Secretary of Foreign Affairs Blas F. Ople will attend the first High-Level Dialogue on Financing for Development of the UN General Assembly, which will convene on 29 – 30 October 2003 at the UN Headquarters in New York.

The High-Level Dialogue will serve as the primary intergovernmental follow-up to the International Conference on Financing for Development (ICFfD), also called the Monterrey Summit in Monterrey, Mexico on 18 – 22 March 2002. The outcome of the ICFfD, the Monterrey Consensus, called for the worldwide mobilization of resources for development with the objective of achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals, which among others envision to halve global incidence of extreme poverty by 2015.

Participation in the dialogue is of special significance to the Philippines primarily because the country, through its Mission to the UN in New York served as the prime mover in launching the discussions on financing for development in the UN General Assembly in the early 1990s.  As chairman of the Group of 77 (G-77) in 1995, the Philippines carried the negotiations when the issue was initially opposed by developed countries.

In 1999, the country’s representative to the UN facilitated the difficult discussions in the Open-ended Working Group on FfD that eventually guided the work of subsequent Preparatory Committees for the Monterrey Summit.

Secretary Ople will serve as co-chair in one of the round tables of the dialogue that will focus on the regional dimensions of the implementation of the results of the Monterrey Summit. He will be joined by Ministers from other UN Member States and representatives of international financing institutions, civil society and the private sector.

During the high-level dialogue, Ople is expected to call on the international community to exert efforts to reverse the declining levels of official development assistance (ODA), implement debt swap for poverty programmes for indebted developing countries and to develop a mechanism to provide microfinance support for micro-, small- medium-scale enterprises (MSMEs).