by Maye Kabil
In his visit to New York to attend the UN’s 70th General Assembly, the Egyptian president delivered the message that Egypt is determined to achieve comprehensive development alongside security stability to fight corruption and to remedy the poor exploitation of resources.
President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi held meetings with political leaders, international organisation heads and businessmen during his visit, which started last Thursday.
This was El-Sisi’s second trip to New York since he was elected president last year. In September 2014, he led the Egyptian delegation at the General Assembly’s 69th session, where he pushed to assert Egypt’s important role in fighting terrorism.
In his speech at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) summit on Friday, El-Sisi expressed Egypt’s concern that tools available for development are not corresponding with current ambitions and existing challenges.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) agenda, which was adopted by the UN in 2000, officially came to an end on Friday. During the summit held at the UN headquarters in New York, a new set of 17 goals was adopted for the upcoming period until 2030, targeting a wider range of global issues, including climate change and energy. The summit was held in the presence of delegations from at least 190 countries.
The Egyptian president raised “other challenges which hinder development, such as terrorism”. The international community needs to deal effectively with such a challenge, which has become an “international phenomenon”, he said.
During his visit, El-Sisi attended a meeting with World Economic Forum (WEF) Director Klaus Schwab, and the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano.
A regional economic forum is scheduled to be held in Egypt next May in Sharm El-Sheikh in partnership with the WEF. During the meeting, El-Sisi discussed the forum preparations with Schwab. In his meeting with IAEA director Yukiya Amano, El-Sisi discussed partnership possibilities for building the Dabaa nuclear energy station to generate electricity.
World Bank president Jim Yong Kim met El-Sisi on Sunday. The bank has given its support to Egypt’s economic reform efforts, according to its president. “I understand Egypt’s circumstances and the need to speed up development efforts,” said the head of the international organisation. According to an official statement, El-Sisi said that Egypt has implemented several national projects “to which the bank can effectively contribute”, including the reclamation and development of 1.5m acres.
The land reclamation project has been a top priority for El-Sisi since he took office, alongside the Suez Canal Axis development project and the “Golden Triangle” project, among others.
El-Sisi participated on Sunday in a meeting attended by several heads of state, as well as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and heads of international financial institutions. In his speech during the meeting, he said that cooperation between developing countries “must have an increasing share in the international economic cooperation system, through regional and international economic frameworks to serve the objectives of this cooperation, especially in respect to food, health, education and infrastructure development”.
The president emphasised the importance of providing the necessary funding to developing countries and activating the transfer of technology for these countries to face their development challenges. El-Sisi also stressed the importance of developed countries’ commitment to allocate the equivalent of 0.7 per cent of their GDP to the OECD’s Official Development Assistance Fund.
The president also met with a number of managers at investment funds and asset management and financial portfolio companies in coordination with the Business Council for International Understanding. He held discussions with members of the American Chamber of Commerce and the US-Egypt Business Council.
El-Sisi sees Egyptian-US relations as “strategic” on the economic and government levels, presidential spokesman Alaa Youssef said in a statement. Youssef added that the relations can be reinforced by cooperation with the private sector in both countries.
“The heads of the US companies [that] attended expressed their intention to pump more investments into Egypt during the next period to take advantage of the available investment opportunities and the lucrative investment returns allowed through working in Egypt,” Youssef said.
The US investors described the governmental reforms (rationing energy subsidies, launching national projects, and reforming the electricity system) as serious, despite the difficult regional circumstances surrounding Egypt. While working on attracting investments, the government is looking to eliminate bureaucracy, El-Sisi said. It is also looking to issue the Unified Investment Law, adopt the free economy trend in which the state is committed to working with the private sector, and consequently focus not only on national mega projects, but also on small and medium-sized projects.
The government is working on achieving democracy and social justice in parallel with efforts made on the economic level, the president said. One day before he headed to the annual United Nations summit of world leaders, El-Sisi pardoned 100 prisoners, including three Al-Jazeera journalists.
