SL moves forward with rapid development - Country Director UNDP

By Anuradha KODAGODA

The UN Day was established to highlight the aims and achievements of the United Nations. The day marks the anniversary of the entry of the UN Charter in 1945. The annual day has been observed since 1948.

United Nations Day has traditionally been marked throughout the world with meetings, discussions and exhibits about the achievements and goals of the organisation.

On December 14, 1955, Sri Lanka signed the UN Charter, effectively binding itself to the notion of putting ideas into practice. There's no doubt that the UN has had a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with Sri Lanka for the past 57 years and continues to make a difference in the lives of the Sri Lankan people.

Of the several UN agencies which are actively resident in the country, United Nations Development Programe (UNDP) is one of the agencies which has done a lot in terms of human development for the country.

The following are excerpts of an exclusive interview the Sunday Observer had with the Country Director a.i. UNDP, Razina Bilgrami, about the support given to Sri Lanka by the UNDP in recent years.

Q: Explain your role in the UNDP as Country Director in Sri Lanka?

A: I have been appointed as acting Country Director for UNDP and in the past three months I have headed all the UNDP programs in Sri Lanka. I have been in Sri Lanka for two years and before my appointment as Country Director, I was the Deputy Country Director for all programs headed by UNDP.

Q: What has been the focus of UNDP's support to Sri Lanka in recent years?

A: In recent years most of the UNDP programs were focused on supporting the conflict affected areas in the Northern and the Eastern provinces in terms of socio-economic recovery. Therefore, a large part of our resources have gone in to provide support in these areas and we are in the process of providing support to the government in terms of building its own capacity for mine clearance. It is one area of work that we are focusing on and the other part of the programs focuses on good governance, access to justice, human rights, local governance and strengthening public service delivery.

The third phase is carried out by the disaster management area and overall energy and environment projects which are under the Environment Ministry and Disaster Management Ministry are facilitated in terms of resources to fulfil the requirements. Finally, through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) we have supported events that took place recently and carried out MDG based planning while working with the national planning department and introduced the concept of results based management to government institutes. Recently we published the National Human Development Report which is mainly based on MDGs and poverty clusters that we have been working on for the past few years.

Q: UNDP has recently launched the National Human Development Report (NHDR) - What is the message you would like to give emanating from the NHDR?

A: UNDP at a global level prepares these human development reports as advocacy tools for human development. After a gap of 14 year this year we prepared a National Human Development Report for Sri Lanka. The report is more focused on regional disparities and inequality. We consider Sri Lanka as a country quite close in terms of achieving MDGs at the national level, but when we look at it region by region we find there are inequalities and disparities which we have to address.

Sri Lanka for example in the Human Development Index at global level could earn the best place compared with the other SAARC countries. But when the inequality is adjusted in the human development index then Sri Lanka is falling down in a reasonable degree. Therefore, this report is studied especially on the education, health and employment sectors to ascertain where the disparity lies.

There are some interesting facts highlighted on the report such as women's low participation in labour force and their representation in Parliament. Though Sri Lanka is doing well in education and health, the report has recommended the need to modernise, diversify and upgrade the level of education and the health sector in the country. Also, in terms of reducing unemployment, the county has done well.

In the analysis we have observed that conflict affected areas need further support to upgrade livelihood, eliminate malnutrition for education and other primary and secondary needs.

Q: If you were to highlight three key development areas which Sri Lanka should focus on, what would they be?

A: In overall terms I would like to emphasise maybe three points. Firstly, Sri Lanka is in the path of rapid economic growth and as the UNDP we would like to help Sri Lanka to move forward in that direction. However, in the path of rapid growth we have to ensure that the benefits of the growth reaches the people.

Secondly, I would like to highlight gender. It is vital to look into gender in the right perspective. The recent published report says that the unemployment of women is greater than the unemployment of men. We should keep in mind that in terms of population nearly 50 percent of the population of the country are women. Hence, it is clear that there are disparities.

Therefore with the rapid economic growth it is important to create an equal opportunity for women to get employment. Thirdly, we are keen that climate change issues should not lead to destroy the natural resources of the country. It is important to have an appropriate understanding and precautions of climate change and disaster management to protect the natural resources of the country. Also I wish to highlight that Sri Lanka has a lot of competence to share with the world. We would like to serve as a platform for promoting knowledge of Sri Lanka to other parts of the world. This could be a model of disaster management.

Q: Looking ahead, how do you see UNDP's continued support to Sri Lanka in the following years?

A: Here I would like to stress that we are moving on a humanitarian approach to sustainable development in the country. UNDP is widening its lense to look at not only the Northern and Eastern provinces, but to focus attention islandwide. There are areas we have identified through the latest NHDR. During the next few years we would continue to focus on socio-economic livelihood development on an islandwide approach.

We would like to move forward to consolidate our programs by integrating the work we are doing on local economic development strengthening local governance in terms of effective service delivery, bringing the communities closer,using the district development plans as reference.