David Cronin
BRUSSELS, Jun 26 2007 (IPS) – The European Union is failing to prioritise health and education in its plans for spending aid in poor countries, according to a new study.
Between this year and 2013 nearly 23 billion euros (31 billion dollars) from the European Development Fund is to given to the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc. Officials working for the EU s executive arm, the European Commission, are currently finalising a series of country strategy papers to determine how this aid should be used.
Sixty-one of the draft papers have been analysed by Alliance2015, a coalition of anti-poverty networks, which found that just two of these aid plans propose to make health a priority sector and only five contain such a suggestion for education.
In its study, published Tuesday, Alliance2015 notes that a staggering 44 of these strategy papers foresee no support for health whatsoever. By contrast, 19 recommend that transport should be a priority.
Alliance2015 contends that the EU s lack of focus on health and education will put the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals in jeopardy. All eight of these goals to reduce the most extreme forms of poverty by 2015 have a health or education dimension. They include major reductions in infant mortality and the incidence of serious diseases and ensuring that all boys and girls can complete a full round of primary education.
The study illustrates a gap between the Commission s ostensibly pro-poor rhetoric and the reality of its aid programmes. EU publications have recognised, the study notes, that there is a chronic shortage of teachers, doctors and nurses in poor countries. While Africa suffers from 25 percent of the world s burden of diseases, it has only 3 percent of the world s health professionals.
Marielle Hart from the Stop AIDS Alliance said that Zambia is among the African countries that have asked the Commission to prioritise health but that such requests have been turned down. Health is not even a priority for the Commission in a country like Zambia, where 18 percent of the population are infected with HIV, she told IPS. This is shocking.
Alliance2015 also points out that the proportion of total EU aid for basic education fell from 4 percent in 2000 to just 2.7 percent in 2005. This is despite how EU rules have stipulated since 2001 that at least 20 percent of its development assistance should go to health and education.
Paddy Maguinness, a spokesman for Alliance2015 and for Irish organisation Concern, said there are grounds enough for the EU s financial watchdog, the Court of Auditors, to investigate if the Union s rules are being broken. The findings of this report are seriously worrying, not just the fact that allocations for health and education are going down but more particularly that the reductions are most noticeable in the case of Africa, he said.
The report claims, too, that the Commission may not be able to present an accurate picture in the years to come of how the aid it administers is being used.
The Commission is hoping to transfer half of its aid directly to the treasuries of recipient countries in order to promote the concept that they own the money involved.
One drawback of these transfers, known to officials as general budget support, is that the Commission will have no control over the end use of aid and will struggle to say how much of it goes to particular sectors.
Vagn Berthelesen, president of Alliance2015, said that trying to estimate what proportion of this aid is ploughed into schools or hospitals would not fulfil criteria for measuring aid decided by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This Paris-based grouping is the main international body tasked with measuring aid flows from rich to poor countries.
The OECD defines how donors should account for their aid, Berthelsen added. The Commission should not deviate from that clear definition. European taxpayers are entitled to a truthful picture of how European Commission money is actually being used.
Another finding of the study is that the EU appears to be using developing aid to promote Western political and commercial interests, rather than to alleviate hardship.
In May, Louis Michel, the European commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, announced that the level of assistance to particular countries will be partly determined through a governance facility .
Under this facility, countries are rewarded for good governance, which is measured by a checklist of 23 indicators. Only one of these relates to the Millennium Development Goals; the others concern such matters as a recipient country s willingness to liberalise trade and take part in anti-terrorism initiatives.
The governance facility is all about persuading African countries to address issues such as migration, trade liberalisation and counter-terrorism, said Berthelsen. It is preposterous to claim that we are trying to support the Millennium Development Goals by tackling unrelated issues that are clearly more important to Europe.
Concern s Maguinness said that the Commission is correct to promote good governance and accountability but that unfortunately it seems to be going about it the wrong way.
