forces to meet this challenge ahead.
A year ago, you gave me a warm reception on my arrival in Geneva to take over as Secretary-General of UNCTAD. At the time I made certain pledges, to which I would like to return today. In my remarks, I would like to begin by speaking about what we have done and continue to do in relation to these pledges. Then I look ahead to the future, in particular to the period between now and UNCTAD XIV in Lima.
Last fall I promised the TDB that I would reach out to the members, I would intensify engagement with my staff, I would strife to keep promises we had made on Results Based Management Framework and that I would enhance the relevance and visibility of UNCTAD.
Firstly, since taking office, I have spent time getting to know you - our member States. I have hosted and attended meetings with permanent representatives and regional groups. Except for the Western Asia group, I have held group meetings with all the designated regional groups Permanent Representatives in Geneva at least once. I have also hosted regional group representatives to a working luncheon in New York. I launched breakfast meetings with mixed groups of 10 permanent representatives and operated an open door policy, encouraging permanent representatives to come and share their thoughts with me. I am pleased to say that many permanent representatives have responded and we have had good conversations. In fact, I have had nearly 90 one-on-one meeting with ambassadors. As a result, I have heard your concerns, as well as your aspirations for UNCTAD and its work. My door remains open and my meetings and breakfasts will continue in the future.
My talks with heads of state and ministers in national capitals have also been instrumental in strengthening our engagement with the member states. From Bern to Oslo, London to Lima, Beijing, Phnom Penh, Vanuatu, Kigali and Cotonou - to name but a few - I have been encouraged by the support and interest in collaborating with UNCTAD. Both here in Geneva and in national capitals, there is a thirst for us to do more and to disseminate more widely what we do.
Secondly, I have devoted substantial time to getting to know my staff. Our Town Hall meetings have been well attended and allowed for frank dialogue. I have organized brown bag lunches with most job categories and levels of staff, both general service and professional, and a new round of these lunches will begin this autumn. In addition, I maintain an open-door policy to all staff, and my front office keeps time in my schedule open for any UNCTAD staff member who wishes to speak to me one-on-one. I also held a productive retreat with UNCTAD's senior management to discuss our management culture, to set collective goals and to seek coherence and inter-divisional collaboration. I have listened to, engaged with and challenged the women and men who serve our Secretariat in every capacity.
To offer staff more opportunities for professional growth, I am laying the groundwork for lateral mobility within the organization. An initiative to be launched in 2015 will encourage and facilitate voluntary staff movements within and between the Divisions. This will put in place a mechanism that does not entail additional costs or obligations, is light on bureaucracy, and allows staff to widen their field of experience. In my various meetings with staff, such an idea has shown growing appeal.
I am also working to promote internal communication - to improve our ability to work as One UNCTAD, and to foster a sense of community. During our brown bag lunches, it has been clear to me that staffers welcome a chance to meet and cooperate with others from elsewhere in the organization. The revamped Intranet that we launched in June, which is gradually being expanded, marks an important contribution in this regard. We will continue to expand use of these and other technological tools - to communicate internally and enhance collaboration across units and Divisions.
Thirdly, under my direction, the Secretariat has been addressing the management issues and challenges identified in the JIU report, as well as those brought to my attention since the start of my tenure. With the aim of building a stronger UNCTAD, we have introduced a number of changes, streamlined procedures and strengthened Results-Based Management.
You will find full details on our actions over the past year in the report we have submitted entitled Building a Stronger UNCTAD, so I will remain brief. We made further progress in all seven fundamental areas identified by the TDB as requiring strengthening. For example, last year UNCTAD started implementing measures to enhance monitoring and evaluation. These include ensuring the systematic evaluation of each component of UNCTAD's programme of work. This not only allows oversight of programmes but also tells us how well they are working and what results they have yielded. We are also drawing up guidelines for the UNCTAD Evaluation Policy and plan to improve the dissemination of evaluation reports to member States and other interested parties.
As some of you noted with appreciation at the Working Party a few weeks ago, we are mainstreaming RBM into our project delivery mechanism for technical cooperation. This lets us deliver with greater impact for our beneficiaries, at the same time as it strengthens the trust and confidence that our donors place in us. I see it as my duty to shepherd our limited resources in the best way possible, and to emphasize results and impact.
I have also decided to establish a robust mechanism for further mainstreaming Results-Based Management into the way we do business. I envisage four key steps, which demonstrate our seriousness of purpose:
- creating a dedicated officer position to serve as a RBM focal point;
- creating a robust implementation team, the RBM Coordination Group, anchored in the substantive divisions to link programmes and results;
- creating a senior-level steering group chaired by me to provide strategic guidance, management support and oversee full implementation, and
- putting in place hands-on UNCTAD-tailored training for programme staff on RBM.
I fully expect that these four inter-linked measures will set us on the road to implementing our RBM framework. I have no illusions; it will take time and effort to see the results we desire.
As part of internal reforms, we also have started work on establishing Compacts for the Heads of all Divisions and Services. The Compacts set specific management objectives for a given year, with measurable deliverables and clear timelines. They include targets in the areas of inter-divisional and inter-agency cooperation, management of financial and human resources, and special objectives related to timely submission of documents, internal communication and staff development. The Compacts will help us to build experience in areas that are vital to our successful operation and support our focus on results.
My efforts to address the first three pledges regarding our member States, our staff and our management culture feed into my fourth promise - to enhance UNCTAD's relevance and increase its visibility. In addition to the moves I have mentioned regarding member States, staff and management change, I have taken a number of other specific initiatives, both here in Geneva and through visits to the field, to bolster our relevance and visibility.
Creating greater synergies, internally and externally, is important if UNCTAD is to be relevant and visible in our increasingly inter-connected world. Again, you will find many details in our report Building a Stronger UNCTAD, but I will mention some here.
In an important step, which has also helped strengthen internal communication, we revamped our Publications Committee. It now meets monthly and has focused over the past year on ensuring coordination and coherence of the main 2014 reports, as well as identifying synergies between them. This, however, was just one of the first steps in improving our publications programme, which is a major priority as far as I am concerned. I welcome the fact that the Inspection and Evaluation Division of the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services has decided to carry out an evaluation of UNCTAD's research, analysis and publications pillar.
I will not dwell long on our ongoing work regarding communications and outreach, as this will be the subject of a separate Working Party meeting. However, as you will see from our report, we have made progress on a number of fronts, such as enhanced web presence, including for member States, greater dissemination and outreach and closer links with civil society.
UNCTAD's relevance and visibility should also be the natural consequence of the effectiveness and impact we have in the Member States we serve. With this in mind, I have immersed myself in the work of our technical cooperation programmes, and have met and discussed with stakeholders how we can build on what we are doing. I saw the impact of ASYCUDA on the ground in Kinshasa and in Samoa and TrainforTrade's Port Training Programme in Benin and Samoa. In Lima, I launched COMPAL Global, which extends our very successful Latin American competition and consumer protection programme to countries elsewhere in the world. At the Competition Forum in Sofia, Bulgaria I saw how we are fostering cooperation and development of regional ties between neighbouring countries in South-East Europe, focusing on competition.
The value that our technical cooperation provides to our Member States is clear to me. In Cambodia, the Prime Minister affirmed the critical contribution our assistance made in their accession to the WTO, and expressed confidence in our ongoing work in the areas of debt management and graduation from Least Developed Country status. In China, I saw first-hand the pivotal role our technical assistance can play in South-South and triangular cooperation efforts, as we collaborated with Chinese officials to deliver training for Least Developed Country cabinet ministers, a joint programme that will be scaled up in future. In Apia, Samoa, a round table of heads of government were unanimous on the value UNCTAD adds to their efforts to overcome the unique vulnerabilities of Small Island Developing States.
Under the auspices of the Trade and Productive Capacity Cluster of the UN, I launched the Arusha business linkage project to punch acclaim and with huge potential for scaling up and replicating elsewhere.
We have signed memoranda with ITC, WTO, NEPAD, World Customs Organization and the South Pacific Forum on collaboration; and embarked on joint projects with some of these organizations. Examples are the training on Trade Facilitation that we carried out in Mauritius for Senior Officers from select African Countries jointly with ITC, our on-going collaboration with Trademark East Africa on TF for EAC, and our recently published joint studies on Small Island Developing Countries with the Indian Ocean Commission and the Commonwealth Secretariat. I recently completed recruitment of the Chief of our revamped office in New York. She has hit the ground running.
In New York, I have addressed the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals and taken part in meetings and events, strengthening our links with partners in the broader UN family.
Outside the UN family, I was honoured to participate in a retreat and seminar at the Vatican organized by Pope Francis that considered ways to achieve a more inclusive global economy. As many of you know, I launched the Geneva Dialogue last November to enhance discourse on the Post-2015 Agenda within the Geneva Trade hubs and to bridge the gulf between Geneva and New York on this vital process. I am glad to report that all three sessions have been resounding successes and that we have fed into the New York process substantively.
These and other discussions also remind us that the burning issues of the day -- such as how to overcome rising inequality and how to take action against climate change -- closely reflect our own Doha mandate to promote development-friendly globalization that is inclusive and sustainable.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Over the past year, I have lived up to the promises that I made you, and I am pleased to turn the page and begin a new chapter in UNCTAD history. Indeed, as you know, 2014 marks fifty years since our inaugural conference took place. This year we have not only celebrated fifty years of accomplishment, but we have also shown where these accomplishments can lead to.
Today, let us look ahead to the next year or two, when we at UNCTAD will be focused on the road taking us from Doha to Lima and the UNCTAD XIV conference. Over the coming year, major decisions will be made which shape the development landscape we will face at UNCTAD XIV in Lima in 2016. All of these issues undoubtedly will have ramifications for our future work and for the issues we take up at UNCTAD XIV
The 3rd Finance for Development conference in Addis Ababa next July; the COP20 and COP21 climate negotiations in Lima and Paris, respectively; the WTO ministerial next year; in addition to the completion of SDG negotiations themselves. We must be prepared to support Member States, as they see fit, but we must also maintain coherence with the larger multilateral system to avoid duplication, and to assure that we only provide added value to these processes.
Our involvement to date in the preparatory discussions on SDGs in New York offers an indication of the areas where there is a specific role for UNCTAD going forward. Importantly, we are asked to facilitating the work on the means of SDG implementation, which encompass many of the areas that are part of UNCTAD's remit.
I welcome the fact that the emerging post-2015 agenda, as evident in the outcome document adopted by the Open Working Group, has embraced a cross-cutting approach to this complex issue of means of implementation. This includes a standalone goal on global partnership to implement the SDGs, but also individual implementation targets under each of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals. I look forward to the discussions that will take place over the next year as the proposed SDGs are finalized, and I look to you, our Member States, to advise where and how UNCTAD can make a lasting and valuable contribution from here in Geneva.
In looking at how UNCTAD can contribute, I would also like to underline the imperative of getting beyond the disagreements that often characterize debates about achieving sustainable development. Here, our three pillars have a role to play. Our research can offer the facts needed to overcome differences, our consensus-building can facilitate dialogue and our technical cooperation can help us to work together to build capacities, particularly in support of the most vulnerable countries.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Over the last year, your encouragement and direction have been invaluable to helping me steer UNCTAD in the direction we need to go to deliver results for all of our Members. Immediately after this TDB, I intend to commence wide consultations first to map out the members expectations and ambition for Lima, and then develop a draft agenda for the negotiating process which I hope to launch at the TDC next spring.
I am confident that with your continued guidance and support, over the next year we will lay the groundwork for an UNCTAD XIV Conference that will meet the ambitions of our Members, and that will help the entire UN system rise to the challenge of implementing a transformative agenda for sustainable development.
Thank you.
