Japan – African Partnership for Development: 0.5
Postscript: Score [0.5]
The African Partnership for Development featured prominently at the 2011 Deauville Summit. The G8 welcomed the conclusions of the 16th meeting of the Africa Partnership Forum on 21 April 2011, which brought together personal representative of Heads of States and Government of Africa and its principal development partners. It also endorsed the first African Union and NEPAD Accountability Report on the G8/Africa Partnership, which acknowledged the urgency of measuring the outcomes of aid, such as streamlining the multilateral aid architecture and launching pilot exercises to evaluate the impact of development policies. Additionally, the G8 urged all donors and stakeholders to develop a more comprehensive and coordinated approach to aid effectiveness in partnership with civil society founded on political will, evidence-based assessment, and transparency.
However, progress was limited. To date, not all of the commitments pledged at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit have been fulfilled. Fundamentally, “G8 aid to Africa falls well short of promised levels, and falls even below contributions from the Nordic countries”. For example, while G8 leaders affirmed that development is a common challenge and that aid effectiveness is a shared responsibility, they acknowledged that not all commitments have been achieved in full. Specifically, there is a gap of USD 1.27 billion in current dollars relative to OECD estimates for 2010.
For its part, Japan is not meeting its commitment to compensate International Financial Institutions for lost reflows as a result of debt service cancellation. As of 18 May 2010, Japan had provided the International Development Agency with an unqualified commitment of $331 million through 2019 to offset MDRI costs – leaving a shortfall of $1.06 billion. Similarly, while Japan has restarted lending programs for African countries, including HIPCs, it must “set a new, more ambitious ODA commitment that includes a transparent baseline, target and allocation for sub-Saharan Africa, and encompasses both bilateral and multilateral spending”.
Therefore, Japan, together with the G8, is assigned a score of 0.5 because it failed to pledge concrete commitments to enhance its ODA and debt relief efforts.