International organizations, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector have major roles in achieving development goals, a manager of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said in a meeting in Istanbul.
All those partners have to work together for bringing solutions to development challenges, Gerd Trogemann, the manager of UNDP's Istanbul Regional Hub, stressed yesterday during the hub's meeting on poverty.
The two-day meeting, which began yesterday, is organized by the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development (ISFD) and the UNDP. It is a preparatory meeting for the "ISFD NGOs Empowerment for Poverty Reduction Program" to be launched on Sept. 27 on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. Several managers from organizer institutions are giving speeches on many issues such as saving children, poverty in Africa, socio-economic issues, Islamic and alternative finance, innovation and blockchain opportunities and partnership with the private sector. Every year, large amounts of money were provided to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but this is not about money, Trogemann underlined. "SDGs require a combination of the power of all levels of community, NGOs and the private sectors," he added. The complexity of today's development challenges cannot be tackled by individual organizations, individual projects and traditional development finance alone, Trogemann said. "To reach the SDGs, the global development community has to work together in a different way, go much deeper and reach much wider than we have done before," he noted. The partners should go beyond organizational borders and "build networks and platforms of partnerships, which are designed to solve complex and systemic development challenges" as each partner has different levels of reach, approaches and solutions, Trogemann added.Khemais El Gazzah, a senior adviser from the ISFD, said the program targets to create more jobs and improve education in member countries.
"We are ambitious to reduce poverty, this cannot be done alone by the IsDB, ISFD or UNDP, we should work together," he underlined. "Fighting poverty is not a one-man or one-institution job; people have to cooperate for achieving this."
"The IsDB started to work with NGOs eight years ago, and now we are at the second stage to become more efficient," El Gazzah further noted.
