By Binta Jaiteh
Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Thursday presided over the official opening of the 8th African Regional Forum for Sustainable Development (FRADD-8).
It is under the theme “Building a Better Future: A green, inclusive and resilient Africa ready to achieve the 2030 Agenda and the 2063 Agenda”.
“Africa has made progress against economic difficulties, but unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down and sometimes even reversed the efforts,” the Rwandan president lamented in his opening speech.
He was pleased, however, that despite this slowdown, COVID had enabled the continent to rebuild a greener and more resilient Africa, by moving forward on certain agenda items.
African ministers, senior officials, high-level policy makers and experts from ministries and agencies, and practitioners from UN member states, the private sector, civil society, academia and UN organizations are attending the three-day meeting.
FRADD-8 is preparing Africa’s position for the 2022 High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF). It will also conduct a regional monitoring and review of the implementation of selected SDGs and Agenda 2063 targets.
It will focus on identifying ambitious strategies and policy actions to build back better after COVID-19 and to significantly scale up implementation for the decade 2021-2030.
The forum again aims to facilitate learning, including sharing approaches, experiences and lessons learned from National Voluntary Reviews (NVRs) and Local Voluntary Reviews (LVRs) and implementation efforts.
It will deliberate and agree on Africa’s regional contribution to the 2022 HLPF meeting in New York.
The Regional Forum is, it is recalled, one of the three mechanisms mandated by the UN General Assembly to monitor, review and catalyze action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by UN Member States in September 2015.
