In a press briefing on Tuesday, newly-appointed Colombo Plan Secretary General Phan Kieu Thu addressed the public for the first time and laid out her agenda for the next four years.
“The Colombo Plan has been here for a long time, but not everybody knows that,” she said at an event held at the Taj Samudra Hotel in Colombo.
Phan was formerly the Ambassador of Vietnam to Sri Lanka, serving in the position from 2014 to 2017. She was the youngest appointed female Ambassador of Vietnam in the country’s history.
The Colombo Plan is an organization of 27 countries, many from the former British Commonwealth. Its mission is to promote socioeconomic development in the Asia and Pacific regions.
Phan said that one of her priorities would be to bring more countries into the plan, especially in Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and grow the organisation’s budget.
Though the Colombo Plan was originally focused on infrastructure development, during recent years, it had directed its attention towards capacity-building.
Ambassador Phan said that she would like the Colombo Plan to focus on addiction treatment, gender and development, and environmental programmes.
Finally, Phan said she wanted to “increase the visibility of the global plan through launching more community-based programmes, especially for Sri Lanka.” Although Sri Lanka is the host country to the Colombo Plan, many had forgotten about it in recent years as its budget and footprint had shrunk, she said.
To that end, Phan said she would like to extend more short and long-term scholarship programmes to study in foreign countries to Sri Lankans.
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