Minister Lehtomäki: Increasing weight for development cooperation work
In public opinion polls, strong support has been voiced for raising development cooperation appropriations to 0.7 per cent of GDP, the level recommended by the United Nations. According to Paula Lehtomäki, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, the Government intends, however, to increase appropriations in line with the previously agreed timetable. “Development cooperation work is a rare sector of expenditure in the State budget, where funding increases every year,” she said.
As official development cooperation work concentrates on increasingly extensive entities and on sector assistance, important grassroots contacts are maintained through organisations. Lehtomäki emphasised that the role of citizens’ organisations, and their operational prerequisites, will be secured in future development cooperation work, too. Increases in development cooperation appropriations will mean more money for organisations: their relative share of total funding will be raised and the intention is to lower organisations’ own share of costs from the current 20 per cent to 15 per cent already during the next application round.
Although Finland’s development cooperation work focuses on partner countries, Minister Lehtomäki gave assurances that this focusing does not bind citizens’ organisations: “Of course we hope that organisations will take the goals of the Government’s development policy programme into account in their activities. It is a great advantage to project work if a Finnish mission operates in the country,” Lehtomäki continued.
In his speech at the anniversary celebrations, Leonardo Santos Simão, former Foreign Minister of Mozambique, pointed out that residents of developing countries don’t expect donors to solve every problem. Distribution of information and discussion are important ways of opening up new possibilities.
Simão has long experience of cooperation with Finland. In the 1980s he served as Minister of Health in Mozambique, and later he was the country’s Foreign Minister for ten years. “We noticed that a great deal of working time went to writing reports and drawing up analyses of different projects and for different sources of financing. In the end, no one had time for doing the actual work. Finland and the other Nordic countries were the first to start harmonising the rules, which brought relief to the amount of work,” he explained.
Finland has helped Mozambique, among other things, to build a meteorological system after the massive floods that plagued the country in 2000. Simão hoped for support to ensure sustainable development of Mozambique’s private sector and business in future – in his view, direct investments by Finnish companies would be highly welcome.
The Development Aid Office set up within the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs started its work on 1 March 1965. Its history spanning four decades and current viewpoints concerning development policy were discussed on the Kalevala Day at the Old Student House in Helsinki.
In conjunction with the seminar, the book “Towards Partnership. How Finland Learned to Carry Out Foreign Development Cooperation 1965 2005” by Juhani Artto was launched and an exhibition was opened. According to Artto, partnership has been the golden thread running through Finland’s development cooperation from the very beginning. And from the very beginning of public discussion pertaining to development cooperation, Erkki Tuomioja, the present Minister for Foreign Affairs, has been an active participant.
As vice-chairman of Teiniliitto (the Teen Association), Erkki Tuomioja was organising Finland’s first Taksvärkki, or day’s work, collection, for the benefit of Peru, as early as in 1966. In Tuomioja’s opinion, after the recession of the 1990s development cooperation settled on healthier ground: then it had been learned what is worth carrying out and how to do it. In considering all of Finland’s development cooperation projects and activities, however, Tuomioja thinks that most of the projects have succeeded well.
“All development cooperation themes now support each other, forming a comprehensive whole by means of which we can move towards sustainable development. New security threats have given added impetus to development cooperation topics. Police or military operations aren’t enough if the actual roots of inequity or poverty are left untreated,” Foreign Minister Tuomioja stated.
Minister Paul Lehtomäki opened the development cooperation exhibition, which was transferred from the Old Student House to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs for two weeks. From the Ministry it will go on tour, to be shown at other events throughout Finland.