At a second meeting on MDG contracts, Sasja Bokkering presented the Oxfam International briefing paper ‘Fast Forward: how the EC can take the lead in providing high-quality budget support for education and health'.

The main points addressed were:

• Budget support is able to provide funding which can be used by the recipient government to pay the recurrent costs for health and education workers. Evidence from Malawi shows that the budget support provided in the form of debt relief was actually used to pay recurrent costs.
• The EC is spearheading in the use of budget support: it has allocated about 50% of the whole EDF 10 envelope to such financing mechanism.
• EC budget support is has a strong focus on MDG-related outcomes.
• A study undertaken by Eurodad and Oxfam shows that crosscutting gender sensitive indicators are more and more used.
• There is still room for EC budget support to improve: it should be fully de-linked from harmful conditionalities (e.g. those imposed by IMF) and it further promote accountability and long-term predictability.

The Commission representative gave a short presentation on the key features of the original MDG Contract proposal: its focus on long-term predictability, on results and on MDGs, its support of processes of harmonization and alignment and its focus on strong performers to limit risks. He also briefly mentioned the new features of the latest version of the proposal that will be presented to the EDF committed on June 10.

Source:

EEPA notes