By Politico staff writer
The Minister of Planning and Economic Development, Dr. Francis Kai-Kai has urged development actors to support building more equitable and inclusive societies. He made the statement during the World Fragility Forum 2022 held via zoom.
Minister Kai-Kai said in order to overcome fragility, all development actors should support the building of more equitable and inclusive societies with policy options to deliver visible change, using strong solidarity to achieve credibility and trust in governance.
He focused his statement on the theme: “A decade after the World Development Report (WDR) 2011: What Have We Learned?’’
The forum among other issues was to exchange innovative ideas and knowledge to improve development approaches in fragile, conflict, and violence-affected settings, to foster peace and stability and explore how the international community could best support the affected countries in a dramatically changing global landscape.
The Minister said securing public confidence and trust in the state and society could be the most important resource required for social stability and effective sociology-economic transformation of the state.
He further stated: “Building confidence and trust are essential ingredients for stability which will lay the bedrock of participatory governance that breed transparency and accountability. Sierra Leone’s Medium-Term National Development Plan (MTNDP) 2019-2023, for instance, has strategic objectives on building public trust in state institutions, promoting inclusive and accountable justice institutions, and strengthening public service delivery, among others”.
He went on to further urge development actors to work together with the states to promote continuous peacebuilding and state-building mechanisms as well as promoting global solidarity. He ended by advocating for debt cancellation for g7+ countries.
“Currently, managing debt levels and servicing is suffocating g7+ countries. Sierra Leone for example is currently spending 2.8% of its total GDP on domestic and external interests, domestic and external amortization, and arrears servicing its debts”, he said.
Dr. Kai-Kai noted that there was a need for development actors to work towards curbing illicit financial flow in order to achieve sustainable development goals, supporting private investments for job creation and growth, and also fighting and addressing the rising global inflation among many other issues identified.
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