Interview: UNDP values China's role in promoting multilateralism, poverty elimination

A senior United Nations official has attached great importance to the role of China's Belt and Road initiative in helping achieve common development and promoting multilateralism.

According to Nicholas Rosellini, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in China, the Belt and Road initiative is very much in line with promoting globalization, which ensures that all countries and all communities within countries can benefit from development.

Under the Belt and Road initiative, China for instance has increased its investment, loans and technical support to Africa. The coordinator believes that the initiative, now with other countries also involved, is very important to promote multilateralism.

"What we are interested in is working closely with the government of China and with the receiving countries, the other partner countries in the Belt and Road initiative to ensure the maximum extent that the investments have the impact on social and economic development planned for," Rosellini said.

"The world now is facing a lot of push-backs in terms of globalization. There are many critics of globalization now in the world," he told Xinhua in an interview on the sidelines of a three-day international conference on the emergence of Africa held March 28-30 in Abidjan, economic capital of Cote d'Ivoire in West Africa.

The coordinator added that globalization helped lift hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty. A specific case is that China lifted over half a billion people out of poverty, through helping to generate the kind of jobs people need in order to have a livelihood and services .

Regarding poverty elimination in Africa and around the world, the official said that working with China and other countries on trilateral cooperation is a very good opportunity.

"It's a win-win way of making sure the goals reached. China is investing a lot in Africa, it's investing a lot through the investments from the government and the private sector. It's investing in infrastructure, creating jobs, improving the ability of countries to develop economically," he said.

"We see a very important role of working in partnership with China and the partner countries, in terms of ensuring these investments have the maximum social impact and can really help eliminate poverty in next period of 2030," he said.

The fact that by 2020, China will eliminate extreme poverty is an unprecedented record of achievement, and this is of great interest to many countries including in Africa where many countries want to learn from China's experiences, he noted.

"How we can work with China is to make sure these experiences can be customized and localized in local situations...So we can take the lessons learned in China and by working with our colleagues in the other countries, we can help to customize those experiences, make them relevant locally," he said.

The conference attracted officials and experts from around 60 countries to participate and focus on the development of African countries. Endit