Briefing to the Member States, UNOSSC’s Achievements and Challenges.
Briefing to the Member States on the Achievements and Challenges
of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation
28 June 2013
Thirty Member States were represented at the briefing. Delegations represented were: Argentina,
Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Botswana, Brazil, Burundi, China, Costa Rica, Gambia, Germany,
Guyana, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Liberia, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Paraguay,
Peru, Qatar, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, United States, and
Uzbekistan (See Annex 3 for details).
SUMMARY
“South-South cooperation brings variety and diversity to development,” said Ms. Rebeca Grynspan, UN
Under-Secretary-General and UNDP Associate Administrator, in her remarks as Chair of the second
quarterly dialogue with Member States on the achievements and challenges of the United Nations Office
for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC).
“As a share of world merchandise trade, South-South trade more than tripled over 1980–2011, while
North-North trade declined,” said Ms. Grynspan, stressing that, “Moving forward we must commit
ourselves to leveraging these new South-South dynamics into development results.”
As the South has grown in economic and political strength, the UNOSSC mandate has become
particularly urgent. With increasing calls on the international development community for greater action,
the dialogue provided an opportunity for the UNOSSC to discuss with Member States options for better
advocating and promoting South-South and triangular cooperation moving forward.
“In our next Strategic Plan 2014-2017, UNDP is committing to mainstreaming South-South cooperation
more effectively as an integral tool for successful development,” Ms. Grynspan said, noting that in this
effort, “UNOSSC is our most valuable partner.”
Mr. Yiping Zhou, UNOSSC Director, highlighted the Office’s major achievements, especially after it’s
renaming as UNOSSC by the 17th Session of the General Assembly High-level Committee for SouthSouth Cooperation in September 2012.
Mr. Zhou outlined the initial steps the Office has taken toward functional realignment and enhancement
following it’s renaming. He also discussed the Multilateral Support Architecture for South-South &
Triangular Cooperation, supported by the Office; the Office’s core business lines as convener, knowledge
-broker, partnerships-builder, fund mobilizer, and communicator; the Office’s resource situation; its
priorities for 2013; and the premises and processes toward its new Strategic Framework 2014-2017.
The Director thanked all Member States for their continued support and attributed all the Office’s
accomplishments to its partner’s strong commitment to effective development through South-South
cooperation.
Member States expressed appreciation for the UNOSSC’s convening of this dialogue at a critical stage
during the implementation of the General Assembly’s Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Review
(QCPR) at the country level. Member States were also encouraged by UNDP’s mainstreaming of SouthSouth cooperation into its Strategic Plan, and by the commitment to take measures to ensure the
UNOSSC is empowered to be more responsive to demand.
1 Briefing to the Member States, UNOSSC’s Achievements and Challenges.
WELCOMING MESSAGES
The Director of the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation (SU/SSC) Mr. Yiping Zhou
welcomed the delegates from Member States and thanked them for their participation. He noted that the
UNOSSC is planning for two more Member States Dialogues during 2013, one in Preparation of the
Strategic Framework and another to consider the Way Forward for 2014.
UN Under-Secretary-General and UNDP Associate Administrator Ms. Rebeca Grynspan delivered
a message to country partners (Annex 1). She outlined current trends, challenges and opportunities for
SSSC in general as well as the initial steps taken to strengthen the UNOSSC and UNDP’s commitment to
SSC.
Major changes are taking place in the development landscape and South-South and triangular cooperation
are playing a central role, she said. Exchanges between developing countries accounted for 55 percent of
global trade in 2010, as compared to 41 percent in 1995, according to UNCTAD. This trend will continue
into the foreseeable future. As a share of world merchandise trade, South-South trade more than tripled
over 1980–2011, while North-North trade declined, according to data gathered by our Human
Development Report Office.
Emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa, are an important part of these
shifts, but are not the only ones, she said. The Human Development Report highlights forty high
achieving countries that performed better than predicted between 1990 and 2012 based on previous trends
– this group includes countries like Bangladesh, Ghana, Mexico, Rwanda, Turkey, Uganda and Vietnam.
Moving forward we must commit ourselves to leveraging these new South-South dynamics into
development results, she stressed. The UNOSSC, as the designated global and UN-wide coordinator for
South-South and triangular cooperation, must continue and strengthen its services to Member States and
the larger UN development system in making South-South work better for development. The Office of
South-South Co-operation should take the lead in system-wide co-ordination of South-South initiatives
and the sharing of knowledge on best practice. What we want to ensure is more interaction between the
Office and UNDP overall, and to see UNDP become much more effective in mainstreaming South-South
and Triangular cooperation. We need new instruments to facilitate such exchanges, and we need to build
these into our programme design. UNDP, as the UN’s largest development agency and the host of the
UNOSSC, must continue to support the Office and provide efficient and effective support to enable it to
fulfill its GA-mandated responsibilities. In its next Strategic Plan 2014-2017, UNDP is committing to
mainstreaming South-South cooperation more effectively as an integral tool for successful development.
In this effort UNOSSC is our most valuable partner, she said. The Office has been working hard to adjust
its role and respond to your demands since its renaming by the 17th Session of the General Assembly
High-level Committee for South-South Cooperation in September 2012. As you might have imagined, the
renaming has served as a booster to the Office’s visibility. But it has also brought the Office new
challenges as it strives to reposition itself to be more responsive, more effective and more efficient in
servicing Member States’ needs and the demand from its UN sister organizations, including UNDP.
She highlighted some activities at the heart of the Office’s work:
•
Institutionalizing its Three-in-One Multilateral South-South Cooperation Support Architecture to
enable all stakeholders to forge inclusive South-South and triangular partnerships, in response to
Member States’ demand.
2 Briefing to the Member States, UNOSSC’s Achievements and Challenges.
•
Work in policy development, research and advocacy, and global and inter-agency coordination
that has enabled Member States to make informed decisions on South-South and triangular
cooperation and enabled the United Nations system to take responsive measures reflecting
Southern perspectives.
•
Strong advocacy that has resulted in South-South cooperation reflected in all major development
frameworks such as the Istanbul Plan of Action on LDCs, the Rio+20 outcome document, the
2012 QCPR decision and in ongoing deliberations on the global partnership for development and
the post-2015 development agenda.
•
New legislative instruments produced by Member States, including the Nairobi Outcome
document, that clearly articulate the principles driving South-South cooperation and highlight the
areas where the UN system can work more closely with developing countries to scale up
successful South-South initiatives.
•
Institutional support to the Office of the Chairmanship of the Group of 77 including preparation
of the Group’s “Development Platform for the South”.
•
Facilitating 25+ UN agencies to “Think as One, Act as One and Deliver as One”.
•
Drafting the Framework of Operational Guidelines on UN system Support to South-South and
Triangular Cooperation that will guide the mainstreaming of South-South cooperation across the
UN system.
•
Drafting the Secretary-General’s Policy Decision on South-South Cooperation that enables senior
managers to articulate UN positions on South-South cooperation.
In the future, the UNOSSC plans to focus more on analyzing and articulating evolving and emerging
trends, dynamics and opportunities in SSC, she said; facilitating dialogue and consensus building; forging
inclusive South-South, triangular and public-private partnerships; mobilizing innovative financing; and
further professionalizing its three-in-one Multilateral South-South Support Architecture in order to enable
Member States, the entire UN system and other partners to effectively engage and invest more in concrete
South-South transfer of expertise, knowledge, technologies and resources towards meeting the MDG
targets and beyond.
Two rigorous evaluations of UNDP’s contribution to South-South cooperation recently found for example
that: UNDP has a strong comparative advantage in supporting South-South cooperation; that the demand
for UNDP support and facilitation of South-South cooperation activities is very high; and that UNDP
brokering of South-South exchanges has produced immediate development results. These findings have
informed UNDP’s Strategic Plan, she said. The new UNDP Strategic Plan for 2014-2017 will make
South-South and triangular cooperation part of the core ways of working in UNDP’s programmes on the
global, regional and country levels.
The Director of the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation (SU/SSC) Mr. Yiping Zhou, presented
the main achievements and development results facilitated by the UNOSSC since 2008 and the main
outcomes of the UNOSSC Annual Joint Retreat of UNOSSC (March 2013, New York). (Annex 2 –
PowerPoint Presentation of the UNOSSC Director)
3 Briefing to the Member States, UNOSSC’s Achievements and Challenges.
INTERACTIVE SESSION
An Interactive Session with Member States followed the welcoming messages and presentations. The
UNOSSC Director highlighted the main challenges for the Office and Member States expressed their
views on how to make the UNOSSC more responsive, efficient and effective.
The representative of China thanked UNDP and UNOSSC for the informative briefing, which comes at
a critical juncture as the QCPR is in its first year of implementation and UN funds and programmes are in
the process of developing their new Strategic Plans for 2014-2017. She stated that there have been many
discussions and policy decisions concerning mainstreaming of SSC across the UN system, yet more
efforts should be made at the regional and country levels aimed at genuinely strengthening UN support to
SSC and mainstreaming South-South and Triangular cooperation into UNDP’s regular work and
programmes.
She expressed encouragement that UNDP is very supportive to the UNOSSC and would like to see more
concrete measures taken by UNDP in the future – especially through its new Strategic Plan – to further
strengthen the UNOSSC. She suggested that SSC among other types of international development
cooperation is still limited in terms of financial resources, therefore should be analyzed and reviewed in a
more proper and balanced context. She further commended the excellent work of UNOSSC expressed a
desire to see more institutionalized normative and policy work.
The Associate Administrator and the UNOSSC Director thanked China for its support. In response the
Associate Administrator said that UN funds and programmes are for the first time aligned with respect to
the cycles of their respective Strategic Plans, and stressed that indeed this is a unique opportunity for all
agencies to work together to jointly develop a more coordinated and systematic approach on SSC. She
also recognized that SSC should not be regarded as substitute to North-South Cooperation.
The UNOSSC Director agreed with the proposals of the representative of China and assured her that the
Office will attach high importance to her important comments in the strategic thinking and planning
moving forward.
The representative of Peru thanked the Director of the UNOSSC for his comprehensive presentation.
She asked to be provided with more detailed information regarding the organizational arrangements and
division of labor between the UNOSSC and UNDP.
Having noted the initial functional realignment and enhancement measures undertaken by the Office, she
asked to be briefed on the future human resources needs of the Office (besides the 12 positions that had
been introduced by the Director in his presentation).
The representative of India quoted relevant points from the statement of the Group of 77 and China on
the 2012 Human Development Report delivered at the Annual Session of the UNDP/UNFPA/UNOPS
Executive Board in June 2013, including the lacking of data of South-South Cooperation. He expressed
three areas that his delegation would like considered by UNDP in further strategizing its work in support
of South-South Cooperation:
•
As concluded by the Evaluation Report on UNDP’s contribution to South-South and Triangular
Cooperation reviewed by the Annual Session of the UNDP/UNFPA/UNOPS Executive Board in
June 2013, there are gaps yet to be bridged between the High-level decisions and country level
integration and implementation on genuinely mainstreaming SSC;
4 Briefing to the Member States, UNOSSC’s Achievements and Challenges.
•
The same evaluation report found that there is a lack of clear evidence about the sustainability of
South-South Cooperation projects supported by UNDP;
•
As decided by the Intersessional Meeting of the High-level Committee of South-South
Cooperation held on 4 June 2013 in New York, UNDP should further clarify its financial support
to UNOSSC and this should be incorporated into the Secretary-General’s report on the State of
South-South Cooperation in 2014.
The Associate Administrator in her response to the representatives of Peru and India highlighted the
importance of sequencing and prioritizing with regard to strengthening UNDP’s support to UNOSSC. She
pointed out that the implementation of the South-South Cooperation Guidelines would have to wait until
the official endorsement of the UNDP Strategic Plan (2014-2017) by the forthcoming Second Regular
Session of the UNDP/UNFPA/UNOPS Executive Board in September 2013. She said that the period
between September 2013 and January 2014 would be the right time for UNDP to speed up its work in
implementing the South-South Cooperation Guidelines.
Concerning the issue of clarifying UNDP’s financial support to UNOSSC, she invited Member States to
consider this during the review of UNDP’s Integrated Budget 2014-2017 that will be one of the agenda
items of the forthcoming Second Regular Session of UNDP/UNFPA/UNOPS Executive Board in
September 2013.
The UNOSSC Director in response to the questions posed by the representative of Peru clarified that all
functional realignment and enhancement measures have been accomplished without creating any new
posts and without any financial implications. He further pointed out that the purpose of changing
functional titles of staff is not to create new positions or promotions, but to make the UNOSSC more
efficient. He then briefed Member States on current human resources (32 staff; 17 core staff positions, of
which 14 are active).
The Associate Administrator and the UNOSSC Director thanked the delegates who attended the
briefing and committed to organizing briefings and exchanges more frequently in order to make the work
of the UNOSSC more responsive, effective and efficient.
[END]
ANNEX 1 – STATEMENT OF MS. REBECA GRYNSPAN, UNDP ASSOCIATE
ADMINISTRATOR
(http://ssc.undp.org/content/dam/ssc/documents/news/UNDP.pdf)
ANNEX 2 – POWERPOINT PRESENTATION OF MR. YIPING ZHOU, UNOSSC DIRECTOR
(http://ssc.undp.org/content/dam/ssc/documents/news/UNOSSC-MS-Dialogue-PPT.pdf)
ANNEX 3 – LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
(HTTP://SSC.UNDP.ORG/CONTENT/DAM/SSC/DOCUMENTS/NEWS/FINAL%20PAR
TICIPANTS%20LIST%20FOR%20MS%20BRIEFING.PDF)
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