DAC Peer Review of Italy

The Italian development co-operation is facing major challenges. The first is an urgent need to reform official development co-operation in the absence of political consensus on how to proceed. The second is that Italy will fail to meet its international commitment to increase official development assistance (ODA) to 0.51% of its gross national income (GNI) by 2010 and is unlikely to meet 0.7% by 2015. In 2008 Italy’s ODA/GNI ratio was 0.22. Despite the challenges remaining, there has been some improvement in Italian aid management since 2008. Italy intends to focus on 35 priority countries, the greater authority given to Italy’s embassies and technical offices to deliver and to contribute to formulating programmes and deliver aid, and the Steering Committee on Development Co-operation’s high level policy direction. Italy still needs a strategy for its development co-operation that is shared by all relevant government departments and regional and local authorities working towards common objectives: building systems to promote coherence between development co-operation and other policies; reforming human resource management for the core cadre of development experts; and regularly undertaking monitoring and independent evaluation. In addition, the limited political debate and public awareness about Italian development co-operation show there is an urgent need for the Italian authorities, together with civil society, to build popular support for development and public pressure for reforming Italian development co-operation.