President Sahle-Work’s Remarks at a press conference during official visit of Finnish President

Good Morning
Ladies and Gentlemen

I am pleased to welcome you to our press conference.
H.E. Mr. Sauli Niinisto, President of the Republic of Finland and I had a very fruitful deliberations on Ethio-Finnish relations as well as regional and multilateral issues that are of common interest to our two countries.

Accordingly, we have discussed on our bilateral relations and consequently reached into an agreement that the Ethio-Finnish bilateral relation is progressing well based on mutual respect and common understanding and we have agreed to strengthen this cooperation further in areas of common interest.

We have reviewed the development co-operation between the two countries and while expressing gratitude for the development assistance offered by the Government of Finland to Ethiopia, which is pertinent to the success of its development efforts, we agreed on the need to increase the development cooperation in consideration of the needs to speed up Ethiopia’s reform programmes.

We have also observed that, although our two countries have 60 years of official relations, economic cooperation between Finland and Ethiopia is still low. In this regard, Mr. President and I agreed that both countries must strive to increase bilateral trade and investment. I have requested H.E. the President to encourage Finnish businesses to invest in Ethiopia considering that there are new opportunities for Finnish Businesses to engage in Ethiopia.

We have also discussed current political, economic and social developments in Ethiopia and the region. I have briefed the President on Ethiopia’s role in strengthening regional integration and consolidation of peace and security. We have also discussed issues of migration and refugees and agreed that lasting solutions should be found in addressing the root causes of migration.

In our discussion of global issues, we exchanged views on the unprecedented challenges we face in climate change. We emphasized that climate change is real and posing a real threat to the survival of humanity. I have briefed H.E. the President about Ethiopia’s plan to build carbon free economy with its Climate Resilient Green Economy Strategy by 2025. I also informed the President that we planted over three hundred and fifty million trees throughout the country in a single day. In total we planted more than 3.5 billion trees in the current year to alleviate the acute problem of global climate change.

I also explained to H.E. the President that Ethiopia has been working to address the gender gap in all sectors by adopting gender mainstreaming package across all sectors and concrete results have been achieved so far.
I thank you.