Resident Coordinator's Remarks at the Rockefeller Foundation's 110th Anniversary Celebration

Senator Khun Kraisid Tontisirin,

Ambassador Ureerat,

Natalye Paquin, Chief Operating Officer, The Rockefeller Foundation,

Deepali Khanna,

Colleagues and friends.

Thank you for inviting the UN to the celebration of one of the world’s most influential philanthropic organizations with a global reach.

I would like to congratulate the Rockefeller Foundation on its 110th anniversary, which speaks to the very long reach both in space and time of its transformative initiatives across the globe.

I understand that the Foundation began working in Thailand more than a century ago — long before the UN came into existence.

Its campaign in the early 1900s to boost medical science in the country resulted in the establishment of the Ministry of Health. Its development of flood-tolerant rice and innovative agricultural techniques were of, similarly, great benefit to people around the country.

In many ways the support of the Rockefeller Foundation has served as the bulwark for Thailand’s advancement of SDGs.

The Foundation has also shown the important role that philanthropic organizations can play in making the world a better place for all.

The UN’s partnership with the Foundation is premised on the SDGs and allows us to leverage each other’s strengths to accelerate progress on them.

Co-operations like this are critical as progress on the SDGs has been reversed globally with only 12% of indicators currently on track to meet the 2030 target.

In a newly released report, the Secretary-General has issued a warning that the global promise of the 2030 Agenda is in grave peril and is calling for “a rescue plan for people and planet.”

Thailand is bucking this global trend, with 42% of the SDG indicators on track.

It is a priority for us at the UN in Thailand to capitalize on this momentum to sustain and even speed up progress in support of the country’s inclusive bio-circular-green development agenda.

We are doing our part as conveners, technical experts, and guardians of universal principles to focus on accelerating SDGs and scaling up their impacts.

One example of this is our partnership with the Ministry of Interior and the 76 Governors of Thailand to localize the SDGs nationwide.

This partnership is already yielding great benefits in the form of waste segregation being scaled up to 14 million rural households across all provinces. It is delivering more than 550,000 tons of carbon reductions annually and its equivalent in carbon credits.

The carbon credits serve as an economic incentive for local authorities to ensure that every rural household will sustain waste segregation in coming years.

Best practices and lessons learned from this and other initiatives can be scaled up and also taken to other countries in the region in the context of South-South Cooperation.

Among our current flagship initiatives together with TICA, we are applying EU standards to the organic farming of rice and mangosteen through farmers-to-farmer trainings for countries across the region.

In another flagship we are strengthening capacities for strategic global health diplomacy and boosting access to quality reproductive health services for young vulnerable people. Earlier this week, together with Ambassador Ureerat we met with representatives from Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia, who are in the country learning about these programmes.  

These high-impact initiatives mirror those of the Rockefeller Foundation, which has spread best practices across the globe for more than a century.

We at the UN look forward to leveraging the partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation to offer scale and transformation of science-based solutions for climate, sustainability, and inclusion in Thailand and across the region.

Thank you.