UN-Energy Africa Meeting

Welcoming Address

By Mr. Josué Dioné,
Director of the Sustainable Development Division of the Economic Commission for Africa (UN- ECA)

November 4, 2004
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Mme Chairperson of UNE/Africa

Dear Colleagues for Sister UN Agencies,

I am pleased to welcome you at the Regional Commission for Africa, here in this city of Addis Ababa. I hope that you all had a nice trip to Addis-Ababa, and do not suffer any discomfort due to the high altitude of this city as many do at first.

Let me start by congratulating you for your dedication to such a centrally important issue as energy development in Africa. As you all know Africa is the only world region where poverty is on the increase rather than decreasing like in most other developing regions of the world. This can be easily correlated with its very low electricity production of about 3.1% of the world total. Because energy is a necessary ingredient to fuel any human activity, low access to modern energy is a barrier to development at every level (health, water, agriculture, industries, any productive activity)

Your meeting today is very important for two reasons:

First: it demonstrates that UN agencies can move away from individualistic programming and implementation to seek more effectiveness in their actions through collaboration and joint programming of activities; the energy sector, more than others, requires such collaboration because of its cross-cutting nature, and the implication of so many UN agencies that develop various aspects of energy at different levels.

Second: This is the second regular meeting of UNE-Africa in less than six months aimed at elaborating and finalizing your programme of work for the next coming years. This programme should guide your concerted efforts to address some of the priority energy issues in Africa. And looking at the draft work programme that I received, I was reassured to see that key problems such as energy access, rural energy, energy database, clean transport and energy production, institutional reform, capacity development, hydroelectricity development and productive capacity needs, also identified as priority in major international conferences such as the WSSD, are all considered. Furthermore, reflecting on a UN-Agencies common input to CSD-14 seems very pertinent.

I hope that once you agree on a final work programme, you will advocate and pursue implementation of these projects with the dedication and dynamism that this sub-cluster has so far shown in an exemplary manner. Without this dedication, it may be tempting to go back to business as usual, that is to concentrate on one own programmatic output without coherence with other's work.

In conclusion, I would like to wish you a very successful meeting.

Thank you.

UNE Africa 2004-2006 Activities