In 1970, the richest countries in the world committed themselves to giving 0.7 per cent of their Gross National Income (GNI) to overseas aid. Today only five of the world’s richest countries are fulfilling their promise and meeting this target – Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Sweden. However, France, Ireland, Finland, Spain,UK and Belgium have all set a clear timetable for reaching this target soon.

 

What is the 0.7% target?  0.7 refers to the repeated commitment of the worlds governments to commit 0.7% of rich-countries gross national product (GNP) to Official Development Assistance.  First pledged 35 years ago in a 1970 General Assembly Resolution, the 0.7 target has been affirmed in many international agreements over the years, including the March 2002 International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico and at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johnannesburg later that year.   In Paragraph 42 of the Monterrey Consensus, world leaders reiterated their commitment, stating that “we urge developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product (GNP) as ODA to developing countries.”  

 

Commitments to 0.7%  As of June 2005, 16 out of the 22 donor countries have met or agreed to meet the 0.7 target by 2015.  On 24 May all EU Development Ministers met in Brussels and announced that by 2015, all of the original “EU-15”, Member states will set timetables to meet the 0.7 target by 2015. In addition, the "new" EU countries (the accession countries which joined the EU after 2002) will achieve 0.33% by 2015. So far, only five countries have met or surpassed the 0.7 target (source: UN Millennium Project)

 

Official Development Assistance in 2005

(*) Indicates countries that have NOT set a timetable for 0.7%.

 

(source: OECD 2005 )

Origins and relevance of the international aid target The international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their national income to development assistance has become a cause célèbre for aid activists and has been accepted in many official quarters as the legitimate target for aid budgets. This paper argues that the origins of the target, however, raise serious questions about its relevance.

 

Adopted at the High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (March 2005) the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, has been prepared with broad participation from development practitioners, through a process coordinated by the High-Level Forum Steering Committee. The declaration will outline a set of joint commitments and targets for governments and multilateral donors to reach over the next five years.  Against the different key principles of the Rome Declaration (2003) and the Marrakech memorandum on Managing for Development Results (2004), the following commitments for donors and partners are highlighted in the Declaration:

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 and nearly 190 countries have subsequently signed up to them. The goals range from halving global poverty and hunger to protecting the environment, improving health and sanitation and tackling illiteracy and discrimination against women. They were introduced as part of a wider attempt to encourage the international community to stop talking about making a difference in the developing world and join forces to start doing something about it.

 

Alongside the Goals, a series of 18 targets were also drawn up to give the international community a number of tangible improvements to aim for within a fixed period of time, and also make it easier for them to measure their progress to date. The intention is that almost all of these targets will be achieved by 2015.

 

HIPC Initiative was the first comprehensive approach by the international community to reduce the external debt of the world’s poorest, most heavily indebted countries, and represented an important step forward in placing debt relief within an overall framework of poverty reduction. While the Initiative yielded significant early progress, multilateral organizations, bilateral creditors, HIPC governments, and civil society have engaged in an intensive dialogue since the inception of the Initiative about the strengths and weaknesses of the programme. 

 

In 2005, in the context of accelerating progress toward the Millennium Development Goals, the HIPC Initiative has been supplemented by the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). The MDRI allows for 100 percent debt relief by three multilateral institutions—the IMF, the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank, and the African Development Fund (AfDF)—for countries completing the HIPC process.