In the Latin American region, the economic recovery that started in 2021 after the big setback of 2020 did not stop the social crisis. “Unemployment rates and levels of poverty and extreme poverty are higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic”, according to ECLAC, the regional UN Economic Commission.

Among those affected, women suffered “a historic setback”. In its recently published “Social Panorama of Latin America 2021”, ECLAC concludes that “one result of the pandemic has been an overburden of domestic and unpaid care and domestic work primarily assumed by women.

HLPF 2022 Online Side Event. The interlinked global crises from an Arab perspective: Systemic failures and its implications on social justice in the region.

HLPF 2022 Online Side Event. The interlinked global crises from an Arab perspective: Systemic failures and its implications on social justice in the region.

The new generation Doha Programme of Action for the Least Developed Countries for the Decade 2022-2031 (DPoA) was adopted by the first part of the Fifth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC5) on 17 March, at the UN headquarters in New York.

The adoption of the DPoA was overdue as the LDC5 Conference, scheduled to take place in January 2022 in Doha, Qatar, was postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Litmus test of international co-operation

One of the global processes falling prey to the Omicron variant of the Covid virus was the fifth UN Conference on the Least Developed countries, originally scheduled for the end of January in Doha, Qatar. It has been replaced with a meeting in New York on 17 March 2022 for the adoption of the Doha Programme of Action (DPoA); a full meeting will be held in March 2023, where governments will gather with stakeholders “to build new plans and partnerships for the delivery of the DPoA over the following decade”. The LDC conferences and programmes of action have a long history of marking the state of global solidarity with countries most in need of co-operation and of the underlying root-causes for global inequalities.