Report: IMI’s Activities at ECOSOC – Vienna

Prepared by Ms. Nida Naqvi; IMI’s representative at ECOSOC office in Vienna. Ms. Naqvi is a graduate from Boston University with BA in International Relations.  She carried a double concentration: the Middle East and Africa, and Environment and Development, with an emphasis on sustainable environmental development. She is Fluent in English, Spanish and Urdu and is currently enrolled in Berlitz language classes for French and Arabic. 

IMI at Vienna International Center: Opportunities and Goals

The goal of IMI representation at the Vienna International Center is to use our freshly acquired NGO consultative status with ECOSOC to influence the United Nations to incorporate our projects into their global activities.  Our projects are borne out of the mission to build the health and social welfare of the Muslim community.   Health development entails: educating about good health, increasing access to medications, and building accessible hospitals and clinics—three activities that the UN involves itself with in many developing countries. Social development involves empowerment: increasing access to proper education, and financially enabling poor communities through the use of various instruments, including microloans—an activity that the UN, through its various subsidiary and affiliated bodies, currently sponsors in many Latin American and Eastern European countries. 

Our primary resource from representation will be the network of international agencies, organizations, and individuals with which we will become involved with.  These contacts will allow us to expand our activities.  I think the most important organization for our purposes is the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS).Their “strong point is helping clients turn ideas into reality. Whether it’s building peace, recovering from disaster, or creating sustainable development.  We provide the people, tools, and operational know-how needed to get their goals met”.  This organization would be most valuable in expanding the size of and improving the efficiency of our operations for earthquake relief in Pakistan, and in a more general sense, building the capacity of our health and social welfare development activities.  Also, the United Nations Information Service (UNIS), their equivalent of DPI, will provide many promising contacts.

There are about 10, and sometimes more, meetings per month. This is the calendar:
The most important aspects of these meetings, for our goals, are that they will be “serving as a forum where new proposals can be debated,” “reviewing budgets and establishing policy,” and “providing training i.e. seminars, workshops, training courses”.  Through our diligent presence we can influence policy and financial allocation, as well as gain knowledge on how to improve our own organization.  To that end however, there are very few conferences, at least until December (which is where the Calendar stops; they have not posted next year’s events yet) that apply to us.  This is due to the fact that the Vienna center is by and large focused on international drug trafficking and international atomic energy.  Of the conferences the most applicable are:

The UNITAR conference can teach us how to operate better as an organization, the Day of Solidarity would be important for us as a Muslim organization, and the conference of the corruption convention might be valuable since that corruption is a major problem in many Muslim countries.

Since there are a limited number of conferences that appeal to us directly, it will be our presence at the center and our active engagement with the network that will be most beneficial to us in our representation at Vienna.