Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-28-Speech-4-042"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20060928.5.4-042"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like, before all else, to thank Mr Hutchinson for his outstanding report, which my group will endorse unreservedly.
This would also be an opportunity to recruit new specialised workers in the field of development cooperation, particularly from among young people.
As long ago as the year 2000, the UN General Assembly set itself the task, one that Members belonging to every grouping in this House have taken very seriously over recent years, of making success measurable, setting goals and showing where progress has been achieved. For us, too, the Millennium Development Goals are the yardstick whereby we assess the effectiveness of what we do on the development policy front.
We found the United Nations’ interim report alarming, in that it showed that the targets set had not been achieved, and, while that sort of failure gives well-paid Europeans a guilty conscience, to millions of people living in poverty it means death, and for millions of young women a whole life without education. That should be a good enough reason for the Commission to review the effectiveness of its aid provision, and certainly gives us enough justification for looking further into its self-analysis, so let me again congratulate Mr Hutchinson on the good work he has done in spelling out very clearly to the Commission what it should be doing.
Having said that, though, let me take this opportunity to consider the role of this House, for we too, to some degree, share responsibility for this failure. It is evident that we have, for years on end, been agreeing to budgets that did not do what they were meant to do, but were we in any kind of position to reach better decisions? Do we possess sufficient information to perform our monitoring role? I doubt it. To date, the Commission has produced no convincing evidence of having managed projects in such a way as to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals, and the budget data on the basis of which we have been required to take decisions are superficial.
In 2005, we called on the European Investment Bank to carry out a benchmarking exercise in respect of its lending, that is to say, to evaluate every loan in terms of its contribution to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The funds over which we have control cannot at present be benchmarked in this way, and, since there is no institution that could take over from us the overall monitoring of what is done with the money, we should also demand that we, as Europe’s Parliament, be given permanent input right along the line of development cooperation, in other words, to have a say in the programming of the European Development Fund.
Proposals need to be made at both the national and regional level, containing definite targets and milestones for the progressive achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and we will, in future, want to see from the Commission country-by-country and region-by-region reports, divided up by sector and project, along with reports listing the project promoters and the firms of consultants involved and detailing the funds that have been remitted to them.
The 65 important proposals contained in the Hutchinson report make clear the fact that this House does indeed possess competence that should be drawn on in future, but I believe there is a second pillar of competence, alongside the governments of the objective regions, in the form of the institutions that operate in those regions, which need to be far more involved. According to one approach, individual donors in a particular region should take on leadership roles in specific sectors; not only does this come in for praise in the report, but we too could consider the possibility of making use of the financial clout that the European Union wields – greater than that of the United Nations – in taking over the leadership in respect of one of the eight Millennium Development Goals, and the one I would propose is water.
The European Union could commit itself to ensuring, jointly with local partners, the supply of drinking water to the continent of Africa and the disposal of its waste water. That would do us more credit than the latest scandal involving the poisoning of drinking water by European companies, and so we should call on the Commission to produce a timetable stating by which dates it should be possible to provide all the major cities south of the Sahara with sustainable systems for the supply of drinking water and the drainage of waste water, and should insist on regular interim progress reports relating to the performance of this task.
I want the Commission to tell us whether or not it possesses the structures that might make a master plan for such a task possible in the first place, and whether it agrees that the international community needs that sort of specialised centre. Better ways must be found of bringing together those who work in the field with policy-makers and donors, and what I would suggest is that the Commission should organise, every other year, an international conference on African development with the specific objective of making policymakers and donors aware of what is needed and of what has been learned in practice. One possibility is that there could be an exhibition detailing successful and unsuccessful projects, with the former being honoured."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples