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Portugal’s secretary of state for foreign affairs said on Thursday that the Portuguese cooperation strategy will expand in Africa beyond Portuguese-speaking countries and includes the health systems of partner countries as one of the priorities in this area.
“The area of cooperation and development is a structuring part of Portuguese foreign policy and complements two fundamental areas: the political and diplomatic dialogue with our partner countries, but also the situation of economic and trade exchanges, the work of our economic agents in those countries,” explained Francisco André, in an interview with Lusa.
The Portuguese cooperation strategy 2030, the framework document for public cooperation development policies for the next seven years, will be presented today in Lisbon and will replace the strategic concept of Portuguese cooperation 2014-2020.
In a context of global economic crisis, accentuated by the war in Ukraine, “the countries we work with, our friendly countries, our sister countries, need us more than words or gestures of solidarity or pats on the back. They need resources, they need mechanisms and response capacity from us, as a member of the international community, to help them get through this moment,” he explained.
In this sense, the new global plan provides for a geographic expansion of political cooperation activities beyond the Portuguese-speaking African countries (PALOP) and Timor-Leste, enshrining the “ambition to expand, especially on the African continent, the capabilities of Portuguese cooperation for development, whether in West Africa, North Africa, but also in Latin America, where it already has a very visible presence,” André explained.
The new strategy also maintains its focus on supporting educational instruments, but also “on the training capacity and resilience of partner countries’ health systems,” said the secretary of state, recalling that the pandemic “demonstrated some of the fragilities that still exist” in many places.
“With this strategy we are going to invest more means, more resources to increase that resilience, especially through staff training, professional capacity building and strengthening the leadership capacity of those same health systems,” he explained.
Among the priorities, the government listed the fight against climate change, in coordination with the Portuguese ministry for the sector.
“This is a particularly sensitive subject”, he acknowledged. “Some of our partner countries are clearly the ones that contribute the least to the phenomenon of climate change, are not emitters of greenhouse gases, but are simultaneously the countries that suffer the most.
And the secretary of state gave the example of Mozambique which is “among the three countries in the world most affected by the consequences of climate change”.
The attention to gender equality and empowerment of women and girls is also part of a “cross-cutting political objective of the cooperation strategy”, he said, stressing that the “gender magnifying glass” in Portuguese cooperation will be of “compulsory use”, imposing a “perspective conducive to the strengthening of gender equality in each cooperation project supported by Portugal or in which Portugal participates”.
In the connection to Europe, Portuguese cooperation wants to assume itself “once and for all” as a “structuring vector of European cooperation”, leveraging as much as possible the available instruments of delegated cooperation.
In triangular cooperation, which refers to the association of two countries to improve the development capabilities of a partner country, Portugal is in talks with “quite relevant countries on the international scene”, according to Francisco André, such as the United States – Portugal’s Camões cooperation institute is preparing to sign a cooperation protocol with USAID – Japan, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and others.
In addition to agreements with these countries, Portuguese cooperation increasingly wants to sit at the table of “international development financial institutions” such as the European Investment Bank (EIB), the World Bank or the African Development Bank (ADB).
With this Strategy, the aim is to “allow civil society, universities, local authorities, the various institutions and the private sector to work in cooperation for development,” being able to “design, implement and execute projects,” he explained.
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