Foreign Ministry: cutting costs in development aid not easy

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The government’s plan to divert money from overseas development cooperation funding to fighting unemployment in Finland would make it difficult for Finland to reach its development policy goals.
      Ritva Koukku-Ronde, head of the Department for Development Policy says that finding places to cut costs is not easy.
      “If we go into large sums, they cannot be taken without leaving some marks”, Koukku-Ronde says.
      She says that one possible model would be to cut a little bit from every sector, such as humanitarian aid, bilateral cooperation with partner countries, and multilateral aid, such as that provided through UN organisations.
     
The government agreed in the spring that it would cut EUR 200 million from the funding of the various ministries with the aim of boosting employment. On Tuesday it came out that to reach the goal, development aid funding was to be cut the most.
      A final decision is to come in the government’s budget talks next week. One option would be to cancel next year’s planned increase in development cooperation funding, which Koukku-Ronde says would lead to a reduction of about EUR 64 million.
      The final amount is hard to estimate. One reason for this is that costs of housing asylum seekers are being shifted to development cooperation funding.
     
Koukku-Ronde says that Finland cannot back out of development projects organised by the European Union, or those to which it has made a commitment of many years.
      No such commitments are linked with humanitarian aid, but Koukku-Ronde does not feel that it would be realistic to significantly reduce spending on that.
     
“Some might think that it is easiest to give up some new goals, but they are also based on the government’s development policy programme”, she notes.
      The worldwide economic crisis has had an especially negative impact on developing countries. Both Ritva Koukku-Ronde and Pasi Rajala, deputy head of the Nordic office of the United Nations Development Programme, say that if Finland decides to cut its development aid funding, the move will bring awkward international attention.
      “Then it will not be possible to avoid the thought that Finland is riding in this boat with a children’s ticket, as it were, hoping that someone else will bear responsibility”, Rajala says.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Employment package to be mostly covered by money from development aid funds (19.8.2009)

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