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Excellencies, 
Colleagues, 
Ladies and gentlemen,

I welcome you to our meeting of National Focal Points of the Caribbean region SIDS.

I must thank you all for gathering on this virtual platform at a time when the challenges to your countries are severe.

The annual meetings of the national focal points are increasingly important in enhancing the coherence of SIDS issues in UN processes, including at the national, regional and global levels. They are also a more and more critical force in steering the focus and efforts of my Office and the UN system in general to deliver targeted support and policy advice at the regional and global levels.

In this connection, I would like to express my gratitude to the colleagues from the UN and other international and regional organisations for your active participation and your spirit of partnership in this endeavour.

This year, with the impact of the COVID pandemic, we are not able to hold the regular in person meeting of the national focal points, which had planned to be convened in the Caribbean for the first time, in Antigua and Barbuda.

We decided to organize a virtual meeting in the meantime, in anticipation of the face to face meeting still to take place in Antigua & Barbuda at a later date.

The time differences, and certain technical constraints, have made it unfortunately necessary to convene separate regional meetings.  Regrettably this does not allow for the cross-regional discussions and face-to-face networking that are so important to this mechanism.

Our first virtual meeting for the Pacific region, which was held last week, however, only served to confirm exactly how necessary and useful these virtual meetings are, providing the opportunity for our national focal points to remain engaged at a time when the sharing of information, lessons learned and best practices is perhaps more important than ever.

The meeting for the Pacific region reminded us that country & regional specifics matter; that we must respond to unique needs.

Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Last year, the high level Mid Term Review of the SAMOA Pathway revealed that while some tangible progress had been made over the past five years in implementation, there were still major gaps and challenges that need to be addressed.

This year, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens this hard won progress. The pandemic has also resulted in a new array of challenges to implementation, while aggravating existing ones.

COVID-19 has laid bare the weaknesses of the health sector in SIDS. It has negatively affected the education sector, especially for the most vulnerable with unequal access to digital technology infrastructure. The pandemic has put tremendous pressure on already limited social protection systems and has triggered large-scale unemployment, which disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable.

Over the past few months, SIDS have experienced an unprecedented decline in economic activity, with rapidly plummeting tourism and remittance flows, and the disruption of global supply chains. Already shrinking ODA, major loss of foreign investment and challenges in mobilizing resources in capital markets for some SIDS, have resulted in limited fiscal space to both respond to COVID-19 and to build back better.

In the Caribbean, COVID-19 has further exacerbated the vulnerabilities with which these countries are confronted, including those in relation to the negative impacts of climate change, ever more frequent and brutal extreme weather events, and crippling debt-to-GDP ratios.

It is clear that SIDS will need targeted and effective support SIDS, in order to innovate and implement bold changes that would boost economic resilience to exogenous shocks, including COVID-19, and to build diversified economies.

In this connection, the UN system has prioritized the most vulnerable countries, including SIDS, in its response to COVID-19 at the national, regional and global levels.

My Office continues to advocate for SIDS on a range of issues, including on access to concessional financing, debt sustainability and food security.

In the context of the focal point mechanism, we are working to build capacities to respond to the range of shocks facing SIDS, toward the implementation of the SAMOA Pathway. We will be circulating the SIDS National Focal Point Guide in due course, and will continue to explore ways to implement the capacity building strategy that we have shared with you earlier in the year.

As a part of this effort, we will be working with Malta and the Small States Centre for Excellence toward the recovery of the tourism sector in SIDS. We will share more on this in the coming weeks.

We are also working toward finalizing the toolkit that we considered during last year’s focal point meeting.

As you may be aware, the toolkit is provide guidance to national governments and relevant stakeholders on effective and harmonized monitoring and reporting on the implementation of the SAMOA Pathway, in alignment with the monitoring and reporting frameworks of other international agreements, including the SDGs and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction.

One of the biggest challenges of finalizing the toolkit is the lack of a clear reporting framework, with validated targets and indicators, for those areas of the SAMOA Pathway that do not overlap in categorization and focus with the SDGs or Sendai Framework.

Last year, the United Nations General Assembly called upon the Secretary-General to identify those SAMOA Pathway priority areas not covered by the SDGs or the Sendai Framework, and to develop targets and indicators for those priority areas. This work will build on the work done by OHRLLS on the toolkit and provide the validation process for these targets and indicators.

OHRLLS is working with DESA to complete this work by the next year September, which would also allow for the finalization of the reporting toolkit. This will in turn allow us to better evaluate and track success in the implementation of the SAMOA Pathway, which is even more critical as we face these multiple and ongoing crises.

Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This meeting provides us with the opportunity to reflect on these and other responses that have been put in place, as well as those that are still needed to put us back on track to realize the SAMOA Pathway and the 2030 Agenda in SIDS.

It will feature resource persons and country representatives from across the region, who will share their challenges, strategies and approaches in response to COVID-19 at the national, regional and global levels.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to inform you that we launched our new website week before last under the UN online umbrella at . We hope that you will find the website to be an important resource for information on events, reports and activities carried out by the office, relevant official documentation and other reports covering the LDCs, LLDCs and SIDS and on how global trends, from COVID-19 to climate change, are playing out in the world’s most vulnerable countries.

This website will also be fully integrated to the advocacy and social media work of the office, providing a forum for information exchange on ways to move forward.

Now, I look forward to listening to you.

Thank you.