(Hina) - Croatian Foreign and European Affairs Minister Vesna Pusić on Tuesday gave a talk at the opening of the UN’s Third Financing for Development conference, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between 13-16 July, calling for a bigger role of small donors, countries with smaller revenues, in the development cooperation and specific projects in countries with which they wish to cooperate.
“We are at the edge of reaching an agreement. There will always be differences in opinions between us but we all need to focus so that we don't miss this chance to reach an agreement which will be to the benefit of all of us,” said Pusić, vice-chair of the conference, adding that the conference was aimed at securing financial and non-financial assistance, but primarily at building partner relations among countries.
“Small countries are important as donors of initial funds if we want to achieve a global consensus on development cooperation, as one of only a few most important instruments of international communication and relations among countries,” the Croatian minister said.
According to her, three most common concepts in development cooperation are money, knowledge and partnership and most people would say money is the most important.
“However, there are countries in which large amounts of money have been invested and the outcome was chaos, like Iraq. This shows that money alone is not enough,” Pusić said at the end of her talk.
At the Third Financing for Development conference world leaders will look for ways to pay for the ambitious and costly sustainable development goals (SDGs), which include ending poverty and achieving food security in every corner of the globe by 2030.