Ireland to miss 2010 aid target

Ireland will almost certainly miss its commitment to spend 0.6 per cent of national income on overseas aid by 2010.

Aidwatch 2009, a lobbying and campaigning initiative which monitors EU governments spending on aid says Ireland, along with Italy and Latvia, have slashed their aid budgets in recent months. Aidwatch also warned that many EU countries are “artificially” inflating overseas aid figures.

This is done by counting debt cancellation towards total pledges even though it is not “new money” for development aid.

The report shows that just a handful of EU countries remain on track to meet the 2010 aid target — helping offset a pledges shortfall elsewhere amounting to €40 billion between 2006-2010.

The missing sum would be enough, says the report, to pay the salaries of more than three million trained nurses over the four-tear period.

The Irish overseas aid budget has been cut by 21.8% of the projected total for the year. The aid budget was cut by €45 million in July 2008, by another €15 million in October, and by a further €95 million in February 2009. The April budget took another €100 million off the aid budget bringing to €195 the fall in contributions to date in 2009 alone.

The initiative says the Irish Government has so far given no explicit recommitment to achieving the targets.

Ireland's stated targets are 0.6% by 2010 and 0.7% by 2012.

Last year, says AidWatch, the UK spent 0.41% of national income on aid - the same as Spain but less than Luxembourg (0.92%), Sweden (0.90%), Denmark (0.78%) and the Netherlands (0.75%). Italy (0.16%), came bottom of the league of the 15 EU countries that promised to spend at least 0.56% of national income on aid by 2010, rising to 0.7% by 2015.

On current showing, the report warns, the EU is “way off-track” to achieve the 2015 target.

However, the Netherlands certainly will meet the 2010 target of 0.56%, and the UK, Spain and Luxembourg are “likely” to so, even without “inflating” the figures to include debt relief and other “non-aid” items such as foreign student education and help for refugees arriving in Europe. Belgium certainly will not hit the 2010 target, while Ireland, Denmark and Sweden are “unlikely” to do so.

Those eight countries have volunteered even tougher goals than the 2015 EU target: the UK has promised to hit 0.7% by 2013, Ireland the same figure by 2012, while Luxembourg has pledged to spend a full 1% of its national wealth on development aid as soon as next year.

At the other end of the scale, Estonia, Greece and Latvia have lowered their commitments below 0.56% next year.

The AidWatch report says all EU governments must now push to meet their targets with “genuine” resources and with no inflationary tactics.

The report says the EU must “ensure that progress on aid commitments goes hand in hand with systemic reform of the international financial and economic system by addressing flaws which impact so heavily on poor countries.”

Aidwatch an initiative by Concord, a pan-European confederation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working on international development issues.