China South-South Development Center (2019)

China attaches great importance to South-South cooperation. As Chinese President Xi Jinping pointed out at the round table on 27 September 2015, South-South cooperation is a great pioneering measure uniting the developing countries for self-improvement and helping them to pave a new path for development and prosperity. As the overall strength of developing countries improves, South-South cooperation is set to play a bigger role in promoting the collective rise of developing countries and generating robust, sustained, balanced and inclusive growth of the world economy. In the past four decades, China, thanks to its reform and opening-up policy, has overcome all kinds of difficulties and realized rapid economic growth. As a firm supporter, active participant and important contributor of South-South cooperation, China is always generous in sharing with the global South the innovations, successful solutions and lessons learned in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and building a community with a shared future for mankind through South-South cooperation. Being a specialized project management agency directly under the Ministry of Commerce, the China International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges (CICETE) has been playing an active role in South-South cooperation since its establishment in 1983. The mandate of CICETE has been expanded from coordinating the development activities of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and United Nations Volunteers (UNV) in China to managing the implementation of general goods supply projects, South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund projects and Human Resource Development Cooperation projects under the China-Aid programme to other developing countries. The history of CICETE’s cooperative partnership with the United Nations Office for South- South Cooperation (UNOSSC) dates to the very beginning of the twenty-first century. Since then, both sides have been maintaining close exchanges, yielding fruitful results through pragmatic cooperation under the framework of South-South cooperation. CICETE is proud to work with UNOSSC in the creation of this South-South in Action report. The report provides sketches of several small-grant projects from the China South-South Development Center (SSDC) project. Since the official joint launching in 2008 by CICETE and UNOSSC, SSDC has been successful and effective in supporting the exchange of South- South knowledge and expertise, resource mobilization and the building of public-private partnerships as well as facilitating cooperation between China and other developing countries in the economic and technical domains. Up to December 2018, SSDC supported 19 small- grant projects benefiting more than 20 developing countries by means of the public-private partnership (PPP) modality. Through their shared endeavour of promoting South-South cooperation, CICETE will, as always, further deepen its strategic partnership with UNOSSC and serve as a bridge between China and the rest of the world.