On behalf of the Deputy Minister of Planning and Economic Development: Head of the Sustainable Development Unit at the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development inaugurates the training program to build the capacity of the national team of experts on methodologies for statistical measurement of illicit financial flows in Egypt

On the behalf of Dr. Ahmed Kamali, Deputy Minister of Planning and Economic Development, Dr. Mona Essam, Head of the Sustainable Development Unit at the Ministry inaugurated the training program to build the capacity of the national expert team on methodologies for statistical measurement of illicit financial flows in Egypt.
The program is held through the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development in cooperation with the United Nations Joint Fund for Financing the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), from 27 to 31 March.During his speech delivered by Dr. Mona Essam on behalf of Dr. Ahmed Kamali said that the general framework of the project comes within the cooperation between the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development as a representative of the Egyptian government and the United Nations Joint Fund for Financing the Sustainable Development Goals, represented by many United Nations bodies in Egypt to develop a “strategy Financing the Sustainable Development Goals in Egypt.


Kamali added that one of the mainstays of this project is the analysis of all sources of financing and all available financial and non-financial means of implementation, as well as the mobilization of all types of resources, and risk management.


 Kamali added that this would only be possible by providing high-quality data, especially those related to illegal financial flows, stressing that illegal financial flows threaten the ability of countries to achieve the 2030 Agenda by diverting financial resources from development.


Kamali added that policies to reduce illicit financial flows require securing financial resources for sustainable development, providing better data, and a deeper understanding of illicit financial flows in terms of their types, sizes, effects, channels, sources, and destinations.


During his speech delivered by Dr. Mona Essam, Kamali stressed that this Egyptian experiment is the first in the world to measure illegal financial flows, including the dimension of trade and taxes with the dimension of crime and drugs, pointing to the most important steps that have been taken in the implementation of the project for measuring financial flows in Egypt.


Kamali referred to the launch of the project’s work in September 2021 by organizing a virtual workshop that brought together international bodies, led by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), where the workshop witnessed the definition of the project and the work plan, with the national authorities presenting their field of work and their role in the file of illegal financial flows in Egypt.

Kamali added that after that, two hypothetical meetings of the group of experts were held, one of which was last December, when the so-called preliminary review of data availability was launched within the framework of the specific methodologies for measuring illegal financial flows in Egypt 2021.

Kamali noted that as a preparatory stage for that training course, 6 separate meetings were held with some national authorities to discuss methodologies that meet their needs, and questions were raised by representatives of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime regarding the responses they were provided to reviewing the availability of data.