Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-23-Speech-1-160"
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"en.20090323.18.1-160"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, for almost three years the European Union and the Member States have been committed to improving the effectiveness of our cooperation with developing countries. Things have been done, but there is strong resistance, above all within the Member States, and therefore there is enormous progress that has yet to be made.
In summary, the MDG contracts project will only be an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of our aid if it is defined very clearly, along with its conditions of eligibility, execution and evaluation. Our report therefore stresses the initiative’s importance, whilst urging caution and stressing the need for the Commission to be far clearer about its intentions and respond to the specific questions raised in the report.
I do not want to finish without touching for a moment on the Court of Auditors’ recent Special Report on European Commission Development Assistance to Health Services in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report’s conclusions are worrying. From a financial point of view, we see that public aid contributions to the health sector have not increased since 2000. Furthermore, it appears that budget support has been very little used for the health sector in sub-Saharan Africa. Consequently, Commissioner, you understand why in our report we return to the idea that it is absolutely essential for us to be more focused on the health sector, but also that there is nothing to guarantee that it is the MDG contracts that will enable us to achieve this.
Access to healthcare and basic education is just a dream for millions of people, many of whom are women. Every day, 72 million children – mainly girls – do not go to school. Every minute, a woman dies from complications linked to pregnancy or in childbirth, while a child dies every three seconds from a disease that a doctor could have easily prevented.
From a geographical perspective, it is sub-Saharan Africa, as we just recalled as a matter of fact, which continues to experience the most catastrophic situation and, with things going as they are, the risk is that this will continue for many more years.
In this context, it is true that budget support – that is, financial aid directly included in the budget of beneficiary countries – could usefully contribute to providing more predictable aid that is targeted at priority sectors and is therefore more effective. That is why the Commission has come up with the idea of concluding Millennium Development Goal (MDG) contracts, which it intends to propose to certain countries in order to commit funds for a six-year period and put in place annual monitoring that emphasises the achievement of results regarding health and education.
Our report stresses the importance of such an initiative, but it also raises a series of questions that require clear answers. What criteria, for example, will the Commission propose that developing countries must meet in order to aspire to concluding this type of contract? What will the lifespan of such a project be and what will be the conditions for carrying it out? We would also like to emphasise that the Commission has not yet published any official communication on the subject; if you wish to know more there are currently no internal documents to which to refer, only the basic information available on the Committee on Development’s website.
Although the Commission’s budget support has several positive features, such as being linked to the achievement of results regarding health and education, or generally being planned over three years, you should know that it is far from perfect. For example, I remind you that the Commission, just as with the majority of other aid providers, will only grant budget support to countries that have implemented an International Monetary Fund programme. This situation is particularly problematic when we know that such programmes can limit the government’s capacity to invest in development and when overly ambitious goals are set, particularly as regards inflation and the budget deficit.
Then, even if the Commission decides to provide budget support in the long term, there is nothing to guarantee that this aid will not itself become the object of bureaucratic procedures that, as we know, lead to significant delays in disbursement.
Finally, budget support suffers from a serious lack of transparency and ownership by the countries involved and their populations. Financing agreements are only rarely made public, nor does the Commission include as a matter of course civil society organisations and members of parliament in its dialogues with the governments of developing countries, as we mentioned earlier.
Nevertheless, it is widely recognised today that for the sake of effectiveness, development must be fully in the hands, not just of the governments, but also of the peoples of developing countries."@en1
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