UNDP Asia-Pacific office in Colombo

COLOMBO: The United Nation's Development Programme Regional Centre in Colombo serving Asia and the Pacific, will be officially inaugurated on April 27.

About 100 people including Hafiz A. Pasha, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Director for the UNDP Regional Bureau of Asia and the Pacific, members of Sri Lanka Government, top UNDP officials from across the region, and representatives of the diplomatic community in Sri Lanka and staff of the Centre will attend the ceremony.

The ceremony will culminate months of working in temporary premises and an intensive renovation effort at 23, Independence Avenue, the new site of the Regional Centre.

The Centre brings together a critical mass of knowledge and expertise on poverty reduction, international trade and investment, HIV and development, gender equality and human development all working from one location.

Regional Manager Minh H. Pham hails this as an important and historic step in continuing to help improve the lives of the nearly 700 million poor people in the Asia-Pacific region.

He said the Centre provides policy advice and technical backstopping to 37 countries in the region complementing the kind of support that UNDP Country Offices provide.

Working as a team, the Centre's experts support each other to develop best practice and build partnerships and capacity that allow development partners to identify, create and share knowledge.

"The concept of Regional Centres has created an incredibly interesting, dynamic and intellectual community within UNDP, connecting the region to a global network of development experts and local knowledge," Pham said. "This enables us to respond better to solving urgent development challenges."

In Asia-Pacific, the Regional Centre in Colombo is complemented by the UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok which addresses issues of governance, energy and environment and crisis prevention and recovery. A sub-Regional Centre in Fiji focuses on Small Island Developing States of the Pacific.