Developed countries fall behind in meeting foreign aid pledges

from the Guardian

Mark Tran in Seoul

Rich countries need to increase their foreign aid by unprecedented levels if they are to meet ambitious targets set out at the Gleneagles summit three years ago, leading development officials said today.

The extent to which the developed world is failing to live up to its pledges was spelt out in stark terms at an international conference in Seoul, South Korea to review the progress towards meeting the UN millennium development goals and to assess aid effectiveness.

This year is the halfway point in the attempt to meet the millennium development goals of halving poverty and hunger, providing primary education for all, promoting gender equality and tackling diseases such as HIV/Aids.

This year is shaping up to be a critical one for official development assistance (ODA) with key conferences coming up in Accra in Ghana and Doha in Qatar. Rich countries will be under pressure to match their rhetoric with action, although the outlook for significant increases in foreign aid looks bleak.

While the world's poorest countries are most vulnerable to soaring food and energy prices, belt tightening in the developed world will mean western governments will find it hard to win public acceptance for massive rises in foreign aid.

Even before the economic slowdown began to bite in the west, preliminary aid figures for 2007 were disappointing.

Stephen Groff, a development official at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said increases in foreign aid were not sufficient to meet targets set at the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland.

The summit, hosted by Tony Blair, agreed to increase aid from $80bn (£40bn) in 2004 to $130bn in 2010 – a rise of more than 60% over six years.

"The preliminary data shows that halfway through those six years, total aid has risen by only 15%, well short of the rate required to achieve the increase envisaged at Gleneagles," Groff told the audience of diplomats, aid specialists and non-governmental organisations.

"A few donors have since scaled back their targets somewhat, but even these more modest targets remain very challenging."

Africa, which was given special attention at Gleneagles, is being particularly short-changed, officials said. The G8 projected a doubling of its aid commitments to the continent, but initial data for 2007 showed bilateral ODA rose by only 9% once debt relief was excluded.

"It is clear that donors still face a real challenge to meet their promises and need to rapidly increase their aid to Africa to meet the 2010 target," Groff said.

Among the countries named and shamed was Japan, where net ODA fell to 0.17% of national income, the lowest level since it joined the OECD in 1964.

France's figure of 0.39% was more than 20% below its pledge of 0.5% made at Gleneagles. Greece, Italy and Portugal gave less than 0.2% of national income, far below the EU targets of 0.33% for 2006 and 0.51% in 2010.

However, the development picture was not totally bleak. Experts said the first of the millennium development goals – halving poverty by 2015 – was within reach and there had been progress on other fronts, though not fast enough to guarantee their achievement in the timeframe envisaged.

Sarah Cliffe, the director for strategy and operations for east Asia at the World Bank, cited the success story of Vietnam, which managed to reduce poverty from 48% of the population to 16%, one of the fastest cases in poverty reduction on record.

Cliffe attributed Vietnam's success to strong government leadership, good coordination among donors in key sectors, their willingness to pool funds and their readiness to allow the country's own institutions to handle the aid. There were plaudits for South Korea, once a recipient of foreign aid but now an active aid donor thanks to its economic success as an Asian tiger.