Resident Coordinator's Remarks for the China-Horn of Africa Partnership Virtual Meeting with Resident Coordinators/UN Country Teams

Yacoub El-Hillo,

David McLachlan-Karr,

Siddharth Chatterjee,

Stephen Jackson,

Distinguished colleagues, experts and friends.

Thank you for the opportunity to share UN Thailand’s perspective on leveraging South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSTC) to accelerate progress on the SDGs.

The role that China is seeking to play in the Horn of Africa through SSTC speaks to the transformative power of partnerships grounded in mutual benefits.  

In the context of Thailand, we have drawn four lessons over the past years on strategically positioning SSC as an accelerator for SDGs in the region.

This has been done through the shared vision and leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UN Country Team.

First, SSTC needs to be an integral part of the Cooperation Framework aligned to its outcomes, which for us in Thailand means a focus on transitioning to a green economy, investing in human capital and leaving no one behind.

To ensure a consolidated, coordinated, and comprehensive approach informed by evidence, the CT invested in a baseline assessment, which showed that we had over 70 south-south projects. Most of which were one-offs with a short-term focus on training and capacity-building.

We were spreading ourselves thin and falling short of being transformative.

The second lesson was to focus UN’s efforts on high-impact flagship initiatives aligned to Government priorities, along similar lines to what China has in mind.

Last month at the Asia-Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we formally announced the first set of three high impact initiatives led by ITC, WHO and UNFPA.

This also translates into scaling up co-financing from the Government in support of the Cooperation Framework.

Let me briefly talk about the 3 flagships.

The first introduces sustainable agricultural practices based on EU standards with a focus on the organic farming of rice and mangosteen through farmers-to-farmer trainings across the sub-region. At the same time, digital technologies are being leveraged for precision farming while playing to the strengths of Thailand’s agricultural sector.

The second flagship involves strengthening capacities for strategic global health diplomacy, which is key in the wake of the pandemic.

The third ensures access to quality reproductive health services including traditional birth attendants with 6 countries across ASEAN.

The third lesson is that it is critical to invest in tracking the impacts of SSTC.

UNFPA’s groundbreaking work on social returns on investment provides a methodology for this.

Assessing such returns indicated that every dollar invested in training midwives in Lao PDR yielded a social value of $4.

An evidence base such as this enables policymakers to scale up investments in SSTC.

The fourth takeaway involves the transformative power of private sector partnerships to accelerate the SDGs.

We are learning that if we introduce the best available clean technologies in high-pollution industries such as steel and aluminium production, the private sector is quick to scale them up of its own accord.

This insight can be leveraged for technological transfers from China to Africa.

In Thailand, we are also seeing the economic value that carbon markets can generate with carbon credits serving as an incentive for decarbonization efforts, especially to offset hard-to-abate emissions.

China can leverage its carbon market to offer technical assistance to countries in the Horn of Africa. Voluntary markets can be piloted in collaboration with the region’s private sector.

As the Global South is asserting its leadership on the world stage, prioritizing South-South cooperation in this vein will be crucial for transformative changes across the entire hemisphere.

Thank you.