Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan on Thursday insisted that the Developing Eight (D8) countries urgently need to expand the scope of trade inside the bloc and mobilise resources to tackle the challenge of the health crisis.
This year, the 10th virtual summit of the D-8 Organisation for Economic Cooperation has gathered leaders from eight countries like Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan among its members. A D8 group that aims to facilitate cooperation in the field of development, PM Khan reiterated and called to strengthen the cooperation due to the pandemic.
In 2021, the theme of a summit was “Partnership for a Transformative World: Harnessing Power of Youth and Technology”, Dawn reports.
PM Khan noted that a D8 was a grouping of over one billion people with a combined GDP of $4 trillion and “we possess two essential prerequisites for growth: resources and enterprising people”. Commenting on the financial and resource mobilisation, the prime minister said that the member states should mobilise financing and resources to recover robustly from the economic and health crisis ignited by the coronacrisis.
“It was in this context that I called for a global initiative on debt relief last April. I invite the D8 members to consider these five points and join in advocacy of Covid-related relief measures,” Imran Khan said.
