Jury still out as aid agency steps up spending reforms

Date: 31/01/02

By David Cronin

One year on from the formation of EuropeAid, David Cronin talks to its Italian director-general, as well as some of the new department's critics,

EU AID programmes don't tend to get a good press. Last year development chief Poul Nielson declared himself furious at how 'a war of accountants' had wrecked some of the Union's efforts to fight the devastation wrought by AIDS.

He singled out one scheme worth €10.5 million for distributing condoms in Bangladesh. Established in 1997, this programme was supposed to be jointly implemented by the European Commission and the UN's family planning division.

But squabbling over UN procurement rules meant the condoms were never circulated.

It was against this backdrop of inefficiency, confusion and delays that the Union's executive launched an overhaul of its external assistance operations in 2000.

The key measure in this process was the creation of a single department to coordinate aid destined for countries from Bosnia to Burundi. And so EuropeAid was unveiled on New Year's Day 2001.

Under its suave Italian director-general, Giorgio Bonacci, the office has recruited more than 1,200 staff in the interim. It manages an annual budget of €9 billion and operates in about 140 countries.

One of Bonacci's main preoccupations is reducing the backlog in project implementation. As part of this, his officials are screening all commitments made before 1995 and determining whether they still relate to viable projects. If it turns out they do not, then the Commission will seek to have the relevant projects shut down.

In 1999, the number of 'old commitments' stood at 1,922; by the end of last year the figure was 1,650.

Although the decrease is not phenomenal, Bonacci believes it is significant.

Perhaps more importantly, he cites a marked improvement in the actual spending of the money at his office's disposal. In the past year, EuropeAid has recorded an increase in disbursing aid by 17.

'By the end of 2001, we had been able to present positive results that many people around here were not expecting,' says Bonacci.

Yet not everybody is pleased with the thrust of the reforms.

Mirjam van Reisen, a Brussels-based consultant on EU development policy, has remarked that it is 'a crude coincidence' EuropeAid's name is close to that of Washington-based department, USAID.

'The view is generally accepted that USAID is closely linked to US foreign policy priorities,' she says. 'The name EuropeAid suggests that a similar trend for the European aid programme might be envisaged.'

Such a move, she contends, would mean that commercial considerations would prove more important in development policy than the goal of eradicating poverty.

In a recent paper, van Reisen laments how staffing levels at the Commission's directorate-general for development have been reduced to less than 200 because many of its personnel have been moved over to EuropeAid.

Nielson is now in charge of formulating policy but not putting it into practice; that's the job of External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten. Van Reisen has gone so far as to brand Nielson the 'Emperor of the Titanic'.

Now that DG Development is weakened, it would be logical for a further Commission to scrap it and the post of Development Commissioner completely, she adds.

Eurostep, an umbrella group for development agencies including Oxfam and Action Aid, also expresses reservations about the reform.

Spokesman Guggi Laryea argues that it is a retrograde step that responsibility for fisheries agreements between the EU and developing countries has been transferred from DG Development to DG Fisheries, where officials are considered friendlier to the interests of the fishing industry than those of poor communities.

Likewise, responsibility for trade with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc now lies almost exclusively with DG Trade.

'The culture in EuropeAid is different than in DG Development,' said Laryea.

'It is worrying that EuropeAid is giving more priority to administrative performance than to good policies.

A lot of EuropeAid staff only seem interested in improving the image of the Commission.'

A senior EU official concurs that there has been some disquiet in DG Development over the reforms.

This has especially been the case recently as its officials are nearing completion of work on a range of strategy papers for assisting individual states over the next five years.

'It's clear that there's a feeling in DG Development of people wondering what their next job is,' the official explained.

'Part of the answer to that is that they will now have to get involved in another very important part of the reform - evaluating the projects.

'If we set the objective of helping economic reform in Algeria, for example, then we need to know if we achieved that.

'Evaluation in the past has been a complex process.We've had these extremely sophisticated reports done by consultants but the problem with them is that they wait until the projects are finished. So we only get the results of evaluations four years afterwards.'

Some officials consider the work of EuropeAid as key to building a 'can-do culture' in the Commission.

One said: 'Our big challenge is how we can shift the culture of everyone in the Commission away from one revolving around inputs and processes, to one that looks at outputs and results.

'This will not happen overnight and has been made more difficult by the climate created by the collapse of the Santer Commission [due to fraud accusations].

'Everyone is more nervous now about accepting financial responsibilities.'

Despite enduring criticisms of inefficiency from Bodo Hombach,

the recently retired coordinator of the EU's Balkan reconstruction efforts, EuropeAid insists its programmes in post-Milosevic Serbia are a success story.

Whereas the implementation of previous schemes in the region has been sluggish, EuropeAid's officials argue that they did not dither on delivering fuel, food and medicine to the country shortly after the election of Vojislav Kostunica as president in September 2000.

More recently, its work in the Middle East has been dragged into a highly politicised row.

Israeli premier Ariel Sharon has claimed that money the EU hands over to the Palestinian Authority could be diverted to weapons. Bonacci insists: 'The allegations are unsubstantiated.'

At 62, he plans to spend the three years before he reaches retirement age bolstering the Commission's presence in the countries it wishes to assist.

By 2005 he hopes that half of the EuropeAid staff now based in Brussels will be undertaking or overseeing work in the field.

In the more immediate future, he is looking forward to taking over the exhibition centre beside the Roi Baudouin football stadium, in Brussels, on 4 February.

That will provide an opportunity for staff to debate the progress being made and hiccups they have encountered.

'It is important that we have the staff mobilised so that they understand the sense of reform,' he says.

Major feature on the European Commission's EuropeAid office.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/europeaid/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/comm/europeaid/index_en.htm

---