Today is United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation
South-South cooperation, as an important element of international cooperation for development, offers viable opportunities for developing countries and countries with economies in transition in their individual and collective pursuit of sustained economic growth and sustainable development.
Developing countries have the primary responsibility for promoting and implementing South-South cooperation, not as a substitute for, but rather as a complement to North-South cooperation. The international community should support the efforts of the developing countries to expand South-South cooperation.
To mark the importance of South-South Cooperation, the United Nations General Assembly decided to observe this Day on 12 September every year, commemorating the adoption in 1978 of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries.
The Assembly also urged all relevant United Nations organizations and multilateral institutions to intensify their efforts to effectively mainstream the use of South-South cooperation in the design, formulation and implementation of their regular programmes and to consider increasing allocations of human, technical and financial resources for supporting South-South cooperation initiatives.
"South-South cooperation offers real, concrete solutions to common development challenges. Sharing best practices, funding pilot projects in far-flung locales, providing the capital to scale-up successful projects, supplying regional public goods, developing and adapting appropriate technologies —these are the opportunities that the international community needs to better leverage. On this United Nations Day for South-South cooperation, I call on all partners to redouble their efforts to harness the wealth of knowledge, expertise and development thinking in the Global South," United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message for the Day.