At the FFD3 conference, international governments will negotiate a plan for sustainable development, post 2015.

Saint Lucia’s Minister for the Public Service, Sustainable Development, Energy, Science and Technology, Hon. Dr. James Fletcher, will today lead Saint Lucia’s delegation to the third International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD3), taking place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from July 13 - 16.

Dr. Fletcher is accompanied by Ms. Kimberly Louis, First Secretary of the Permanent Mission of Saint Lucia to the United Nations.

At the FFD3 conference, international governments will negotiate and agree to an outcome that will provide the means for implementing the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda. The outcome will be published in chapter 3 of the UN Development Agenda, and will be adopted in September at the UN Summit. Policy financing and the implementation of mechanisms at the national, regional and international levels are also expected outcomes of this conference.

Aditionally, the FFD3 will focus on addressing new and emerging issues, such as the evolving development cooperation landscape; the relationships between the sources of development finance; the synergies between financing objectives across the three dimensions of sustainable development; and the need to support the United Nations Development Agenda beyond 2015.

The FFD3 is one of three UN conferences scheduled for the year whose outcomes will be of significance to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like Saint Lucia.

The other, a Post-2015 Development Agenda Summit, to be held in New York, in September, aims to replace the existing eight Millennium Development Goals with a new set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); while the third, the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will see a new, legally-binding Climate Change Agreement signed in Paris, in December.

The Government of Saint Lucia has played a very active role in all of these negotiations, as Saint Lucia’s Minister for Sustainable Development, Hon. Dr. James Fletcher, chairs the regional task force established by the CARICOM Heads of Government to coordinate the region’s preparation for and participation in these meetings.

At the recently-concluded meeting of the CARICOM Heads of Government in Barbados, Hon. James Fletcher briefed CARICOM Heads on the status of the negotiations and the outstanding issues that were of relevance to CARICOM Member States.