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UNICEF to G7: End 'free-fall' in aid now

The childen’s agency spoke on the eve of this weekend’s meeting of G7 Finance Ministers in Bonn and expressed the hope that both debt relief and increasing bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) will be prominent on their agenda. UNICEF said the gathering presented an excellent opportunity to reverse a grim decline since 1990 in international aid to the poorest countries.

UNICEF noted that a newly-issued report from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) indicates that there has been a 16 per cent decline this decade in bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) given to all developing countries.

As bad as is the overall decline in aid, UNICEF said trends within that decline are shocking, and have particular impact on children and women:

• There has been a 21 per cent drop in bilateral aid to countries where under-five mortality is at the highest level.
• In countries where less than 60 per cent of the population has access to safe water, aid has decreased by 23 per cent.
• Nations where women have more than five children have experienced a 24 per cent decline in ODA.
• And in countries where more than one in five children do not attend primary school, the greatest drop of all has occurred: a 25 per cent fall-off in ODA.

"These are devastating figures which point to specific denials of the right of children and women to basic health, nutrition and education," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. "As the purse-strings of many industrial nations have tightened, millions of the world's most poor and vulnerable have been literally written off. Increasingly, industrial nations are determining by their actions, and by their inaction, which of the poor will live and which will die."

Though the DAC report reveals greater concern about targeting aid to the countries in greatest need, Ms. Bellamy said this is hardly a substitute for continuing declines in the overall amount of ODA.

"If we know what to do and fail to do it," she said, "our responsibility is greater. We should apply growing knowledge to raising living standards for the millions of children and women who are presently being ignored."

The DAC report paints a bleak picture of the aid horizon for the future. Beyond the overall percentage decline in ODA, it notes that aggregate public and private resource flows from OECD countries to aid recipients fell for the first time this decade in 1997, the latest year for which figures are available. It adds that all projections indicate that the decline continued and widened in 1998. The Asian financial crisis is seen as having exacerbated the downward trend.

Since 1992, the G-7 nations' contribution to the general ODA fund has fallen about $15 billion – a reduction of almost 30 per cent in real terms. The ODA of all 29 OECD member nations fell in 1997 to a record low of 0.22 percent of collective GNP, less than one third of the agreed target of 0.7 percent.

"We live in a world of trillion dollar economies where transfer to the poor of even miniscule fractions of this amount would work wonders," Ms. Bellamy said. "UNICEF urgently advocates that an increased percentage of the world’s wealth be directed to saving the lives, and raising the living standards, of the planet’s most vulnerable children and women. The result will be greater peace, greater prosperity and an end to the threat of a two-tier world of rich and poor.”

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