PULLMAN, Wash. – The founding dean of The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, Lawrence Pintak, will host an Internet global town hall with a panel of government ministers from post-conflict states at an international conference in Mexico City next week.
The conversation will take place at a summit of the G7+, a group of the world’s most fragile and conflict-affected states. It will focus on the effectiveness of a 2011 “New Deal” framework that outlined a fundamentally new approach to aid and development in countries emerging from conflict. The agreement was endorsed by 44 countries and international organizations at a summit in Busan, South Korea.
“The New Deal recognized that there is no cookie-cutter solution to the crises facing fragile states. The goal of this conversation is to begin to identify what is working, what is not and what the opportunities are going forward,” Pintak explained.
The Mexico City summit, which is the first high-level meeting of the new Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, has the potential to “shape the aid landscape for decades to come,” according to Helder da Costa, the general secretary of the G7+.
The global town hall moderated by Pintak will bring together about 200 civil society activists, development partners, government representatives and others to share experiences on the ground.
The panel will include government ministers from Timor Leste (East Timor), Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Ivory Coast, along with top officials from the US Agency for International Development, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the government of Finland.
The session will take place Tuesday, April 15 at 8 a.m. Mexico City time (9 a.m. EDT/6 a.m. PDT) and will be streamed on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Google+ (http://bit.ly/1hwevX9) and YouTube (http://bit.ly/PV8Car) channels. Questions can be submitted via Twitter using the hashtag #newdeal.
From its original seven members – Afghanistan, the Central African Republic (CAR), Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Haiti, Sierra Leon and Timor Leste – the G7+ has grown to 18 countries.
Contact:
Darin Watkins, The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, 509-335-4456, darin.watkins@wsu.edu