Kilimanjaro Hotel Kempinski

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, December 10, 2008

 

Dear Participants, Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, I would like to extend my warmest congratulations on the opening of this workshop and my sincere welcome to all of you.

This year of 2008 marks the 30th anniversary of China’s Reform and Opening-up policy. During the past three decades, China's GDP had grown by 9.8 percent annually from 364.5 billion Chinese Yuan at 1978 to 24.95 trillion Chinese Yuan at 2007.

China’s reform and opening-up is the most powerful drive for China’s poverty reduction and is the largest campaign against poverty ever launched in world history. Statistics show that in 1978, when the reform and opening-up started, China had 250 million extremely poor people in its countryside, or 31 percent of its rural population. The figure declined to 15 million, or 1.6 percent, by the end of 2007. World Bank statistics also indicate that China accounts for 67% of poverty reduction achievements worldwide over the past 25 years. The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Report 2008 evidences that the goal of halving the proportion of absolute poor and hungry has been true in China earlier than scheduled time, while the other seven goals are catching up.

China is an active participant in worldwide poverty reduction. Besides our domestic activities, we have been providing development assistance to our friends in African countries as far as our capacity allows. Here in Tanzania, we have been sending Chinese doctors for the past 40 years to improve the health care for the local people; we have been sponsoring various human resource co-operations and training programs to develop their capability in fighting poverty; we have been aiding Tanzania with various projects aimed at providing clean drinking water, better infrastructures and educational facilities. Our development aid to Tanzania has promoted the long-existing friendship between two countries and improved Tanzania people’s quality of life and social well beings.

Ladies and Gentlemen, as Anna Mwasha just mentioned, our Tanzania friends have developed National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty known as MKUKUTA in Swahili. I congratulate them on the progress made so far. And I believe that efforts to implement the Strategy would require effective cooperation, exchange and experience from global partners, which is the intention of this Workshop. I hope that in the following days, professionals from both China and Tanzania can learn from each other and contribute to the poverty reduction in their own county respectively and in the world as a whole.

Finally, I wish this workshop fruitful and successful.

Thank you.