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.