Mr. Nigel Tarling
Director of Programmes, International Council on Social Welfare

     Mr. Nigel Tarling representative for the International Council on Social Welfare (ICSW) gave in his address the role of ICSW in the current process. He said that ICSW was an International Non Governmental Organization (NGO) working with members in eighty different countries around the world most of whom were from developing countries. He told the participants that ICSW is the leading organization working on the critical issues and commitments emerging from the Copenhagen process. He indicated that over the past three years ICSW has hosted approximately 30 similar meetings all over the world, bringing together Civil Society organizations to focus on what achievements and issues have emerged since the Copenhagen Declaration of 1995.

     Mr. Tarling said that the meeting would seek to bring together a set of recommendations from civil society in the Caribbean. These recommendations would be fed into the UN’s review process and the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in Geneva.
He indicated that since Copenhagen some progress has been made in bringing attention to the critical need for governments to put greater focus on social development issues and thereby increase the level of investment. He noted that in this regard, evidence would show that in some developing countries efforts have been made to spend more of their national budgets on areas such as health and education.

     However he went on to state that there were still major challenges ahead and that these included:

• The economic gap between the richest and the poorest people in the world has continued to widen.
  
• Official Development Assistance from the more powerful economic developed countries to developing countries has continued to fall.
  
• Debt repayment commitments are continuing to cripple developing countries while the pace of forgiveness and rescheduling mechanisms have been slow.
  
• Adjustment Programmes encouraged by the World Bank and IMF continue to cause severe problems for social security systems.
  
• Globalization is creating wealth for developed countries at the expense of developing ones

     He concluded by arguing that more needed to be done to ensure that governments kept to the commitments made at Copenhagen. He reiterated that this was only likely to happen if solid support was gained from developed countries and if there was a deliberate strengthening of the UN economic and social agencies to oversee this process worldwide.