Events

UNIDO ITPO Italy to the Global South-South Development Expo 2011

Rome, 5 th to 9 th December 2011. UNIDO won the annual “South-South Cooperation award, thanks to the “Solar power for Irrigation in Remote Areas of Mozambique” initiative. Awarding came on the occasion of the Global South-South Development Expo 2011, an event organized by FAO to highlight the global food insecurity situation, which sees more than 925 million go hungry every day.

Four days to share information, during which 30 expositors showcased successful examples of Southern-led solutions to global development challenges.

Food insecurity is one of the main challenges to which FAO and UNIDO are committing their resources. To this end, Mr. Mpoko Bokanga, AgroBusiness Development Unit Chief from UNIDO’s HQ in Vienna, joined the event witnessing the joint effort to seek to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Indeed, within the 2011 GSSD Expo, UNIDO organized the Solution Exchange Forum on Agribusiness, Renewable Energy and Food Security. Mr Mpoko Bokanga illustrated UNIDO recent interventions in developing countries that have successfully helped those countries to shift to higher value-added production, processing and marketing systems.

ITPO Italy staff took part in the “Leadership Round Table”, an opportunity to discuss how to turn around the precarious global food-security situation and accelerate progress in the fight against hunger. Within this framework, the experts shared success stories and challenges from Africa, Asia, Latin America and discussed how closer collaboration among the countries of the South can help to solve the problem. To these meetings followed many specialized forums such as the ones dedicated to Technology Transfer and Public-Private Partnerships and Local Public Finance and Food Security. These special sessions represented opportunities to identify and engage with partners who share a common vision for transferring and scaling up particular development solutions.