South Korea’s foreign minister Thursday called for more concerted efforts to improve the quality of aid as United Nations member countries are seeking to set new sustainable development goals beyond 2015.
U.N. members are working on setting new sustainable development goals as the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to cut global poverty in half are poised to expire in 2015.
In a related move, policymakers and experts from more than 160 nations gathered at South Korea’s biggest port city of Busan in 2011 to launch a fresh bid to make global aid more effective by agreeing to set up a new, inclusive and representative Global Partnership, named the Busan Global Partnership.
Speaking at a forum on official development assistance (ODA), Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said that the Busan Global Partnership can be regarded as a model of a “renewed partnership” for the post-2015 development framework.
“The Busan Global Partnership offers us a platform for translating our visions — of banishing poverty and attaining sustainable development — into action on the ground,” Yun said.
He said that although the MDGs are “a landmark achievement,”
there are also limitations in achieving the development goals such as growing inequality among countries. Yun said that the Busan Global Partnership pursues “an action-oriented and evidence-based” partnership.
“In this context, the Busan Global Partnership is capturing attention as a pragmatic, practical ‘enabling framework,'” Yun added.
South Korea has been widely viewed as the first recipient-turned-donor country in the world.
Seoul extended a total of US$1.74 billion in ODA in 2013, making it the world’s 16th-largest donor, according to the prime minister’s secretariat.
Seoul ranked 16th among 28 member countries of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the value of its ODA accounting for around 0.13 percent of the country’s gross national income (GNI). South Korea is seeking to raise the size of its ODA to over 0.2 percent of its GNI by 2015. (Yonhap)
