Madam Chair,
Italy welcomes this focused discussion and thanks the esteemed panelists and discussants for their valuable inputs and presentations.
As we gather in the occasion of the HLPF to give impetus to effective solutions to address poverty and accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, it is imperative to examine the unique situations of African Countries, LDCs and LLDCs, in order to tailor our action to their specific strengths and vulnerabilities and make our partnerships more effective.
In particular, we concur with a sense of urgency to address LDCs’ and LLDCs’ additional challenges when facing food insecurity, climate change, infrastructure development and the recurrence of natural disasters. We support the Doha Program of Action and we look forward to the Third UN LLDCs Conference to be held in Gaborone in December this year.
Mutually beneficial and equitable cooperation with the African countries and regional organizations is a top priority for Italy, and has been fully reflected in the Program of our G7 Presidency. In this context, outreach and inclusion of our global partners has been a prominent feature to increase their voice, space and participation and also in the design of a number of concrete deliverables that have been launched by the recent G7 leaders’ Summit across the SDGs and the key transitions.
Among these initiatives, please allow me just to mention a few:
- The G7 Apulia Food Systems Initiative, aimed at leveraging multi-stakeholders partnerships and investments, and call for an acceleration of all Food Security commitments;
- The Energy for Growth in Africa Initiative, to address the energy transition bottleneck and to unlock socio-economic dividends;
- The Artificial Intelligence Hub for Sustainable Development, designed with UNDP to leverage the benefits of AI for SDGs and support local AI and digital ecosystems;
- The follow-up to the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, to better align it with the EU Global Gateway and taly’s Mattei Plan for Africa, involving the private sector and the African Development Bank to aggregate investment support to infrastructure projects, through the establishment of a Permanent Secretariat and new synergies with the Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa and the African Virtual Investment Platform, in collaboration with the African Union and OECD.
Together with partners, we intend to continue to work towards strengthening industrial capacities, promoting diversified and resilient supply chains, and reducing critical dependencies and vulnerabilities.
Madam Chair,
Investing in the SDGs, reducing poverty and tackling global challenges such as climate change are interlinked challenges, and we need to adopt an integrated approach and to rely on strong partnerships if we want to succeed in addressing them.
Thank you.
