NGOs Take a Stand and Form Coalition

The first thing on the Agenda this morning was a press conference with a group of NGOs who have decided to form a coalition and who wanted to share their plans with the press. The initiative was taken because this group has realized that all NGOs are scattered throughout the Conference and if they work together their projects can have a bigger impact, they call it a “useful coalition.” The NGOs taking part in this are Refugee International, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action, Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, Amnesty International, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Freedom House, Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, Search for Common Ground, Transparency International, Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, International Crisis Group, Medicins Sans Frontières and Electronic Frontier Fondation.
All delegates were unanimous on one thing, they have received very good feedback from the committees and as Transparency International noted “countries are actually approaching us to help with the documents and to make recommendations.” They have had the opportunity to give speeches in front of many committees like DISEC, in which the speech gave place to a good interaction between the OXFAM delegate and the countries present. The major problem that this coalition is facing is that they do not have access to Specialized Agencies, but they believe that they still have a lot of work that can be done on other committees.
The initiative for this coalition was taken by the delegate from Search for Common Ground, who has been working very hard on this project and has been rewarded with great results. It all started at the HGA, where they have made the biggest progress. Blocks from this committee have been sending them documents to their newly created email, for the coalition to draft recommendations, it was the case for a paper written by the delegations of South Africa and Mali. Working together there have been able to make recommendations that benefit not only an NGO but the whole lot of them. They each get the opportunity to make recommendations and be heard. The team is now working on drafting recommendations for a series of other papers emailed to them. We can only expect great things to come from this coalition and wish the best of luck to this hard-working team.

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