The headquarters building of the SAARC Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) has entered into final phase of finishing work and likely to be completed by August this year.
The SAARC CCI Senior Vice President Iftikhar Ali Malik who is also Chairman of the building committee disclosed this while apprising the President of SAARC CCI Ruwan Edirisinghe on Friday.
Ruwan said the state of the art 10-storey building of chamber's headquarters in Islamabad after completion soon, will be a symbol of peace, beacon of prosperity, progress, an effective catalyst for SAARC's rescue and resuscitation besides inculcating the spirit of trust with its neighbours, showing solidarity, and forging mutual cooperation. He said the headquarters building will also provide a platform to communities of the region for coming together and discussing the prospects of doing business together.
He said it is the top priority of the chamber agenda that all due efforts would be initiated to forge good relations with all SAARC member states and for this, we have to commit to and accelerate our efforts towards forging closer bilateral and regional partnerships and economic integration within the subcontinent and beyond.
He is much confident about the future of the chamber and said we will have to underwrite the creation of regional public goods for South Asians to integrate sitting here from chamber permanent headquarter. We can utilize this capacious building for launching pad of optimal utilization of the region's natural resources, building regional infrastructure and creating connectivity within the region, he added.
Ruwan said South Asian cooperation faces multiple challenges as this constitutes the world's second least developed region after Sub-Saharan Africa and its per capita GDP, in terms of purchasing power parity, is three times below the global average while it has more poor people than the rest of the world.
Despite this, he said, SAARC region holds immense trade and investment potential and to actualize that potential special focus and effort is required for regional integration. He said SAARC member countries must focus on removal of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) and must work for enhancing B2B interaction to boost trade.
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