Monrovia — Liberia’s Vice President, Chief Dr. Jewel Howard-Taylor is in Kigali, Rwanda, attending the forum on the Sustainable Development Goals implementation in Africa, highlighting reflections on a three-year journey.
The conference kicked off today, Wednesday June 12 and runs to Friday, June 14, 2019.
The objective of the Financing Health, Education and Green Water in Africa session is to bring together key decision makers in governments and in the financing and donor community, including the private sector, to discuss financing for education, health and green water for sustainable agriculture across Africa.
VP Howard-Taylor, according to a dispatch, is due to deliver the keynote address at the pre-conference session which will be on the theme: ”Why Africa Needs New Financing Vehicles for Health, Education and Rainfed Agriculture.”
Presentations at the conference will focus primarily on the improvement of the quality of primary and secondary education for all children in Africa; initiating programs aimed at strengthening African health systems, with strong focuses on accountability and governance; and increasing the productivity and resilience of smallholder farmers in the African dryland regions, mainly through scaling-up rainwater harvesting technologies.
It can be recalled that in 2015, through the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, heads of state and government high representatives affirmed their strong political commitment to addressing the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development in the spirit of global partnership and solidarity.
The Conference comes in the wake of the recognition of an urgent need for financing the SDGs in Africa; as Africa remains low in human development, characterized by a lack of demographic transition. Social inclusion is constrained in part by the rapid population growth, which outpaces most incremental progress being made on the SDGs. Poverty concentration remains high and inequality in Africa ranks amongst the highest in the world.
In May 2018, VP Howard-Taylor, as a means of pushing for Liberia’s representation on the global stage in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), held talks with officials of the SDG Office in Rwanda with the aim for the global development agenda to make its presence felt in West African region by opening an office in Monrovia.