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Summit of the Americas

The Department of Social Development and Labor, as one of its central goals, supports the fulfillment and provides follow-up to the mandates of the Summits of the Americas , the Ministerial Meetings of Social Development and the General Assembly on issues of its competences.

The Summit of the Americas process, which started in 1994, has gradually been incorporating the challenges of development and the fight against poverty as some of its main priorities. The understanding being that it is not possible to neither consolidate democracies throughout the Hemisphere nor strengthen their institutions is basic needs are not addressed at the same time.

The Summits of the Americas provide guidelines to the activities developed in the framework of the Meetings of Ministers and High Authorities of Social Development and the Inter-American Committee on Social Development. On the other hand, this Committee and the Ministerial Meeting provide inputs and influence the identification of sectoral priorities that the Summits process embraces, in order to ensure relevance and pertinence of the mandates given at the highest political level of our States.

This process, that convokes the Heads of State and Government, has become of greater relevance in the area of social development, especially since the celebration of the Special Summit of Monterrey, held in Mexico on January 2004, and of the IV Summit of the Americas held in November 2005. The motto of this last one was “Creating jobs to fight poverty and strengthen democratic governance”. Under the understanding that the fight against poverty and democratic stability are interdependent factors and strengthen each other, the heads of State and Government reaffirmed their commitment to “ fight poverty, inequality, hunger, and social exclusion in order to raise the standard of living of our peoples and strengthen democratic governance in the Americas ”. Among other things, they committed to implement comprehensive government policies that institutionalize the fight against poverty and exchange practices in the region regarding policies and programs to confront poverty.