This Tuesday the international meeting of the Alliance for Vaccines (Gavi) begins in Madrid in which progress in immunization in the world is presented with the 8,000 million euros that donors committed for this purpose in June 2020. number of children without any vaccinations reached 18.2 million in 2021. Despite not being among Gavi’s largest funders, Spain is the host country of this appointment in which the intervention of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, was scheduled (before the announcement of the next national elections on July 23), but not confirmed.
The amounts contributed to Gavi have also gained weight: at the 2020 fund replenishment conference, the Government announced 50 million for the work until 2025 of this conglomerate of countries, foundations, international organizations and private companies that supports the least developed nations. in the fight against communicable diseases, but preventable thanks to vaccines. A figure higher than the 47.5 million that he had given in the previous 15 years, at a rate of 9.5 million per year. Spain’s relationship with the Alliance, whose main funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, became even closer when it was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Cooperation in 2020.
As in the case of participation in Gavi, the country has gained a presence in the arena of global health, at the same time that the economic and political commitment to cooperation in health matters has been increasing. In his first intervention as president (acting) before the UN General Assembly in 2019, Pedro Sánchez announced 100 million euros for the Global Fund for AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis. He thus returned to the fight against the three pandemics after eight years in which not a single euro had been put into this entity, the largest in the world in the matter. It was also in New York, in 2022, at the annual event of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with its allies, where Sánchez announced that he was renewing financial support for the Global Fund with 130 million for five years. It was 30% more than the previous three-year period, in line with the increase in funds from the rest of the countries.
Meanwhile, Spain has also hosted the two global congresses on pneumonia, the last one this year. And the Government has expressed its contributions to Covax, the mechanism for equal access to immunizations and other treatments for covid-19. “I would like to highlight the donation of vaccines during the pandemic. With 60 million, we are the seventh country in the world in terms of the number of vaccines and the second in Latin America and the Caribbean, only behind the United States”, recalled Pilar Cancela, Secretary of State for Cooperation, in a meeting last Thursday with a development NGO in Madrid.
In the opinion of Iliana Olivié, a researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute and a professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the Complutense University of Madrid, development cooperation has been promoted as a “form of international projection and soft power”.
In the opinion of Iliana Olivié, principal investigator at the Elcano Royal Institute and professor in the Department of Applied Economics, Structure and History at the Complutense University of Madrid, development cooperation, and specifically that concerning global health, has been promoted as ” form of international projection and soft power”. “This had not happened to such an extent neither with Zapatero nor with Rajoy”, she adds. In her analysis ―together with Maria Santillán O’Shea― Development aid and influence in the global health system concludes, through interviews with experts, that “it is considered positive, for the Spanish influence on global health, high-level political representation […] through a more active participation of the Presidency of the Government in these spaces”. However, in Olivié’s opinion, “the question is why, what is the strategy”: what should be the priorities for action of these entities, in terms of geography and activity.
In their report, the authors state: “Spain maintains a low profile when it comes to advancing priorities and suggesting initiatives. He is generally seen as not a particularly proactive giver.” And they exemplify: “Spain’s focus on the importance of Latin America (sometimes, almost exclusively) is not usually accompanied by objectives and elements that fall more directly within the priorities of the Global Fund or Covax. A greater geographical and thematic alignment with the general objectives of these spaces would increase Spain’s ability to influence them”. The same thing happens, says Olivié, in other areas such as defense or climate change.
Global health has been, of all these areas, a priority for Moncloa “with advertisements and reruns even before the pandemic,” he stresses. The researcher does not rule out that the purpose is to defend the multilateral global system itself (in which different countries and actors come together) at a time when not all leaders have that vision of international relations. The new Cooperation Law, approved in February with the only vote against by the ultra-right, makes a plea in defense of these spaces and the presence of Spain in them. In his presentation on development cooperation with a view to the Spanish presidency of the Council of Europe, Cancela defended that it is about the country occupying a position “not following others – before nothing was done if France and Germany were not in favor —. Now Spain has its own political position and is also leading the way in Europe”.
“In international relations, new positions are beginning to appear, the rise of new donors, a reduction in the opposition of some multilateral organizations, more South-South, triangular cooperation… This whole scenario is where European cooperation, with its values, must manifest itself. We defend that building alliances, adding, reinforcing each other, and betting on dialogue and multilateralism is more necessary than ever ”, Cancela argued in his intervention at that meeting with an NGO. “Cooperation is a policy with great value in the foreign policy of our country. It reflects the values of our society. There are no citizens, or very few, who question the work in the field of cooperation and development”.
“The multilateral cooperation that the Government decides on —not the one that is mandatory, such as the allocations to the European Union or the UN— was at a minimum,” notes Arturo Angulo, head of cooperation policies at the Coordinator of NGOs for Development. As little as Spain has contributed compared to other donors -for example, Germany gave 1.3 billion euros to the Global Fund, 10 times more-, it is a return to the spaces from which it had disappeared in the previous stage. “There has been an awakening in these initiatives, it’s a comeback and it’s important, but now they have to consolidate and know what they want to defend,” he says. “We are still a little brother.”
“The challenge is to coordinate all these initiatives of a vertical nature,” say sources from the Spanish Cooperation. “Beyond specific diseases, the most important thing is to strengthen the countries’ health systems so that they are resilient and balanced, with primary and hospital care.” And there, they say, Spain is a benchmark because its health system serves as a model for providing universal health care. Angulo qualifies that the financial support mechanisms for the countries of the global south for this purpose “have been abandoned or reduced.”
“Spanish cooperation works with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and has projects in Paraguay or Bolivia. In Africa, the main countries are Ethiopia, Niger, Mauritania or Mozambique. The Pedro Alonso malaria vaccine has been developed at the Manhiça research center (Mozambique), “the Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation (Aecid) lists. “Another example of why Spain is a benchmark in health is the Medicines for Neglected Diseases (DNDi) initiative, which has just received the Princess of Asturias award,” they add. As for emergencies, these same sources highlight the donation of 30 ambulances in Ukraine or the field hospital deployed in Turkey after the February earthquake, in which 195 professionals from the National Health System treated 4,700 patients, 45.6% of those treated by emergency medical teams.
The budget for development aid this year in Spain (4,400 million, 0.34% of Gross National Income) is the highest in a decade, according to the Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation
According to him annual report of Médicos del Mundo and Medicusmundi, which evaluates Spanish international cooperation in health, the funds in this item increased by 260% in 2021 compared to the previous year, to reach the highest figure ever contributed in this chapter: more than 526 million euros . But 59% went to the fight against covid-19, they note. In humanitarian action, Spain also increased its budget, according to that same document from December last year, with 11 million euros more than in 2020, up to 107 million. This amount represents 3.5% of the total official development assistance (ODA), very far from the average of the countries of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a 10 .5%, and the historical commitment to allocate 10% for this purpose. Hence, the organizations responsible for the study consider the increase insufficient.
According to the latest OECD figures, published in April, Spain dedicated 4,207 million euros to official development aid in 2022, which represents 0.3% of Gross National Income (GNI). And what is budgeted for this 2023 (4,400 million) amounts to 0.34% of GNI, “the highest level in a decade,” say Aecid sources. The highest point was reached in 2010, with the Government of Zapatero (0.46%) and the lowest in 2015-16 with Rajoy (0.15%). When Sánchez arrived at La Moncloa he was in 0.19%. The rise since then is still far from the Executive’s commitment to reach 0.5% by the end of the legislature and even further from the 0.7% included in the new Cooperation Law.
In addition, a total of 850 million (20.2%) of the 2022 funds were dedicated to assisting refugees within their own borders, according to the OECD. It is, according to the institution, the main cause of the growth of the item that the Government of Sánchez allocated to foreign aid. The Executive has consolidated this trend in the 2023 General Budgets, with an investment of just over 900 million euros to care for refugees in Spain.
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2023-06-13 03:30:00
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