China's Global Development Initiative helps complement the key priorities set out in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and will help increase the development of countries in the Global South, a Cuban diplomat said while visiting Beijing.
The SDGs refer to a set of 17 targets for global development adopted by the UN back in 2015 which aim to be achieved by 2030, with countries agreeing to work towards these goals in order to deliver environmentally, socially and economically sustainable global development. Ernesto Soberon Guzman, Cuba's permanent representative to the United Nations, was in the Chinese capital to attend a workshop on new industrialization and new quality productive forces which opened on Tuesday and brought together UN diplomats to better understand China's Global Development Initiative (GDI).
In an interview with the China Global Television Network (CGTN), Soberon Guzman outlined how the initiative helps to further advance the shared causes among countries around the world.
"I think it's a very important initiative. It's an initiative that [has] granted help for many people, for many countries. And China, with its huge economic power, is in the position to cooperate and to develop those kinds of initiatives like this. So I think that's very important. I think it's very important that an initiative like this becomes reality. Because as everybody knows, we have not got all the goals that we [set out to] achieve at the beginning of the SDG process, I think that the Chinese [proposed] initiative could be a complement to the rest of the [priorities] in order to achieve those goals," he said.
He also believes the initiative -- which was first proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the general debate of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly in September 2021 -- will give an especially important boost to the Global South.
"The Global Development Initiative, I think that also will permit the South countries, increase their level of development and at the same time their participation in the global development [priorities]. So it is very important that this initiative be implemented in terms to grant that the South will play the role that they are supposed to play in the economic world order," he said.
Noting that China and Cuba enjoy a very good relationship, the diplomat said that the cooperation between the two countries will also help improve Cuba's industrialization.
"I'm sure that we will continue working together in terms to increase our cooperation and our development agreements and our trade also. Even when we are very far from one other, at the same time, we have a lot of things that united us, so I think that in the future I hope that we will have more and more [cooperation] between Cuba and China," he said.
China's Global Development Initiative complements UN 2030 SDG goals: Cuban diplomat
