Emmanuel Macron will launch, around the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games next July, “a major initiative for the children of the planet” around questions of health, food and education, announced Tuesday the French presidency.
At the end of August, the Head of State said he wanted to organize an “Olympic sustainable development summit” before the Olympics. These included a follow-up to his “Paris Pact for People and Planet” concluded at a previous meeting in the French capital earlier this summer, which calls for an overhaul of global financial institutions to no longer having to “choose between the fight against poverty and the fight for the climate”.
Questioned on Tuesday by journalists, the Elysée explained that there would not be a summit “follow-up to the Paris Pact” in July, strictly speaking, “this is not planned”.
“We will rather use the mobilization created around the Olympic Games to take a major initiative for the children of the planet,” said an advisor to Emmanuel Macron. “Since on the occasion of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games a large number of heads of state will be gathered in Paris”, “we will ask them all to make commitments in the field in particular of food, health, education,” she explained.
This “initiative” must be in line with the Global Coalition for School Feeding which held its first meeting in France in October, with the objective that all school children on the planet have access by 2030. to meals “necessary for learning and growing well”.
“This is the best fight against inequalities,” they argue at the Elysée. Furthermore, France intends to organize, “probably in June”, an event “to follow up on all initiatives for more local production of vaccines” drawing lessons from the Covid pandemic, according to the same source.
“We have worked a lot with our African partners on the subject and therefore we should, with Gavi in particular – the Vaccine Alliance (international organization, editor’s note) – announce new collective investments on this subject probably next June,” he said. we added.
