Commission to cut red-tape burden for poor countries

By David Cronin

Date: 07/07/05

Poor countries should not have to face increased red tape to benefit from higher aid budgets from the West, the European Commission will say next week.

On Wednesday (13 July), the Commission is to approve a declaration on the future of EU policy on development assistance.

This has been designed to set out how recipients can administer the extra €20 billion in aid which EU governments recently pledged from 2010 as part of efforts to reach the UN's Millennium Development Goals on poverty reduction.

Officials say that it is vital that poor country administrations will not have increasingly onerous requirements to report to a plethora of donors. "If we do business as usual, the extra resources will never be absorbed," said one offical.

The declaration also aims to help the ten countries that joined the Union last year fashion development aid policies that incorporate lessons learned from previous experiences. Many of the new states are still at the early stages of devising development strategies.

Louis Michel, the commissioner for development and humanitarian affairs, is in favour of a system which would allow the aid activities of several member states to be merged, with one of them taking the lead. Britain, he has suggested, could be placed in charge of implementing education programmes on behalf of the entire Union as it has many years of experience of funding schools in poor countries.

Yet, though Michel indicated earlier this year that he would favour allowing money traditionally earmarked for social schemes to be used to finance armies in countries emerging from conflict, next week's declaration will not raise that possibility.

Instead, it will say that the principal objective of development aid has to be alleviating hardship. While development officials say that such an agenda is complementary to building a more secure environment, they insist that development policy cannot be subordinate to such agendas as the fight against terrorism.

This week, Aprodev, the aid arm of the World Council of Churches, published a study expressing concern that the nature of EU development aid could be used to cover projects where the focus is more on security issues than on health and education.

Rob van Drimmelen, Aprodev's general-secretary, said he could understand why officials in the EU institutions dealing with security policy are keen to draw money from development spending, given the limitations on their own financial resources. "But the integrity of policies should be safeguarded," he added. "Development co-operation involves specific tasks to improve the livelihood of poor people, with the ultimate objective of eradicating poverty."

Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson yesterday called on rich nation leaders at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland (6-8 July) to resolve to rewrite the rules of global commerce in a way that benefited Africa. He estimated that if Africa's share of world trade could rise by even 1%, this would deliver seven times more than its current aid income.

Article anticipates a European Commission declaration on the future of EU policy on development assistance, expected for 13 July 2005. The Commission was to set out how recipients could be enabled to administer the extra €20 billion in aid which EU governments had recently pledged from 2010 as part of efforts to reach the UN's Millennium Development Goals on poverty reduction.