Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Giant and DwarfOfficial Development AssistanceObligation to provide official development assistance as one of the consequences ofour membership in the OECD and the EU. Mandatory multilateral and voluntarybilateral assistance—73:27. Words are far from action: tabulating the obligationsand current reality of delivered assistance. Writing off the debts of colonel Gaddafi.Helping the wealthy more than the poor many times over. The secret professionalcompetencies of SlovakAid staff.The Slovak Republic became an OECD, or Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment—otherwise known as the “club of the world’s developed countries”—memberin 2000. Several years later both Slovakia and the Czech Republic both joined the EuropeanUnion. Membership in the OECD and the EU is accompanied by membership obligations,including the obligation to become development assistance providers. As the CzechRepublic became an OECD member in 1995, it began fulfilling these obligations a numberof years in advance.Adopting required laws, building official development assistance institutions and developingtheir agendas is not as simple as it sounds and it took both countries a number of yearsbefore they actually began to distribute funds intended as assistance for other countries. Justlike many others, we also received assistance from outside with Slovakia in this case receivingsupport from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and from the CanadianInternational Development Agency (CIDA). Just before entry into the EU in 2004, the SlovakRepublic voluntarily accepted the obligation to provide development assistance up to a totalof 0.17 % of gross domestic product by 2010, increasing this to 0.33 % of GDP by 2015. Thesenumbers are one of the aspects of official development assistance (in international terminology,the abbreviation is ODA) that will be looked at in depth over the coming pages.An expert or an active observer of the Slovak political scene would not be surprised thatthe referenced and lofty intentions remain exclusively on paper as of 2012, despite theeconomic boom of the first decade of this century. As a professor and MP Mikuláš Huba,himself a senior Slovak proponent of conservation and civil activism once said, for Slovak246