Capacity 21 project launched
Capacity 21 project launched
Fabiola Desy Unidjaja, The Jakarta Post, Nusa Dua, Bali
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) launched here on
Thursday evening its Capacity 21 project to empower the people in
fulfilling their own basic needs for water and energy, and in
fighting against poverty.
UNDP administrator Mark Malloch Brown said that dealing with
local communities was the best way forward for sustainable
development as the local community or people served as "the front
line of the battle."
"That is why we have to invest in the fundamental line. The
local community is the frontline in turning around natural
degradation," Brown said during the launching of Capacity 21 here
on Thursday.
The project goal is to deal directly with the local
communities in empowering them to build partnerships with other
groups in the effort to provide access to water and energy, and
eradicate poverty.
Capacity 21 is designed to support developing countries in
meeting the Agenda 21 on sustainable development that was agreed
at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro ten years ago.
The project is also meant to achieve the Millennium Goals,
agreed in 2000, of halving the number of people lacking access to
clean water and energy by the year 2015.
Over the past ten years, the UNDP had been working with 2,600
NGOs in 35 countries in carrying out various sustainable
development programs.
It would continue to work with those NGOs in implementing its
Capacity 21 projects so that sustainable development projects
would continue to improve the world even if the upcoming World
Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg failed to
produce something beyond the Rio declaration.
"The real application happens at the local community level.
The people are the means to win the battle of sustainable
development," Brown said.
Separately, the UNDP environment and sustainable development
group chief, Alvaro Umana, told The Jakarta Post that the
Capacity 21 project would educate the people so that they could
organize themselves in obtaining their basic needs of energy and
water.
He underlined that when people had the knowledge, they could
address their own problems with water or energy access and
improve the quality of their lives.
Umana stressed that although the program promoted
partnerships, it would not encourage any privatization of water
and energy supplies for the ordinary people.
"This partnership is not something that considers
privatization as we all agree that energy and water should not be
for making profits," Umana said.