“Challenging self-interest”

EU member states are becoming increasingly inward-looking and eager to promote aid policies which prioritise foreign or domestic policy objectives. These are the main conclusions of the annual AidWatch report by CONCORD, released on May 19th in Brussels.

Despite being the world’s biggest aid donor, only nine countries met their EU aid targets in 2010, with the bloc as a whole falling short by a whopping €14.5 billion. Italy alone accounted for over 50% of the EU's aid shortfall, closely followed by Germany on 35%, with many countries making cuts in their aid budgets that were disproportionate to other areas of spending.

In addition to weakening their ambitions on aid levels, aid effectiveness and budget support, the member states are linking their aid more closely to EU security, migration and commercial interests; this is a major cause for concern as it reduces the money that is actually available for fighting global poverty, underlines the report.

Despite the OECD categorising no fewer than 48 countries as fragile, more than 30% of all global development aid channelled to fragile states since 2002 has gone to just three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan is a priority country for 11 EU countries, including Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK.

Yet high levels of poverty and significant development challenges in Afghanistan cannot fully explain the EU’s interest in engaging in the country. As the report shows, allocations to Afghanistan have been justified domestically mostly on grounds of security and migration concerns.

“Aid is under assault and EU self-interest seems to be driving it”, says Jean Kamau from ActionAid Kenya. “It’s bad enough that the majority of member states are cutting aid but using it to mask domestic or foreign policy priorities is totally unacceptable”.

But, adds Chris Coxon from ActionAid, this self-interested approach is being replicated at all stages of the aid process, including the way in which EU member states judge the extent to which it is effective.

In 2010 alone, EU member states inflated their official aid spending by more than €5 billion, equivalent to almost 10% of the total aid provided by the EU to partner countries in that same year. Of this, €2.5 billion was debt cancellation, roughly €1.6 billion student costs and €1.1 billion was spent on refugees in donor countries.

The 1,600 organisations represented by CONCORD are calling on EU governments to end the misuse of aid for national security, migration and commercial interests, and the inflation of their aid budgets, ahead of the high level meeting on aid effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, this November.

Marie-Martine Buckens