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Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries 30 May - 3 June 2011, Turkey

Member States

The General Assembly in its resolution 63/227 decided to convene the Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries in 2011 with four specific mandates; such as:

  1. to undertake a comprehensive appraisal of the implementation of the Programme of Action for the Decade 2001-2010
  2. to identify effective international and domestic policies as well as new and emerging challenges and opportunities and the means to address them;
  3. to reaffirm the global commitment to address the special needs of the least developed countries and to support the least developed countries to eradicate poverty and to integrate beneficially into the global economy; and
  4. to mobilize additional international support measures and action in favour of the least developedcountries and, in this regard, formulate and adopt a renewed partnership between the least developed countries and their development partners.

The preparatory process for the Conference has been underpinned by a bottom up approach, starting with country-level preparations feeding into regional- and global-level preparations. National-level consultations were launched in 2009 with the support of United Nations resident coordinators, involving a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including Governments, parliamentarians, civil society and private sector representatives, and culminated in results-oriented, analytical and forward looking national review reports on the implementation of the Brussels Programme of Action. The national reports are available here.

Two regional preparatory meetings for the Conference were convened, providing an assessment of the implementation of the Brussels Programme of Action with distillation of lessons learned and offering policy platforms setting out both region-specific and global expectations of least developed countries from the Conference.  The first regional review meeting, the High-level Asia-Pacific Policy Dialogue on the Brussels Programme of Action for the Least Developed Countries was held at the ministerial level from 18 to 20 January 2010 in Dhaka, hosted by the Government of Bangladesh and organized in cooperation with the Office of the High Representative and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). The meeting adopted the Dhaka Outcome Document. The second regional preparatory meeting was organized jointly by the Office of the High Representative, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa. It took place in Addis Ababa on 8 and 9 March 2010 at the ministerial level and also adopted an outcome document.

A total of 16 pre-conference events were organised by different UN agencies and coordinated by OHRLLS. Two meetings of the Intergovernmental Preparatory Committee were held from 10 to 14 January and 4-8 April 2011, at which the draft Outcome Document was discussed.