2009 Financial Bill finally approved: ODA cuts are confirmed

Last Friday, the Lower House of Parliament approved the 2009 Financial Bill, actually confirming the heavy and initial cuts to development cooperation. Despite proposal by minority groups and pressure from Civil society, no change was introduced within the Bill as for development cooperation section. According to unconfirmed sources, in the view of the Italian G8 Presidency, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs has asked 500 million dollar to be allocated to development cooperation over 2009. Extra-budget cycle financial allocations to development cooperation via a special decree is not new in recent years, both with centre-right ( the 2005 Tsunami Decree) and centre-left governments (the 2006 revenue-windfall decrees).

New evalutaion Unit members appointed: first evaluations planned after 7 years?

The last Steering Committee for development cooperation has appointed the new 5 experts for the Evaluation Unit. According to the current legislation, the Evaluation Unit is tasked with:1) ex-ante initiatives approval before they are submitted to the Steering Committe and 2) commissioning ex-post independent impact evaluations. Due to zero financial resources allocated to the last evaluation unit activities, the Italian development cooperation did not actually carry out any independent evaluation over the last 7 years. The 2009 workplan of the newly appointed Evaluation Unit provides for 500,000 euro worth evaluations. Unfortunately, an approved plan of activity is no guarantee that these are going to be adequately resourced. In 2006, the last evaluation unit approved a 3 year plan, but no financial resources have ever be allocated to implement that.

Multi-year development guidelines approved

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, presided the December 9th meeting of the Steering Committee for Development Cooperation. The Minister reported almost the full use of the fiancial resources of the cooperation for 2008 - ( 811 million euros as grants and 270 million euros as soft loans) .

The December 9th, Steering Committee has also approved multi-years guidelines for development cooperation for the years 2009-2011.