By Li Yong
I N September 2019, the international community committed to step up its drive towards the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As a result, the year 2020 was ushered as the beginning of a Decade for Action to enable the acceleration of sustainable solutions to the world’s biggest challenges, aligned to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. From the industrial development perspective, the Decade of Action means that organizations like UNIDO, together with its development partners need to address industrialization challenges, particularly in least developed countries where progress is too slowly to meet the targets of the 2030 Agenda and particularly those of SDG 9 on resilient infrastructure, inclusive and sustainable industrialization and innovation.
With the onset of COVID-19, these challenges are amplified. The world is tackling a global health crisis that is destabilizing the global economy and posing a massive threat to humanity. Undoubtedly, progress made on the SDGs is being reversed. The United Nations has estimated that 60 million more people are now living in extreme poverty than before the crisis. Up to half the global workforce – 1.6 billion people are without livelihoods, with a loss of $8.5 trillion in global output.
These estimates come on the back of slow growth in key economic sectors even before the crisis. In 2019, manufacturing output grew only 1.5 per cent from 2018, the slowest year-onyear growth since 2012. There is also a declining trend in the share of manufacturing employment in total employment and industry needs to significantly reduce greenhouse gases to meet the goals of the 2030 Agenda and Paris Agreement. Small-medium enterprises (SMEs) that at the end of 2019 accounted for 70 per cent of employment and seen as businesses that have the propensity to drive innovation are now particularly challenged.
In the wake of the crisis, the concerns of UNIDO, as the specialized agency of the UN system to promote inclusive and sustainable industrial development and main custodian for SDG 9, are focused on the three main channels of the global economy: demand, supply and finance. Capitalizing on the Organization’s effort to integrate and scale-up, we mobilized our intellectual and analytical resources, and developed a series of analytical tools on the effects and policy responses needed to address the pandemic. Our analyses show that many otherwise healthy firms are at serious risk of being unable to resume their business operations after the crisis, and jobs and incomes could be permanently lost, making global recovery more difficult. A loss of firms and factories has extensive impact on the lives of those who are directly employed in the firm, as well as many vulnerable persons who eventually benefit from the firms’ production and wealth distribution.
Premised on this, and aligned to the UN Framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19, the UNIDO response to the pandemic is to prepare and contain, respond and adapt, and recover and transform. Our approach is based on mutually inclusive pillars, namely strong partnerships with countries like China to accelerate the global response, integrated service packages tailored to our Member States’ particular situations and needs, capacity-building and knowledge exchange based on lessons learned, best practices and best available technologies.
In responding to the pandemic, we are currently supporting the protection of health workers and workers in general through the repurposing of existing SMEs to locally produce PPE and health equipment. By repurposing existing initiatives, we are providing capacity building support, training for entrepreneurs and workers to produce personal protective equipment, for example, in Kenya, Tajikistan, and Tunisia. We are also working with our UN sister agencies, such as UNDP, UNICEF, IOM and UNFPA to strengthen the capacity of industries and services critical to country economic resilience with a particular focus on youth and women working in SMEs. Emphasizing the importance of protecting jobs, particularly informal sector work ers, and those offered by SMEs, we are supporting our Member States, such as Colombia, Egypt, and Lebanon to develop norms and standards. These include health and safety guidelines around preventive measures to help local businesses to cope with the effects of the COVID-19 crisis, prevent the spread of the pandemic, and to reactivate production. We have also developed a step-by-step business-recovery guidance document for MSMEs in China, and are scaling-up the guidance to support MSMEs globally. Drawing on our longstanding experience with industrial upgrading and the modernization of enterprises and institutions, we launched the COVID-19 Industrial Recovery.
Programme (CIRP) to support governments in the restructuring of their industrial sector to transform and adapt to the post-COVID recovery phase.
An increased use of technologies and data applications can be witnessed in the current fight against COVID-19. In this regard, UNIDO Member States had the foresight of the growing importance of innovation and technology when they mandated UNIDO through the 2019 Abu Dhabi Declaration to scale up our programmes for developing countries that support technological learning, technology transfer, and innovation, in particular for SMEs, women and the youth.
During this crisis, we are supporting the establishment of technological start-ups to countries like Armenia to provide employment and capacity-building opportunities for rural youth. We offer the use of 3D modeling and web design services on a commercial basis to ensure the sustainability and development of different products, including personal protective equipment. In India, an online knowledge platform for MSMEs was launched to support efforts to restart, recover and revitalize business. We further launched a global call for developing countries for “Innovative ideas and technologies vs. COVID-19 and beyond” this month to further identify and promote innovative solutions to tackle this crisis.
As we support our Member States to recover, the recovery must be one that leads the world onto a safer, healthier, more sustainable and inclusive path. In this regard, we have repurposed our ongoing waste-management programmes and projects to manage and dispose hazardous medical waste, to mitigate the immediate risk of contagion, in particular for healthcare personnel. In China, UNIDO procured a set of mobile medical waste disposal equipment to Wuhan, which greatly reduced the infection risk for local people. In Iran, we hope to deliver similar support with funding being pursued through the China-established South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund. In India, an ongoing Global Environment Facility (GEF) project on biomedical waste management has been extended to enhance capacity in the country to address this important issue with the pandemic. Similarly, in the Philippines, also working with GEF, UNIDO is also strengthening infectious waste management capacities in the country.
UNIDO will continue to stand in solidarity with our Member States and alongside the United Nations system to address the impact of this devastating crisis and build a better future. In addressing this impact we will work closely with countries like China and other partners taking benefit of SouthSouth and triangular cooperation opportunities to link existing demands to appropriate responses. If responses are implemented well, the global community has an opportunity to emanate from the current crisis stronger and to transform into inclusive, resilient and sustainable economies, built on innovative manufacturing and industrial development. For all of us, the call of the day is for more multilateralism and not less, and for solidarity with those that require our support.
