UN day for south-south cooperation

The Assembly also urged all relevant United Nations organizations and multilateral institutions to intensify their efforts to effectively mainstream the use of South-South cooperation in the design, formulation and implementation of their regular programmes and to consider increasing allocations of human, technical and financial resources for supporting South-South cooperation initiatives.

The Special Unit for South South cooperation (SU/SSC) was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1978. Hosted in UNDP, its primary mandate is to promote, coordinate and support South-South and triangular cooperation on a Global and United Nations system-wide basis.

The Special Unit receives policy directives and guidance from the General Assembly High-Level Committee on South-South Cooperation (HLC) which is a committee of the whole and a subsidiary body of the General Assembly that reviews world wide progress in South-South Cooperation. The Special Unit serves as the HLC’s full Secretariat, preparing all substantive reports, including the report to the Secretary General on the state of South-South Cooperation. It organizes the GA-proclaimed United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation, celebrated annually on December 19. The Special Unit for South-South Cooperation manages the United Nations Trust Fund for South-South Cooperation (UNFSC) and the Perez-Guerrero Trust Fund (PGTF) and also implements programmes financed by United Nations Development Programme.

The Special Unit for South-South Cooperation also operates by building and strengthening broad-based partnerships with a range of organizations, including the International Organization for Migration, UNCTAD, UNESCO, the World Bank, NGOs, the private sector, civil society and a wide variety of international development agencies. These relationships have attracted inputs, funding and other resources which are committed to implementing projects by utilizing a number of methods including triangular cooperation. In scenarios where triangular cooperation is used, SU/SSC initiates, develops and assists in the execution of technical cooperation among two or more developing countries that is supported financially by northern donors or by international organizations.

There are currently a few diversified funding mechanisms. The South-South Trust Fund, for instance, provides one of the effective mechanisms to collect and make use of resources in support of South-South cooperation initiatives.Resource mobilization is essential to ensuring that the agenda of the Global South has concrete outcomes. For this reason, the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation administers existing funds as well as secures additional funding sources through its public private partnerships and pivotal countries in the South to provide seed funding to inspire and support new initiatives in their incubator stages.

 

Find out more: http://tcdc.undp.org/index.aspx