TURKEY’S INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS
One of the principal goals of Turkey’s foreign policy is to help secure and nurture a peaceful, prosperous, stable and cooperative environment that is conducive to human development in its region and beyond. In this framework, Turkey strives to extend the scope of its involvement beyond its immediate neighbourhood and proactively address pressing global issues.
These efforts are reinforced by Turkey’s rapidly expanding development cooperation activities. Turkey’s endeavors in the field of development cooperation reflect its dedication to the global efforts aimed at poverty eradication and sustainable development.
In this regard, Turkey, the world’s 16th and Europe’s 6th largest economy,has emerged as a new and dynamic actor in the international development cooperation architecture.
Official development assistance (ODA) has increasingly become an integral part of Turkey’s proactive foreign policy. As part of its policy of utilizing a wide range of soft power instruments, Turkey has boosted its ODA to various countries affected by conflicts and other sources of instability such as natural disasters. It is engaged in a wide geographical coverage of development partnerships, focused on the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia and also covering countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
As an emerging donor country, Turkey has steadily increased the amount and geographical scope of its ODA in recent years. Turkey’s Official Development Assistance in 2011 reached 1.3 billion US Dollars. This represents an increase of 38% as compared to 2010, making Turkey the OECD member state that most increased its ODA in 2011. In 2011,Turkey provided development assistance to 131 countries that appear on the OECD/DAC list of aid recipients.
Turkey concentrates its aid efforts on strengthening economic and social infrastructure. Most of Turkey’s development cooperation projects between 2005 and 2010 focused mainly on the development of the social infrastructure sector. This concentration can be attributed to Turkey’s demand-driven aid policy, that is, to respond to the call of recipient countries to deliver aid in sub-sectors such as education, health, water and sanitation, administrative and civil infrastructure which represent the basic needs of people.
As an emerging donor country and development partner, Turkey will continue its active engagement in international development efforts and is fully committed to further expanding its growing contributions to the efforts for finding lasting solutions to the most pressing global problems of our age.