Government of Albania participates at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness

From 29 November to 1 December 2011, in Busan, Korea, was organized the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4) with the participation of over 3000 delegates aiming to review global progress on implementing the principles of the Paris Declaration. A Delegation from the Government of Albania participated at this important forum for the aid effectiveness issues. The delegation was headed by the Director of the the Department of Strategy and Donor Coordination, Valbona Kuko and was comprised of the Deputy Minister of Labour, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, DSDC Coordinator, Klodian Seferaj, and Nevila Çomo from the Donor Technical Secretariat.

They forum discussed on how to maintain the relevance of the aid effectiveness agenda in the context of the evolving development landscape. The official opening ceremony took place on the morning of 30th November, 2011. During the ceremony, speeches were made by the President of the Republic of Korea, Lee Myung-bak, Korean Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Min Dong-seok, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Queen Rania of Jordan, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Antonio Tujan, Chair of the Better Aid Coordinating Group of Civil Society Organizations.

The Forum culminated in the signing of the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation by ministers of developed and developing nations, emerging economies, providers of South-South and triangular co-operation and civil society, marking a critical turning point in development co-operation.

In their interventions, the high level personalities strongly supported political statement ‘Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation’. The declaration adopted at the conference marked a turning point for international development cooperation by establishing for the first time a framework agreed by over 80 countries and organizations with common goals of poverty reduction and sustainable development. The Statement was to express the support for the new vision and commitments of the Busan outcome document and to demonstrate their political will to put them into action through more strengthened cooperation within a new and inclusive Global Development Partnership

A particular focus at the Forum was provided to gender equality and empowering women for development effectiveness with a special panel session dedicated to gender hosted by Mrs.Hillary Rodham Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State, and Kum-lae Kim, Korea’s Minister for Gender Equality and Family, and moderated by Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director, UN Women. In this panel was presented a new initiative promoted by the U.S. Secretary of State on “The Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE)”. EDGE is a new initiative to improve the availability and use of statistics that capture gender gaps in economic activity including: (i) the development of an online database for a harmonized set of indicators on education, employment, and entrepreneurship, among others; (ii) a set of common, pilot activities in a small number of partner countries to develop protocols and data collection methods for sex-disaggregated data on entrepreneurship and assets, two areas with large data gaps.

Additional materials from the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness can be found here.