Making It Magazine

Making It: Industry for Development - UNIDO's new quarterly magazine.

Welcome

It has happened to many of us in recent months. We flick through a newspaper filled with downbeat assessments of the prospects for the global economy, predictions of a future ravaged by the effects of climate change, and shocking reports of humanitarian catastrophe in the world’s poorest countries, and we ask ourselves – where did we go wrong? What became of the expectation that, through concerted action, poverty would be defeated in our time? Why, almost two decades after the Kyoto Declaration, have we still not properly tackled the issue of environmental degradation? And, with the scars of the worst recession since the 1930s still visible on enterprises the world over, how can it be that we did not learn from the mistakes of the past?

Yet, amid all this gloom and doom, there are positive developments that need to be acknowledged, learnt from, and built upon. We see them in Asia, in Latin America and, let’s not forget, we see them in Africa too. Our country feature on Rwanda illustrates just one of several encouraging improvements taking place on that continent.

The goal of Making It is to throw some light on these and other matters, to stimulate reflection and debate on both the challenges and the solutions, to be critical but also constructive. It is not a publication that claims to have all the answers, but it is a forum for enquiry into a range of topics across the intersection of industry and development. Published each quarter, Making It will always have a specific thematic focus – the subject of this first issue is the promise of “green growth”.

The magazine’s contributors come from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds – they may not agree with each other, nor with the official stance of UNIDO, the Organization that I have the privilege to lead as Director-General. But I believe that we all share the wish to see the day when finally, in the words of the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, “hope and history rhyme”.

I trust you will find Making It a stimulating and thought-provoking read, and I encourage you to join the debate about how productive activities can help the world to develop and progress.

Kandeh K. Yumkella

For more information, please visit the Magazine's website