Luxembourg's development cooperation - Annual report 2015

Dear friends of Luxembourg’s development cooperation,

It is my pleasure to present to you this annual report 2015 on Luxembourg development cooperation. In last year’s annual report I highlighted the fact that 2015 would be a pivotal year for development cooperation and that the major international meetings would to a large extent reconfigure our post-2015 development cooperation and its financing.

Indeed, this is what has happened: the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development was adopted last July and the Sustainable Development Summit in September adopted the 2030 Agenda with its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). We now have clarity regarding objectives and the resources to implement them. Nevertheless, the chosen approach Millennium Development Goals (MDG), since in a globalised word very different from the 1990s and 2000s, the concepts of North and South or donors and recipients have become obsolete. Actions by one party will have an effect on the other – in economic, environmental and social terms, and therefore for sustainable development.

Such a full and complex agenda has to be put into action by every country in all their national and international policies, including their development cooperation policy. We in the Luxembourg development cooperation sector must therefore revisit our strategies in order to better integrate the SDGs and to consider with our partner countries how to integrate these requirements into the Indicative Cooperation Programmes (ICP) and into the support to our partners. Financial and non-financial resources for its implementation must contribute to this goal, which involves greater consistency of our development and sustainable development actions.

2015 also saw challenges of a different kind for Luxembourg’s development cooperation: the European Year for Development and the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of the year.

The 2015 European Year for Development, organised by the European institutions, was a unique opportunity to raise various audiences’ awareness of the challenges and responsibilities involved in development cooperation. We knew that we had to engage young people – schoolchildren and students as a priority – and the general public and explain to them why every single person’s involvement matters. The slogan of the European Year, “Our World, our Dignity, our Future”, guided our approach. A rich national programme of activities organised with the Cercle of NGOs and the representatives of the European institutions in Luxembourg allowed us to get a very large number of people involved. I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to Ben Fayot, the special ambassador for the European Year, for his valuable help and his deep commitment.

The responsibility of organising at the European level the closing ceremony of the European Year in the presence of our head of state, our Prime Minister and representatives of the European institutions ultimately fell to the Luxembourg Presidency. At our behest, an inter-institutional declaration was signed at that event promising that the momentum of the European Year would continue in the actions of the Member States and the institutions well beyond December 2015.

In our capacity as the President of the Council of the EU, we attended the major international meetings in the second half of the year, helping to coordinate a unified European position, including on official development assistance, and maintaining a close dialogue with the European Parliament and representatives of European civil society.

In its Presidency, Luxembourg made policy consistency the main theme of its action, with the aim of making the other sections of the Council aware of the imperatives of maintaining consistency in development. With this in mind, the migration issue was addressed – an issue which came to the fore on the European scene in the second half of 2015 with the arrival in the EU of a large number of migrants and refugees, mainly from Syria. The Valletta Summit involved discussions with countries of origin and transit the issue of migration from Africa.

This sad state of affairs made us better understand the situation of extreme distress in the countries in crisis, the huge humanitarian needs, especially in the countries bordering Syria, and the absolute lack of future prospects which forces young people in developing countries to leave their homes. The general public here and the decision-makers have become even more aware of humanitarian needs, of the link between humanitarian aid and development, especially in complex, long crises, and the huge anticipated need for funding. These topics will be addressed at the first World Humanitarian Summit, which will be held in May in Istanbul. In its Presidency of the Council of the EU, Luxembourg launched preparatory discussions between Member States to define their positions with a view to this important meeting. As over 60 million people flee crises of all kinds, this Summit must produce results.

Our international and European obligations in 2015 have not made us lose sight of the special relations with the bilateral partners of Luxembourg’s development cooperation. Four new Indicative Cooperation Programmes were signed and a fifth was extended. We are strengthening our relationships with the least-developed countries in West Africa and South-East Asia and we are diversifying our actions in middle-income countries such as Cabo Verde. Vietnam and El Salvador will no longer be partner countries from 2016 but we will maintain strong links through development cooperation projects and new instruments such as triangular or South-South cooperation. The ICPs are already including the new environment of the SDGs, but we are yet to see how we should assist our partners even more through our sector-based programmes to implement these goals.

I would like to emphasise how happy I am that within the Zukunftspak framework of measures for Luxembourgish NGOs we have been able to find a compromise to ensure their implementation. A greater concentration of financial assistance to the least-developed countries (LDC) goes hand-in-hand with financial support at an equal level to strengthen civil society in middle-income and emerging countries. In my view, this is in the spirit of what we decided at the Summit in New York in September.

2016 is set to be a year when reform and new agendas successfully add these values in the field of sustainable development in the global, inclusive way set out in the 2030 Agenda.

In that respect, I am pleased to be able to rely on the advice and recommendations from all the actors in Luxembourg’s development cooperation who I see every year at the Conference for Luxembourg’s development cooperation: I thank them for their commitment and dedication.

My thanks also go to all those who are working in the field in difficult conditions, especially in terms of security, but who are unceasingly forging ahead.

Romain Schneider
Minister for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Action