ORU Fogar asks decentralized cooperation to support regional governments in the South
The ORU Fogar Executive Bureau held in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) last April 25 agreed that ORU Fogar's president, Rachid el Abdi, would send a letter to the 38 sub-state governments with cooperation policies to support the regional governments of the South.
The decision was made after learning about the “Decentralized Cooperation Report 2023”, published for the second consecutive year by the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation. This report points out that the cooperation of municipalities and regions has reached 3072 million dollars in 2021. And it accredits that eleven states have offered some kind of development aid in a decentralized way in 2021: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, Portugal, United Kingdom and Switzerland. Thus, aid actions are recorded from thirty-eight specific sub-state governments, among which the Spanish autonomous communities stand out, with Euskadi and Catalonia in the lead, Flanders, Scotland, Wallonia and Bavaria. In general, cooperation is channeled mainly through NGOs and sometimes by central governments, but very rarely through region-to-region agreements.
During the Busan Forum of the Global Partnership for Cooperation Effectiveness, held in Korea last December 2023, this situation was already highlighted. ORU Fogar's vice-president, Ahmed Youssouf Benjeloune, also president of the Association of Senegalese Departments, called on all levels of international cooperation to strengthen regional governments as key actors in development policies. ORU Fogar's Secretary General, Carles Llorens, underlined the request with this consideration: “It is paradoxical -he said- that not even decentralized cooperation is helping to strengthen the regional governments of the South”.
Now a letter from the president of ORU Fogar and of the Moroccan Regional Council of Rabat Salé Kénitra is going to ask 38 regional presidents from the North to include in their cooperation plans support for the development policies of their brothers in Africa, America and Asia.
