UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK, 26 July 2021 – NEDA Undersecretary for Policy and Planning Rosemarie Edillon proposed five critical areas for urgent global action that can help countries recover from COVID-19, at the UN high-level meeting held ton 16 July 2021 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). These actions include ensuring vaccine equity, developing a common digital vaccination certificate, collaborating for developing online learning platforms and resources, institutionalizing knowledge exchange, and ensuring access to food and essential goods to truly achieve a sustainable and resilient recovery for all, without leaving no one and no country behind.
Undersecretary Edillon also elaborated on the recalibration of national development goals to steer transformation towards equity and resilience. She also appealed for stronger global mechanisms that will immediately address delays in production and distribution of vaccines, and underlined the crucial need to address intellectual property rights restrictions that prevent scaling up of production.
The Undersecretary expressed the hope that the ECOSOC would consider establishing a simple yet globally recognized digital vaccination certificate which contains secured data that can be verified.
Undersecretary Edillon called on experts among Member States to create open educational resources (OER) such as learning management systems and mobile applications and cited initiatives such as OER4Covid (established by the Commonwealth of Learning) and OERu (established in partnership with the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education and the International Council for Open and Distance Education), which could serve as models to develop similar programs that increase interoperability and availability of OERs for teachers and students all over the world.
This year’s ECOSOC High-Level Segment focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the implementation of the SDGs. It also provided the space for ECOSOC and delegations to present innovative ideas that could contribute to the reflection on how best to improve multilateralism in the area of sustainable development while celebrating the Council’s positive impact during its 75 years of existence.
Source: Republic of Philippines Department Of Foreign Affairs