Italian aid effectiveness strategy: first ever official statements

On June 26th, at a UN sponsored Parliamentary event, the deputy general director for the Italian development cooperation partially unveiled the Italian priorities for EU Accra agenda. Italy is supporting a greater role for civil society within the Paris Declaration. As for the EC sponsored division of labour, Italy is willing to increase its engagement in fragile States, while volunteering to play a role in health, education, rural development, with keep focus on other cross-country sectors (women empowerment and environment). The official data on sector of engagement will be published at the end of July. Unfortunately there was no reference to further aid untying. The EC division of labour is pushing the Italia development cooperation to understand whether its added value is. While discussion on aid quality is slowly moving on, the government is cutting the 738 million worth development cooperation budget within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by 510 million euro over the next 3 years.

Waiting for the Economic Financial Perspective, Italian ODA/GDP at 0,22% in 2008

On June 18th the Government approved the Financial and Economic Perspective for 2009-2011. According to official declarations on the eve of the meeting, the Perspective is expected to be a short document (20p). Yet, this document is neither publicly available nor clear whether any ODA increase is mentioned. Previous 2002 and 2007 Financial Perspectives had included annual timetables for aid increase to allow Italy to meet the EU aid targets. Those commitments were not actually met. Over the last months, civil society has called on the new government to include a updated version of the aid timetable, in order to show its commitment to achieve the EU ODA target on the even of the Italian G8 Presidency

The June EU Head of States Council reaffirmed their commitment to reach 0.51% ODA/GDP in 2010, meaning that Italy will have to more than double its current aid level. Recent estimates from the Ministry of Finance forecast 2008 Italian aid at 0.22% - up from 0.19% and equal to 3,5 billion euros, including 600 million from debt relief.

New director for development cooperation appointed

Elisabetta Belloni was appointed as the new Director General for development cooperation, taking over from Alain Economides appointed as Head of Cabinet. Director Belloni was managing the Emergency Unit of the Minister of foreign affairs.

ActionAid 2008 report on Italian development cooperation: Ready for the G8?

ActionAid Italy launched the third Italian edition of the shadow report on the Italian development cooperation - “Italy and the fight against poverty: Are we ready for the G8?”. The report attempts to assess the Italian legitimacy to lead the G8 in 2009 on the development and Africa related issues. The Italian performance on development cooperation is benchmarked against internationally or EU agreed targets on aid quantity, quality and allocations. The main call is that Italy will be able to meaningfully steer the G8 African agenda only if the Italian development cooperation is in line with the EU average. The report acknowledges that some improvements occurred over the last two years, with a significant increase in genuine aid, a new focus on Africa, and an increase in aid predictability. Conversely, other aid features such as tied aid, aid allocations to LDCs and BBS further deteriorated. The report argues that the G8 is a crucial opportunity to quickly speed up the alignment of the Italian development cooperation. Although the Italian development cooperation crisis worsened over the last 15 years, many quality and allocations issues can be quickly fixed by 15 points action-plan with no addition cost for the Italian State budget. In the following debate discussants and speakers agreed that the 2009 G8 Presidency provided the very opportunity to embed development cooperation at the core of the Italian foreign policy.

Progresses on Division of Labour but concerns on aid scale_up

Following evident delay, Italy finally decided to take part into the European Commission Division of Labour Fast Track exercise in the following countries: Bolivia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uganda. In Albania, Italy will be one of the EU MS to chair the division of labour exercise. Before Accra, and possibly on the eve of the next EU technical seminar on aid effectiveness mid-June, Italy is also going to select its sectors of engagement in each country.

It is important to note that each decision on division of labour is going to happen between Rome and Brussels not at field level. Italy requested this specific centralized communication arrangement, as the Italian cooperation field offices do not have enough power to independently decide where actually to get engaged. The current centralized structure is also preventing Italy from taking part into “delegated cooperation” experiments.

As for the binding timetables on aid increase, Italy opposed and continues opposing any binding timetable. More worryingly, in 2005 together with Germay, Italy signed the 0.51% ODA target subject to financial national economic situation. Later, the new German government accepted the 0.51% without condition, while Italy apparently never officially changed its initial condition. As for tied aid, Italy had no problem in accepting the recent DAC expansion to all HIPC, while wishing to bring on board aid new donors such as China, on this issue.