Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-11-Speech-3-470"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20090311.41.3-470"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"− Madam President, the Commission really welcomes the European Court of Auditors’ special report on EC support to health services in Africa. The debate on this oral question gives us an opportunity to discuss our health support to Africa with you, the European Parliament.
I therefore hope that our debate today will contribute to further clarifying these issues and to helping ensure that Europe fulfils its promises to Africa.
I am not going to repeat here the formal reaction the Commission has already made regarding the Court of Auditors’ special report, which has already been published on the Internet.
Unfortunately, this report has not received wide coverage in the press and, when it was mentioned, things were sometimes oversimplified by saying that ‘Europe has not kept its promises in Africa’. Let me therefore just clarify a few essential points before we enter into the debate.
The Commission remains fully committed to supporting the Millennium Development Goals, the health-related Goals 4, 5 and 6 being an integral part of these goals: reduction of child mortality by two thirds, reduction of maternal mortality by three quarters, and halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS. This is what our development cooperation stands for, but our commitment must not be measured by budgetary allocations to the health sector alone.
Doubtless, child mortality will be reduced by effective health service interventions, vaccinations in particular. Therefore, we monitor vaccination coverage not only in our health programmes but also in many of our general budget support operations. However, child mortality also depends on other factors such as nutrition, housing, access to safe water, sanitation and education. Therefore our contribution can, and will, frequently be outside the healthcare sector itself.
When deciding on sectoral allocations and modalities of our development assistance, we agreed in Paris and Accra to increasingly respect basic principles of aid effectiveness. Here are just two examples. The first is leadership by partner governments. This means, after an in-depth discussion with the partner country, accepting the sectors proposed for support. It might not be the health sector but education or water and sanitation.
Second: alignment on national systems. This means channelling our aid, preferably as budget support (provided that the basic criteria are fulfilled). If the country has a sufficiently well formulated poverty strategy, our support may preferably be channelled as general budget support.
Although this support will not then be earmarked as health sector support, it is linked to targets for health, such as vaccination coverage rates or proportions of births assisted by skilled health personnel. Such targets are usually part of the poverty strategy and are monitored, and budget support disbursement is often linked to progress on them.
In addition to the global commitments on aid effectiveness made in Accra and Paris, we, the European Union, have collectively agreed on a code of conduct that foresees, for example, a reduction in the number of sectors in which each and every donor is active, in order to reduce the administrative and managerial burden on our partner countries through the multiplicity of donors. This is the meaning of the division of labour approach that EU Member States and the European Commission have agreed upon. We know that it will not always be easy to agree on this at the country level, particularly as health scores high in public opinion, and all donors and donor countries want to be present and to be seen. We will, at times, have to resist such a tendency and leave it to the other donors to do the job."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata | |
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples