Newsletter – n°25 – December 2013

The world at a glance

With almost 40% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) spent in fragile states but these countries very far from achieving the Millennium Development Goals, comes the conclusion that there can be no development in a zone of conflict and violence.

In the context of the 2013 European Development Days, PLATFORMA, Saferworld, Cordaid and Friends of Europe organised a session on peace and security in the post-2015 development agenda, discussing how to best address the peace, security and development nexus in the post-MDGs framework.

Speakers reminded than the rate of extreme poverty in countries that have experienced fragility in the past decade is twice that of those that have not and that the new development framework must acknowledge the impossibility of attaining sustainable development in the context of fragility.

They called for fragility, peace and stability to be a core part of the post-2015 agenda and the EU representatives and were supported by Marcus Cornaro, Deputy Director General at European Commission DG DEVCO and Marciej Popowski, Deputy Secretary General at the European External Action Service in this claim.

Both stated that integrated planning and linking crisis management and post-conflict development were part of the solutions to address the security and development nexus and that the EU would be focusing on that in the next mandate.

Boubacar Bah, Mayor of District V of Bamako (Mali) and president of the association of municipalities in Mali reminded the key role of local/regional leaders during the crises, where mayors faced the occupying forces and ensured continuity of basic services to the population. He called for political voluntarism to support local and regional governments in the reconstruction, saying that decentralisation, which is part of an integrated solution to State building, was not a matter of resources but a matter of will.

Watch the podcast of the session on the 2013 European Development Days website.

Other speakers included El Khidir Daloum, Director of programmes, Africa and MENA at Safeworld, Simone Filippini, Chief Executive Officer at Cordaid, Emilia Pires, Minister for Finance of Timor Leste, Chair of G7 and Member of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons advising the UN on the post-2015 global development agenda, Lida Nadery Hedayat, Deputy Chief of Party for USAID’s Land and Reform in Afghanistan (LARA) Project, Alex Thier, Assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL), USAID. The session will be moderated by Shada Islam, Director of Policy at Friends of Europe.