BENEDICT TEMBO, Lusaka
ONE, an international advocacy organisation says official development assistance to Africa was virtually frozen last year, increasing by only 0.4 percentage point.
Zambia falls under least developed countries (LDCs)
“Already, low levels of development assistance to LDCs have declined since 2010. Only 30 percent of ODA (official development assistance) went to LDCs in 2014,” One executive director Sipho Moyo said.
Speaking in the sidelines of the recently held African Development Bank annual meetings in Abidjan, Ivory Coast Dr Moyo said this decline must be reversed to put the poorest countries first on the development agenda.
She said governments should reboot development assistance so it is targeted where it is most needed, with 50 percent going to LDCs while Development Assistance Committee (DAC) countries should set a time table to reach their target of spending 0.7 percentage point of gross national income on ODA.
“If all DAC countries had provided 50 percent of their total ODA to LDCs in 2014, this would have made US$26.5 billion of extra support available to those countries to fund vital investments in nutrition, education, maternal and child health and other social and productive sectors,” she said.
Dr Moyo said ODA is and will continue to be crucial to providing basic services in many of the poorest countries that currently cannot make adequate investments in human and productive capacity if they had to rely solely on domestic resources.
One is an organisation of over 6,000,000 people taking action to end extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa because the facts show extreme poverty has already been cut by 60 percent and can be virtually eliminated by 2030.