Alliance Sud is the umbrella development organisation created by the six Swiss aid agencies Swissaid, Fastenopfer (Swiss Catholic Lenten Fund), Bread for All, Helvetas, Caritas and HEKS (Swiss Interchurch Aid). It campaigns for coherent Swiss policies towards poor countries. The organisation’s core policy question is whether development funding serves to meet the requirements of developing countries and the needs of the poorest, or other purposes such as the self-interest of industrialised countries or foreign policy operations that are financed out of the development budget. The members of Alliance Sud have therefore developed an Agenda for Swiss Development Cooperation to go alongside its own Development Policy Guidelines.
Alliance Sud’s development policy agenda lists the following points:
Goals of development cooperation
- Fight poverty and misery
- Campaign for human rights
- Facilitate development
- Stand up for peace
- Promote gender equality as the basis of development
- Protect people’s livelihoods and secure their rights
Concentrate on what development cooperation can achieve - Place the Millennium Development Goals at the centre of all action
- Maintain a practice- and grassroots-led focus
- Encourage the independence of civil society organisations
- Support women’s organisations directly
- Tie government aid to conditionalities
- Do not use development funds to finance political cooperation with emerging countries
‘Paris Declaration’: collaboration while retaining Swiss strengths - Offer conditional support to the ‘Paris Declaration’
- Reinforce ownership
- Guarantee the autonomy of civil society organisations
- Improve reliability and introduce mutual accountability
- Participate on a selective basis in budget and sectoral aid
- Factor in differences between donor countries
New possibilities in multilateral development cooperation - Take part in multilateral development cooperation by the UN, the World Bank and regional banks
- Keep an open mind about new developments led by funding agencies based exclusively on developing countries, and be prepared to revise opinion and put the role of the World Bank into perspective
- Abolish the economic conditionalities still demanded by the World Bank and the IMF and which are still a feature of national development and poverty reduction strategies
- Make the World Bank commit to a coherent climate policy
- Make the World Bank and the IMF more democratic
For a larger, targeted and transparent development budget - Strive to achieve a development budget that is proportional to Switzerland’s position as a winner of globalisation
- Test new instruments for development funding
- Reverse the creeping erosion of bilateral development funding
- Not finance foreign policy and foreign trade operations out of the development budget
- Keep the development budget transparent