USP Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor. Pal Ahluwalia,

Professor Sharma, representatives from USP,

Ms. Nicola Noble from the British High Commission,

Experts, representatives from the business sector, students, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

On behalf of the UNDP Pacific Office in Fiji, I take great pleasure in greeting you all at the today’s right to information advocacy event for the business sector, facilitated by our partners at the University of the South Pacific (USP) and supported by UNDP as part of our regional UN Pacific Anti-Corruption Project generosity funded by the Government of the United Kingdom. 

Allow me to express our appreciation and gratitude to all our partners at USP, BHC and all students and businesses for making this happen. 

This workshop is part of our comprehensive Pacific-wide efforts to foster knowledge and inspire action among different stakeholders around the importance of the Right to Information for improved governance, and specifically for increasing transparency and accountability and combating corruption.

By working with all of you on this topic, the students and entrepreneurs from across the Pacific, we recognize the critical importance of your knowledge and your practical contribution to building a just, prosperous and rights-based future for everyone in the Pacific region.

An informed citizen is better equipped to keep necessary vigil on the instruments of governance and make the government more accountable.

An informed entrepreneur or potential entrepreneur can also make additional good use of improved access to information for business growth purposes, improved service delivery, contribution to the economy and overall development of society.

The main objective of our conversation with you today is precisely about

1. the multiple benefits of you becoming empowered citizens to proactively promote transparency and accountability in the working of the Government, contain corruption, and make the democracy work for everyone including for the business sector; and also 
2. the multiple benefits of the business sector having access to readily available and accurate official information, which can attract local and international investments, and encourage innovation including through right to information tools and open data.

While corruption is clearly detrimental to the overall business climate and opportunities why do we specifically focus today on sharing knowledge among women and youth entrepreneurs?

Let me mention few considerations to provide some food for thought:

First, corruption disproportionately affects vulnerable populations and hits the poor the hardest, especially women, who represent a higher share of the poor. In society, gender commonly delineates divisions of labour, control over resources and decision-making, from the domestic sphere up to the top echelons of government.

Second, women’s entrepreneurship has been on the rise over the past twenty years in the Pacific region. While there are multiple, often inter-connected complex barriers to running a business across many countries in the region, these barriers sometimes tend to be significantly higher for women than men. In other words, the challenges facing women across the region are not limited to poor access to finance, information and communication technologies or lack of business opportunities, but they are also linked with vulnerabilities related to corruption and access to information as well. In other words, women entrepreneurs are disproportionally affected, and we need to do something about it.

Third, women entrepreneurs in the Pacific are already recognizing that the concepts of gender equality and anti-corruption are mutually reinforcing, and they have already actively sought to better understand and overcome the potential corruption challenges in their businesses. Right to information is an important tool on this road.

Fourth, youth in general in the Pacific are such an important stakeholder not only because of the sole fact of being half of the Pacific population, but also because the future of the good governance practices, as well as the entire social and economic prosperity of the region is inevitably contingent upon harnessing the potential of this demographic dividend. For this reason, you should be positioned at the forefront of the anti-corruption and right to information movement by having knowledge and skills to influence, contribute and participate in decisions that affect your lives, your families, your businesses, your countries, your future.

Finally, while we focus today on small and medium enterprises, I would like to emphasize that in these efforts to combat corruption and promote access to information, we always try to encourage and nurture multi-stakeholder partnerships between governments, administrations, business sector, academia, civil society and media that seek all perspectives and work together to meet the development challenges in the best interests of the Pacific communities.

Thank you very much for your commitment to being part of this collective effort for making a positive change in addressing corruption and promoting good governance in the Pacific.

I wish you a successful and productive event.

Vinaka vaka levu.