The Diplomat
Rebeca Grynspan, Ibero-American Secretary General, former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and former Vice President of Costa Rica, has been appointed by the G-20 as a member of the group of world leaders who will make up the newly created Independent High-Level Panel on Financing the Global Pandemic Commons, which will also include Ana Botín, CEO of the Santander Group.
The Panel’s role will be to assess current financing systems to propose viable long-term solutions for better pandemic prevention and response, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The High Level Panel (HLIP) has been established at the proposal of Italy, which currently chairs the G-20. Its recommendations will be presented to the group’s finance ministers and central bank governors in July 2021.
In addition to Rebeca Grynspan and Ana Botín, the HLIP includes Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; Vera Songwe, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA); Mark Suzman, President of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and Jean Claude Trichet, former head of the European Central Bank.
The Ibero-American Secretary General is, along with former Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno, the only member of the Panel from Latin America.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rebeca Grynspan and the Ibero-American countries have made a constant call for more agile, flexible and supportive funding to counteract the devastating health, social and economic effects of the pandemic in Latin America, which with 8% of the world’s population accounts for 30% of the deaths caused by coronaviruses.
The Ibero-American Secretary General has insisted on the urgency of financially supporting the countries that need it most and are being particularly hard hit by the pandemic: “The world cannot risk a recession that could affect more than 5 billion people if we leave the so-called middle-income countries behind”.
Recovery from the COVID-19 crisis will be a central theme of the XXVII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government to be held on April 21-22, 2021 in Andorra.
