Luxembourg's development cooperation - Annual report 2012

The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has the mandate to ‘‘promote development co-operation and other policies so as to contribute to sustainable development, including pro-poor economic growth, poverty reduction, improvement of living standards in developing countries, and to a future in which no country will depend on aid”. To attain this objective the DAC evaluates the development cooperation policies and practices of its 26 Members by subjecting them to critical peer reviews every four to five years.

The peer review is conducted by a team composed of representatives of the DAC secretariat and civil servants from two Member States - Spain and Greece participated in the peer review for Luxembourg in 2012. In a memorandum, submitted in March, Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation provided a detailed description of the organisation, administration and implementation of its interventions. During its visit to Luxembourg in April, the evaluation team met all of the actors involved in Luxembourg’s development cooperation (Ministries, the Chamber of Deputies, Lux-Development, development NGOs, inter-ministerial committees). Subsequently, the evaluators went to Vietnam and Laos to evaluate the extent to which Luxembourg integrated the DAC’s major policies, principles and preoccupations into its projects and to assess the activities carried out in the two partner countries, particularly in terms of the fight against poverty, sustainability and local coordination of aid.

Following the two visits, the DAC secretariat and the evaluators jointly compiled a report following these two field visits. Their analysis served as the basis for the peer review meeting which took place in Paris on 21 November 2012 lead by Ms Marie-Josée Jacobs, Minister for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs. The committee praised Luxembourg’s programme both for the quality of its interventions and its quantitative commitments. Brian Atwood, the DAC’s President declared, “Luxembourg is the Development Assistance Committee’s third most generous donor as a portion of its economy - after Sweden and Norway - and it has a high quality programme. We commend Luxembourg’s commitment to keeping its ODA at 1% of GNI until 2014.”

The Minister for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs then presented the results of this review to the relevant parliamentary commission and the Ministry-NGO working group.

The DAC’s secretariat noted that Luxembourg’s Development Cooperation had adopted the recommendations of the 2008 peer view: four fully and nine partly. Based on this progress, the committee advised Luxembourg to implement changes or improvements in six areas.