The Crown Prince met a broad audience including students and academic staff from the University in Bucharest – Faculty of Political Sciences and of Sociology, Romanian officials and representatives of NGOs and media, as well as diplomats and Norwegian businesses in Romania.
The lecture took place at the initiative of the Political Science Department, the European Commission and the United Nations Development Programme, and was supported by the Norwegian Embassy in Bucharest. On this occasion, HRH Crown Prince Haakon spoke about cooperation for development and about the Millennium Development Goals providing concrete examples of his work and his activity as UNDP ambassador since 2003, with a view to achieving the development goals (MDGs).
The event was part of the series of the Kapuscinski Conferences that will take place in the 12 new member states of the European Union, and was moderated by Jan Szczycinski, Coordinator of the Kapuscinski Conferences series in UNDP Bratislava. The scope of these conferences is to provide the civil society, the media, the business environment, and the governments in different countries with a platform for dialogue on cooperation for development, as well as with knowledge and experience sharing on the above mentioned issues.
His lecture was preceeded by the opening remarks of Prof. Mircea Dumitru, vice rector of the University of Bucharest and by the intervention of H.E. Mr. Jan Sørensen, UNDP resident representative. Mr. Doru Costea, State Secretary for Global Affairs, Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Prof. Iulia Motoc, PhD, SJD International Law Chair, University of Bucharest, and Ms. Luciana Alexandra Ghica, PhD, assisting professor in Political Science, University of Bucharest also shared their experience regarding issues of cooperation for development and about Romania’s shift from the position of a recipient state to the one of a donor.
HRH the Crown Prince graduated from the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy in 1995. In autumn 1996, he moved to the USA to study at the University of California at Berkeley, and received his BA in political science. In 2001 he followed the Foreign Ministry’s trainee programme for diplomats, and completed his education in 2003 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he took his MA in development studies, specializing in international trade and Africa. You may read more about the Royal family here.