16th Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers of the ... - Development

2 Opening Statements
A. Opening Address by Mr. James Michael Kulikowski, Deputy
Assistant Director-General for External Relations and
Cooperation of UNESCO
7. Mr. James Kulikowski welcomed all participants and expressed his appreciation to the
Senior Fellowships Officers for having honoured UNESCO with the recommendation
to host the 16th Meeting at its Headquarters in Paris.
8. He underlined that, by definition, UNESCO’s mission focused on knowledge and
skills acquisition, sharing and transfer as well as on intellectual solidarity among humankind
in the fields of educations, science, culture, information and communication.
To UNESCO, intellectual solidarity was its raison d’être. As early as in 1951,
a programme to promote and develop youth exchange for educational purposes was
established. It awarded stipends to youth in cooperation with international organizations
concerned with a view to preparing young people to play an active role in the
development of their countries.
9. Citing from the Director-General’s address in the 175th Session of the UNESCO Executive
Board in October 2005 which valued “knowledge as the key to achieving peace
and sustainable development”, Mr. Kulikowski underlined that fellows were a valuable
pool of knowledge acquisition, transfer and sharing. People were the real wealth of all
nations and the capacity-building of human resources for sustainable development was
the principal priority of the international community. Therefore, knowledge acquisition
was in the center of UNESCO’s mandate in all fields of its competence.
10. To attain the objective of knowledge transfer and to avoid brain drain, UNESCO
required from fellows studying abroad to bring back to their countries an added value
and thus contribute to attaining UNESCO’s strategic objectives at national level.
11. Cooperation and coordination with the United Nations system agencies, both at headquarters
and in the field, had always been at the heart of UNESCO’s work. In this
context, he emphasized that the Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers came at an
auspicious time to permit more inter-agency harmonization and coordination.
12. In closing, Mr. Kulikoswki called upon the participants to enhance harmonization
among all UN agencies in the field of Training and Fellowships in order to make sustainable
development efforts of the whole United Nations system more efficient and
more human-centered.
B. Opening Address by Honourable Dr. Theo-Ben Gurirab, Speaker
of Parliament of the Republic of Namibia and President of the
54th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations
13. Dr. Theo-Ben Gurirab opened his discourse by evoking the memories that UNESCO
Headquarters brought back to him as the place where he had participated in many conferences
on the illegal occupation of his country, Namibia, and the UN-supervised road
to its independence.