The EU Council of Ministers on Thursday 16 May expressed growing concern about the downward trend in collective EU Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 2018 for the second consecutive year, based on the European Commission's analysis and preliminary data published by the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in April (see EUROPE 12234/23, 12233/17).
This is the main message expressed in the conclusions on the EU's development aid objectives, adopted without debate on the margins of the Foreign Affairs Council meeting in its ‘Development’ format. These conclusions serve as the 2019 annual report to the European Council.
In 2018, EU ODA reached €74.4 billion, or 0.47% of EU GNI (compared to an average of 0.21% for other OECD/DAC countries). This total was €731 million lower than in 2017, when the amount expressed as a percentage of GNI was also higher, at 0.5%.
The Council regrets that with this decline, the EU is moving further and further away from the EU's collective target of allocating 0.7% of EU GNI to ODA, even though ODA is a major source of financing for the least developed countries and fragile states, which do not have the capacity to raise funds from other sources.
It is also 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 (LDCs) in the short term, although EU aid to LDCs has, for the first time, increased slightly (0.12% of GNI in 2018 compared to 0.11% since 2014).
The Council nevertheless welcomes the fact that the EU and the Twenty-eight have, collectively, maintained their position as the largest donors of ODA, contributing almost 57% of the total ODA provided to developing countries by members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee.
It reaffirms its leading political role and commitment to development assistance and recalls the individual and collective ODA commitments of the EU and its Member States, as set out in the new ‘European Consensus on Development’. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)