New Delhi: The United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation is being observed on September 12.
South-South cooperation is a manifestation of solidarity among peoples and countries of the South that contributes to their national well-being, their national and collective self-reliance and the attainment of internationally agreed development goals, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. South-South cooperation is accelerating progress towards the implementation and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“South-South cooperation has offered concrete solutions to shared challenges, with many countries becoming sources of support and inspiration for innovative development approaches,” says UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
South-South cooperation is done through a broad framework of collaboration among countries of the South in the political, economic, social, cultural, environmental and technical domains. Involving two or more developing countries, it can take place on a bilateral, regional, intraregional or interregional basis. Through South-South collaboration, developing countries share knowledge, skills, expertise and resources to meet their development goals through concerted efforts.
Triangular cooperation is collaboration in which traditional donor countries and multilateral organizations facilitate South-South initiatives through the provision of funding, training, management and technological systems as well as other forms of support.
The United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation celebrates the economic, social and political developments made in recent years by regions and countries in the South and highlights United Nations efforts to work on technical cooperation among developing countries.
Objectives of South-South Cooperation
• foster the self-reliance of developing countries by enhancing their creative capacity to find solutions to their development problems in keeping with their own aspirations, values and specify needs;
• promote and strengthen collective self-reliance among developing countries through the exchange of experiences; the pooling, sharing and use of their technical and other resources; and the development of their complementary capacities;
• strengthen the capacity of developing countries to identify and analyse together their main development issues and formulate the requisite strategies to address them;
• increase the quantity and enhance the quality of international development cooperation through the pooling of capacities to improve the effectiveness of the resources devoted to such cooperation;
• create and strengthen existing technological capacities in the developing countries in order to improve the effectiveness with which such capacities are used and to improve the capacity of developing countries to absorb and adapt technology and skills to meet their specific developmental needs;
• increase and improve communications among developing countries, leading to a greater awareness of common problems and wider access to available knowledge and experience as well as the creation of new knowledge in tackling development problems;
• recognize and respond to the problems and requirements of the least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, small island developing States and the countries most seriously affected by, for example, natural disasters and other crises; and
• enable developing countries to achieve a greater degree of participation in international economic activities and to expand international cooperation for development.
Theme for 2019:
From Commitment to Action — Follow up to Buenos Aires Plan of Action+40
In 1978, the first United Nations Conference on Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (TCDC) took place in Argentina, adopting the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries (BAPA), endorsed by the General Assembly (resolution 33/134).
On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the adoption of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation among developing countries (TCDC), the Second High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation (BAPA+40) was recently held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 20-22 March 2019. That is why this year the theme will be focused on the implementation of the commitments adopted in the Plan of Action+40.
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