The Diplomat
Last Tuesday, the Council of Ministers authorized voluntary contributions from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) to international organizations, programs and funds and other international entities for an amount of 13,840,000 euros.
The main beneficiary, with eight million euros, is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund-GF), established in 2002. This contribution is part of the commitment made by Spain in 2019, at the sixth Replenishment, when it pledged 100 million euros for the period 2020-2022. Apart from that, this contribution comes to complement the contribution made in 2022 by the Directorate General for Sustainable Development Policy, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs and the Ministry of Health. Between 2003 and 2010, Spain donated a total of $693 million to this organization, but stopped contributing funds between 2011 and 2014 due to suspicions of corruption. In September 2022, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced that Spain will contribute 130 million euros over three years.
In addition, AECID will contribute 1,190,000 euros to the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), an organization created in 2003 to provide permanent institutional and technical support to the Ibero-American Conference, of which the twenty-two Ibero-American countries are members. The proposed contribution will be used to finance actions in the areas of youth, justice, disability, as well as studies on perceptions in Latin America.
In addition, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) will receive a contribution of 1,100,000 euros. This contribution will focus on actions in Venezuela, focused on capacity building to guarantee sexual and reproductive rights, and in Morocco, where it will promote the social integration of young women who neither study nor work through an integrated capacity building program.
As for the rest of the contributions, 700,000 euros are to be highlighted for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), specifically to strengthen the child protection system in Venezuela in two municipalities of the State of Amazonas with a majority indigenous population (Atures and Autanas), and for projects in Senegal on civil registries to increase the registration of children and young people.
The list of contributions includes 600,000 euros to the World Food Program (WFP) to finance intervention in Niger in the area of food security and nutrition; 500,000 euros to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for Dialogue between Cultures (FAL); and 450,000 euros to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In addition, AECID will contribute 250,000 euros to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), 200,000 euros to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and 100,000 euros to the G5-Sahel (G5S), in this case in compliance with the mandate of the Sahel Alliance, which Spain currently chairs, in order to help these countries face the serious crisis of security, political stability and development.
