Global aid flows which stalled (tabte fart) last year after hitting record highs in 2005 could continue to decline this year, making the doubling of aid to Africa by 2010 a distant prospect, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Friday.
2007 could see a noticeable fall in overseas development assistance as debt relief continues to decline, the Global Monitoring Report for 2007 said.
The report, issued by the World Bank and IMF ahead of the organizations’ spring meetings, said the 2005 spike (toppunkt) was mostly due to the 18 billion US dollar in debt relief granted to Nigeria and Iraq under the Paris Club agreements.
Aid flows from the development assistance committee of the OECD developed states fell 5 percent in 2006 to just under 104 billion dollar, as debt relief operations launched in 2005 continued to wind down, the report said.
Mark Sundberg, lead author of the report, said that the biggest declines in aid last year came from Japan and the US.
However the report noted that there had been an increase in aid flows from non-traditional sources and predicted that non-OECD donors would double their assistance to over 2 billion dollar by 2010. Saudi Arabia and other Middle eastern countries for instance provided over 2,5 billion dollar in assistance in 2005.
This years report focused on gender equality and the lack of opportunities for women as well as the vulnerability of fragile states.
The authors stressed that Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 3 – the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women – is important for reasons of fairness and is also essential to economic well-being and the advancement of such other goals as halving poverty, achieving universal primary education, and lowering the under-five mortality rate.
– Persistent (rodfæstet) poverty and unequal opportunities for women slow development and block attainment of the MDGs. Likewise, fragile states need urgent attention if the goals are to be met, said World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.
The Bank estimates there are 35 fragile states in the world, of which many are among those least likely to meet the goals. An estimated 9 percent of the developing worlds population lives in fragile states but they account for 27 percent of the developing worlds extreme poor.
Nevertheless, there had been recent progress towards achieving the target of reducing those living in poverty in Sub Saharan Africa to 23 percent of the population. While two years ago the bank thought this target would be missed by 14 percentage points, it now thinks it will be undershot by about 5 points.
The report states that Latin America still has a long way ahead in its fight against extreme poverty noting that “47 million Latin Americans still live in the greatest of misery”.
According to the report, the proportion of Latin Americans that subsist on less than one dollar per day diminished “slightly” (en smule),’ from around 9 percent in 2002 to 8,6 percent in the 2004, allowing approximately 700.000 people rising above the dollar per day poverty level.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
