ST. AUGUSTINE, Trinidad and Tobago. Thursday 10th December 2020 – With the active policy shift from COVID-19-driven responses to post-COVID-19 recovery, the debate now is over what comes next for the Caribbean and the role of partnerships. For the Caribbean region, the United Nations (UN) remains a vital channel of support for the region. It is in this context that The UWI St. Augustine’s Diplomatic Academy of the Caribbean (DAOC) will host a webinar on December 15 titled: ‘The Caribbean and Post-COVID-19 Recovery: The Role of the United Nations in the Context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. 

The webinar, which will be held via Zoom web conference, centres around four related themes: (i) the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications for the Caribbean’s ability to advance on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a 15-year plan to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that UN Member States signed off on in 2015; (ii) the Agenda 2030-related opportunities to ‘build back better’, taking account of COVID-19-related setbacks; (iii) UN programming/partnership (re-)calibrations in the region in the age of COVID-19, against the backdrop of the Decade of Action; and (iv) the Caribbean’s postCOVID-19 recovery planning/policy trajectory.  

“This DAOC-hosted webinar represents an opportunity to contribute to framing of the unfolding Caribbean post-COVID-19 recovery narrative through the UN lens. The nature of the COVID-19 crisis has elicited renewed interest in the importance of multilateralism, the UN’s 75th anniversary also spurring wider debates on same,” said DAOC Manager Dr. Nand C. Bardouille.

This upcoming webinar, which will be moderated by Dr. Bardouille, features three panellists: Mrs. Safiya Horne-Bique, Director of Trade and Sustainable Development, Association of Caribbean States (ACS) Secretariat; Mr. Srdan Deric, RCO Team Leader, United Nations Country Team (UNCT) Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Curacao and Sint Maarten; and Dr. Abdullahi O. Abdulkadri, Coordinator, Statistics and Social Development Unit, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Sub-regional Headquarters for the Caribbean. The Commonwealth Secretariat’s Senior Director for the Economic, Youth and Sustainable Development Directorate, Dr. Ruth Kattumuri, will serve in the role of a panel-wide discussant.

Given the ACS’s role of enhancing cooperation within the Greater Caribbean, Mrs. Horne-Bique will provide a perspective on COVID-19 driven responses and post-COVID-19 recovery in the Greater Caribbean. Mrs. Horne-Bique’s presentation will set the stage for her fellow panellists, highlighting the importance of partnerships in the sustainable development of the wider region. From their respective institutional vantage points, Mr. Deric and Dr. Abdulkadri will elaborate on the role of the UN in lending support to the Caribbean in this ‘COVID-19 moment’. Dr. Kattumuri will provide a Commonwealth perspective on the issues, taking into account the Commonwealth Secretariat’s role as a key multilateral partner for its Caribbean small states members. 

A cross section of the public and private sectors, as well as some non-state actors, are expected to be on hand in the webinar’s virtual audience.

The webinar takes place from 10am to 12:30pm (Atlantic Standard Time). For registration details, please visit https://sta.uwi.edu/daoc/webinars.

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Note: This DAOC-hosted webinar is a follow-on to the inaugural webinar of a recently launched DAOC webinar series. Held on September 22nd, the webinar was convened under the title ‘The Caribbean and the Coronavirus Crisis: Big Problems for Small States’ (link to the recording is available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WvXVaTOXA1BUJif5LEk8rZ2tZniFD8KI/view?usp=sharing).