Polish ODA meeting in November

The Polish national platform of development NGOs, the Zagranica group, teamed up with the Polish Green Network in November, to bring together key players and discuss development policy in the region.

The cross-sectoral meeting, Development Assistance – our common responsibility, gathered key players in the four Visegrad countries (V4: the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) and covered three main themes.

Development Policy Coherence
The Zagranica group has just published a report on Polish development policy (see link below), with a focus on coherence, so this is a very relevant topic. A representative of the Polish MFA talked about how coherence relates to internal policy just as much as donor-recipient coherence, and noted how priorities can have an effect (such as security concerns being valued more highly than development issues). A Polish Green Network representative talked about the importance of development being sustainable, as well as interconnections between issues being recognised. The discussion that followed highlighted issues of incoherence in several countries. The Czech Republic for example has 9 ministries involved in ODA, and coordination between donors is variable.

Priorities
The V4 countries have many overlapping priorities. A second representative from the Polish MFA described how priorities are set, taking into consideration commitments Poland has signed up to, and the capacity Polish actors have on the ground. The Polish institutional view was complemented by a representative from the Czech MFA, who informed participants that a new development agency would be created in 2008. There is a strong NGO community in the Czech Republic as MFA cofinancing complements that from the EU and funding for NGOs is therefore almost guaranteed. A representative from the Slovak Agency of Development Cooperation gave an overview of the situation in Slovakia, where the national platform is part of a group that is writing the new law. She talked about the need for ODA to be made attractive to the media and general public.

These viewpoints were added to by representatives of Slovak and Hungarian NGOs, where concerns included priorities focused on infrastructure and the dominance of business partners in Slovakia. The discussion that followed covered the difficulty of the situation faced by a number of NMS, where economic growth has meant that the ODA percentage commitments countries agreed to, now refer to larger sums of money, and are increasingly difficult to meet.

Development Policy 2007-2013
The third section of the meeting started with presentations from the Global Development Research Group, and representatives from beneficiary countries – the West Ukrainian Centre ‘Women’s Perspectives’ and the development of small towns of Tajikistan ‘Vatanam’. The research group would like to bring a programme-based approach to Poland, instead of the current project-based approach. The two beneficiaries underlined the importance of European ODA and noted that sharing expertise could be just as valuable as financial aid.
The discussion that followed focused on the issue of treating beneficiaries as partners rather than subordinates.

Information provided by Rebecca Steel, TRIALOG Policy Officer

Download the report on Polish development policy, published by the Zagranica group: http://www.trialog.or.at/images/doku/polish_oda_report.pdf

More information:
The Zagranica Group: http://www.zagranica.org.pl/
The Polish Green Network: http://www.zielonasiec.pl/