4-5 Apr 2024 Bogotá, Colombia | Conferences and meetings of subsidiary bodies
Senior authorities responsible for science, technology and innovation policies in Latin America and the Caribbean will gather on April 4-5, 2024 in Bogotá, Colombia to define lines of work and cooperation areas for the 2024-2025 regional agenda. They will be joined at the Fourth Meeting of the Conference on Science, Innovation and ICTs of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) by representatives of international organizations, the scientific community, academia, the private sector and civil society.
This regional event – organized by ECLAC along with Colombia’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation – will be inaugurated on Thursday, April 4 at 2 p.m. local time in Colombia (GMT-5), at the Palacio de Nariño with the country’s President, Gustavo Petro; its Minister of Sciences, Yesenia Olaya; and ECLAC’s Secretary of the Commission, Luis F. Yáñez. The meeting’s central theme will be “science, technology and innovation for productive development.”
The fourth meeting of this subsidiary body of ECLAC will include four panel discussions in which participants will address issues such as the channeling of science, technology and innovation to solve strategic problems; the challenge of public-public and public-private coordination; the design and implementation of science, technology and innovation policies with a territorial approach; and innovative instruments for strengthening science, technology and innovation.
At this intergovernmental gathering, ECLAC will present the document Science, technology and innovation for sustainable and inclusive productive development: Guidelines for 2024–2025.
Latin America and the Caribbean faces a structural problem of low growth largely explained by stagnant, or even declining, productivity in recent decades. In order to avoid the low-productivity trap and be able to move towards more diversified and complex productive structures, the region’s countries must enhance and scale up their productive development policies, and efforts on science, technology and innovation (STI) will be vitally important to this process.
The Fourth Meeting of the Conference acquires even greater relevance due to the STI contributions the region can make to the Summit of the Future, which the United Nations Secretariat will hold in September to promote a global compact for accelerating fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Follow the meeting with the hashtag #Innovalac2024.