As prepared for delivery

Excellencies,

Mr. Wofgang Manig,

Mr. Faisal bin Abdullah Al-Hanza,

Distinguished guests, partners and friends

I am delighted to be here today with our founding investors -- the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Qatar -- to officially launch the United Nations Development Programme Accelerator Lab in Azerbaijan.

The Accelerator Labs are a new initiative UNDP is rolling out in 60 countries around the world pioneering an approach to development -- by elevating grassroots solutions and using experimentation to accelerate learning and ultimately support progress towards achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goal by the year 2030.

WHY was this initiative necessary?

Simply put: The pace of progress made on achieving the SDGs is stalling.

The pace of complexity of changes in the environment is increasing. We see climate events more  frequent and intense, inequality growing despite economic growth, the impact of artificial intelligence on unemployment, and technological ability to produce information that are not necessarily true increasing.

All of this undermines our ability to engage in fact-based discussion, make development sustainable and economic growth something that also contribute to environment conservation and social well-being.

The number of young people worldwide is larger than it has ever been and their future will depend on how they are educated and skilled for the changing world of work.

Faced with increasing complexity, our approaches in the public sector and in development have been struggling for some time. We make some progress and impact but we are nowhere near keeping up with the pace of these epochal changes. The gap between the pace of change and our ability to impact it is in fact increasing.

These are complex and fast-changing challenges that are far from simple to solve. They are intricately interconnected and compounded by millions of actions and interactions.

Such problems do not respond to conventional economic growth and development plans. Nor can they be overcome by social mobilization alone. They cannot be analysed with five-year-old datasets. And they won’t be solved by any singular technological breakthrough.

The speed, dynamics and complexity of today’s challenges are fundamentally different from previous eras in history. A new breed of development challenges is emerging and - to date - the development system has not been able to address these effectively.

And yet history shows that innovations in policy, institutions, management models, finance, sciences and technology can bring about major improvements in socio-economic inclusiveness, gender parity and tackling the effects of climate change.

So innovation will be critical to reverse the negative trends holding back global development and to achieve the SDGs over the coming years.

Our innovation efforts must leverage the capacity of all women and girls, boys and men to deliver ingenuity on a scale that benefits everyone.

This calls for “accelerated solutions” (what does this mean?)

We have just over 10 years to achieve all 17 SDGs by the year 2030 -- so speed is of the essence.

We need a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve the Goals. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development gives high priority to science, technology and innovation as critical enablers of development.

The Accelerator Labs are aligned to this thinking.

We need to fast track and put in place accelerated solutions.

The Accelerator Labs are part of UNDP’s response to this urgent demand.

One of the key ideas behind the Accelerator Lab initiative is to speed up the testing and implementation of solutions. For while traditional monitoring and evaluation methods might take two years or more to ascertain whether a solution is working, Accelerator Labs can reduce this time to a matter of months or even weeks.

The labs marry UNDP’s long-standing expertise in climate change, governance and poverty reduction with a new set of capabilities to tackle 21^st Century development challenges.

Globally, we are bringing on board more than 150 data scientists, designers and ethnographers to help us in our mission to reimagine development services.

And as of today, the Accelerator Lab in Azerbaijan will be joining the sixty labs set up in 78 countries exploring radically new approaches that match the complexity of today’s development challenge.

A local team of explorers, mappers and experimenters -- whom you will meet today --has already been brought on board to map out innovative solutions on the ground in areas such as smart cities, urban development, agrobiodiversity, transportation, information technology, employment and healthcare.

We will be working together with partners to map and highlight solutions that can help create jobs, develop new skills and improve the quality of life of people with disabilities in this country.

Our team will be working closely with local people and innovators, and cooperating with the government, international partners and the private sector. The focus will be on solutions that can be replicated and scaled up.

This is a new and exciting kind of partnership -- one where we engage together in an experiment at scale to reimagine development for the 21^st Century.

We are very much looking forward to embarking on this journey with our founding investors, Germany and Qatar.

We are grateful for the leap of faith they have taken supporting this global experiment

We know that the most pressing issues cannot be tackled single-handedly.

We know we cannot do this alone.

We as the UNDP team look forward to partner with many of you present here today. We believe that, together, we can open many doors to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs, test and grow new and innovative solutions for sustainable development - to leave no one behind.

Those of you that are interested to join us in this experiment -- do reach out to us and spread the word.

I look forward to seeing the results generated by this exciting work.

I hope that you too will enjoy hearing how the Accelerator Labs can play a critical role in opening-up new opportunities for development.

I believe that we will all be leaving here with new ideas and new contacts, and that this event will give rise to valuable future partnerships, friendships and ventures.

Thank you for coming in today!