As host of the G8 Summit in 2010, Canada has the opportunity to provide bold leadership to help solve the pressing challenges of global poverty and climate change that the world faces. A timetable to achieve 0.7% would greatly increase Canada’s global leadership credibility and help to ensure significant results at the G8.
With the global economic crisis, the food crisis and the impacts of climate change threatening to undermine the progress being made towards ending poverty, it is even more urgent than ever before that Canada live up to its promise to increase our foreign aid to 0.7% of our national income.
After several years of slow progress toward the 0.7% aid target, most recent figures for 2008 from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show Canada’s official development assistance at only 0.32% of our Gross National Income1 or less than half of what we should be giving.
Canadians like to think of themselves as a compassionate and generous people. But we are 16th out of 22 donor counties and well below the average country effort of 0.47%. Netherlands, a country with less than half the population of Canada gives almost twice as much aid in dollar terms. Five countries - including Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Denmark - have reached or exceeded the 0.7% aid target. Another 11 countries, including UK, France and Germany have timelines for doing so before 2015.
There was a time when Canada was a leader, not a laggard in the war on poverty. In fact, the 0.7% UN target for development assistance was a Canadian idea. It was originally proposed by former Canadian Prime Minister and Nobel Lauriat, Lester B. Pearson, in his Partners in Development report to the World Bank in 1969. The United Nations adopted this target in 1970 and Canada promised to reach this goal by 1975. Canada has repeated this promise many times over the years but never delivered. The closest we came was in 1987 when we gave 0.5% of our national income.
In its April 2005 International Policy Statement, the government reiterated Canada’s long-term commitment to the target of devoting 0.7% of gross national income to ODA, and “committed at a minimum to doubling (relative to 2001) our international assistance to over $5 billion per year by 2010.”2
The Canadian House of Commons unanimously passed a motion on June 28, 2005 calling on the government “…to honour the Millennium Development Goals and to commit immediately, through a plan, to increase Canada’s aid budget by 12 to 15% annually to achieve an aid level of 0.5% of Canada’s Gross National Income by 2010 and 0.7% of Canada’s GNP by 2015.”
Canadians may have reservations about simply increasing Canada’s development assistance when there are concerns about the quality of that aid. Those concerns are not without justification. Although progress has been made in recent years in improving aid effectiveness, including un-tying aid, the Canadian aid program still has a ways to go before it will become as effective as it can be.
But new legislation, the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act, which became law in 2008, will greatly boost efforts to improve the quality of Canadian aid. It says that Canadian aid must be focused on poverty reduction and requires much better government accountability for aid spending. While it will not transform Canadian aid policy overnight, it sets the legislative framework to help improve the quality of the aid we give.
With the passage of this legislation, we have made a big step forward on the “better” part of the “more and better aid” goal of the Make Poverty History campaign. Make Poverty History is redoubling efforts now to achieve the “more” with the launch of its “Let’s get to point seven” campaign.
More and better aid is not the only thing needed to achieve an end to poverty. Debt cancellation and more just trade rules are also needed to give the people in developing countries a better chance in their own efforts to eliminate poverty.
A majority of the poor countries of Africa are making serious efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and have made poverty reduction a top priority. Although uneven, progress is being made around the world towards ending extreme poverty. But the rich countries have not kept their part of the bargain to increase aid, cancel debts and reform trade rules.
2010 provides an opportunity for Canada to provide bold leadership at the G8 to help mobilize a renewed global effort to achieve and exceed the Millennium Development Goals by announcing a timetable to reach the 0.7% aid target within ten years.
As host of the G8 and G20 in 2010, Canada will be expected to come forward with some kind of legacy initiative. Canadian civil society groups are recommending some bold initiatives on child and maternal health and on food security, which are badly needed as we have made the least progress on the millennium development goals in the child and maternal health area. And on food security, after actually going down to about 800 million people in hunger, we have now gone back up to over a billion. So we desperately need some bold action.
Such bold initiatives cannot be accomplished simply by shifting funds within the existing aid budget. It will require additional aid dollars, which can only be available by committing to a timetable to achieve the 0.7% aid target within 10 years. We estimate this would require about an annual 15% increase in the aid budget.
Recommendation:
Make Poverty History recommends that the 2010 Federal Budget include a timetable of 15% annual increases for official development assistance to reach the UN aid target of 0.7% of GNI within ten years.
1http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/52/42458612.pdf
2 Pistory, Marcus, Official Development Assistance Spending, IN BRIEF, Parliamentary Information and Research Service, Library of Parliament, PRB 07-10E, 22 August 2007 http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/library/PRBpubs/prb0710-e.htm
