Directors of UN Rome-based agencies meet to strengthen ties on South-South and Triangular Cooperation
20/05/2022 Rome – In view of upcoming key South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSTC) commitments, the three Rome-based Agencies (RBA) Directors in charge of SSTC met today at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to discuss current and potential joint field collaboration on SSTC.
Anping Ye, Director of the SSTC Division in FAO, opened the meeting, reiterating the importance of mutually beneficial SSTC initiatives undertaken by the RBAs in recent years; and emphasizing how this joint commitment has resulted in further mainstreaming SSTC. “South-South and triangular cooperation enables countries to pool resources, adopt and adapt these solutions consistent to their needs”.
“Our engagement and support are therefore fundamental to mainstreaming South-South and Triangular Cooperation and accelerating the recovery and transformation of agrifood systems in the Global South” Ye noted.
IFAD and WFP also expressed their deep ties to RBA SSTC collaboration.
“It's a great opportunity to focus on School Feeding as a practical example of how we as agencies can jointly leverage SSTC to support our Member States overcome some of the challenges they face currently” Ron Hartman, Director, Global Engagement, Partnerships and Resource Mobilization Division, IFAD.
“Home-Grown School Feeding is a proven model widely documented. An RBA joint SSTC initiative in this area can be key to take this model to scale while contributing to national pathways to sustainable food systems” David Kaatrud, Director of the Programme (Humanitarian and Development) Division, WFP
The meeting was the first to be convened this year in person making it even more significant.
FAO also presented its newly launched SSTC Guidelines for Action, which outline a new and more programmatic, focused, result-based, systematic and quality-assured approach to mainstreaming SSTC in FAO, and strongly highlights the need to work closely with the RBAs.
Two main agenda items were discussed during the meeting.
The first one, presented by IFAD and FAO, was on a completely new RBA field collaboration on SSTC in home-grown school feeding, for which FAO, IFAD and WFP have, at present, identified three potential inter-linked interventions for school feeding in the Philippines, Sao-Tome and Principe and Senegal. SSTC will complement and scale-up on-going interventions in these three countries, who are progressing towards national home-grown school feeding programmes.
Further discussions were held on the possibility of including other pilot countries from East Africa such as Kenya and Rwanda. The RBAs Directors highlighted that this initiative holds the potential to support the UN Food System Summit outcomes, in particular by contributing to the Global School Meals Coalition, and helping countries confront the challenges posed by the unfolding humanitarian crisis from recent global events.
During the meeting, it was also noted how, through SSTC, this new joint initiative will strengthen national capacities to establish sustainable and inclusive public food procurement, promote local food value chains, improve the access of direct beneficiaries to healthy food, and ultimately support the mobilisation of food processing technologies to transform agricultural products into school meals.
The second agenda item, related to the RBAs 2022 UN SSC Day celebrations, was presented by WFP, as this year’s host. WFP presented the proposal for a joint UNOSSC Global South-South Expo (GSSD) thematic forum.
All the representatives agreed that the forum would be a good opportunity for the RBAs to launch this home-grown school feeding joint initiative.
In their closing remarks, the RBA Directors highlighted the strong need to mobilize adequate financial and technical resources to implement impactful SSTC programmes and initiatives: one further compelling reason to strengthen ongoing ties among the three agencies as they work together to fight food insecurity and ensure sustainable agrifood systems transformation.
