Changing context and challenges, DEVCO announced that the EU’s Aid for Trade Strategy “is currently being revised to improve complementarity between trade and development policies and increase the effectiveness of Aid for Trade on least developed countries (LDCs) in particular”.[i] Aid for Trade (AfT) is part of Official Development Assistance (ODA) related to improving countries’ capacity to trade and comprises five categories.[ii] Given that Aid for Trade represents a third of the official development assistance of the EU and its Member States, the review offers an important opportunity to ensure that this public money is channelled not only towards economic sectors but also to areas where it could reduce inequality and improve the distribution of gains from trade.
On 20 March, the Government of Ireland announced a contribution of €3 million to the UN Humanitarian Pooled Fund in Sudan. The funding ($3.3 million) to the Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SHF) will be used to provide life-saving assistance through UN and NGO partners, based on the needs of vulnerable people facing conflict, forced to leave their homes, and with insufficient food to feed their families, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Sudan reports in its latest weekly bulletin.
At the launch of the Global Report on Food Crises 2017, Daniel Gustafson, the Deputy Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, warned that 108 million people are in “food crisis” around the world. Daniel Gustavson joined the FAO in 1994, serving in Africa and South Asia. Before assuming his present role, he was the director of the organisation’s Liaison Office for the US and Canada. Gustavson spoke with EURACTIV.com Development Correspondent Matthew Tempest. The message of today’s report seemed to be summed up in the words that ‘famine is back’, especially looking at South Sudan, Somalia and north-east Nigeria.
During an official visit to Kenya, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has pledged new support for projects in the power and transport sectors.Also, at a press conference In Nairobi with Cabinet Secretary for the Treasury Henry K. Rotich, the signature of a connectivity project was announced. The EIB’s three-day programme will include a site visit to the Lake Turkana Wind Park, the largest windfarm in sub-Saharan Africa developed by the private sector, which the EIB helped finance in 2014.At the Treasury the EIB signed the “Last Mile Connectivity” project, which will connect nearly 300.000 Kenyan households (equalling up to 1.5 million Kenyans) to the national electricity grid.
The signing of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC) 60 years ago in March 1957, came at a tumultuous time in relations between Europe and Africa. Just weeks earlier Kwame Nkrumah had declared Ghana a republic, an event which was a turning point in the decolonisation of sub-Saharan Africa. Nkrumah remarked that the treaty's inclusion of colonial territories was to neocolonialism what the Berlin Treaty of 1885 had been to colonialism.
In East Africa, the Kenyan government has approved 6.7 billion ($65 million) towards the country's last mile connectivity project. The loan signed with European Investment Bank (EIB) concerns a multiple scheme electrification project, targeting universal access to electricity for the Kenyan population by 2020, the Standard reported.
President Donald Trump's proposed deep cuts to humanitarian aid go against the global development goals the United States committed to in 2015, the European Union's international development chief warned Friday. "Any withdrawal or cut in the development assistance would actually go contrary to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals agenda," the EU commissioner for international cooperation and development, Neven Mimica, told The Associated Press. The ambitious set of global goals take aim at eradicating poverty, reducing disease burden and ensuring clean water around the world, among other issues, by 2030. They were adopted by the international community at a United Nations summit.
This budget support report covers an important year for development. The debates in 2015 around the third Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, Agenda 2030 and the related sustainable development goals have highlighted the global challenges around inclusive growth, inequality and poverty. A key message that emerged from the Addis Ababa conference is that domestic public finance — revenue mobilisation and effective use of resources — provides by far the largest and most stable source available for financing sustainable development.
DGs ECFIN and DEVCO jointly hosted an all-day workshop on Thursday 2 February, on private sector participation in development finance. The objective was to showcase a variety of innovative cases which might inspire instruments under the new European Fund for Sustainable Development (EFSD). There was strong interest in the event, with around 140 people taking part from a variety of organizations including international finance institutions (EIB, EBRD, World Bank), other development finance institutions, private investors and representatives from the EP (notably the BUDG committee secretariat). Following the announcement of the Commission's new European Fund for Sustainable Development (EFSD), this workshop aimed to showcase a number of innovative blending instruments to demonstrate how these tools could be further developed with support from the Fund.
The UK’s National Audit Office says the number of fraud investigations has increased in tandem with more public money being delivered to “fragile” countries where bribery can be seen as “cultural norm”. Euractiv’s media partner The Guardian reports. Fraud investigations involving foreign aid have quadrupled over five years as more public money is given to “fragile” countries, a UK government spending watchdog has found. Reforms introduced by David Cameron to increase funding and assign it to unstable nations have increased the risk of wrongdoing, according to the National Audit Office.