UN Financing for Development confce July 13-16

The United Nations conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa on July 13-16 will launch a renewed and strengthened global partnership for financing people-centred sustainable development from which countries like Bangladesh will benefit.

“The conference is all about implementation of ambitious goals. It's expected to provide means of implementation,” said Alexander Trepelkov, director of the Financing for Development Office at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA).

He was talking to journalists from around the world through video conference from the UN headquarters on Thursday night.

A select group of journalists, including that of The Daily Star, joined from the United Nations Information Centre in Dhaka.

On how the UN and development partners can help Bangladesh achieve middle income status by 2021, Alexander said international public finance was the most important for the least developed countries (LDCs).

“Unfortunately the recent trend shows that overall development assistance and the share of LDCs in international public finance is decreasing. So the conference is attempting to reverse the trend and to agree on allocating much greater share, up to 50 percent of the ODA (official development assistance) for LDCs,” he added.