More than a thousand development leaders from across the world will meet at Mexico City for the first high level meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC) on April 15.
Published : 12 Apr 2014, 06:17 PM
Finance Minister AMA Muhith will lead the Bangladesh delegation to the two-day event.
The meet aims at reviewing how development co-operation was made more effective globally besides deciding on actions to enhance that progress.
We also have a results framework for our Five Year Plan that gives government and development partners the chance to assess alignment, performance and results, and ensures accountability for all parties.
These successes are worth celebrating, but there are still challenges. More aid needs to be untied, especially for grants. Some partners have not yet fully aligned with our national systems. Transparency is also an issue, with not all aid appearing in budgets yet.
We are gradually working to overcome such problems and on the whole we are moving in the right direction. There is no lack of goodwill from both the government and development partners to move even further forward on effective development co-operation.
Q) What are the Asia Pacific region’s priorities for the Global Partnership’s High-Level Meeting in Mexico?
Representatives from Asia-Pacific governments, civil society and business gathered to discuss their vision for more effective development co-operation at a Global Partnership consultation in Seoul on March 10-11. Countries reviewed their progress in making development co-operation more effective and discussed common solutions to shared development challenges. They also voiced their top priorities for the Global Partnership’s first High Level Meeting to be held in Mexico City on April 15-16.
We had very interesting discussions and I think a few key issues emerged to take to Mexico from the region:
Firstly, representatives from countries in our region think that the question of the quantity of aid going to developing countries is still very important. At the same time, how aid is delivered is no less important. We want to see that commitments made earlier in Monterrey, Paris, Accra, and in Busan are all met.
Secondly, we need to find out how closely we can link this Global Partnership with the post-2015 development discussion now being held in different regions. Given the wide gamut of development challenges expected to come under the purview of the post-2015 development agenda, it will be critical to enhance mobilisation of domestic resources as well as the supply of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and investment in less developed countries.
Thirdly, we see that South-South co-operation needs a further boost on this continent. Asia is a region with great South-South potential if you look at geographic coverage and the number of initiatives already undertaken. But we need a strong policy environment, institutional capacities and strong political commitment to drive this agenda forward. This is especially important given that South-South co-operation will greatly compliment traditional North-South co-operation.
Finally, I would like to add that policy coherence between development areas such as aid, trade, climate, migration and technology transfer is extremely important to bring about better results. In some cases, our partners are pursuing policies that are not in line with other policies. For example, many aim to support developing countries through aid policies and by working to provide 0.7% of Gross National Income as aid. On the other hand, policies in other areas work at cross-purposes to this agenda. Take trade policy. Some policies give preferential access to certain markets, creating an uneven playing field for trade between countries, which can contradict development co-operation.
We also need policy coherence related to worker migration, which can be an important form of development cooperation. Legal, time-bound selective migration programmes for low skilled workers can bring resources to poor countries many times higher than those which ODA and other traditional support can provide. Clearly, policy coherence is an area worth exploring.