UNDP agrees to give grant worth $5.8 million to ASEAN

JAKARTA (JP): The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) agreed here yesterday to provide US$5.8 million in technical assistance for trade, investment, environment, technology and human resource development in ASEAN.

According to documents signed by UNDP's resident representative in Jakarta, C. Jan Kamp, and Secretary General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Dato' Ajit Singh, the grant will be used to finance a five-year cooperation program, called ASP-5 or ASEAN-UNDP Sub-Regional Program for the Fifth Cycle.

Singh explained that ASP-5 is divided into five sub-programs dealing with the liberalization and promotion of trade and investment, trade and environment, technology, human development and capacity building.

With the grant, ASEAN, which groups Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, will soon be implementing the five sub-programs, which Singh described as a joint effort towards sub-regional cooperation, particularly in "human development and sustainable economic reform."

He also pointed to the programs' significant link to the ASEAN movement towards an ASEAN Free Trade Area, which is now applying the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) scheme.

Kamp meanwhile remarked that the sub-programs "are ambitious and will require close management and monitoring" to produce the planned results.

ASEAN and UNDP established dialog relations in 1977 and since then more than $30 million has been provided by the UN body to the regional grouping. (17)