His Excellency Munir Akram, President of the Economic and Social Council and Chair of the Forum; Fellow Ministers; Development partners; distinguished guests: good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.

Thank you for this opportunity to participate in this forum. The international community can do much to strengthen a coordinated health response to the pandemic we confront today.

The availability of COVID-19 vaccines brings much optimism and hope for all of us. But with countries rushing to inoculate their adult citizens, these vaccines have become another source of inequality between the wealthier and lower-income economies.

The COVAX facility has proven to be a just and effective mechanism in bringing much-needed vaccine doses to developing countries. However, a much broader cooperation framework is needed in this global battle against COVID-19.

Rich countries, multilateral financial institutions, and global organizations must join forces in ensuring the accessibility and affordability of vaccines to low-income countries.

For the Philippines, we thank our multilateral partners--- the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank---for their prompt and flexible financing support during the height of the pandemic. They provided us budget support financing for our COVID-19 response measures.

Subsequently, they helped finance the procurement of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines for the Filipino people. The trilateral cooperation among the three multilateral banks in support of the Philippines’ COVID-19 vaccination program is a first in the ASEAN region. This is an excellent example of close coordination among development partners. International organizations can learn much from this collaborative effort to eliminate redundancies and enhance the delivery of their assistance programs to developing countries.

Only through the equitable distribution of the vaccines can the world achieve a safer recovery from this pandemic. But our work doesn't end there. The effort to revive our economies will be a long one.

The next period after this health crisis would require even more intensive collaboration among international organizations. We will have to help each other pick ourselves up and redouble our efforts to speed up global recovery to pre-COVID levels.

Ending the pandemic and making sure that countries recover strongly from it are probably the biggest human endeavors of our time. We must raise international cooperation on these herculean tasks to the highest level.

Thank you.