The latest report by Kopin (Koperazzjoni Internazzjonali, Malta), a non-governmental organisation working on north-south cooperation whose mission is “to contribute actively to the alleviation of global poverty and social injustice”, should give the new government pause for thought as it fleshes out its policies.

The report makes specific reference to an issue which Skop, the national platform of non-governmental development organisations, has raised before. This concerns the amount of funds annually given by Malta as aid to developing countries and the proportion of this that is apparently made up of money spent on irregular immigrants and refugees already on the island.

Malta had committed itself, in 2004, in line with the other newly-acceding countries to the European Union, to spending 0.33 per cent of its gross national income in overseas development aid by 2015.

In 2011, the island reported that it spent 0.25 per cent of GNI on aid to developing countries. However, judging by a 2012 Aid Watch report, it appears that over a quarter of Malta’s aid contribution that year consisted of money spent by the government on asylum-seekers already here.

According to Kopin, the country has inflated its development aid donation by 28 per cent in this way, giving a misleading impression of the amount of aid that has actually been extended to developing countries around the world.

Has Malta been perpetrating a scam on its development aid budget figures, as Kopin and Skop imply, or is there a respectable reason for the way the figures are presented?

When the non-governmental development organisations raised this issue in 2010, the then Foreign Minister, Tonio Borg, said that the government would continue to credit Malta’s immigration expenditure as part of its overseas development aid expenditure because this was in line with the criteria laid down by the Organisation for European Cooperation and Development.

It would, therefore, appear that what the Maltese government has been doing for the last few years is in line with accepted international practice in this field. Yet, the issue is much more than simply a narrow, technical accounting one. Overseas aid is also both a moral issue and an international relations and diplomatic matter.

It is morally right that richer countries should provide assistance to poorer ones in a world many of whose people live in abject poverty. Malta, a Catholic country and doing well economically, has a moral responsibility to help those worse off than itself.

It is also in Malta’s own self-interest to provide overseas aid. The problems of irregular mass migration are, at their root, caused by poverty, lack of economic investment and institutional immaturity. Aid, properly targeted, can, therefore, help to relieve the very causes of mass international migration at source in the countries of origin and lift the developing world out of poverty.

In its electoral manifesto, the new Labour government promised “to take a more active role in international development aid”. This is a worthy aim. For a start, the government should publish the breakdown of the country’s current overseas development aid expenditure so that a balanced public assessment can be made of how much of its global sum is accounted for by internal expenditure on irregular immigrants already in this country, how much is actually being expended abroad, in which countries or regions and on what projects.

Malta should have nothing to hide or to be ashamed of. This is an area where transparency is key.

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