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Resource Mobilisation

European donors⁽¹⁾  account for more than 53% of total development aid and is home to 18 of the 23 international donor countries. It is only some European donors who have reached the UN target of allocating 0.7% of their GNP to development aid (Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden), and donors from Europe account for only 40% of aid to population and sexual and reproductive health activities.

At the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994, the international community set a global resource target for population and reproductive health programmes including family planning for the year 2000 of US$ 17 billion of which US$ 11.3 billion would come from domestic funding and the remaining US $5.7 billion from external donor funding. While many countries, both developed and developing, have increased their contributions to population and reproductive health activities since ICPD, the target of US $17 billion is far from being met. There is a shortfall of about 36% of total funding, of which 24% should be from domestic funding and around 61% from external donor funding.

As a result of this shortfall in resources needed to reach ICPD goals, European parliamentarians and European all-party parliamentary groups have all monitored and intervened in the annual budget debates in their national parliaments on questions such as the overall level of financing of their countries to sexual and reproductive health and rights, as well as more specifically on multilateral funding to UNFPA and IPPF.

EPF activities in relation to resource mobilization are guided by the commitment of over 100 parliamentarians meeting in Ottawa and Strasbourg at the biannual International Parliamentarians’ Conference on Implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action (IPCI), namely that parliamentarians should :

• Strive to attain 5 to 10 per cent of national development budgets for population and reproductive health programmes.
• Strive to fulfil the agreed target of 0.7 per cent of GNP for official development assistance (ODA) and make every effort to mobilise the agreed estimated financial resources needed to implement the ICPD Programme of Action.
• Give high priority to achieving universal access to reproductive health services and commodities in national health and poverty-reduction frameworks, both in terms of budget allocations and in terms of programme activities.