The European Union has earmarked R9-billion in development funding for South Africa over the next seven years, EU ambassador to South Africa Lodewijk Briët announced on Wednesday.
”We want to work with South Africa to enhance its democratic roots … and to help South Africa and Southern Africa, and all of sub-Saharan Africa, to move ahead,” he said at a briefing in Cape Town.
”We cannot see Africa in this 21st century as the continent that remains behind.”
The main focus of the funding will be poverty eradication, which the EU wants to do through South African government programmes such as the Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative.
The EU intends being active in this year in capacity building in the areas of water supply, health, science and technology and local economic development, particularly in the Eastern Cape.
Projects the EU has funded in the past include the building of schools in rural areas, water and sanitation supply, urban renewal, social housing and HIV/Aids programmes, among them work on an Aids vaccine.
Briët said EU funding last year covered the cost of treating 184 000 South Africans infected with HIV, tuberculosis or malaria.
The EU allocated R8,4-billion to its South African programme between 2002 and 2006.
Briët said the EU and South Africa are expected to formally endorse a ”strategic partnership action plan” in Brussels in May.
Although it is too early to give specifics, the plan aims to deepen the ”political dialogue” on issues such as conflict resolution on the continent, and at building on the EU’s existing trade development and cooperation agreement with South Africa.
Briët did not agree with the view of Botswana’s President, Festus Mogae, that China talks with African countries and the West talks to them.
”I truly feel that we want to engage with South Africa on an equal basis and in an equal partnership,” he said.
There is ”an issue” about aid to medium-income countries such as South Africa.
”[But] it would be premature to phase out our assistance to South Africa, because it’s an anchor country, because its stability over the years to come, looking beyond December 2007, looking beyond the 2009 presidential elections … is going to be determining for the stability of the whole region, if not beyond.”
In the long term, the EU will shift its focus from development towards reduced funding and more ”strategic cooperation”.
This would likely come into effect towards the end of the seven-year funding period.
By then South Africa will be 20 years into the post-apartheid era ”and I think by then the situation will have stabilised”.
Strategic cooperation implies working together on projects that are not of direct benefit to South Africa, such as peacekeeping missions, or addressing climate change.
Last month the European Investment Bank, an arm of the EU, announced an R8,5-billion loan to South Africa to promote development, also covering the period 2007 to 2013. — Sapa