The European Commission laid out a twelve point plan to support the international community in delivering the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

Ten years ago, world leaders agreed to take decisive action to combat world poverty in its different dimensions. Using time-bound and measurable targets, they agreed that by 2015:

    *      Poverty and hunger should be reduced by one half,
    *      Full primary education for all should be ensured,
    *      Gender disparity should be eliminated,
    *      Maternal and child mortality should be reduced by two thirds and three quarters respectively,
    *      The spread of HIV/AIDS and incidence of malaria and other major diseases should be halted,
    *      Environmental sustainability should be ensured,
    *      A Global Partnership for Development should be developed.

With only five years remaining before the agreed 2015 deadline, world leaders will gather in New York on 20-22 September 2010 for the UN MDG Review High Level Plenary Meeting (HLPM). Their aim is to ensure a comprehensive review of successes and gaps, and agree on concrete action to speed up progress.

The action plan consists of 12 points.

•          To ensure EU keep its promises of 0,7% GNI for Aid by 2015, Member States will be asked to establish realistic, verifiable annual action plans for reaching individual targets2 and publish the first plans before September 2010. The implementation of such action plans will be submitted to an EU accountability mechanism: based on Member States’ annual action plans and the Commission’s monitoring report, the Council should hold an EU-internal ‘ODA Peer Review’ and report the results to the European Council.
•           Working all together coordinated (aid efficiency) at the EU scale (saving estimates around 3 to 6 billion a year) and even beyond
•           Doing more and better for the poorest (reallocate fundings to off track and fragile countries, starting with Haïti)
•           Improving results and targeting the key sectors for gender, education, health and food security
•           Working in partnerships (EU Africa partnership, Millennium Development Goals Targets in national strategies…)
•           Acting in coherence: use other EU policies for Development from Trade to migration to food and climate change
•           Help better national fundings to work (tax for development, promote good governance…)
•           Strengthen regional integration and trade for growth and jobs (Aid for Trade, EU Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund…)
•           Support initiatives on innovative financing with high revenue potential that can benefit the poorest
•         Use the EU's €2.4bn a year "fast-start" funding commitment for climate change as a test for aid effectiveness and coherence.
•         Launch a new plan to address conflicts situation and make development and security work better. No development without and not security with out development.
•         Support a stronger weight of developing countries in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the UN reform for more effective agencies

Since 2000, the EU doubled its aid already and a lot has been done. Today the EU is the first donor providing more than half of development aid worldwide and € 49 billion in 2009.

Despite all our efforts in Europe and beyond to reach our Development Goals we need to do more and to do it soon. In 2009, EU ODA corresponded to 0.42% EU GNI. Despite more encouraging trends expected in 2010, the EU is behind the schedule to reach the collective EU intermediate target of 0.56% of GNI by 2010, as a step towards devoting, by 2015, 0.7% of GNI to ODA.
The Commission commends the countries that have continued to increase their aid, and notes that OECD statistics on the preliminary ODA spending in 2009 show that the EU institutions are the second largest single donor and that three out of the five largest donor countries worldwide are EU members – France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The Commission also welcomes the fact that four of the five countries exceeding the UN target of 0.7% of GNI being devoted to development aid - Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden - are EU members, and that Belgium is set to join this group in 2010.

Also Finland, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and the UK have already achieved or exceeded the intermediate individual ODA targets that had been agreed for 2010, i.e. to spend at least 0.51% of GNI as ODA in the EU15 and 0.17% in the 12 Member States, which have joined the EU since 2004.

While Belgium has so far been the only Member State that made the 0.7% ODA/ GNI target legally binding, similar efforts are now also under discussion in the UK.

The aim of this action plan is to prepare an agreed and strong EU position ahead of the MDG Summit in September and define a set of actions to be implemented at national, regional and international scales.

Our Communication is taking the form of an action plan involving EU Member States and EU Institutions, but this is also a clear call to all the donors (old and emerging ones) and to developing countries to act for development since we can just succeed acting all together.