Chairperson,
As part of the Royal Thai Government’s Look West Policy to engage beyond the Asian region, we are intent to enhance strategic partnership with Africa.
Thailand continues to attach great importance to Africa, as a continent, as well as relations with individual African countries.
Thailand stands ready to share our best practices in development through the TICAD framework as well as with other development partners.
Primarily, our cooperation on African Development is focused on capacity building for human resources and institution.
In the past decades, we provided:
- scholarships for higher education;
- postgraduate programmes for governmental officials;
- over 700 fellowships provided annually for International Training Courses on key areas such as sufficiency economy, climate change, food security, and public health;
- comprehensive programmes on technical cooperation collaborated according to specific needs, mainly in sectors of agriculture on food and fishery, public health, services, and rural development.
Thailand’s best practice on Sufficiency Economy has contributed to the nation’s sustainable development and the grassroots self-reliance towards a resilient community, a pilot model of the Sustainable Agricultural Learning Centre set up in Lesotho proven to be successful and applicable.
? Under the Trilateral Cooperation Thailand prompts to share our know-how on rice production with Africa through the Coalition for African Rice Development (CARD) Initiatives.
In support of the Millennium Development Goal 8, Thailand is looking forward to cooperating with Japan and other development partners through TICAD process and beyond, as well as forging a post-2015 development agenda that reflects Africa’s priorities.
Lastly, we concur with the theme of TICAD V in promoting Public-Private-Partnership, our government will encourage the Thai private sector to play more active roles in Africa.
Having said that, we feel the time is ripe for Thailand and Africa to elevate our long-term partnership to a higher stratum.
Thailand recently launched the Thai-African Initiative to enhance our long-term engagement with Africa through south-south economic, development, and strategic partnerships.
To invigorate this process, Thailand will convene a Thai-African High-Level Dialogue in November 2013.
Beyond economic interactions, development, and our mutual efforts on global endeavours, the Thai-African Initiative presents an opportunity to reflect on the broader vision for an enhanced linkage between Africa and Asia.
We hope that the Thai-African Initiative would complement global deliberations and actions to promote growth, to forge the common development agenda, as well as to address important transnational issues using human-centred approaches.
For further information, please contact the Press Division, Department of Information, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tel.02-6435170, Fax.02-6435169, E-mail: div0704@mfa.go.th