Greetje Lubbi

Netherlands Organisation for International
Development Cooperation (Novib)

Priorities for Action

    Greetje Lubbi began by introducing Novib, which is a Dutch non-governmental development organisation, a member of Eurostep and Oxfam International.

    She described how Eurostep has played an active role in the World Summit for Social Development (WSSD) and worked through the Development Caucus and Women’s Caucus with NGOs from all over the world.

    In August 1994 these NGOs produced a document entitled “Quality Benchmark for the Social Summit”. It grew from the fear that the Social Summit would not be addressing the economic and political environment necessary to allow social development, nor the ways in which the implementation of the Summit’s Declaration and Programme of Action could be ensured.

    Since then the Quality Benchmark has served as an instrument for measuring progress made in preparations and the outcome of the Summit and was used as a tool to generate debate at the national level (more than 1000 organisations have endorsed it). Macro-economic issues and structural adjustment programmes and debt are viewed as crucial areas by the Declaration of the Copenhagen Summit.

    After the Summit, Novib focused on the implementation of commitments. A group of NGOs formed the Social Watch network. They publish an annual report as a watchdog to monitor
governments’ compliance with agreements of Copenhagen and Beijing. In February 1999, at the UN Commission for Social Development, the next Social Watch report will be presented. It will contain a “Fulfilled Commitments Index”.

    Greetje Lubbi saw Novib’s priorities for action towards the Dutch government and the EU as being: to build on the Quality Benchmark and Copenhagen commitments, and to focus on the implementation, but not to add new ‘issues’. She strongly believed that there was no room to renegotiate commitments.

    Ms. Lubbi identified the following areas for follow-up:

1. Enabling Environment

• The Declaration and Programme of Action state that Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) should include social development goals and protect people living in poverty and vulnerable segments of society from budget reductions on social programs and expenditure, while increasing the quality and effectiveness of those expenditures. It was also agreed that the impact of SAPs on social development must be reviewed, including the impact on women. A lot has to be done, including the review of SAPs which is underway in the SAPRI-initiative, and more pressure needs to be put on the IMF to assess the impact of their policies in South East Asia.
  
• The need to find solutions to multilateral debts was explicitly recognised. The 1996 mechanism for Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) was an important step but is not enough. There needs to be more and accelerated debt reduction, and during the 1999 HIPC review NGOs should push G7 governments to make HIPC effective to more countries and to change the instrument as well as pledge more money to the HIPC fund. HIPC should lead to considerable debt reduction in order to release funds for social development. She believed that the Jubilee 2000 campaign could be a big support to this.

2. Basic Social Services

The Copenhagen Summit called for new and additional resources (with reservations from the United States).

Greetje Lubbi stated that the inclusion of the 20/20 compact, which is about development aid and recipient governments’ expenditure, is the only quantitative criterion.

Regarding aid donors, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) published a document “Shaping the 21st Century”. It puts commitments of the international conferences in a time frame. By 2015 the following goals must be achieved:

• universal primary education;
  
• reduction of infant, child and maternal mortality;
  
• universal access to reproductive health services;
  
• gender equity; and
  
• halving the number of people in extreme poverty.

Greetje Lubbi stated that urgently needed steps by donor countries are:

• to give more aid instead of less, noting that world aid fell from $55.4 billion in 1996 to $47.6 billion in 1997 (a fall of 7.1% in real terms) and that public deficits in OECD countries have been reduced from 4.3% of combined GDP in 1993 to 1.3% in 1997, yet aid continues to be cut;
  
• to redirect aid to the social sector. (In 1996, donors reported that 2.4% of ODA was spent on basic health care and 1.4% of ODA on basic education);
  
• to spend aid in countries where the majority of the population is in absolute poverty (aid to the poorest countries is at its lowest level in a decade).

    Ms. Lubbi went on to state that these figures come from the “Reality of Aid” report 1998, an NGO review of development assistance published by Eurostep and the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA). The first sentence of this report states:

“If policies were programmes and promises were dollars, the Reality of Aid could report great progress on the road to eradicating global poverty this year. But at a time when donors acknowledge that ending poverty is possible, it seems that commitments are being offered instead of resources.”

    She ended by stating that the political changes in European countries will have to lead to real change in international cooperation and will have to materialize into more resources for social development in Europe and in developing countries.



Greetje Lubbi is a Director of Novib, the Netherlands Organisation for International Development Cooperation.