The motto of the GSSD Expo 2010 is Solutions! Solutions! Solutions!
Seeking to showcase successful Southern solutions to the complex challenges facing the South today, the GSSD Expo 2010 will take place before the backdrop of a global economic downturn that continues to affect all regions of the world and has left those in the developing world, particularly those living in Least Developed Countries, with significantly fewer opportunities for growth and security. This economic crisis, which exacerbates and is exacerbated by food insecurity, climate change, HIV/AIDS and other global health pandemics, has highlighted, among other things, the need to include social security protection as a core elementof policies to reduce poverty and enable countries to grow with equity.
The experiences and successes that many countries in the South have achieved in providing minimum income and livelihood security for poor and vulnerable populations and facilitating access to essential services can provide valuable impetus, ideas and means for other countries in the South to address similar concerns and challenges.
Additionally, with only six years until the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, participants at last year’s GSSD Expo 2009 frequently emphasized that capacity development was vital to the realization of all internationally agreed development goals, especially the MDGs. While the transfer of financial resources for physical investments has created a strong foundation for self-sustaining development, one of the major obstacles to economic progress is the need to develop the people themselves. People, when armed with management capacity, specialized education, skills and training, and supported by the new technological facilities of information and communications, are becoming the strongest engines of rapid growth.
As such, the GSSD Expo 2010 will focus broadly on enhancing the growth of strategic capacities of developing countries in research and technology development, as well as enhanced inter-regional partnership building, in each of its core topic areas.
