President John Dramani Mahama has advocated a reset of the world with special focus on re-engineering the very logic of development itself.
“The world needs a reset, a re-engineering of the very logic of development itself,” President Mahama stated when he delivered the keynote address at the launch of the Presidential Council and the High-Level Panel on Reimagining Global Governance for Health and Development.
Speaking at a side event at the ongoing United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, USA, the President said the reset initiative aims to rebuild global development around sovereignty, workability and shared value to make it possible to co-invest, co-design and co-create for shared prosperity.
It is borne out of the Africa Health Sovereignty Summit, Accra, on August 5, which reached a consensus that the health crisis Africa and the world faced was not only a crisis of disease, vaccines and hospitals, but also a crisis of social and economic inequality; a symptom of a deeper malaise in the global development architecture itself.
The event was attended by many global leaders, including the Prime Minister of Barbados, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was the co-convenor, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Director General of the WTO, Director General of the WHO, Ministers of Health from the African continent, CEO of GAVI and many others.
According to President Mahama, the Convener of the event, if the health system were to be healed, development needed to be reset to propel the agenda.
The reset initiative, he said, was anchored on three fundamental shifts – recognising that we live in an era of unpredictability, a focus shift – moving beyond crafting a new list of global goals to building executable business models; and reality shift – accepting that diverse and contradictory interests are now a permanent feature of the worldwide system.
The above, Mr Mahama said, was crucial if the world was to make any progress going forward, especially as the Sustainable Development Goals draw to a close in five years’ time, yet fewer than half of the 169 targets have been achieved.
“This new model demands resource multiplication and not rationing. Instead of limiting resilience, let us multiply it, instead of setting new spending targets, let us measure the additional value that health, climate, resilience and food security can contribute to the global economy.
“The reset is not only African in its origins, but global in its reach and its relevance. It is indeed right that the global south should take the lead. For it is in our countries that the collapse of the old world model will be felt most acutely, and it is from our innovations that the world can find new answers and solutions,” President Mahama noted.
To him, the current system was fundamentally broken, because the collapse of the legacy aid system, punishing debt burdens in the global south and fragmented supply chains are not isolated problems.
“The evidence that the very logic of global development as we have known it is no longer fit for purpose,” he said.
He said “The initiative has the potential to turn the current crises into trillion-dollar opportunities for emerging economies, and represents the next phase of global development – one that transforms systemic challenges into collaborative platforms for shared prosperity, and positions Africa not as aid recipients but as innovation leaders in creating sustainable solutions for worldwide challenges.”
He recalled that the last major attempt to reset global development came with the Monterrey consensus at the beginning of the millennium and for the first time, multilateralism formally shifted from a paternalistic approach to a partnership based one.
Calling on global leaders to show the same courage as previous generations, he said “history will ask whether this generation, in the face of crisis, rose to the occasion, and I believe that we can summon the same courage that people like Kofi Annan and Olusegun Obasanjo and other world leaders mastered when they mobilised the world against HIV and AIDS.”
The reset of global systems, Mr Mahama emphasized had become more crucial than ever especially after the COVID-19 pandemic erased two decades of poverty reduction in less than two years.
“Let this be a positive turning point where we rise as partners and take our destiny into our own hands for the present and future generations of the world,” he rallied.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
🔗 Follow Ghanaian Times WhatsApp Channel today. https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbAjG7g3gvWajUAEX12Q
🌍 Trusted News. Real Stories. Anytime, Anywhere.
✅ Join our WhatsApp Channel now! https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbAjG7g3gvWajUAEX12Q
