Thank you Mr Chair.

Ambassador Bankole Adeoye, SRSG Onanga-Anyanga, ASGs Spehar and Kimani, Excellencies:

First, I‘d like to thank Ambassador Omar Hilale and Ambassador Churchill Ewumbue-Monono for convening today’s meeting, and to extend a particular word of welcome to all colleagues who have traveled from Addis for this meeting today.

It is a particular honor for me to present today on the topic of financing and partnerships, as the PBC-AU partnership has been one of our priorities in the PBC, particularly during Germany’s Chairmanship of the PBC in 2025. I look back with great appreciation to last year’s Consultative Meeting between the AU-PSC and the PBC in Addis Ababa, which I had the honor to co-chair – and I would like to again thank Ambassador Ewumbue-Monono for welcoming hosting my delegation and I so graciously in Addis.

Together, we renewed our commitment to enhanced coordination, national ownership, sustainable financing and inclusive peacebuilding that empowers women, youth and local communities. And I look forward to build on these shared commitments today and deepen our partnership further.

The topic of “financing and partnerships” is of particular importance. The two are intrinsically linked: neither can be effective without the other. Both are essential – to make financing more coherent, predictable and impactful and, of course, also to mobilize funding.

A greater AU-UN partnership is needed to overcome some of the hurdles we face in peace financing:

• International financing becomes tighter, but the demand for investments in peace is growing.
• The number of conflicts is rising, but fragile contexts are challenging environments for IFIs and private sector actors, especially when trying to scale up best practices.
• Having many stakeholders, like IFIs, donors, regional actors, involved requires coherence, but oftentimes not everyone speaks the same language.

Germany, as the biggest cumulative donor of the Peacebuilding Fund, has been actively engaged in developing the instruments needed for overcoming these hurdles. This is why we hosted the very first Peace Finance Forum here in New York together with PBPSO, Norway and Japan in April this year.

And partnerships that matter for financing were a particular focus. I would like to highlight three priorities with regard to the peace financing partnership of the AU and UN:

Firstly, we need to enhance AU-UN coordination to create synergies between the different instruments at our disposal. Today provides a great opportunity to discuss, among others, how the Peacebuilding Fund and the AU Peace Fund can complement each other. Stronger coordination between political engagement and financing – e.g., and this has been mentioned from the podium, through joint country visits or joint analysis of crisis contexts and financing gaps would allow for greater coherence and streamlining of our efforts, while respecting national ownership.

Secondly, the AU and UN should deepen engagement with the African Development Bank and other financial institutions to ensure financing is sustainable. Just recently, we have seen the signing of a Letter of Intent between the DSG and the African Development Bank. This is a very important step for greater coordination, for joint analysis of conflict settings and for mobilizing innovative financing for peace-positive investments, including the Peacebuilding Fund. Going forward, the AU-PSC and PBC can facilitate more systematic engagement with regional development banks.

Thirdly, we jointly need to also invest in new partnerships. We need to broaden the dialogue and the funding base for peace financing. The AU-PSC and the PBC can play an important advocacy role in this regard. What we need to do is forge new and innovative alliances, including strong public-private partnerships. Because we have seen that small scale peace positive investments can be key to sustainable peacebuilding and prevention efforts. By way of example: together with UNCDF and PBPSO Germany has grown our joint initiative ‘Investing for Peace’ with the goal to become a trailblazer for peace-positive investments. Our team is currently preparing its pilot investment in Somalia – a context with lots of potential for successful investments.

The upcoming review of the PBF strategy provides an excellent opportunity to further strengthen the PBF’s comparative advantage.

Over the years, experience across different country contexts has shown that peacebuilding financing can be particularly effective when it is grounded in the principle of national ownership.

The Central African Republic is a particularly compelling example of how peace-positive investments can deliver results when they are flexible enough to respond to national contexts and priorities, and implemented under government leadership, with technical expertise from the UN and other partners. This was also underscored by Minister Mandaba from the Central African Republic, at an event on peace financing that we co-hosted with PBPSO during High-Level Week, and he made that point very forcefully.

Excellencies, colleagues the value of our partnership will be measured by the results we are able to deliver on the ground. This is why we particularly value the dialogue with those countries who partner with the UN, including with the PBF and the PBC.

I thank you and I look forward to a very fruitful discussion.