Deputy Minister Marina Sereni chaired the fourth annual meeting of the Joint Development Cooperation Committee, in which the Director General for Development Cooperation, Fabio Cassese, and the Director of the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, Luca Maestripieri, also took part. Representatives of other public sector organisations with competence for the issues discussed also attended.
The Joint Committee adopted a number of important decisions for the Italian Cooperation system. These include a programme of donor initiatives for the countries and regions of intervention for 2022. The programme envisages a total of 988,733,961 euro, an increase of 34% with respect to 2021. This takes into account the large amounts of resources allocated in response to the crisis in Ukraine and the need to continue to operate in the customary areas for Italian Cooperation and address other ongoing crises.
The donor programme for 2022 is fully in line with the Three-Year Programming document for 2021-2023, which was approved by the Council of Ministers meeting of 15 June. This document is the fruit of consultation and the sharing of views and information with the actors of the Italian Development Cooperation System. It sets out the strategic vision, the goals for action and the criteria for intervention, the choice of priorities in terms of geographical regions and individual countries, and the policy and strategy approach for Italian participation in European and international bodies and multilateral financial institutions.
During the meeting, voluntary contributions to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) were also approved. So too were bilateral initiatives in Niger and Palestine, in the sectors of health and support for the institutions respectively, totalling around 13 million euro.
