UNIDO Day 2018: Belt and Road Cross-Border Cooperation
On 20 April 2018,
[lo_drop_caps style=”square” tag=”h6″]I was honoured to be invited on UNIDO Day 2018: Belt and Road Cross-Border Cooperation Forum held in Shanghai, China. This year United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) presented the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which encapsulates the main agenda of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and act as a guiding path globally, regionally and for a national development plan for the next 15 years. I have observed that very few among the audience are aware of these goals.[/lo_drop_caps]
There are 17-key SDGs which UNIDO is primarily focusing. They include poverty eradication by ensuring that all people in the society share the benefits of industrialisation; improvement in the standard of living; complete elimination of hunger that supports value addition to agricultural output and further helps in reducing post-harvest losses which increases overall resource efficiency, and in parallel, creating job opportunities for rural communities and improving the food security conditions by targeting more on agri-business development and upgrading agro-food value chains.
Good-health and wellbeing is another important element that supports and encourages the establishment of a pharmaceutical industry in developing countries for the domestic production of the significant generic drugs and necessary equipment and appliances.
In order to achieve all the above objectives, it is important to have peace, justice and strong institutions which support the restoration of economic activities and empowerment of communities affected by crises to improve the human security conditions, which are the major dilemma of third world countries. Lastly, to achieve all the above-enlisted goals there is dire for having a country-level partnership for the goals so that UNIDO can facilitate international cooperation’s, multi-stakeholder partnerships and alignment of public and private investments and industrial policies. Conduct capacity building to strengthen technology exchange mechanisms, technology policy coordination measures and provides the technical and statistical support to the monitoring and review of the sustainable development goals.