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Remarks by Kemal Derviş, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme on the occasion of the Business Call To Action

Prime Minister Gordon Brown,
President Kufuor,
President Kagame,
President of the General Assembly Srgjan Kerim,

It really is a great pleasure and an honour to co-host this event on behalf of the United Nations development system. As was just said, I think the UN is moving very firmly towards trying to be a strong partner to the private sector because we have well understood that without the private sector’s dynamism, without the innovation, the technology, the know-how, the Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved.

Now, some mention charity, and charity does remain important: there will always be room for charity, there will be a need for a safety net - global public sector safety net and a global private sector safety net - and charity remains welcome. But the event today is not about charity: it’s about productivity, it’s about investment, it’s about doing core business and doing it in a way that profits development and goes towards the Millennium Development Goals. We heard many examples of this: school feeding crops in Uganda; making remittances more easily available through banking technology; how to make computers essential tools for development, and many others.

President Kufuor said that there is no more profitable investment than in Africa. Now from the point of view of economics, and I am an economist, this is really not surprising. When you bring new technology to places that have not got that technology, where you bring that know-how into new markets, into new environments, profitability is higher. Why can some Asia countries grow at 9, 10, 11 percent whereas the potential growth in the best years of rich countries is perhaps 3 and a half or 4 per cent? Because you have a combination of new technology, new markets, new scale, new skills coming together in a novel way.

And if Africa can bring the same kind of tools together as East Asia has and other places have– and even in Asia there are still countries that have to do it, it’s not just about Africa; it’s also about Central America, parts of Latin America and parts of Asia – then we can have very, very rapid growth. It has been shown. It’s not a dream. Some countries have succeeded in having growth rates of close to 10 percent. And that of course means reaching the MDGs: wiping out poverty, reaching the health and education goals, and, of course, we have to underline these days with greater force the environmental goals that have to be built into this whole endeavour. So it is possible. There are examples, we can do it, and the private sector must be the driving force.

Now the final point I would like to make is that in the past many opposed private sector-led development versus public sector-led development, as if these were two alternatives to one another. We may still disagree on a lot of precise policy detail; not everything is solved in economic policy and in development. But I think we do agree now that private sector initiative, private sector know-how, and good public policy are not alternatives to one another, but complimentary: they have to come together. And that is true at the national level, and also at the international level.

This is where the role of the broad UN system, including the World Bank, UNDP and other UN agencies, comes in. We must work with you to build that complementarity, to build the policy frameworks that will work; that will work for the private sector, but in a way that private sector development works for all. We have seen examples of policies where this can happen; we’ve also seen counter examples. It is hard not to mention the food price crisis today that is hitting the headlines. When policies are counter-productive, such as export bans for example, problems will become worse. Or subsidies for crop-based biofuels which are part of the big problem we are facing today. So policies need to be right. With the right kind of policies the private sector can move ahead and build prosperity for the entire world.

UNDP resident representatives - 134 of them in almost every developing country around the world - are there to help. Please call on them, seek them out, and ask them for help when you need it, particularly on the policy front.

Together, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown stressed, and as I stress, together, public policymakers and the private sector can make it. I think today has been a watershed event. 2008 can be a real turning point and I hope that this event will be a big, first important step and will be followed by a very successful meeting on 25 September in New York at the United Nations.

Many thanks.