Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations

Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations

Welcoming remarks by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at the Joint event to raise awareness on Russia’s international development assistance projects

Your Excellences, Ambassadors, Heads of UN agencies and offices, colleagues,

I would like to welcome you at the event dedicated to the launch of 8 projects supported by Russia and implemented by the UN agencies in our partner countries.

There are a number of common features in all these projects. They fully correspond to the development priorities of the recipient countries and are aimed at ordinary people and their immediate needs. We aim at contributing to the building and increasing of the long-term socio-economic potential in those countries in areas where Russia is proud to share its best expertise, including statistics, healthcare, education, infrastructure resilience. The assistance is also inclusive as it covers different society groups.

As for the package of projects in Syria, we believe that the areas they cover, namely, resilience-building and strengthening local capacities to deliver education, nutrition and health services are vital for a country going through a difficult period.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of UNICEF project that aims at reducing child mortality and morbidity in the DPRK through the improvement of preventive medical interventions. As for the UNFPA project in DPRK on strengthening statistics, we believe it should have important implications for economic planning and consequently for the socio-economic development of the country.

Same on planning applies to the UNICEF project on the development of demographic statistics in Tajikistan, as the country is going through the national census this year.

And finally, we note the UNICEF project on inclusive education in Belarus that will complement the ongoing project on the social inclusion of children with special needs there. We hope that these two projects combined with the Government efforts will help those children live better and happier lives.

In conclusion, let me thank you again for coming and say that Russia is proud to be a partner with the UN in development assistance. I would like to invite our distinguish guests to share their views on those initiatives.