EU overhauls aid system

European aid too often arrives too late

The European Commission is to radically overhaul the way it runs its vast foreign aid programme after years of inefficiency and mismanagement.

Details of the plan were announced at the European Parliament in Strasbourg by the Commissioner for External Relations, Chris Patten.

EU's aid shambles

Pledges unfulfilled

Projects unfinished

Growing fraud

EU missions abroad will get a bigger role in implementing programmes on the ground, while a better staffed organisation will be set up within the Commission to speed up aid delivery.

Mr Patten, who took over his job last September, is said to have been shocked by what is described as a catalogue of waste and incompetence.

Chris Patten: Wants to streamline process

"We cannot go on as we have been," Mr Patten said in a statement launching the reform plan.

"It will restore its credibility as a foreign policy actor in one of the major fields of external action."

Money unspent

Mr Patten said he had found, among other things, that money sent by agencies and governments to the EU had failed to reach needy people - projects were unfinished, promises not kept and fraud had grown.

It's not fair to the people in the poor countries, and it's not fair to the people who are paying for the aid programme

Chris Patten

The EU is the biggest aid donor in the world, providing about 10% of all global aid funds.

The Commission's aid budget this year stands at 9.6bn euros ($8.6bn).

But because of bureaucratic delays, a huge backlog of unpaid funds has mounted.

When money is handed out, the projects it funds are often not properly managed.

The worst examples include a promise of 210m euros ($190m) for reconstruction work in Central America after Hurricane Mitch, none of which has yet been spent.

And a hospital built with EU money in Gaza has stood empty for a year because no funds were provided to train local staff how to use the state-of-the-art equipment.

Delivery

According to Mr Patten, 20bn euros ($18bn) are piled up waiting to be spent. It would take eight and a half years to spend the money that has accumulated for Mediterranean projects alone.

He told the BBC the aid budget had increased threefold in 10 years and it was now time to concentrate on speeding up and targeting its delivery.

The shake-up is part of overall Commission reforms following a fraud and mismanagement scandal which brought down the previous executive in March last year.