Annual Report on Italian ODA: now available in English

Italy and the fight against world poverty - launched in May 2008 - is the third ActionAid report on Italian development cooperation. It assesses the progress made by Italy in maintaining the commitments undertaken since 2000 in the fight against global poverty. A few months before 2009 Italian G8 Presidency, the report attempts to answer the question whether Italy is ready to lead the G8. Contrary to last year’s report, our findings this year indicate that there are more obvious trends towards improvement, despite the fact that the overall results are still inadequate. T current results are still inadequate and it is very important that more efforts should be made in this direction. The most obvious example is the failure to meet the financial commitments the amount of aid: delays in allocating funds have meant that Italy has deprived the international aid community of 5.2 billion Euros since 2003.

This report assesses the trends and performance of Italian cooperation with respect to shared European objectives and strategies- summarized in the table below.

Sector	Trend	Judgement for 2009
Quantity of aid	Stable – improving in 2008	Inadequate
Phantom aid	Improving	Inadequate
Predictability	Improving	Adequate
Debt	Stable	Adequate
Aid to Africa	Improving	Adequate as regards the bilateral quota Inadequate as regards financial resources
Aid to least developed countries	Worsening	Inadequate
Emergencies	Improving as regards forecasts	Inadequate
Aid to basic social services	Worsening	Inadequate
Trade aid	Stable	Adequate
Coherence	Stable	Inadequate
Tied aid	Worsening	Inadequate
Volatility	Worsening	Inadequate
Fragmentation	Improving	Inadequate

Eventually, ActionAid recommends quick priority actions that could realign Italian cooperation to the European average within a year. Its English version is now available at:
http://www.actionaid.it/fileViewAction.do?xclass=Multimediafile&field=file&width=0&height=0&mime=application/pdf&id=23855