Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-23-Speech-1-161"
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"en.20090323.18.1-161"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I wish first of all to thank the Committee on Development and its rapporteur, Mr Hutchinson, for this report which returns to a number of issues and concerns that we completely share.
More and better development aid is necessary if we want to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by 2015, but also aid that is far more predictable and less volatile, as your report very rightly reminds us.
These efforts will obviously be made using a combination of multiple instruments. However, from my point of view, in the countries that allow it, budget support, whether general or sectional, remains the best adapted and most appropriate instrument.
Budget support is the best way of strengthening national systems and processes, increasing ownership by the countries, facilitating harmonisation, reducing transaction costs and so improving the management of public expenditure, and accelerating the achievement of development goals.
The Commission has already greatly increased the use of budget support and will do so again over the course of the next six years, within the framework of the tenth European Development Fund (EDF). It is to make this instrument more effective and more predictable and so the Commission has, in consultation with the Member States and other stakeholders, devised a longer-term form of budget support, which we have called the MDG contract, for countries that meet certain criteria: good past performance, reliable public finance management, appropriate sectional policy, and so on. The MDG contract is the natural evolution of general budget supports, not just because it is more predictable but above all because it is focused on results and can have a response that is graduated according to performance. These are partner states that commit to focusing their policies, and consequently their spending, on the MDG.
The MDG contract offers the following key elements: a six-year commitment, that is six full years as opposed to the normal duration of three years for general budget supports; a guaranteed, fixed payment of at least 70% of the total commitments, provided that there is no breach of the conditions in which payments become due or of the essential and fundamental elements of the cooperation; a variable component of up to 60%, intended to reward performance with a view to achieving the MDG and linked to results indicators, mainly in the fields of health and education, as well as progress in public finance management.
Countries are eligible if they have already put budget supports into practice in a satisfactory way as part of the ninth EDF, as well as those that demonstrate a strong commitment to ensuring the monitoring and achievement of the MDG. This is to improve the budgetary resource management of countries where donors have their own coordination.
After evaluating 10 countries, the Commission awarded MDG contracts in seven of them: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. These programmes were presented to and awarded by the Member States last December. Three contracts have already been signed: Zambia and Rwanda – which I signed personally – as well as Mali. The others will be finalised in the next few weeks. Collectively, these seven programmes represent approximately EUR 1.8 billion. In other words: some 50% of the overall general budget support and some 14% of the tenth EDF’s total for national indicative programmes.
It is understood – in fact, your report encourages this – that we will seek to extend this measure to other countries, including non-ACP ones, according to experience gained from these first countries. Obviously, other approaches will have to be devised for countries that are still not eligible for budget support, but the MDG contract already constitutes an important contribution to improving the effectiveness of aid and the acceleration of progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals."@en1
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