Science moves up Europe’s aid agenda
7 January 1999 (Nature, Vol. 397, page 8)
[ MUNICH ] "Five years ago, research was almost a dirty word in development aid circles," says Barend Mons, a senior adviser to the Dutch research organization NWO . But today research is no longer considered as "a luxury toy for rich countries", but a fundamental component of economic success in all countries.
The change represents a major shift in European attitudes towards Third World aid in the past few years. Research has been a significant beneficiary.
In June 1997, the European Union’s Council of Development Ministers passed a resolution acknowledging the potentially important role of research and technology in achieving the objectives of the EU’s development policy. It stressed "the strategic role that research could play in enhancing sustainable development".
This has committed the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to finding new ways of boosting the amount of research it supports in developing countries — and ensuring that support is effective.
Until relatively recently, most of this support took the form of researcher-initiated projects within the five-year Framework research programmes. The rest was provided through separate development aid programmes designed in collaboration with the governments of recipient countries.
But a review of this strategy in 1997 revealed a lack of synergy between the two arms, and noted that scientists from the South were frequently junior, rather than equal, partners in research projects.
The review also pointed out that research, particularly that funded with development aid money, tended to be focused on short-term technical fixes, rather than helping developing countries to increase their self-sufficiency by building up local research capacity.
The underlying problem, according to the commission, had been the lack of political support for research in sustainable development. But many European politicians now accept that research is a necessity if developing countries are to be helped to solve their problems.
Key phrases now heard in the corridors of Brussels and increasingly echoed in national development aid policies include ‘co-ordination of research effort’, ‘building research capacity in the South’, and ‘equal partnerships’.
A small office has recently been established in the commission’s development directorate to promote this new philosophy. One model being used is the so-called ‘fisheries initiative’, a programme set up by the development and research directorates in the early 1990s to address in a coordinated way the problem of diminishing fishing resources in the Third World.
Programme spokeswoman Cornea Noun says the initiative was drawn up after meetings with representatives from developing countries, who told the commission what they needed, and what the cultural and political implications of meeting such needs were likely to be.
The programme has a strong research component, and each project it supports has to include partners from the EU and the South on equal footing. It must also help build research capacity in the South. "We have practical research tools to develop aquaculture technology," says Noun. "But we must make sure that management tools are in place to allow research-based developments to become general practice."
Coordination of research projects supported by the commission, national development agencies, and other donors such as aid charities, is helped by a series of new theme-orientated web pages such as the health page SHARED. This lists and describes all research programmes involving Third World scientists that are supported in Europe, at national or international level.
One of the goals of the new office is to encourage developing countries to agree to spend more of their EU aid on research. At present only one per cent of the EU’s ECU3.5 billion (US$4.1 billion) development budget is spent on research, and the commission would like to see this rise to between three and five per cent.
But such growth may take several years to achieve. Lobbies for science are weak in developing countries, whose politicians are seldom keen to attend meetings with the commission on research issues.
Yet their support is essential if there to be any increase in international funding for such work. There is no increase in the money earmarked for the Third World in the EU’s new fifth Framework programme of research, even though the ECU250 million handled in the fourth Framework programme is generally considered to have been well spent.
Equal partnerships and the potential for building up local research capacity in the South became mandatory components of all projects funded through the EU’s INCO-DC ( International Coordination - Developing Countries ) programme.
In one project, for example, scientists from France, Britain, Kenya and Brazil collaborated on an investigation of the genetic component of susceptibility to schistosomiasis. This involved epidemiological studies, mapping of susceptibility genes and the evaluation of immunological correlates of disease.
The study required the creation of an immunology research group at the Faculty of Medicine of Uberaba, Brazil, and strengthening the schistosomiasis research group at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
INCO-DC applies the same rules to its approval of projects as other EU research programmes, emphasizing the need for scientific excellence and eschewing any sense of offering ‘charity’. "You don’t do anyone any favours by funding second-rate research with second-rate equipment," says a programme spokesman. "Scientists in the South must be supported only to do research at the same standards as in Europe."
EU member states have been adopting the same new philosophy in their national programmes. Denmark, Europe’s largest aid donor in relation to its gross national product (GNP), has in the past ten years increased the proportion of its aid budget spent on research nearly fivefold, to three per cent of the total.
One exception to the EU trend is Britain, which devotes only 0.27 per cent of its GNP to development, four times less than Denmark in relative terms. Just seven per cent of this budget is spent on "research and related knowledge generating activities". One reason for this is that Clare Short, the UK international development minister, has made poverty eradication as her government’s development priority.
But in its 1997 white paper (policy document) on development, the government stated that it "sees continued investment in knowledge generation as a key element in achieving its aims and objectives for international development".
Britain has shown that it is possible to back such philosophical statements with cash. Last summer, for example, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced to the meeting in Birmingham of the G8 group of industrialized countries that Britain planned to spend £60 million (US$100 million) to support the international Multilateral Initiative on Malaria.
Alison Abbott
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Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1999 Registered No. 785998 England.