Round Table Meeting 2019: Opening Remarks by Sara Sekkenes

Your Excellency, Dr. Sonexay Siphandone, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Planning and Investment,

Your Excellency Mr. Khamkhan Chanthavisouk, Governor of Luangprabang Province,

Excellencies and Ambassadors,

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies & Gentlemen,

Thank you, Excellency Sonexay Siphandone, Deputy Prime Minister/Minister of Planning and Investment, for opening today’s High-Level Dialogue.

Thank you, Excellency Khamkhan Chanthavisouk, Governor, for the warm hospitality extended to us in Luangprabang.

It is my honour to address you all on behalf of the United Nations Development System and the UN Country Team in Lao PDR at this important high-level development dialogue on the occasion of the annual Round Table Implementation Meeting.

Yesterday’s Technical Forum displayed constructive discussions on a number of pertinent subjects influencing the development path of Lao PDR. We look forward to hearing about the results of the Technical Forum today and hope that they will serve to inform the 9th National Socio-Economic Development Plan, which will guide the country through the time period in which the Governments’ ambition is for Lao PDR to graduate from its Least Developed Country status.

With the commitment and strong ownership of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Lao PDR has continued to demonstrate rapid progress across multiple sectors in 2019, including strong economic growth, improvement of health and education indicators, measures to strengthen disaster response and climate change adaptation. These are promising and much needed outputs.  

LDC graduation is an important milestone – it entails that domestic policies/strategies are bearing fruit, that growth is addressing vulnerabilities, and that international support mechanisms are playing positive roles.

But graduation is not an end in itself as the same issues remain prior to and beyond - it is a catalyst to mobilize resources and actions to achieve continuous, inclusive and sustainable growth with substantial poverty reduction on the road towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

• For example, graduation may be used as a way of attracting new investment in the fast-growing economy to further stimulate growth.
• Nations become less dependent on international support, enjoy more independent “policy space” and become less risky for investment, often showing that public investment will increase in parallel with private investment.

Like many landlocked LDCs, Lao PDR face particular development challenges that must be tackled to gain traction on the road towards graduation; to secure the graduation criteria but more importantly, to ensure equality and sustainability in the development pathways it carves out. And this requires both determination, priority setting and the policies that best can address the choices made.  

One delegate yesterday suggested to develop a common national transition plan. This may indeed be a good take-away from this year’s Round Table meeting.

To address the remaining challenges, it is important to utilize development cooperation potential to the fullest, including the fast advancing cooperation with the private sector, civil society actors and agents of change as well as traditional donors, south-south cooperation, regional groups and all neighbouring countries that invest in and can impact and support a sustainable development for Lao PDR.

Such an effective development cooperation would also help bring forward transnational issues that can impact Lao PDR’s development trajectory, with opportunities to identify, accelerate and safeguard development gains.

As a forum for the exchange of views on the critical development priorities and challenges ahead, the annual Round Table Meeting is an important venue that can help navigate the choices needed to be made.

A focus on areas of interest across sectors that can bring together, integrate and coordinate line ministries and sectors is warranted, and many good suggestions have been made that can serve as the outline for a common transition plan.

Such a focus would also create a networked co-ownership across sectors to contribute towards the achievement of all SDGs, and effectively address inherent tradeoffs and necessary priorities to ensure no one is left behind. Following the structure of the NSEDP:

• Under the economic pillar, priorities could for instance focus on ongoing reforms to enhance fiscal space, for instance via blending and other instruments, to yield higher output and efficiency gains from the significant infrastructural investments already made in hydro power and transportation networks nationwide.
• Under the social pillar, focus could be on human capital and the investments that would be required through the life cycle of women and men, and particularly girls and boys who will be born between now and 2030 – the Lao Generation 2030 - including adequate health care, nutrition and development in early life; access and quality in elementary, secondary and higher levels of education and TVET, and public health throughout life, an issue that also emphasizes the need for more systematic and institutionalized social protection leaving no one behind, especially focusing on health, development and protection of adolescent girls.
• Under the environmental pillar, attention could be on the nexus of disaster risk reduction and recovery and climate change adaptation; and the transformation of the labour intensive sectors, e.g. how to leapfrog the agriculture sector in a green and sustainable manner that would serve to sustain livelihoods, provide higher levels of food security and of income by moving up through the value chain.

These are examples of three areas that could also ripe synergies and reinforce each other. Jointly reflecting on the overall progress in implementation of the next steps and recommendations of the Mid-Term Review of the 8th National Socio-Economic Development Plan has been crucial at this year’s Round Table Implementation Meeting as it enabled us to have an evidence-based look at the current state of the localization and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Technical Forum made it even more so clear how important it is, the linkage between planning and budgeting and alignment of various planning instruments and priority processes, and better linking national policies and strategies with local level implementation through provincial and district planning in the context of the Three Builds strategy, including the LDC transition strategy, Green Growth Strategy and National Disaster Recovery Framework and National Strategy for DRR, under the overall wireframe of SDGs to be captured in the 9th NSEDP (2021-2025).

Remarkable efforts have been made in a number of socio-economic sectors, crucial for SDG achievement and to secure sustainable LDC graduation, though continued progress is needed to address the growing disparities recognized based on ethnicity, language, gender, age, educational attainment, disability, and social-economic status that otherwise risk leaving the most vulnerable groups of population behind.

Another promising priority mentioned yesterday in the outline of the 9th NSEDP was the horizontal and vertical coordination output that would serve to enhance local level capacities including authorities, civil society and development partners, to better translate the NSEDP into results on the ground.

Similar to the recent reform of the UN Development System aimed at ensuring a system approach with a well-coordinated strategic and technically integrated collaboration, among UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes under the Resident Coordinator system, it is encouraging to witness the mirrored effort of the Government, under the leadership of the Ministry of Planning and Investment, to converge a whole-of-Government approach for effective planning and development cooperation for SDG achievement which would address the horizontal coordination needed (e.g. revised ODA decree).

In the centralization process, it will however be important to maintain efficiency and further strengthen the critical vertical alignment ensuring that the national policies match the necessary needs, knowledge and investments for implementation at the local level.

Such system efforts are more effectively applied vis-à-vis measures targeting the diverse needs within human capital development in order to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for all, which is a critical component in the broader development priorities of Lao PDR.

The UN system therefore also stands ready to support the Government with an Integrated National Financing Framework that could help identify the blended financing that can best leverage ODA with a statistically supported evidence-based monitoring framework that would help keep track of progress of the 9th National Plan and SDGs, including through the 10 Sector Working Groups (SWG), chaired by line ministries and co-chaired by development partners, under the Ministry of Planning and Investment.

More active and recurrent coordination and oversight of the SDG targets implementation by Sector Working Groups, particularly in areas of high disparities, would also enable the Round Table Process to become even more result-oriented as an SDGs-driven effective platform for development dialogue.

Ladies and gentlemen,

As mentioned in the beginning of my remarks, the purpose of today’s High-Level Dialogue is to engage in discussing the results of the panel discussions and provide outputs, in view of the concept development of the 9th NSEDP. Together we need to seize the momentum to ensure a people-centered 9th NSEDP, focusing on vulnerable groups in order to reach poverty alleviation and SDGs targets, as well as to address the widening disparities to ensure that we leave no one behind.

Sustainable development in Lao PDR, as in any country, requires multilateral cooperation, to tackle challenges that have impact beyond borders and generations. In this spirit, the UN system strongly encourages to hear, also through the Round Table Process, from the women and men, from girls and boys, all income groups, state and non-state actors and the diverse civil society, the very beneficiaries of development policy, in order to understand their different needs.

In following the tradition of the annual RTM, on behalf of the United Nations Development System and the UN Country Team, I look forward to convey development partners contributions to the outcome of our dialogue to His Excellency Prime Minister Sisoulith later this week.

In closing I would like to again thank the Government of Lao PDR, my co-chair Excellency, Dr. Sonexay Siphandone, our host Excellency Mr. Khamkhan Chanthavisouk, and all distinguished participants of the 2019 RTM, wishing you good health and prosperity throughout the annual Round table process.