From beneficiary to donor: an extremely informative exercise - Development aid
It is difficult for new Member States of the European Union (EU), still seen today as ‘poor’ of the EU and hence receiving special aid amounting to some €8.5 billion from the European Cohesion Fund, to become fully-fledged members of the EU, the leading donor world-wide, providing more than 50% of total Official Development Assistance (ODA).
António Ole, Remote connection: fragments of a dairy, Luanda - Jerusalem 1996.
Photo Carlo Pereira Marques, credit artist.
Upon joining the EU on May 1, 2004, there were no tall orders made of the ten new Member States – Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus. They will only have to begin contributing to the European Development Fund (EDF) in 2008, at the start of the 10th edition of the EU aid budget for ACP States. Even if the new Member States committed themselves in May 2005 to gradually increasing their aid contribution, they managed to ensure that this would happen at a slower pace than for their partners. Whilst the UN fixed the level of official aid to be committed at 0.7% of GNI by 2015, the objective for the ten new Member States was fixed at 0.33% with an intermediate objective of 0.17% to be achieved by 2010 (0.51% for the EU-15).
This is a grace period that all of these countries are using to full advantage to build their cooperation and development policies. Twinning arrangements have been established to strengthen institutions; this is especially the case with France and Germany, followed by Spain and Great Britain. Large donors are following suit, United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) amongst them. But it is first and foremost Canada, which since 1989 has played a key role in building the capabilities of the Visegrad Countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) and the three Baltic States via the Canadian International Development Agency (ACDI). The objective: to fund and run joint aid projects in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
Neighbours first
For the new EU Member States, the bulk from the former Soviet Union, the first priority is stability in the Central and Eastern European region, “of vital necessity”, emphasises the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs. So it is hardly a surprise that topping the list of beneficiaries of their government aid should be their nearest neighbours, namely the Balkan States, as well as a number of Eastern European nations. And what of the ACP countries? Until recently, only a handful of them received aid from the new EU donor countries. And although several countries have decided to extend their bilateral cooperation, the list remains short and is limited for now, to Africa. Four countries head the list: Angola – which features amongst the ‘priority’ countries of Czech and Polish cooperation agencies, as well as Kenya, Zambia and Sudan.
Good governance and agriculture
“We have specific experience not shared by traditional donors”, remarks an expert from the NGO platform for Slovak development, “and which is rooted in the transformation process we lived through after the fall of the Berlin Wall”. It is not surprising then that aid for good governance and opening up to the market economy are priority sectors for assistance provided by the new Member States, especially for the countries close to them. As for Africa, aid is concentrated on more ‘traditional’ sectors such as agriculture, industrial development or the environment.
