DHAKA: Finance Minister AMA Muhith said trade must be given great importance to expedite the economic activities of the countries around the world and to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
The Bangladesh minister made the comment while addressing a discussion on “Financing the SDGs” at the UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday (February 24) as a part of the programs in observing the daylong UNDP 50th anniversary Ministerial meeting.
Ministers for Finance, Planning and Development from across the world participated in the program.
Permanent Mission of Bangladesh to the United Nations issued a press release regarding the matter on Wednesday.
UNDP administrator Helen Clark and executives of international and regional development organizations also attended the day-long program.
Muhith said, ‘Bangladesh has tremendously expedited the domestic resource mobilization and has been implementing giant infrastructure projects which would contribute to implement SDGs’.
“Through the process, Bangladesh has come out of the ODA dependency also,” he added.
He also said to focus country-specific needs to make individual plan of actions with the resources that they have and that they would realistically receive from external sources for the implementation of SDGs.
The Minster, however, disagreed with the announced estimated cost to 3.5 trillion USD per year for the implementation of SDGs.
He said, it was not correct in the case of MDGs as more resource than the estimation was needed in the implementation of MDGs.
Other than Muhith, five dignitaries including Prime Minister of Senegal, Finance Minister of Ghana, Planning Minister of Jordan, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia and Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan were panel discussants on the subject.
Earlier in the morning, the Minister had bilateral meetings with Parliamentary Under Secretary for the international development of the UK, Baroness Verma, UNDP Administrator Helen Clark and Executive Secretary of UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) Judith Karl.
In the meeting, the UK Minister expressed her satisfaction for the on-going development in Bangladesh.
The Finance Minister said the present government has been implementing various development programs to reduce income inequality and improve quality of data.
He also said the government has been implementing special social safety-net programs for the physically challenged population, encouraging women to be entrepreneurs and participate in economic activities more, mentioning that in the Garments sector about 90 percent workers are women.
The UK Minister showed interest to improve the data quality in Bangladesh.
The UNDP administrator congratulated Bangladesh for the graduation to Lower middle income country and hoped that Bangladesh would also be able to implement its target to be a middle income country by 2021.
The Minister requested the UNDP administrator to provide support to the initiatives of IDCOL to set up solar grids to ensure solar irrigation.
They also discussed the challenges to implement the SDGs.
In the meeting with UNCDF executive secretary, the Minister requested her to expedite the process to finalize the project titled “Help develop women entrepreneurship through SME”.
He also explained the progress of the implementation of other UNCDF-funded projects.
The UNCDF executive assured the minister that the project for women economic empowerment would be finalized expeditiously.
BDST: 1305 HRS, FEB 25, 2016
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