31/03/2004 - The OECD's Development Assistance Committee, which groups the world's principal aid donors, will meet in Paris on April 15-16 to review recent aid figures and the level of progress towards the targets set under the UN's Millennium Development Goals.
The DAC High Level Meeting will bring together ministers and senior officials from OECD governments as well as representatives of the World Bank, the IMF and the UN Development Programme. DAC Chair Richard Manning will hold a closing news conference at 2.30 p.m. on Friday 16 April at OECD headquarters.
Discussion will focus on the role of international aid donors in helping to improve the control and functioning of security systems in developing countries. Bad policing, lack of civilian control of the military, weak justice and penal systems, and corruption impede human and economic development, and the proportion of aid spent on short-term emergency humanitarian assistance, as opposed to longer-term projects and programmes , has risen from 3% in the 1980s to nearly 10% in recent years. The ministers will look at how to achieve more co-ordinated approaches by OECD governments to support better-functioning armed forces, policing, and judicial and penal institutions in developing countries and regions to help ensure good governance and the rule of law.
Ministers will also examine ways of making aid more effective, including the need to support developing countries' own priorities and systems. Better co-ordination between and amongst donors and recipients is needed to minimise aid-related bureaucracy. The meeting will review progress on this agenda ahead of a special high level forum to be hosted by France early next year.
For further information please contact Helen Fisher at the OECD Media Relations Division (tel:+ 33 1 45 24 80 97). Media interviews with ministers can be organised during the course of the two-day meeting on request. To register for the news conference, journalists are invited to contact the OECD's media relations division (tel: + 33 1 45 24 97 00).
Further information on the meeting is available at www.oecd.org/dac/hlm2004
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