4th floor West Terrace
United Nations General Assembly Building
UNHQ
United Nations, New York
22 September 2016
Honourable Co-chairs thank you for this opportunity.
In the Pacific, we are interested in durable, inclusive, genuine and mutually accountable partnerships that deliver real and sustainable results on the ground.
We have mapped the SAMOA Pathway Partnerships and out of the 300 Partnerships, 74 engage our 14 Pacific Small Island Developing States.
Two of these partnerships were collectively launched in Samoa by our Pacific Leaders and are coordinated by my organization. These are, the Pacific Oceans Alliance; and the Forum Compact – A Regional Enabling Mechanism to deliver sustainable development in the Pacific.
Since its launch, the Pacific Ocean Alliance has assisted Pacific SIDS to progress regional discussion on the relevance of areas beyond national jurisdiction, and in particular biodiversity of these areas to the future of Pacific people.
The Alliance also provides an inclusive platform for coordination of implementation and reporting against SDG14 and the Oceans and Seas priorities of the SAMOA Pathway, amongst the other regional ocean priorities and commitments.
The Forum Compact Partnership was established by our Leaders to help strengthen the means of implementation for development in the Pacific. Through the Compact, we are taking stronger leadership and ownership of our own development practices and approaches in the Pacific.
We are innovating island to island peer to peer learning to help build our institutions, capacities and policies to better plan for, deliver and account for our development aspirations as reflected in the SDGs, SAMOA Pathway, our Framework for Pacific Regionalism and most importantly, our national plans.
Peer to peer learning is the most widely appreciated but least funded capacity building modality with our Pacific SIDS. We ask our development partners to help us scale up peer to peer or south south cooperation amongst our member countries.
We are strengthening our national and regional accountability mechanisms through improving public financial and aid management systems and making our development partnerships more inclusive of non-state actors through institutionalized high level dialogues with Pacific Leaders.
Colleagues, while we are encouraged to hear of the new partnerships being launched today, we must also keep focus on those 300 already launched in Samoa in 2014.
Early indication from some of our Pacific SIDS is that many of the 74 partnerships promised to the Pacific are not active and if they are, they are not actively being accounted for nor tracked at national level. We must ask WHY? We must and should account for our promises.
This is why accountability for these 74 partnerships that engage our countries must and will be integrated into our regional and national SDGs and SAMOA Pathway monitoring processes anchored in our Pacific SDGs Roadmap, our National Development Plans and our Framework for Pacific Regionalism.
We will be using relevant SDGs targets and indicators to also track progress on the SAMOA Pathway priorities and the 74 partnerships that our region engages in as appropriate to our national plans and our Framework for Pacific Regionalism.
I thank you.
