Website Announcement: Whither EC Aid? Towards a new approach for assessing development cooperation

ECDPM and ActionAid are pleased to announce the launch of a website for their joint project ‘Whither EC Aid?’ This project aims to re-position the debate on monitoring the effectiveness of European Commission aid by seeking to open it up and bring in the views of a wide variety of stakeholders. On weca-ecaid.eu, you can find the latest information about the project and contribute directly to the debate. We invite you to visit our website and participate by:

• Sharing your views on key EC aid effectiveness topics
• Making recommendations on how to improve EC aid
• Consulting the project’s bibliography and suggesting new sources
• Alerting us to related events
• Keeping informed about the project’s latest developments, particularly the roundtables with key stakeholders that are being organised. You will receive a confirmation e-mail soon, enabling you to choose to subscribe to automatic updates.

About ‘Whither EC Aid?’

The next five years will be decisive for the future direction of international development cooperation in general and European Union cooperation in particular. The EC plays a crucial role in EU development cooperation, as a facilitator as well as a sizeable donor in its own right. Despite ambitious international aid goals, there is a lack of shared understanding of key underlying issues that shape the EC aid effectiveness debate. These include the objectives of EC aid, its areas of added value, and how to ensure true ownership over development.

In order to move forward on the road from Paris to Accra and beyond, it is necessary to map the different perceptions and assumptions underlying the EC aid effectiveness debate. Both ActionAid and ECDPM have long track records of working on EU development policy. Re-positioning the debate will help to develop an evidence-based, common understanding of the characteristics, added value and impact of EC development cooperation.

In the first part of the project, we drafted an initial discussion note on EC Aid, based on a review of available relevant literature and a series of interviews with around 30 decision-makers and experts from both Europe and developing countries.

A series of roundtables and an online consultation form the second part of the project, which is on-going. The aim of this phase is to broaden and deepen the debate by generating more interactive and open discussions about the role and effectiveness of EC Aid. The outcomes of the roundtables will be shared and discussed on the website.

On the basis of the outcomes of the research and consultation phases, a final report on “Whither EC Aid?” will be written and completed in spring 2008.
During the current phase of the project, we hope to generate in-depth discussions and collect many different views. We hope you will participate in this project and look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Contact information	Gwen Corre (ECDPM) and Joanna Maycock (ActionAid) (email: weca@ecdpm.org)
News type	Inbrief
File link	http://weca-ecaid.eu/
Source of information	EC AID
Subject(s)	INFORMATION - COMPUTER SCIENCES
Relation	http://www.emwis.net/overview/fol101997
Geographical coverage	EU
News date	24/01/2008
Working language(s)	ENGLISH

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