The chair
of the European Parliament’s Committee on Development, Linda McAvan, has warned
nongovernmental organizations that they have “a lot of work to do over the
summer” to ensure solid outcomes at the third International Conference on
Financing for Development next month in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“We know it’s going to be a
battle to get agreement at Addis,” McAvan said at an event that Bond — a network of U.K.-based NGOs — held
in London. “NGOs need to be lobbying their governments for a good outcome —
both the ministers that went to the meeting of EU development and cooperation
ministers recently in Brussels, and those going to Addis.”
At last month’s meeting in
Brussels, development ministers set out the bloc’s position for July’s Addis
conference. The ministers renewed their collective commitment to an official
development assistance target of 0.7 percent of gross national income, but
failed to support the European Parliament’s recommendation to achieve this by
2020.
Instead,
the target deadline for the target was pushed back to 2030 — within the time
frame of the post-2015 agenda.
“Britain lobbied hard for 2020,
but NGOs and grass-roots organizations need to put pressure on ministers from
other countries — particularly the French and German ministers — to help create
the climate in which governments can take the necessary decisions,” McAvan
said.
The DEVE chair also urged the
development community to lobby the U.K. government to collaborate on resolving
migration issues facing southern European states, which she said were otherwise
unlikely to support Britain’s push to prioritize development aid over
“firefighting” their economic crises and influx of asylum seekers by boat.
“The Italians, I can imagine,
won’t be lectured by the U.K. about supporting the 0.7 percent target when they
see the failure to solve problems around migration,” she told Devex. While
Europe is trying to agree on a response to these migration issues, refugee
camps have started developing in Italy and neighboring France.
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Eliza
Anyangwe (left) of the Guardian’s Global Development Professional’s
Network
and Linda McAvan MEP (right), chair of the European Parliament’s
Committee
on Development during a question-and-answer session at the
Bond
#EYD2015 Breakfast. Photo by: Bond
|
“They have to be pushed,” McAvan
stressed.
The development community
therefore needs to “make some noise” and convey to the ministers that they will
be made accountable for whatever they say and agree on in Addis — and that
includes the migration issue.
The Bond event at EU House
brought together academics and implementers to explore better ways of
communicating development within the sector, and to policymakers — something
Bond CEO Ben Jackson said was sorely needed. Given the economic crisis in
Europe, he said there is “very real temptation” to turn inward and push for the
“charity begins at home” mantra.
“It’s important as a community of
NGOs that this refocuses our minds not just on the campaigning agenda and the
policy change agenda, but also on the long-term, perhaps less glamorous work of
just going out there and winning the case,” Jackson said.
McAvan
agreed on the pressing need for development organizations to share research and
impact findings with policymakers, especially ahead of the U.N. meetings in New
York and Paris later this year.
“I often meet academics who are
doing great work around issues like climate change, but when I ask what their
plans are to share their findings with policymakers, they often say that’s not
their job — their job is to do the research,” she said. “If this information
stays within the academic world, it doesn’t get utilized.”
The DEVE chair said it was
equally important for NGOs to push leaders toward signing up to stronger
commitments on good governance.
“Not much work has been done on this
because it’s a difficult issue diplomatically to talk about,” McAvan said, “but
we have to have honest debates on why country X does better than country Y, how
one government has improved development outcomes, and what was done to trigger
those outcomes.”
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