The principal goal of Turkey’s foreign policy is to secure and nurture a peaceful, prosperous, stable and cooperative environment that is conducive to human development both locally and globally. To this end, and in support of global efforts aimed at poverty eradication and sustainable development, Turkey is rapidly expanding its development cooperation activities through wide-scale official development assistance (ODA) and more specific assistance dedicated to least developed countries (LDCs).
Recently, Turkey has boosted its ODA to countries affected by conflicts and other sources of instability such as natural disasters. This includes a range of development partnerships focused on the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Most of Turkey’s development cooperation projects between 2005 and 2010 focused mainly on social infrastructure, in response to requests by recipient countries for assistance in education, health, water and sanitation, and administrative and civil infrastructure.
Turkey’s assistance to LDCs has been strengthened by a US$ 200 million per year economic and technical cooperation package, developed after the country hosted the fourth United Nations Conference on LDCs (LDC-IV) in Istanbul in May 2011. Priority projects within the package are being identified for rapid implementation in 2012, and cover the following areas:
• Developmental and technical cooperation – Turkey will allocate its assistance budget to projects and programmes in line with the respective populations and capacities of LDCs. Projects will focus on education, training and health, as well as productive sectors and infrastructure, including agriculture, water and sanitation, and energy.
• Trade – Projects will consider expansion of duty-free, quota-free market access for agricultural products. They will also extend export-import bank lines of credit to governments, financial institutions, regional development banks and other relevant entities of LDCs on deferred credit terms for imports of goods and services from Turkey. Trade policy support will share experiences and expertise in standards, networking, product and market development, and trade facilitation. Bilateral institutional links will be made between business associations in LDCs and their Turkish counterparts.
• Investment – Concessional lending facilities will support infrastructure and productive capacity building. The United Nations Development Programme Istanbul International Center for Private Sector in Development will cooperate in capacity building programmes for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and private sector development. One focus will be on investments in agriculture, agribusiness, infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, water, extractive industries and tourism. Another will be on technical support to establish or strengthen investment promotion institutions in LDCs.
• Technology – The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey in partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization exchange of scientists and researchers will coordinate technology transfer programmes through bilateral and triangular cooperation. Projects will encourage scientific institutions to network. Turkey will establish an international science, technology and innovation centre for LDCs that will also serve as a technology bank to help them access and use critical technologies.
• Education – Over the next 10 years, Turkey will grant 1,000 scholarships to LDCs, predominantly covering postgraduate studies in agriculture, engineering and medicine. Support will be given to build educational infrastructure, especially for primary education, and for education and vocational training of girls and women.
• Tourism – Projects will share tourism experiences to build capacity and tourism-related training will be provided.
• Agriculture and forestry – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Food Programme (WFP) will share best practice in agriculture production. Projects will transfer modern irrigation techniques and provide technical assistance for land-use management. Technical assistance will also be available for afforestation, reforestation, dryland management, erosion control and desertification in partnership with the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Transfer of technology and technical assistance will support seed, sapling and fertilizer production, while training will enrich agriculture and forestry. Turkey, in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization, the WFP and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, will establish an international agriculture centre dedicated to LDCs.
• Energy, water and climate change – Projects will focus on the transfer of technology and technical cooperation in power generation, including hydro, wind and solar. They will also support technical cooperation for disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change. Best practice in water resource management will be shared and there will be provision of water- and energy-related vocational training.
• Technical and policy-level cooperation – Projects will share best practice in poverty alleviation programmes and in local authorities and their services. Turkey will implement this assistance package in cooperation with the United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States and relevant United Nations agencies.
The scope of the Economic and Technical Cooperation Package is ambitious and Turkey’s commitment to LDCs does not stop here. The country aims to increase its level of direct investment in LDCs, in particular from its private sector, which is currently approaching US$ 2 billion to a total of US$ 5 billion by 2015. It will then strive to increase the amount to US$ 10 billion by 2020.
On a wider scale, Turkey has steadily increased the amount and geographical reach of its ODA in recent years. Combined official and private sector development assistance amounted to an estimated US$ 1.7 billion in 2010, while ODA alone reached US$ 1 billion. In the same year, Turkey provided development assistance to 131 countries that appeared on the list of aid recipients drawn up by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
As a developing country itself, Turkey fully understands the requirements of LDCs and endeavours to raise awareness of the international community regarding development-related issues and concerns. It is with this understanding that Turkey hosted LDC-IV, which brought together governments, parliamentarians and academics, as well as representatives of civil society organizations and the private sector. The conference was a milestone in bringing the challenges of LDCs to the attention of the international community.
In the post-conference phase, the momentum built in Istanbul must not be lost. The Istanbul Programme of Action adopted at the conference is a valuable, forward-looking document that reflects the international community’s strong political will to support the LDCs. It must be effectively followed up and implemented, and to ensure progress, Turkey has offered to host the Mid-Term Review Conference of the Istanbul Programme of Action in 2015.
ODA and initiatives such as the Economic and Technical Cooperation Package for LDCs have become an integral part of Turkey’s proactive foreign policy. Based on its belief that ensuring comprehensive, fair and sustainable development is a common responsibility for the international community, Turkey will continue its engagement in international development activities and is committed to expanding its growing contribution to efforts aimed at finding lasting solutions to the most pressing global problems of our age.