UN General Assembly
2016

I would like to congratulate the President on his well-deserved election to lead the General Assembly at its seventy-first session. Seventy-one years after the founding of the United Nations, we have made significant progress in human development. Inspired by the guarantees in the Charter of the United Nations, people across the world, and in Africa in particular, have achieved freedom and self- determination while expanding democracy. Thanks to the international community’s advances in technology and collective action, the world has made remarkable strides in health care, education and agriculture and has eliminated a number of killer diseases. The Cold War is behind us, paving the way for greater opportunities for global synergy. Even among younger nations such as Kenya, technological innovations such as M-Pesa, our mobile phone-based platform for money transfer and financial services, are leapfrogging us into the future, promising greater prosperity and integration.