India joins UN to launch capacity-building programme for Global South nations

The "India-UN Capacity Building Initiative" was launched on the sideline of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Saturday (Sunday in India). It aims to share India’s development experiences, best practices and expertise with partner countries in the ‘Global South’ through capacity building and training programs, India’s permanent mission to the UN in New York stated. The initiative builds upon the extensive cooperation in development and capacity building that India already has bilaterally with the partner countries, it added.

"Our experiences and our achievements we place before you in a spirit of sharing," External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said as he was joined by the ministers of several developing countries as well as the officials of the UN. Dennis Francis, president of the 78th UN General Assembly, and Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, prime minister of Samoa, also attended the event.

The initiative also complements the “India-UN Development Partnership Fund”, which has developed a portfolio of 75 development projects in 61 countries in the last six years.

The UN India team and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will partner to leverage India’s Technical and Economic Cooperation platform to share India’s development experiences and best practices across the world. A Joint Declaration of Intent was exchanged between the UN Resident Coordinator in India and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

When it has come to South-South cooperation, India has endeavoured to walk the talk, the external affairs minister said, underlining that one of the really important outcomes of the recently held G20 summit in New Delhi was the membership of the African Union into the grouping. Jaishankar said that it was appropriate that India started its G20 presidency by convening the ‘Voice of the Global South Summit’, an exercise that involved 125 developing nations.  

The newly launched initiative would also operationalise the development-relevant deliverables of India’s G20 presidency, including the G20 Action Plan for Accelerating Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, technological transformation and building Digital Public Infrastructure, New Delhi’s permanent mission to the UN in New York said

Jaishankar said that the countries of the ‘Global South’, in addition to bearing the consequences of structural inequities and historical burdens, were plagued by the impact of economic concentration, suffering from the devastating consequences of the Covid-19 and beset by conflict, tensions and disputes, which had stressed and distorted the international economy. Geopolitical calculations and geopolitical contests “are impacting very basic requirements of many countries”, including affordable access to food, fertilizers and energy.

“It was therefore, for us, a particularly onerous responsibility to make sure that in collaboration with all our G20 members, we were able to refocus the G20 on the urgent and pressing needs of the Global South,” Jaishankar said.