Swedish observers to Sri Lanka
The Swedish government will send four observers to monitor the upcoming parliamentary election in Sri Lanka as part of a European Union election observation team, according to a press release from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Sweden demands refund from Mozambican government

The Ministry of Education in Mozambique has in principle accepted to refund SEK 1.7 million of Swedish aid used for scholarships, following an audit carried out for Sida by Ernst & Young. Some of the grants were awarded to relatives of the Minister of Education. Sweden will also demand refunds of up to SEK 4 million for transactions that were not supported by documentation. The Ministry is currently trying to track down the missing documentation. Eight donors, including the European Commission, have established a large-scale sector programme, (FASE) for education in Mozambique. The grave findings in the Swedish report have caused serious concern in the donor community.

Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol Denmark committed itself to reduce yearly carbon emissions by no less than 21 per cent of the 1990 emission level in the period 2008 to 2012.

The so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was designed with the dual purpose of helping poor countries obtain financing for clean technology and giving rich countries a means to reach their emission deduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.

The DAC Secretariat has presented a number of options for including humanitarian assistance in the regular peer reviews of aid. The Secretariat is also concerned about the fact that there exists no common definition of humanitarian assistance and international statistics are not comparable.

Donors still have a long way to go to translate buzz words like “partnership", “ownership" and “donor coordination" into practice, according to an ambitious new evaluation involving almost 20 bilateral and multilateral donors.

The Nordic Plus Group has presented a concrete joint action plan for harmonisation of their donor practices. The group consists of four Nordics, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, plus the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Ireland.

Improving Danida’s evaluation capacity

A team of international experts gave high marks to the Evaluation Secretariat of Danish International Development Assistance (Danida) last year, describing it as “state of the art". (See DT 5-6/03)