OECD urges rich countries to help world’s poorest

PanARMENIAN.Net - The west’s leading thinktank has urged wealthier countries to step up and help the world’s poorest, after revealing that aid to the most impoverished nations fell by a sixth in 2014, the Guardian reports.

An annual assessment of overseas development assistance from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris found that aid to the least developed nations stood at $25bn last year – a 16% drop from 2013.

“Overseas development assistance remains crucial for the poorest countries and we must reverse the trend of declining aid”, said Erik Solheim, the chair of the OECD’s development assistance committee. “OECD ministers recently committed to provide more development assistance to the countries most in need. Now we must make sure we deliver on that commitment.”

The OECD said that one reason for the fall in aid to the poorest countries in 2014 was that there had been exceptionally high debt relief to Burma in 2013. Debt relief is counted as aid, so the 2013 figure was boosted as a result.

Even excluding debt relief, however, financial assistance to the least-developed countries fell in 2014, the OECD said. Aid to all countries – which includes middle-income as well as the poorest nations – was virtually unchanged in 2014, at $135.2bn, a two-thirds increase since the UN set its millennium development goals for indicators such as extreme poverty, infant mortality and access to clean water, in 2000.

The OECD said the small rise in inflation between 2013 and 2014 also meant aid flows had fallen by 0.5% in real terms.

The OECD’s secretary general, Angel Gurría, said: “I am encouraged to see that development aid remains at a historic high at a time when donor countries are still emerging from the toughest economic crisis of our lifetime.

“Our challenge as we finalize post-2015 development goals this year will be to find ways to get more of this aid to the countries that need it most and to ensure we are getting as much as we can out of every dollar spent.”

Britain was one of five of the 28 members of the OECD’s development assistance committee that met or exceeded the UN target for spending 0.7% of national income on aid. Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden were the others.

The OECD said development assistance made up more than two-thirds of external finance for the poorest countries, and that it would use an international conference of financing for development in Addis Ababa in July to call for more aid to be used as a lever to generate private investment and domestic tax revenues in poor countries.

“OECD work on combatting tax avoidance and illicit financial flows out of least-developed countries also aims to reduce dependence on aid”, it said.