Africa will once again be on the - loaded, but non decision-making - agenda of the Foreign Affairs Council, meeting in its Development format, on Thursday 16 May in Brussels. This session, chaired by the High Representative, Federica Mogherini, will be dominated by exchanges of views on the Sahel, sustainable development by 2030 and youth, and by the adoption of conclusions without debate, including the level of EU official development assistance.
EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. The EU Council will adopt conclusions of the European Court of Auditors' Special Report on this Trust Fund launched in November 2015 at the EU/Africa Special Summit in Valletta to strengthen long-term stability and address the root causes of irregular migration from Africa. The EU Council should agree with the Court's conclusions that this Fund has the merit of being a flexible, but unfocused, financial tool. It should invite the Commission to follow the Court's recommendations, namely to improve the quality of the objectives, review the project selection procedure, speed up implementation, improve monitoring (see EUROPE 12153/14).
Policy coherence. The EU Council is expected to adopt conclusions on the EU's 2019 report on policy coherence for development (PCD) for the period 2015-2018. In particular, it should welcome the integration of PCD into the Commission's work on the implementation of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, the link between this report and the discussion paper on a sustainable Europe by 2030 (see EUROPE 12232/10) and ask the Commission to make greater use of this instrument in future initiatives. It should also call for even greater efforts to ensure that the EU's various sectoral policies take into account the development objectives of the EU's developing country partners.
ODA level. The EU Council will adopt conclusions on the performance of the EU and its Member States in terms of official development assistance (ODA) in the light of preliminary 2018 data published in April by the OECD and the Commission (see EUROPE 12234/23). It should welcome the fact that the EU and its Member States have collectively maintained their position as the largest donor (57% of total ODA), but be concerned that the EU has not yet reached its target of allocating between 0.15% and 0.20% of its GNI to the least developed countries in the short term.
Sahel. Development Ministers will discuss the development aspects of the EU's integrated strategy for the Sahel, an African region facing many challenges, including endemic poverty, climate change and food insecurity. These exchanges will follow discussions by Foreign Ministers, Defence Ministers and their counterparts from the G5 Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad) on security aspects (see other news and EUROPE 12253/3).
Sustainable development. Ministers will have an exchange of views on the UN’s agenda for sustainable development to be reached in 2030 and the implementation of its 17 SDGs. The aim is to prepare the July high-level political forum (see EUROPE 12228/16), the Climate Action Summit on 23 September and the SDG Summit (24-25 September), which will be held in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly.
Youth and development. Ministers will have a discussion to identify ways to strengthen partnerships with young people as key actors in the implementation of the UN’s agenda for sustainable development to be reached in 2030 and its 17 SDGs.
Financial architecture for post-2020 development. Over lunch, Ministers will have an informal exchange on the financial architecture for development, proposed by the European Commission last May as part of the EU's 2021-2027 draft budget plan with a single instrument for neighbourhood, development cooperation and international cooperation (NDICI). The project is currently under negotiation (see EUROPE 12228/22, 12225/13). It will be a question of taking stock of the issue. The Ministers had already briefly discussed the subject in November 2018 (see EUROPE 12134/5). (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)