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NAM CSSTC Participation in the Village Development Forum (VDF)
NAM CSSTC actively participated in the Village Development Forum, “Representing Village: Democracy, Autonomy and Prosperity”. The event was conducted on August 24-25, 2017 in Jakarta. The VDF is hosted by the Ministry of Village, Development of Disadvantaged Region and Transmigration of Indonesia.
NAM CSSTC has brought the wider participation by inviting the Chairman of NAM as one of the resource person and the GC members of NAM CSSTC to participate in the Forum. The number of resource persons and participants are approximately 120 persons. They are delegates from Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand and Venezuela. The Chair of NAM, Ambassador of Venezuela, served as a resource person. The GC member of NAM CSSTC, Ambassador of South Africa, also attended the Forum.
The Ambassador of Venezuela to Indonesia (representing the Chair of NAM) presented the successful achievements of rural development in securing food supplies in some countries as she had been working closely with FAO and IFAD for the past eight years. She underlined that livelihood that promotes the advantages of rural and village communities such as sustainable agriculture should become the main policy focus of rural and village development.
Some important and highlighted issues from the Forum among others are: (1) decentralization of power and human resources needs to be accompanied with the development of supporting policy, regulation and capacity building; (2) reducing rural poverty requires a multi-sectoral approaches that adddress the social, economic and political challenges faced by the poor rural communities; (3) guidelines on planning referred to by the villagers to develop local planning should be prepared; and (4) building and scaling up the protection systems, strengthen rural institutions and local government are pertinent to the empowerment of the rural poor.
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