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The United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) bold four-year Strategic Plan sets out to deliver solutions to end extreme poverty, reduce inequality, and build resilience to crises in order to help countries achieve the 2030 Agenda. But as the UN system grapples with funding challenges, as private finance is further mobilized for development, and as technological advances shape the development landscape, what is UNDP’s comparative advantage? We look forward to discussing these issues with UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner and key stakeholders.
A small community around the world is building better ways to regulate migration. The Global Compact on Migration is not making headlines, but its effects will certainly ripple around the world and throughout this century.
UN Member States are gathering today in New York at the United Nations Headquarters for the first round of negotiations on the Global Compact on Migration zero draft. It is a once-a-generation chance to shape migration cooperatively, for mutual benefit. Global migration governance is, in its current form, unprepared and insufficient to manage future flows.
More than 65 million people are forcibly displaced, for on average about ten years. That's the scale of the problem facing Mark Lowcock, the new UN Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs.
In Congress, support for aid is often bipartisan, and the seriousness and quality of thinking about aid reform is often very high. Case in point on both fronts is new legislation introduced by US Senators Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) that would create the architecture and principles for a policy review and assessment of US contributions to multilateral institutions.
In the lifetime of the United Nations, there have been two times when there have been intellectual centers addressing major global issues that led to a sea change in how the world works. One such time was in the late 1940s when a number of Nobel Prize thinkers created national accounting, like the gross national product, and established the post-World War II international trade regime. The second such time started in 1989. Can we imagine a third wave of intellectual leadership at the UN?
You might remember the UNCTAD report on trade misinvoicing published last year which alleged that the majority of gold exports leave South Africa unreported. If not, you will more than likely have heard the billion dollar estimates of illicit financial flows as a source of resources for financing the SDGs. It is increasingly clear that these calculations, based on gaps and mismatches in trade are not reliable.
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