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Opening Remarks
Excellencies Good afternoon. Welcome to the CDC and to the meeting of our Partnership and Harmonisation Technical Working Group. Our objective today is to review and discuss a number of issues that were included in our 2009 Workplan. One of the main guiding principles when we identified priorities for this year 2009 and developed the workplan was that we would be responsive to sector priorities and challenges. I therefore hope that today's agenda is addressed this need and we will have opportunity to discuss what is happening at the sector level. It is important to emphasise that implementing and achieving aid effectiveness is not only the responsibility of CDC. It is, of course, the responsibility of all of us but CDC can provide support and can play facilitation role in this exercise. So today's agenda represents a set of issues that are of mutual interest and I trust that our discussion can be guided by this principle. The agenda is quite long, which I think indicates the level of activity that we have maintained throughout the year. I hope that in most cases these issues are principally for information sharing but in one or two, I hope we can have a more in-depth and substantive discussion. Most of this issues also underline the effort we have made in the Government to emphasise the principle of partnership, mutual accountability and the need for a focused approach in the sectors. This is your agenda, ladies and gentlemen; it affects colleagues from every Government ministries/agencies and the work of every development partner. I therefore look forward to listening your views and reports on progress. We have estimated the time to be allocated to each topic and we hope to conclude our discussions in 2½ hours. May I first ask if the agenda is agreeable to all members? I wish to inform you that the agenda has been slightly amended from the original and moving up the priority project discussion along side with Aid Effectiveness JIM. So let us begin our meeting, but before our first agenda item can I ask any new members to identify and introduce themselves? |