Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-17-Speech-4-138"
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"en.20051117.18.4-138"2
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"Mr President, Mrs Martens, ladies and gentlemen, Africa is the continent that poses the greatest development challenges. Progressive desertification, the shortage of water, famine and HIV/AIDS have reached critical levels there.
The conclusion of Economic Partnership Agreements as a development-centred tool for liberalisation has the potential to promote economic growth in Africa.
When it comes to creating an attractive climate for reliable and predictable investment, to foster this we have, as you know, proposed setting up a permanent European forum bringing together African and European entrepreneurs, and building infrastructure in the widest sense of the word, including water, energy, ICT and transport, as provided for in the Europe-Africa Partnership on Infrastructure.
Let us not forget either the launch of a new European Union Programme for Action to confront HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; the emphasis placed on higher education alongside the efforts being made in basic education, and the increase in budget support. The Commission and the Member States will indeed have to endeavour to make the transition from aid projects to sectoral approaches and to direct budget support on that basis. No doubt we will be returning to this during the course of this debate.
Finally, increased coordination of European aid and the implementation of a roadmap on coherence, coordination and complementarity seek to ensure that the European Union cooperates more effectively on development.
These, then, are the main themes of the Africa strategy. I am delighted to see that Parliament finds its concerns reflected in our three basic concepts and in the specific proposals. Mrs Martens’ report and the motion tabled are ambitious. I am delighted; I thank you for this and I congratulate you.
Africa is the continent where there are more donors than anywhere else. It is therefore the continent where the need for coordination and complementarity is the most urgent. Countries such as Tanzania or Mozambique each have to manage some 500 individual projects funded by European donors in the social infrastructure sector alone, even though the amounts devoted to each of these projects are relatively small.
Africa is also the continent that offers us the greatest opportunity today. The birth of the African Union and the adoption of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the reinforced role of Africa’s Regional Economic Communities and the emergence of a new generation of leaders at national level have changed the way Africa is governed. New glimmers of hope for peace are being seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Somalia, Burundi and Liberia. This continent, which is the ecological lung of the world, has unrivalled wealth when it comes to natural resources.
It is also a future demographic power. By 2025, the population of Africa will have grown to more than 1.3 billion, almost as large as that of China or India, and greater than the combined populations of the European Union and the United States. It will also have the advantage of a younger population, since at that time almost 800 million Africans will be under the age of 15.
More than ever, this Africa deserves Europe’s full attention. That is why the Commission has proposed a new Strategy for Africa, which was adopted on 12 October and presented in this House the very same day, a strategy intended to provide the European Union with a single, comprehensive and long-term framework for its relations with Africa.
Mr President, Mrs Martens, ladies and gentlemen, the Strategy for Africa is based on three main themes: one Africa, one Europe and one objective.
One Africa: while Africa has many faces, different histories and diverse needs, it has now collectively embarked on a path of political, economic and cultural integration of the entire continent, crystallised in the integration efforts promoted by its Regional Economic Communities, the launching of the African Union and NEPAD. In short, this is integration that deserves our unconditional support.
One Europe: Europe has also changed. The enlargement of the European Union to include ten new members has taken the number of potential individual partners to 26: the 25 Member States plus the European Community. This development has increased the European Union’s potential political and economic impact, but the enlarged membership also poses new challenges in terms of aid coordination and complementarity. The European Union Strategy for Africa will therefore make aid effectiveness and donor coordination central priorities in the years ahead.
One objective: Europe’s policy on security, for example, has for a long time coexisted – not always happily, I might add – with its development policy. Recent experience – and I am thinking in particular of the Peace Facility for Africa – shows how intimately security and development are linked and how important it is for European policies in these areas to be closely coordinated. In the European Union Strategy for Africa, the common objective is, therefore, to promote the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Africa. Our overall strategy comprises a series of specific proposals, as you know, and I am glad to see that we largely agree on these points, some of which appear in Mrs Martens’s report, such as strengthening the Peace Facility for Africa, and strengthening the role of national parliaments and civil society organisations in planning, prioritising and – let us not forget – scrutinising development cooperation policy."@en1
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