Examination of Witnesses (Questions 74-79)
MR MACIEJ
POPOWSKI AND
MS CLARE
DENVIR
7 MAY 2008
Q74 Chairman: Welcome to the Committee.
I know that you have been listening to the first part of the evidence
and so you will have a flavour of what we are exploring. Thank
you for coming and agreeing to give evidence to us. Perhaps for
the record you would introduce yourselves.
Mr Popowski: It is an honour and
pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. My name is
Maciej Popowski, director of horizontal issues. I am from the
Directorate General for Development of the European Commission.
That includes aid effectiveness. I am quite a newcomer to the
Commission since I joined the service only three months ago. It
is a very challenging and demanding field of work and I am looking
forward to doing the job. I am accompanied by Clare Denvir who
is working on aid effectiveness in my directorate.
Q75 Chairman: The European Union
is hugely important in aid and development. The Committee has
had a number of meetings both with the cabinet and Louis Michel
himself. Obviously, we are very well aware that when you take
the entire ODA budget of the Member States of the EU you are talking
of 52% of the world's development budget, so it is a very major
player. But when we have discussed co-ordination there have been
clear issues. When we talk to the Commission there is very much
a shared agenda as between this Committee and our own Department
for International Development. Mr Petit, to whom we have spoken
on a couple of occasions, quite often points out that he is a
servant of the Member States and not all of them share the same
ambitions and that makes co-ordination difficult. Clearly, effective
co-ordination by the EU would hugely improve the reach and effectiveness
of EU aid. Do you believe it is possible for the European Commission
to co-ordinate effectively enough to be, as the world's largest
donor, perhaps, also the most effective provider of aid?
Mr Popowski: I think it is and
must be. We are cautiously optimistic, and you have already touched
on certain limitations stemming from the character of the European
Commission which is sui generis. We are not a classic development
agency and we have our 27 political masters around the table watching
what we are doing. Therefore, we can go as far as Member States
let us. That is not going to change; that is how it is designed
by the treaties. But we can do better and it is very much our
ambition to do more, and faster. That was the leitmotif of the
latest set of proposals adopted by the European Commission in
its 9 April package. Basically, that is the major political input
into the two high level events in Accra and Doha later this year.
First, we want to ensure that collectively we all live up to our
commitments to scale up aid. As you rightly point out, the EU
collectively is the largest donor. We are on track but we are
not there yet in terms of fulfilling the Monterrey commitments.
We need to improve our aid effectiveness. We are just in the process
of making certain newly-adopted instruments work on the ground.
The main instrument I have in mind is the EU's code of conduct
on the division of labour adopted in May last year which we are
now in the process of implementing. Certain ideas as to how to
do it better and more effectively were outlined in the document
I mentioned. That would be our input for Accra which, as mentioned
by Mr Deutscher, is very much linked to Doha and financing for
development. It is a process but we remain ambitious. We believe
that the Accra conference cannot simply be a stock-taking exercise
on the implementation of the Paris Declaration; we must be ambitious
and try to arrive at actionable results and to do better collectively.
Q76 Chairman: The UK through DFID
is giving £1 billion to the Commission which sadly is now
only €1.25 billion—it might have been a little more
a few months ago—but it is still a significant contribution;
it is 20% of DFID's budget. Although clearly DFID takes the view
that the European Commission delivers a lot of its objectives,
otherwise presumably it would not give it such a substantial sum,
it goes on to say that it believes there are limitations and that
Commission "delegations are still prevented from making timely
responses by an often bureaucratic system of checks and balances,
and the Commission sometimes lacks the numbers of people with
skills and experience appropriate for development."[12]
DFID has a similar problem in that it is constrained by staff
and skills, although generally speaking the quality of DFID's
people seems to be very highly rated internationally. How are
you addressing that both in terms of the people you have and effectiveness
in terms of the speed with which you can respond and deliver?
Leaving aside the politics of satisfying the Member States, what
is the Commission doing to deliver its own operational effectiveness?
Mr Popowski: I think that certain
reforms undertaken within the European Commission in 2000 are
now bearing fruit, in the sense that we have separated programming
from implementation mainly through the creation of the Europe
Aid Co-operation Office. We have managed to significantly reduce
the delays between programming and disbursement on the ground,
although there is always more to do. We have also managed finally
to overcome a former obstacle concerning the co-financing of projects.
The revised financial regulation of the Commission now allows
for co-financing of projects with Member States. In one of its
previous reports DFID says that this obstacle must be addressed
and I can confirm that we can now go ahead on this front. Our
services have been auditing the Member States' national aid agencies
in order to be ready to co-operate on the ground. So far the audit
of four agencies has been successfully conducted. Therefore, we
can delegate co-operation to Member States and co-finance projects
run by others and there are no more limits to that. In terms of
manpower, fortunately or unfortunately we are in the hands of
our Member States, so there are limits to that. We are a global
operator; the Commission is globally present through its delegations.
That is a major asset which we intend to use in future, but we
have to count on the support of Member States and the European
Parliament in terms of staffing.
Q77 Chairman: We looked specifically
at co-ordination on the ground in Ghana which we visited a few
weeks ago. When we looked at the group of donors actively co-ordinating
within that country it was slightly strange to see Canada, the
United Kingdom, Sweden and then the European Commission. One had
several Member States operating there and the European Commission
is effectively regarded as another donor, whereas surely it ought
to be different. It raises the question of what more can be done
on the ground. Louis Michel has often said to us that the EU flag,
if you like, in terms of development is planted in more places
than any other bilateral donor. But could and should you be doing
more to provide an umbrella for Member States so that when you
are operating in-country the European Commission perhaps is comparable
with, say, the World Bank but is treated clearly as an umbrella
organisation rather than just another donor?
Mr Popowski: I agree. The specific
role of the European Commission has been acknowledged by the OECD
DAC in its 2007 peer review. The OECD DAC referred to the European
Commission as a federator of Member States. We see our role as
a federator of Member States including on the ground. I mentioned
our code of conduct on the division of labour and aid effectiveness.
That is exactly the tool that we intend to use to create more
synergies on the ground and to engage with Member States to avoid
redundancies and duplication of both programming and spending.
You can ask the question why we cannot provide more tangible results
for the time being, but I would say that it is a matter of time;
it is a long-term process. The code of conduct was adopted only
in May of 2007. We have to prepare the ground by engaging our
delegations, and we are now in the process of reflecting on what
part of the work on the ground we can delegate to Member States
and whether or not we can take over from them, so it should go
both ways in order to be more effective. We have the EU umbrella
but underneath it there may be fewer players than before because
it is not always necessary. We could address situations of donor
congestion in different countries. We should build on comparative
advantages. We are globally present but in some countries Member
States are better represented and rooted and they can build on
their comparative advantage. We can then delegate to them and
they can run the programmes on behalf of the EU.
Q78 John Battle: Referring to the
code of conduct and the role of federator, as you put it, I accept
that it was only introduced in 2007, but hints we got from the
Overseas Development Institute which looked at Zambia and the
implementation of the code there were that the number of donors
per sector had barely reduced and, perhaps more significantly,
the willingness of donors to withdraw from sectors in which they
were engaged was limited. Can you give any examples of donors
tackling donor congestion? Have any agreed to move over and let
others get on with it because they realise that is the way to
co-ordinate aid? Do you have any good examples rather than people
just crowding around and agreeing who should go first and no one
really moving?
Mr Popowski: So far we have had
a few good examples—there are more to come I hope—in
Vietnam, Kenya and Burkina Faso. We have engaged with some Member
States in joint programming, for example in Sierra Leone, which
is also a major breakthrough as a first step in joint implementation.
We would like to go further. We have also done joint programming
in South Africa. Therefore, it is an ongoing process. We have
to discuss with Member States whether or not they or the Commission
are ready to withdraw from the sector for a good reason and to
what extent they would like to stay engaged, for example in the
political dialogue in the country in question. We also have to
take into account the position of the country in question in order
to respect the principle of ownership. There are some limitations
in the sense that, as you know, a lot of our aid is provided in
the form of budget support; it is 44% of our aid programme under
the 10th of the European Development Fund. We provide budget support
in the health sector for example where donor congestion is quite
a problem in countries like Mozambique. There we have to reflect
how to do it. Can we really delegate budget support for something?
It is a simple, straightforward instrument and there is not much
scope for delegating it, but that can be overcome. Right now we
are in the process of preparing proposals for Member States to
discuss in order to arrive at something that is more tangible,
preferably by the time of the high-level meeting at Accra.
Q79 John Battle: Accepting that the
code is voluntary, I am looking at what you can do with EU donors.
Can you toughen up the code with monitoring mechanisms perhaps?
You heard in the earlier conversation reference to methodology.
Could monitoring mechanisms be introduced to tackle the problem
and push the donors to address this a bit more seriously?
Mr Popowski: I think we can push
the donors gently. I do not think we shall change the voluntary
nature of the code of conduct. That was what the Member States
agreed to do, and I think it is right. We have had some good experience
with codes of conduct in the EU context in other areas, even sensitive
ones like arms exports. By the way, that was introduced by the
UK during its presidency in 1998. That is working fine. Sometimes,
if the European Commission proposes something binding, the Member
States react badly and say that we are trying to impose something
whereas we are not. Monitoring is certainly the right thing. Engaging
operators on the ground is the right thing; that is what we are
trying to do now with our delegations, pushing them in the direction
of more donor co-ordination. We are also preparing a compendium
of best practices and ideas on the division of labour that we
would like to share with Member States. Some Member States are
also working on similar documents, in particular Germany and France.
12 DFID, European Commission Development Effectiveness
Summary, 2007 Back
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