Opening Remarks at Lao PDR-UN High-Level Joint Steering Committee

Excellency Phoxay Khaykhamphithoune, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs,

Distinguished Government Representatives,

Colleagues from the UN Country Team –

Good afternoon,

It is an honour to welcome you all to our High-Level Joint Steering Committee meeting for 2024.

This is an occasion that offers us an opportunity to reflect on where we are after a particularly eventful year.

And, as the seniormost governing body for our Lao PDR-UN Cooperation Framework, is also our platform to set strategic directions for our work as we move into the penultimate year of implementation of the Framework.

In Lao PDR, the clear, structured, and shared governance and oversight of the entirety of UN’s development work is one of the key dividends that has been delivered by the reform of the UN Development System that begun in 2018.

But the real value of this joint platform can only come when we think and act in more integrated ways that give us the best chance of tackling the most challenging development issues facing the country.

With that in mind, I would like to offer particular thanks to all those that also joined us for our back-to-back technical-level Joint Steering Committee meeting this morning, where we discussed a number of important considerations in detail.

This included our assessment of the key changes in development context over the past year, and what their implications are for the achievement of the four Strategic Priorities we have under the Cooperation Framework in our 2024 Update of the Common Country Analysis.

It also included initiating preparations for a robust review of our work under the Cooperation Framework through an in-depth independent evaluation during 2025. 

As this is our first strategic framework since the UN Development System reform, which led to many significant changes in how we work and how we have organized ourselves, this evaluation will be especially important, and will serve as a key input into the design of our next five-year framework.

And we covered important practical updates such as the finalization of the UN in Lao PDR’s first Partnership Strategy to support the implementation of the Cooperation Framework, and proposed updates to the Terms of Reference for the Joint Steering Committee based on what we have learned over the past 3 years.

Ladies and gentlemen,

These productive discussions at the technical meeting earlier today have laid the foundations for this high-level meeting now.

Reflecting on the important global discussions that Lao PDR has actively engaged in this year, our meeting this afternoon will begin with a discussion of the Pact for the Future adopted by the world leaders in September in New York, and what it means for our work here in Lao PDR.

The Pact aims to rejuvenate the role of multilateralism in addressing global challenges and priorities, and will serve as an important guide for all our engagements from here forward.

We will then turn to focus on the work of the UN under each of our four Strategic Priorities: People’s Wellbeing; Inclusive Prosperity; Governance and Rule of Law; and Environment, Climate Change, and Resilience.

Short presentations on each of these will be delivered by respective UN agency co-chairs leading the work in each area.

These will include highlights of what has been achieved over the past year – ahead of the much more detailed account that will come in our 2024 Annual Report that will be available early next year – and also current thinking for priorities in 2025.

This is the core of our discussion this afternoon, and we count on members of the High-Level Joint Steering Committee for advice and guidance on priorities for the coming year, in particular. Your feedback and insights will help to shape our 2025 workplans, which will soon be developed.

As I am sure we are all aware of, and will become even clearer as we move through our presentations this afternoon, 2024 has been a year where much has been achieved. Indeed, it brought many accomplishments that we can collectively look back on with pride.

But we also continue to face pressing development issues affecting the lives of people across the country, and so we shoulder important responsibilities to reflect seriously on how we can build on progress so far, and go even further in 2025.

With this in mind, I look forward to our deliberations today, and even more so, to continuing to work closely together to take forward the outcomes of our discussions from the new year.

Thank you.