Overview
Egypt is one of the most active voices of the African Group in the DSI negotiations and frequently speaks on the Group’s behalf. It favours a system that balances access, benefit-sharing and data governance, and during the Open-ended Working Group it called for the measures taken by public DSI databases, and their implications for the mechanism, to be covered by the review, alongside an adaptive-management approach. At SBI-7, speaking for the African Group, Egypt argued that the Cali Fund’s standard MoU with the UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office was signed before the Conference of the Parties had been consulted, which undermines transparency, and insisted that the Fund must not be donor-driven. It asked that the MoU and related Steering Committee documents be submitted to COP17, and urged that the review methodology be developed carefully before conclusions are drawn on the mechanism’s effectiveness.
Goals
- Bring the Cali Fund’s MoU and Steering Committee arrangements under the authority of the COP
- Prevent a donor-driven Fund, with its rules written by Parties
- Ensure DSI database governance and its implications are covered in the review of the mechanism
- Develop a careful, Party-driven review methodology before drawing conclusions