–amid glaring vulnerabilities, Dr Singh tells UN high-level political forum

WITH the vulnerabilities of Small Island Developing States (SIDs) being evident now more than ever, the need for concessional financing cannot be overemphasised, Senior Minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, has said.
Dr. Singh advocated strongly for SIDs to be granted access to concessional financing during his address to the United Nations (UN)’s 2021 high-level political forum, held virtually under the title: “The multi-dimensional vulnerability index (MVI) and SIDs.”

Concessional financing is considered loans that are extended on terms substantially more generous than market rates.
In pursuit of this necessity, Minister Singh informed participants of the need for the question of “scale needs” to be addressed after the first hurdle of access to concessional financing is crossed.
“The question of scale does need to be addressed because the reality is that adequate levels of concessional resources and adequate levels of development financing have not been mobilised to address the development challenges we face as a global community and the development challenges that SIDS, in particular, face,” Dr. Singh reasoned.

The Senior Minister with responsibility for Finance, while continuing to highlight the unique multi-dimensional vulnerabilities faced by SIDS, alluded to the decades of research done under the auspices of the Commonwealth Secretariat in defining the peculiar vulnerabilities of small states.
He related that rigorous articulation of these vulnerabilities needed to be moved to the point of a universally- accepted multi-dimensional index to form a basis on which access to concessional financing is granted.

“We have to recognise the oneness …the interconnectedness of our world and this has been reiterated amply by the onset of COVID-19 which has reminded us that events on one side of the world affect us on the other side of the world, and so the reality is that the eradication of poverty, globally, is a global objective that we share and it is in everybody’s interest…the entire global community needs to ensure its achievement,” Dr. Singh posited.

While elaborating even more on the effects of COVID-19 on SIDS, as well as other recent disasters which those countries face, Minister Singh added: “There is clearly a strong and immediate recommitment to multilateralism and the shared objectives that we embrace as a global community.”
He concluded that there is need for accelerated action on climate change, urgent action to harness the benefits of the ‘blue economy’ and the acknowledgement of the global community that long-standing developmental financing commitments (some dating all the way back to the 1970s) need to be delivered.
“We might think that we cannot afford to deliver on these commitments. I would say quite the opposite. We really, as a global community, cannot afford not to deliver on these commitments if we recognize the oneness, the interconnectedness and the intertwined nature of our nations in the global community,” Dr. Singh reiterated.