BRUSSELS: The EU has come under fire for failing to set a deadline for its own financial commitments to aid, a move that activists say could threaten wider talks on funding an ambitious development agenda.
A critical funding summit in Addis Ababa in July is meant to agree how to finance development priorities for the next 15 years.
The sustainable development goals (SDGs), which will replace the millennium development goals when they expire this year, will be ratified in September. But campaigners say that, without concrete progress in Addis Ababa, the entire process is in jeopardy.
The EU is absolutely central for any global agreement, and unless the ministers become more ambitious, there is a very real risk that the international negotiations will collapse,” said Tove Maria Ryding, head of tax justice and financing for development at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad).
This would not only be a missed opportunity to repair the broken financial system and mobilise the funding we need to end poverty. It could also cost us the new sustainable development goals as well as the climate treaty, which is supposed to be adopted at the end of the year,” she added in a statement released after a meeting last week of the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council on Development.
The council set out the EU’s vision of a new global partnership for sustainable development, including a renewal of member states’ pledges to commit 0.7% of gross national income to aid. But it gave no concrete deadline, saying the target would be achieved “within the timeframe of the post-2015 agenda”.
