Mr. Ercan Murat

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

Closing Statement

    From the recommendations presented, I can tell that you have had a productive two and a half days. You must have shared lots of ideas among each other and learned from different experiences in the region.

     The issues for the countries are more or less similar in the region. A common concern is the breakdown of economic and social structures, which resulted in high rates of unemployment, social exclusion within the population, and poverty. Some groups are, or can easily be, more vulnerable than others – children, women, elderly, disabled, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees who are displaced by conflicts and wars.

     It has been well observed in the Copenhagen Summit that NGOs have an important role to play in working with those groups of people. But they cannot and should not do this in a vacuum. They should be given support of their governments and international agencies, not only in terms of financial assistance but also in terms of encouragement to participate in policy-making, monitoring, and evaluation.
The country reports and recommendations made during this conference should now be passed on to the upcoming ministerial level meeting in Ashgabat. They will be an input of enormous value. They will also feed into a set of international meetings to be concluded by the Special Session scheduled in June 2000 in Geneva, where implimentation of Copenhagen commitments will be examined.

     I am confident that these recommendations will contribute to enhance the civil society participation in the region and improved outcome of social development goals. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the experts for their input and representatives of ICSW who organized this event. And we should all note that the conference was made possible with the commitment, hard work, and contribution of each one of the participants.

Thank you.

Mr. Ercan Murat is UN Resident Co-ordinator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Azerbaijan