Your Excellencies, colleagues and friends,

I would like to begin by congratulating the Federal Republic of Somalia, the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN), OPHI, and UNDP Country Office in Somalia for bringing us together today. 

This side event happens between two critical processes for the future of multilateralism, development and peace: the Summit of the Future, convened by the Secretary General, and the United Nations General Assembly High-level week.   The Pact for the Future adopted by world leaders on Sunday explicitly recognizes poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, as the greatest global challenge and its eradication as an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.  In response, Member States have committed to place the eradication of poverty at the center of our efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda by taking comprehensive and targeted measures to address the multidimensional nature of poverty and concrete actions to prevent people falling back into poverty by establishing well-design sustainable and efficient social protection systems for all that are responsive to shocks. 

Excellencies, colleagues and friends, our future is not predetermined – we live in a world of possibilities and among those possibilities is ending poverty in all its forms and dimensions. The latest MPPN communiqué shows us the way: to continue measuring multidimensional poverty through the Multidimensional Poverty Index and encouraging its use as a policy and planning tool with a clear purpose: putting poor people at the center of public policy efforts. 

Our experience in Latin America and the Caribbean reaffirms that this is possible.  It has long been a pioneer in exploring ways to understand and measure poverty beyond mere income, with initiatives dating back to the 1980s.  Since the launch of the Multidimensional Poverty Index by OPHI and UNDP in 2010, twelve countries in the region have adopted it as official measures of poverty alongside traditional income metrics.  For several decades, the region managed to significantly reduce poverty by introducing innovative public policies focused on solving this problem. However, this trend began to reverse two years before the pandemic.  Revitalizing the poverty reduction agenda requires resuming this innovative capacity and political will. We have done it in the past, and we must do it again. 

Excellencies, colleagues and friends, poverty reduction is at the core of UNDP’s mandate because of its intrinsic link to human sustainable development and well-being. This centrality is reflected in our current Strategic Plan, which sets the ambition of empowering

100 million poor, marginalized and excluded populations to escape poverty and persistent multidimensional vulnerabilities.  Today, the UNDP Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean - which I have the honor to lead - is advocating for a renewed focus on the complexity of poverty in public discourse across the region, bringing it at the forefront of the development dialogue.  It also demands the creativity and innovation we have demonstrated in the past to explicitly connect these efforts to productivity, climate change, human mobility, citizen security, technological and energy transitions, and democratic governance.  The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) serves as a robust tool to guide these efforts. This commitment drives our strategic alliance with OPHI and our engagement with the MPPN, as reflected in the collaboration agreement focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, signed this past March.

Let me conclude by echoing the words of UNDP’s Administrator in the Summit of the Future: “The Pact for the Future is about renewing a spirit of global inclusivity. It is about the promise of multilateralism to deliver tangible solutions and a future where no one is left behind. It is a call to ensure that we do not simply transfer today’s challenges to our children, but instead pass forward the ‘torch of choice’”.  Please rest assured that you can rely on the six decades of experience that the UNDP brings as the United Nations’ lead agency on development over 170 countries and territories. Our global  capabilities to design integrated local impact solutions tailored to the multidimensional development challenges, in alignment with your national priorities, are at your service in this urgent endeavor.

Thank you.