Brussels, 16/09/2008 (Agence Europe) - EU foreign affairs ministers were informed about the European Commission's 2008 annual report on development policy and Community external aid implementation and on Monday 15 September in Brussels, welcomed the general yearly improvement in performance. They do consider, however, that there should still be more focus on pragmatism.
The Council's conclusions state that the Commission met its reform expectations on obtaining greater external European aid efficiency and improving the report structure on Millennium Development Objectives (MDO). The Council also welcomed the Commission's launch of its website to improve information transparency regarding allocation of contracts to operators implementing cooperation action. The contractual partners' countries of origin will be indicated each year, as well as what the cooperation instruments are, as the Council had requested.
The Council is calling on the Commission to pursue efforts to make the annual report into a tool for making political decisions on performances, so that the results recorded during the year help define future policies. To this end it has asked it to: maintain a link with the MDO and orientations defined through European development consensus; emphasis on the results of the actions undertaken, particularly democratic governance, gender equality and climate change, rather than process implementation; lessons to draw from these results made more systematic to rectify any possible shortcomings; focus some of the report on budgetary aid implementation in all beneficiary countries; further improvement of statistics by way of data broken down on gender, people on low incomes, per capita, beneficiary country in each instrument and by illustrating differences between public development aid (PDA) and finance from other sources. The Commission is also invited to continue action to eradicate poverty in all development countries - particularly less developed countries and other low income states and to support the poor and social cohesion in intermediate income countries. (A.N./trans/rh)