In October 1970, the United Nations General Assembly agreed to allocate 0.7% of the Gross National Income (GNI) to Official Development Assistance (ODA). More economically advanced countries committed to achieving this by 1975, but only Sweden and Holland met the initial deadline, and were later joined by Norway, Denmark, Finland, Luxemburg and, more recently, the UK and Germany.
Spain took on this 0.7% commitment when it joined the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 1991. From that point on, and given that the said commitment was never fulfilled, Spain — and the other countries that have not fulfilled it either — has renewed its commitment to assign 0.7% in ODA on numerous occasions, with the last time coming in 2015 and the approval of the final declaration on development financing at the Addis Abeba Summit. The time frame for meeting this goal is 2030, also the deadline for attaining the Sustainable Development Goals.
Despite the broad social consensus development cooperation possesses, it has not been consolidated as a State policy with a stable and permanent timeline. Moreover, it has been exploited to benefit governments in power and in short-term circumstances.
In 2007, all parliament groups signed the State Pact Against Poverty, which aimed to raise cooperation up to State policy, endowing it with a more stable and permanent time frame. Since 2010, accumulated cutbacks have been around 70% and position ODA in 2018 at 0.20%; what’s more, if we take away the mandatory contributions of the European Union and international organisations, we can conclude that ODA continues to operate at a bare minimum.
Safeguarding ODA at 0.7% by law seems the only option for cooperation to become State policy and to navigate the lack of commitment by different governments. This is what the UK has done: in 2007 and 2008 its ODA was lower than Spain’s, but in the face of economic adversity, the UK backed an increased ODA, making cooperation a State policy, while Spain has dismantled it and has proved incapable of retrieving it.
As organisations drafting this report, we agree on the need to follow in the UK’s footsteps with regard to cooperation and to safeguard against excessive cutbacks to budgets allocated for cooperation, putting forward a programme of minimums and a road map. Besides granting international prestige to Spain, reaching 0.7% in ODA will, first and foremost, save lives, contribute to resolving inequality, and offer new opportunities to the most vulnerable sectors in the population. In short, it will contribute to meeting the SDGs.
There is an argument that Spain is in no position to reach the 0.7 target due to cutbacks, putting the starting point even further out of reach of such a goal. If that is true, then so too is the possibility of establishing a timescale that safeguards a 0.7% commitment. There is absolutely no justification for this decade-long approach to cooperation.