Stories

ITC Executive Director calls for economic empowerment of women, LDCs

5 February 2014
ITC News

Arancha González, the Executive Director of the International Trade Centre (ITC), stressed the importance of the economic empowerment of women and vulnerable communities during the 10th anniversary of the Ferdi Symposium, themed ‘Sustainable development, vulnerable development’.

Ms. González spoke on a panel about ‘Development goals in the post-2015 agenda: vulnerability against sustainability’ on 10 January in Clermont-Ferrand, France. She presented ITC’s contribution to the past Millennium Development Goals and its position in shaping the new sustainable development goals (SDGs). She highlighted the new geography of poverty, both internationally among states and domestically within each state.


Reinforcing development goals

Fellow panellist Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS, talked about the importance of reinforcing social and economic goals in the sustainable development goals through more precise and measurable indicators to further target vulnerable groups and those living in poverty, such as HIV-affected communities.

The symposium at large covered the links between sustainable development and vulnerable development, along the topics of 20 years of development economics: a new approach to the risk, international financing, regional integration and the post-2015 development agenda.

Ferdi is a French think-tank for development studies and economic research. It contributes to the definition of the Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI) of the United Nations, which is one of the three official criteria in establishing the list of least developed countries (along with the gross national income per capita, the Human Assets Index and the population limit of 75 million).