Opening Remarks at Lao PDR-UN Technical Joint Steering Committee

Director-General Moukdavanh Sisoulith, Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

Distinguished Government Representatives,

Colleagues from the UN Country Team –

Good morning,

Today, we gather to reflect on our progress and strategize for the future as we approach the end of an eventful year.

This is a year that has seen not only ongoing work to address pressing domestic challenges, but also Lao PDR’s successful delivery of the ASEAN Chairmanship, including the ASEAN-UN Summit for which our Secretary-General made his first official country visit in October, and the delivery of the 3rd Voluntary National Review of progress towards the SDGs.

The global Summit of the Future in New York in September set out to rejuvenate multilateral cooperation, and delivered three important outcomes to strengthen all of our work, including the Pact for the future, the Global Digital Compact, and the Declaration on Future Generations.

And national planning processes have kicked into high gear, with work now well advanced on the development of the 10th National Socio-Economic Development Plan, and setting up processes for the implementation of the Smooth Transition Strategy to prepare for anticipated LDC graduation.

In this context, the Joint Steering Committee plays a crucial role as the most senior body providing oversight of the work of all 25 members of the UN Country Team and how we work together to deliver our Cooperation Framework. 

The Framework is a jointly owned vision, co-signed by both the Government and the United Nations, and it is only in the JSC that we formally come together to review our progress with implementation, and take strategic decisions to set the agenda for where we go next.

So, I am particularly glad to see strong participation from both Government and the UN at our meeting today.

Ladies and gentlemen,

By this point, I am sure that we are all familiar with the four Strategic Priorities set out under the Cooperation Framework: People’s Wellbeing; Inclusive Prosperity; Governance and Rule of Law, and Environment, Climate Change, and Resilience.

These represent the UN’s contribution towards the achievement of national development priorities as set out in the National Socio-Economic Development Plan.

As we have done every year under the Cooperation Framework, we begin our annual planning process with a careful review of what has changed in the development context for the country, which is done through an update to our Common Country Analysis.

This represents the consensus view of the Country Team on how the situation has evolved over the past years on issues relevant to the achievement of our Strategic Priorities. 

Today, highlights from this updated analysis will be presented by the UN agency co-chairs leading the UN’s work under each of these Priorities, and we would of course welcome the JSC’s feedback on our analysis. 

This, in turn will form the basis for identification of our priorities for 2025, which will be set out in the Joint Workplan that we will begin work to develop shortly.

I would like to emphasize that the work of the JSC is particularly important as we approach the end of the third year of our 5-year framework. 

This means that we will soon embark on the process of designing the plan for our next cycle, which will take us through to 2031.

And this should, of course, include careful consideration of how we have organised ourselves, and how we can further strengthen our ways of working in the next cycle.

As a first step towards this, today we will also discuss the outcomes of mid-term reviews undertaken by UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and WFP on the implementation of their respective programmes under the Cooperation Framework.

These will be valuable considerations to guide the design of the overall independent evaluation of the Cooperation Framework, which will be undertaken from next year, and will be presented in more detail later this morning.

Then, finally, there are important practical updates that we would like to share with the Committee on our work. These include:

• The development of our first Partnership Strategy to support the implementation of our Cooperation Framework, setting out how we will improve the transparency, efficiency and coordination of our resource mobilization efforts and engage more strategically with key groups of stakeholders; 
• Sharing our support to the flood response and recovery efforts in the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi; and 
• Updating the Terms of Reference for the JSC itself to reflect experience gained from the 3 years of implementation so far.

So, as ever, we have much to cover and we count on your active and frank engagement across all of these important matters.

I thank you all again for taking the time to join, and I look forward to our discussions over the coming hours.

Thank you.