Spain Can Be a Trailblazer in this New Age of Aid Austerity (The Guardian)
CGD's Commitment to Development Index is mentioned in a Guardian piece on Spain's aid program.
Spain's aid budget may be contracting sharply, but with greater craft and focus it can demonstrate that money isn't everything.
Spain's commitment to increasing its aid programme in the 2000s was remarkable. A net aid recipient until the 1980s, it moved to become the world's sixth largest bilateral aid donor, increasing its aid from less than $2bn to almost $7bn in just six years.
Then the economy crashed. With spectacular debt problems, and high youth unemployment figures, Spain is slashing its budget for official development assistance. It fell to just over $4bn (£2.65bn) in 2011 and is decreasing steadily.
Despite this seemingly bad news, however, there are two reasons for Spain to be cheerful. First, money isn't everything. I don't buy the numbers NGOs sometimes give us linking cash spend to lives saved. I think aid should be increased because there are many issues that require international attention, including persistent poverty, but much more important are the objectives and effectiveness of aid interventions. Rather than worrying about how much money it is spending, Spain should demonstrate how much it can achieve with limited money, like every Spanish household seeing its budget squeezed. And $4bn is still a lot of money – look at what the Gates Foundation has achieved with an annual budget of about $1bn less.
A brilliant mock "white paper" drawn up by CIECODE – which co-hosted the conference with the Real Instituto Elcano – and Gonzalo Fanjul sets out seven ways in which Spain has an impact on development and what it needs to do to implement them. As well as aid these include tax justice, climate change, peace and weapons, immigration, trade and investment, and governance. It uses the example of the global food crisis to show how working on all of these issues could produce a virtuous circle leading to both urgent response and systemic change.
To borrow a phrase from the environment movement, this is an attempt to plot Spain's "development footprint". Though imperfect, this approach mirrors somewhat the Center for Global Development's commitment to development index, making the point strongly that non-aid actions are as important as aid, if not more so.