Europe Africa

BRUSSELS, 18 January 2024 / PRN Africa / -- Madam Moderator,

The European Union welcomes today’s intersessional meeting and thanks Chile, Luxembourg, and the core group of the 2030 Agenda resolution, for organising it together with the Office of the High Commissioner. We thank the panellists for their thoughts on the reform of the international financial architecture in the service of poverty organisations and the fulfilment of human rights.

Very much like the United Nations and the multilateral system, the EU is founded on the principle of the protection of human dignity of all people, everywhere. This means that we are committed to the universality and indivisibility of human rights. Today, it is clear that the world faces some of the most significant development challenges of our time – poverty in all its forms and dimensions, climate vulnerability and soaring debt.

While fiscal policies and representation on the boards of international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are matters for EU Member States in their national capacity, our collective aspiration is to establish a strengthened international financial architecture that prioritizes people and the planet.

The EU’s Global Gateway strategy and our European financial architecture for development aim to translate our commitment to human rights-based sustainable development and SDG implementation in practice. Until 2027, The EU will invest up to 300 billion Euro in projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Asia and the Pacific. The European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund hold a robust development mandate – in 2022, the EIB invested close to 11 billion euros in developing countries, for instance helping 11.6 million people get access to safer drinking water or supplying 2.1 million households with electricity from renewable sources.

Reforms of the international financing architecture are necessary, not only to close the gap in development finance and scale up the financial capacity of the system in the long-term, but also to ensure that human rights are not relegated to an afterthought. This includes applying a gender perspective to investment decisions to advance poverty eradication. But the challenges identified by the SDG Summit of 2023 and ahead of this year’s Summit of the Future are daunting and complex, especially when we are trying to achieve consensus in a fraught geopolitical environment.

We would like to ask the panellists how best to overcome short-term thinking and tear down the silos that often exist between the decision-makers who deal with macroeconomic issues and human rights.

Thank you.

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SOURCE European External Action