President meets UNDP director

– high-level delegation to visit Guyana

Guyana’s Head of State Donald Ramotar continued his rounds of meetings on the sidelines of the 67th United Nations General Assembly in New York and on Tuesday met with Regional Director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Heraldo Munoz and delegation. The officials discussed a number of initiatives.

A high-level UNDP delegation will be visiting Guyana next week to review their work as part of a Caribbean-wide review. “You know we have a lot of programmes we are doing with the UNDP, very successful programmes that we have done with them, they are, I think by speaking with them, they are satisfied with the work with the Government of Guyana – the various ministries and hopefully when they come for the meeting in Guyana next week, not only will we be meeting with them again, but we will have the possibility of looking at new projects and looking at new initiatives that we can work on as well,” President Ramotar said.
Among the projects that UNDP is assisting with is the Youth Empowerment Inclusion and Reconciliation Project being undertaken by the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development. This will be executed by representatives of three ministries- Local Government, Culture, Youth and Sport and Finance.
In conjunction with the Amerindian Affairs Ministry, the agency in August signed an agreement for US$6 M of the US$70M Norway funds to be channeled to the Amerindian Development Fund which will cater for projects at the community level.
The organisation has partnered with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and in July the two parties signed a Gy$33M agreement for the execution of a six-month project aimed at developing a comprehensive strategy that will be adopted as a policy for sustainable management of Guyana’s natural resources.
The UNDP worked with Guyana on developing the Country Action Plan, a process that began in 2010 when the UN initiated planning for successful implementation of the 2006-2011 United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF). The latter was signed in August 2011, identifying key areas for UN support: Inclusive Growth, Inclusive Governance, Human and Social Development and Environment and Sustainable Development.
The organisation partners with Guyana in a number of other areas including disaster preparedness and, tackling human trafficking.