Turkey’s Minister of Labour and Social Security Faruk Celik made the commitment during a bilateral meeting with Zambia’s Deputy Minister of Finance and National Planning, Miles Sampa in New York.

At the May 9-13, 2011 UN Conference for the Least Developed Countries (UN-LDC IV) in Istanbul, Turkey promised to make available US$200 million annually to Least Developed Countries (LDCs) for technical cooperation and scholarships.

Turkey’s assistance to LDCs will be in development and technical cooperation, trade, Investment, technology transfer, education, tourism, agriculture and forestry, energy, water, climate change, and other technical and policy-level cooperation.

Celik explained that the Turkish Employment Agency, Ministry of National Education and the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Administration (TIKA) had a joint training programme in agriculture for African countries.

Turkey has one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

And Sampa says Zambia, like most countries worldwide, had a problem of unemployment, especially among the youths, and called for collaboration with Turkey to address the issue.

Since 1991, when the country reverted to multi-party politics and ambitiously rolled out what experts say is the world's poorest privatization programme – where more than 2,000 companies went under – Zambia has received over 400 million euro in various forms of aid.