European Commission

Today, CONCORD, the European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development, published the annual AidWatch Report, this year entitled “More and Better EU aid can score Millennium Development Goals”. It features an EU-wide assessment of progress on aid quantity and quality, and a country-by-country report on how each Member State is progressing towards their 2010 individual intermediate targets.

Well, I must say this report comes at a right time as EU Ministers of Development will meet on Monday during the Foreign Affairs Council.  The European Commission has been calling for Member States to keep their promises on aid. Indeed, Europe’s credibility rests in sticking to our commitments. We all prepare for the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals this September, and we need a renewed commitment towards our partners and a common position so that Europe speaks with one voice in New York. We need to scale up aid, make it more effective and make other EU policies work for development. We have just five years for the Millennium Development Goals to become the Millennium Development Achievements. This is doable and MDGs are just too big to fail. This is one message I’ll pass on the Council on Monday.

On the amount of aid, I am determined to achieve that Member States prepare concrete and credible yearly action plans to meet our 2015 target of 0.7% of GNI. This will be key if we are to call upon our international partners to match EU’s level of ambition.

On MDGs, the Report calls for aid to be allocated with a primary focus on reducing poverty. Redirecting aid to those countries most off-track from the MDGs and those in situations of fragility is indeed at the heart of the Commission’s proposal for an EU 12-point plan in support of the MDGs adopted on 21 April this year. I can announce that Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa will be among the first test cases this autumn.

But aid alone won’t be enough. We need it to be effective and part of a broader picture. As the report says, it is about “more” but also “better” aid.

In that respect, I share CONCORD’s willingness to encourage a more democratic ownership in partner countries to make aid more effective. It is well known that good governance is a prerequisite for taking a country out of poverty. More specifically, the Report calls for the implementation of the EU Gender Action Plan put forward by the Commission on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2010. This action plan will be hopefully endorsed by the Council of Ministers on Monday, allowing us to move ahead.

Better aid also means coherent EU policies serving aid purposes. This includes the areas of trade, climate change, migration and food security. I have already pro-actively engaged my colleagues in the Commission to ensure an upstream coordination of the policy making in these areas.

At the end of the day, our common objective is to eradicate poverty by making sure every euro spent has a high impact on the ground and generates an additional investment from other partners. This is a shared responsibility between public and private actors in development. And this is the only way to bring more sustainable growth, more jobs for all people in the development world”.

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