Aid effectiveness
Aid effectiveness is - together with aid volume - one of the key pillars of development cooperation. The EU is firmly committed through both the Paris Declaration and the EU Consensus on Development to deliver more and better aid. The EU has also taken a lead role in implementing the commitments of the March 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in order to improve aid delivery, and it even made four additional commitments. Regarding in particular complementarity and division of labour, the Council and the Member States adopted in May 2007 an EU Code of Conduct on Complementarity and Division of Labour in Development Policy. Complementarity of donor activities is of paramount importance for increasing aid effectiveness, and thus for a more effective and efficient development assistance. EU initiatives on a better division of labour will aim at reinforcing the objective of strengthening the partner country ownership and capacities to take over responsibility for donor coordination processes.
In May 2008, the Council adopted a comprehensive set of Conclusions on "The EU as a global partner for development: Speeding up progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)" (doc. 9907/08 ). These conclusions contained a chapter entitled "An EU aid effectiveness roadmap to Accra and beyond: hastening the pace of reforms", with a view to the preparation of the III High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (Accra, 2-4 September 2008) and ultimately to the Ministerial Declaration adopted at the end of the conference, i.e. the Accra Agenda for Action, for which the EU had a very ambitious approach and wanted strong, precise and measurable commitments as well as a timetable for implementation.
The Accra Agenda for Action adopted on 4 September 2004 reflects to a large extent the expectations and the ambitions of the EU, as outlined also in the Conclusions adopted by the General Affairs and External Relations Council on 22 of July 2008 (doc. 12080/08 ). Among others, key achievements include the commitments by donors to provide 3-5 year forward information on their planned aid to partner countries (predictability), to use partner country systems as the first option (use of country systems), to move from prescriptive policy conditions to conditions based on the developing country’s own development objectives (conditionality) and elaborate individual plans to further untie their aid to the maximum extent (untying of aid).
In November 2009, the General Affairs and External Relations Council adopted an operational framework which contains measures in key areas of the aid effectiveness agenda, such as division of labour, use of country systems and technical cooperation. They will reduce the burden on developing countries and contribute to a more effective delivery of aid. The Council underlined the EU's commitment to aid effectiveness and stressed that the implementation of the aid effectiveness agenda should be reinforced. With a view to further enhancing the implementation of the EU aid effectiveness agenda and providing a strong and effective EU input to the Seoul High Level Forum in 2011, the Commission and future Presidencies are invited to prepare early in 2010 further action-oriented proposals for possible joint approaches to be added to the Operational Framework.
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