 Good morning everybody and thank you very much for your patience. My name is Barry Colfer, I'm the Director of Research here at the IIA. Absolutely thrilled to have Carson Stauer here to speak to us about development assistance in a changing world. That's all I have to do because it's my pleasure to invite Michael Gaffey from Irish Aid to give a couple of opening remarks. Michael. Great, thank you very much. If I can keep my introduction as brief as that, I'll be doing really, really well. Good morning everyone. It's great to be here on the latest of the Development Matters series of lectures. With the IIA, which we, in collaboration with Irish Aid, it's a really good forum for us over recent years in bringing significant and influential figures in the world of development to speak in Dublin. I have to say it is a real honor and a pleasure to have the guest today, Carson Stauer. It feels, I should first of all say, it feels like a bit like an old ambassadors club standing up here because Carson has been ambassador to the UN in New York when I went as ambassador to the UN in Geneva. He was the Danish ambassador and of course David was the Irish ambassador to the UN in New York and the father of the SDGs. So we'll just set all that ex diplomacy aside because Carson is here today as the chair of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD and the DAC is a really important influential organization. He was elected chair about a year ago. He's in his first year. He's making a real impact and I would say that the world today, as we say constantly, is in a state of multiple overlapping crises and the place of ODA of official Development Assistance in helping in the response to some of those crises or to that poly crisis situation is a subject of huge debate at the moment. I think in Ireland and probably across the world, the debate on whether we need to have ODA anymore has finished. I think the focus now is on how do we use ODA? It's not going to solve all our problems, but it is a very significant piece resource of voted government expenditure and the DAC, the Development Assistance Committee, is the custodian of ODA, the rules for ODA, how it works and how consensus can be reached on that. So I attended last week the DAC high level meeting in Paris and it was actually a really important two days of discussion on the place of development in our world today and on how we can use and apply ODA as effectively as possible. So I want to say Carsten has already met with our Senior Management Group this morning and given us a really, really clear and interesting sort of analysis of how he sees the world today and how we deploy ODA in it. So rather than me going on anymore about that, I just want to welcome Carsten and look forward to a really good discussion with him this morning. Thank you very much, Carsten Starr. Michael, thank you as ever. And just echoing your remarks, it's really wonderful, Carsten, to have this opportunity to welcome you to Ireland. Not your first time. I think you've had an illustrious career and Michael and I were able to be able to work with you at different points when you were State Secretary for International Development Corporation in Denmark. We worked closely and then later in your various UN roles and indeed other colleagues worked with you while you were Danish Ambassador to the OECD and now you've ascended as a result this crucial role and we're all delighted that a friend is there and that's somebody whom we value greatly. A few housekeeping points before I ask Carsten to take the floor. First, you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on the Zoom. Please feel free to send in questions throughout the session as they occur to you or observations or challenges or whatever and we'll come to them after Carsten has finished his presentation. A reminder that both his presentation and the Q&A will be on the record. Please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter or X using the handle at IIEA. We're also live streaming the discussion today. So with that, Carsten, once again, a very warm welcome from the IIEA and over to you. Thank you. I might stand up here just to make it a bit more informal. Just to say thank you very much for the invitation and for this honor and opportunity to be here and to say a few words. I have worked closely with Ireland in a number of occasions, not least in the Global Fund. Nicola Brennan, I think she's now in Addis, was a good colleague in the Global Fund Board where we both represented the group that was called 0.7. That was aspirational on part of Ireland. It was more a matter of fact in part of Denmark. But basically we worked in Nordic countries plus the Netherlands, the UK, Luxembourg. Not the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg with the Nordics in one of the 10 constituencies on the donor side. And it was a real pleasure to work with you on that. If you look at the OECD DAC and on developer cooperation on ODA from the outside, you can say that this is just a success story. Last year, 2022, we had the highest ODA ever. More than the first time we passed the $200 billion mark, $204 billion, up $18 billion compared to $21.36% of GNI, the highest number that we have had for since 1986. So basically a success story is in many ways. ODA is as strong as it's ever been. The DAC itself I think is also a success story in the way that we do rulemaking, in the way that we do data and the way we do analysis, in the way that we create peer learning environments for member states to work on. So basically a good story and an easy job. On the other hand, there are some real challenges out there that I think we need to be aware of and where we basically need to start discussing and some of them we have been discussing for some time. ODA is $200 billion a year, but there's a lot of pressure on it. We see pressure from humanitarian assistance. Gaza right now is providing a lot of pressure on ODA budgets to deal with the present emergencies of course and there will be a discussion about reconstruction coming up very soon hopefully. Then we have pressure on Ukraine. Biggest recipient of ODA from Ireland, from Denmark, from a number of other countries in 2022. We have the pressure from indowner refugee costs, which are huge in 2022. You saw half of the Irish budget is indowner refugee costs. For other countries it's not necessarily all that, but it's a significant part. 14.4% of total ODA in 2022 was indowner refugee costs, most of it from Ukrainian in general. We have seen a lot of pressure on COVID-19, the whole issue of vaccine donations. We have seen the knock-on effects of COVID-19 and the economic circumstances of countries. We have seen only 12% of the SDGs being on track when we had the discussion in New York in September. We will not go to be in a situation where we can see we have lived up to the SDGs when we are in 2030. The only question right now is how close will we get and we need to get as close as possible. We see climate change coming up. Part of that, a large part of that, assistance to mitigate and to adapt to climate change will be ODA or is ODA, but there's also a pressure of moving more ODA into the work of climate change, mitigation and adaptation than in what has been traditional focus of ODA in social sectors in health education, social protections and so on. So there's a lot of pressures on the envelope of ODA from a number of sources. At the same time, we see competing models of cooperation emerging. China is not a big provider of ODA, but it's a big provider of finance. A lot of it, of course, is capital that's lend out at commercial terms. Huge importance to Africa in recent years, and we have seen the Belt and Road Initiative, we've seen the Global Development Initiative from the Chinese side, in the sense that that provides and is seen as providing an alternative to the traditional donor role of the West. It's not entirely so, and I do think that there are ways of also where we can also cooperate, but in very much also seen that in a way that it is basically a competing model. We will never get to a new Cold War situation where we have two different systems opposing each other, but we will get to a situation where there will be tensions in some areas and cooperation and others, and that's something that we need to deal with. We also see pressure on trade patterns. When we had the 30 years of ODA driven by Cold War from 1960 to 1990, then we went into a mode of globalization. Globalization was the driver of our ODA narrative. We wanted developing countries to join the global economy to grow through integration into the international trade and to have export-led economic growth. That was dependent on free, open trade in the world. We are in a slightly different situation now. We will talk about home-shoring, near-shoring, French-shoring, strategic autonomy, talk about shortening supply chains. We talk about more resilience in our supply chain. So there's a lot of change in the way that we look at trade, and it all boils down to maybe a new look on markets and where we should solicit from companies, where should their suppliers be. And we see a number of interest in maybe getting closer to Europe, in our case and in your case, and also to move to new markets. And that was where Africa will become a big issue in the discussions in the years to come. And finally, we see criticism of ODA in the way that we account for ODA. I think 90% of all ODA is grants, and that's very easy to account for. But we do have some part of ODA which is related to loans, to debt, forgiveness. And there has been a discussion about that. And we basically are in a situation now where we also have to address that kind of criticism. So under the surface of a great success, there are some challenges that we need to address in the years to come. And we're quite aware of that. And the high-level meeting that Michael alluded to last week has also set an agenda for how to address some of these points in time. Now what to do when I'll try to be brief here and we can elaborate on that during the Q&A. But for me, it's very clear that we need to increase ODA. 0.36% overall is good. It's better than for a long time, but it's not enough. And especially not enough if we use ODA for a lot of sideshow, so to speak. Additional aid to Ukraine. Ukraine is not the typical developing country. It is a European middle-income country that happens to be on the ODA eligibility list. But it is not a typical country for what is meant historically by ODA. And so I think it is important that our assistance to Ukraine become additional. It may not be possible in the forum, but I think we have to, as we did in 2022, to be able to say that most of our assistance to Ukraine has been additional. It was clear, if you look at it overall for 2022, that we can say not all of it, not for all countries, but as an average, the majority of our assistance to Ukraine was additional in last year. So that's really important. What is also important is that we don't get into a situation where we can say that Africa is going to pay for Ukraine. Again, look at the numbers for 2022, the provisional numbers, fall in bilateral assistance for Africa overall of around 7%. It may be corrected when we get the final numbers just before Christmas, but there was basically a story out there that can say that for a certain part, Africa did actually pay for the assistance to Ukraine. And that is not, I think, what we want, where we want to see ODA. And that's not a situation that is politically conducive. So we have to be sure that we can increase ODA. We can also increase within ODA our assistance to Africa. And we should not get into a situation where we are forced to choose between increased military expenditures and increased ODA. It is not. And I think that may be the most important political message here. It is not an either or it is a both and. There are a number of huge pressure on our security in parts of the world, including in Europe. There's a good reason to increase military spending, defense spending due to the threat which is Russia poses in our neighborhood. But it should not be at the expense of our possibilities to increase ODA. And I think that hopefully will be a key important political issue in the time to come. The other issue that we have is the allocation of ODA. The pressure right now is very much on more support for middle-income countries. The World Bank reform, the MDB reform, the pressure that we now get to provide more funding for the international development and financing system is basically going to be a lot of pressure to provide money for middle-income countries. We also see when we get to a new search in our support for debt relief, which will come that will also happen to be presumably for number of middle-income countries. So the pressure is there. Middle-income countries are battling with a lot of challenges in terms of climate change mitigation in terms of dealing with all sorts of problems geopolitically and economically. And of course, the political pressure from this group of countries, I'm sure, will only increase in the time to come. In that situation, I think we really need to look into to try to defend and protect our support for low-income countries for disease, which traditionally has been the recipients of ODA. ODA is much more economically important for low-income countries than it is for middle-income countries. I think up to 10 percent of GNI in low-income countries actually emanates from ODA, whereas less than 1 percent if you look at lower middle-income countries. So the economic importance of ODA is quite strikingly different in the poorer countries than it is in the middle-income countries. And the potential effect of ODA is also increasing in low-income countries. And there's no doubt that we need to change the way that we do business. There has been a lot of discussion at the ILO meeting last week that we need to listen more, we need to stay engaged, we need to build more on locally-led development, we need to be more flexible in the way we adapt to changing political situations, economic situations in ODA. And as maybe at some point in time, some people say that we have to be less personalistic in the way we do business and I think that is really, really important. We've tried to do that for a long time, but we have not finished that job and we need to reinforce the way that we try to create partnerships with our partner countries. We also need to look a little bit more deeply into the role of ODA. ODA has always been a catalyst for change. We try to move, we try to help countries do the reforms that need to do and they want to do by way of ODA. So we invest in change, we invest in reform. We have a lot of focus now on investing more in domestic resource mobilization and tax systems and creating revenues in countries for them to themselves to be able to increase their investment in health, education, social protection and other main important issues. And that still, that using ODA to create an enabling environment for growth and for development will still be a very key factor in the way that we do ODA. But we have an increasing discussion about ODA in mobilization, leveraging ODA, making sure that we can use ODA to generate more private investment, more private finance and development. We do that through, and Ireland is not in that club that has development finance institutions, but half of the DAC members actually do that. So there is a growing interest and that's the reason that we had a lot of discussion in recent years on private sector instruments. How can we use ODA to raise private fund? How can we de-risk? How can we in other ways try to be helpful to overcome some of the obstacles for private finance in developing countries so that we can actually do what we need to do? Even though ODA is $200 billion, even it's a record number. It's a small part, five percent maybe, of the total financial needs in developing countries. If you look at the SDG business and if you look at the climate change, the calculations, you see numbers in the classes of trillions. ODA is a small part of that, and ODA was never meant to fill that gap. Countries themselves have to mobilize. Private sector has to play an important role in mobilization for development, in financing for development. So how can ODA be helpful in generating that change? That's another quite important agenda, which I think we need to take too hard. Then maybe just to finish, there will be an important conference coming up a few years time, financing for development in 2025. And some of these questions about the role of ODA, where it fits in, what are the targets for interventions, which are the countries that should receive ODA and why, will have to be dealt with in the run-up to that conference. So that donors and the DAC community, I think, have aligned and have an opportunity to discuss them as far as possible, also to coordinate our views on that issue. And I think that would be a very important fixed point. And one thing that we are very aware of is we start preparations now. Final point on ODA integrity. It's very clear that ODA is a strange thing. It's a concept that was invented by the DAC in 1969. It's a concept that was put into the UN legislation, so to speak, or the decision from the General Assembly in 1970, 53 years from now, almost to the day, where the General Assembly adopted the framework of ODA and adopted the 0.7 percent target, which means that then that target was adopted as an international standard for what developed countries should do in support of developing countries. And at the same time, it was left to the OCD DAC to define what actually development assistance was. And for the past 54 years, we tried to do that, tried to change and modify the definitions and reporting directors as the world changed. And we're still in that situation. But it's also a lot of trust in the DAC from the international community that said that we have given you a pressure-intangible asset here, ODA, and you gave it to you to administer that. And what do you do that with the whole world's eyes on you and that responsibility and that accountability to the international community at large? I think it's something that we need to be aware of. It's the question of how we adapt gradually as things change, the concept of ODA and the way that we account for it, but we still have to do it in a way where we can say that we maintain the original spirit and the integrity of ODA. And for me, that is a real important thing for us because we have an intangible with a lot of political value, all countries feel, all members of the DAC feel that they should attain the 0.7 percent target one way or another at some point in time. So the political pressure is there. And we need to make sure that the value of that target is kept and that we don't dilute it. So that would be one of the I think the main challenges for the years to come that we that we try to maintain that integrity of ODA. Thank you. Carlson, thank you very, very much. Extremely interesting set of challenges as you are describing it. Many of those resonate, of course, very strongly with an Irish audience. I think the emphasis on low income countries, Africa cannot pay for Ukraine and so on. Let me invite people to put questions and comments to Carlson. And I can kick off with a couple of myself. I think there was a reference last week at the high level meeting Carlson to a strategy, a new strategy, which will come out in 2024. What kind of content do you see for that strategy? Would you embrace some of the questions that you just been talking about? That I think, Michael, that basically is I think the reason I think it's a well kept secret, but actually in 2017 there was an annex to the high level meeting outcome which also had the chair strategy for the duck. I must confess I only read that after I became the chair. So it was a well kept secret that we actually had one. So at the end we said that we renew our strategy. And I think that's the basis. So we do have a point of departure from that. Maintaining integrity. Maintaining the traditional emphasis on the poorest countries. And I think what we try to do now is to be sure because the world has changed dramatically since you did the SDGs in 2015. And basically look at it's eight years since then. We have had Trump. We have had Brexit. We have had a financial crisis and COVID. We had Russian aggression. Now we have Gaza. So that small eight years less than a decade has really changed the way that we have been looking at things and looking at ODA. And I think as I said, I think the main structure of the house is fairly good. The question is the village in which the house is situated has changed. So we need to be sure that that house still fits in that village. And that would be the main challenge for the strategy to contextualize ODA in another world. What about overall ODA levels, Carson? I mean, is it your sense that the traditional donors will keep up their commitments? And what about possible new donors? I mean, one thinks of the Gulf of traditionally and there are other countries. I mean, China, to say, gives relatively little in ODA terms, but it clearly has resources available. I mean, what number one, how are the traditional donors shaping up and number two, what scope is there for adding to the number of donors? I think that the main pressure I think on traditional donors is that on one hand, I think we can see increasingly that the global agenda is an important one. In the trade-off right now is between the short term, and I took a lot about Europe here, the short term regional agenda in terms of grain, Russia, security, our own integration processes, vis-a-vis the longer term or global agenda. They have, of course, a crossroads on there where you can look at the whole issue of security, of migration, a number of challenges to Europe that has to be dealt with in the medium and long term. And the sooner we get to that, the more sure our investments will or the more profitable in that language our investments will be. So I think that the main challenge is to have a discourse in the public, in political circles and parliaments that actually tries to look at this in a bit longer term and in a global perspective, not being totally absorbed about the short term regional one. I think that is the main challenge. And then to have a good, solid analysis of how things are interrelated and interconnected in a way that makes sure that we can make the investments at the right time and the right size. I think that is basically the argument for ODA and to increase ODA. It's the hard political cell. There's no doubt about it. But again, it's a question also about those who actually create the political discourse and create the political discussions. How far can you take that? How much can you expand the narrative around that? I think that would be critical. On new donors, Michael was present at our first meeting of global providers in February just before I took over as dark chair. And there is a clear ambition from the OECD dark 32 members to increase collaboration with non-dark members. And we had a lot of countries present there and we are trying actually to pursue that. Arabs is one thing, but also Indonesia, Thailand. Brazil have interest in extending collaboration with that. And that has a lot to offer on the technical side. How do you do developer cooperation in a rational way? There's a lot of instruments that we have that we can put at least disposal of others. So I think that we are trying to find how can we actually get into a second global providers meeting. We will have a meeting next year in the DAC Arab dialogue in Kuwait, which we're trying to find a date for right now. So we are reaching out to all this non-traditional donors that we will tell them. The big elephant in the room, of course, is China. And we all have strategies on dealing with China that goes from cooperation on climate change to that we are competitors as an economic front and then we are systemic rivals on a third dimension. So where do we take development? Because development deals with climate change. It also deals with economic growth and competition. And it basically also deals with values, which are the systemic issues. So development cooperation is spread on all levels of our relationship with China. So we need to discuss how we intervene, how we seek dialogue with China. But I think there's a good basis for it. And I think we need to reach out to China and to have some discussions on the issues that are of mutual interest. And I think we can do that. Yeah. You mentioned cost and security and migration among the challenges certainly facing Europe. And that brings up then the question of the definition of ODA because in recent years, as you know, various efforts have been made to bend or to solve from the DAC rules. I remember 20 years ago, when we were both in sort of similar positions, there were quite strict rules in those days. From your perspective now, how do you see the integrity of the rules? I'm not necessarily advocating that they stay immutable, but security and migration are two areas. If you like, you mentioned the indoner refugee costs. And then there have been efforts by the UK, for example, to solve for the present British government to soften the rules in favor of military type expenditure. There are threats, therefore, to the purity of the rules. How do you assess those threats? It's obvious that, as I said, it is an ongoing discussion. And there are adaptations of the rules because the world changes and the rules have to change. So that's a natural development over time. But there's always been a pressure in the sense that for a number of countries, they have only ODA. They don't have any other bucket of fun here. Some countries will have other buckets of funding, so they are more relaxed on what is ODA and what is not ODA. But a number of countries actually only have ODA. So whether an investment is included in ODA or not is quite decisive for whether that investment is possible. And if you can expand ODA with yet another kind of investment that usually has not been ODA, it makes it much more possible to do more on that front. And that creates, of course, an ongoing discussion around where the limits are. Luckily, we're in a situation that we can only change the rules if all 32 members are in agreement. That means that we spend a lot of time on our last discussions on private sector instruments. We spent seven years discussing what we agreed to here in October. There's also 100 pages of good language on how we can actually define and count ODA. So it also goes into the details. The DAC is striving on reporting directors or member states are doing the reporting according to those directives. And we can change those directives if we agree on it as we did with PSI. And the reason for that was exactly to try to, first of all, to create rules where there hadn't been rules before, but also to create rules that would incentivize the use of smaller part of ODA to leverage other kinds of funding. And that was the idea around that. And then, of course, a lot of people said, we need to be sure that we're not trying to finance things that are not ODA and are not naturally within ODA. So a lot of discussion on where the limits were and also the whole accountability for the transparency of arrangements. So I think that's a good example on peace and security. It's obvious that we do have rules if for a peacekeeping operation, a certain percentage can be reported as ODA, it's usually a very low number. But we can always adjust that and it's based on evidence on how big a share of a peacekeeping operation is actually dealt with, dealing with issues that are within the ODA fund. So these things can be done. But we have to do, as I said, we are accountable. We're accountable to our voters that we don't cheat on where they see ODA and what it actually is. So there has to be some kind of transparency and accountability there. But we're also accountable to the world at large. And we cannot, in my view, change the rules dramatically from one day to the next without losing that vote of trust and vote of confidence from the international community to us. So it's a balancing act where we need to adjust because the world is changing. But we also need to be sure that we adjust on the basis of the values and the criteria and the definition that we have had for decades. So it's not an easy answer to that. But the good thing is that taking 32 countries to move very dramatically is a bit of a hard sell. So all the changes will be incremental. They'll all be tested. And they all try to stand the test of political acceptance by 30 different governments and monuments. I remember 20 years ago that we were hoping that maybe some additional migrant relation costs could be accepted within the ODA definition. But I remember our Swedish colleague of the time, Tenebi, no way that they wouldn't go along with that. Of course, I run a day more recently, Swedish government had no problem altering the definition of ODA. But when it's done in donor refugee costs, we clarified those rules in 2017 after the migration crisis in Europe in 1516. We said that you can report these costs for the first 12 months. That the 12 months actually kick in once the refugee comes to a European country. So if you go through Germany and Poland and end up in Ireland, actually it's not full 12 months in Ireland. That's one thing. The other thing is that it's basically basic sustenance. So it's health, education, it's housing. It's not preparation for the labor market. It's not tertiary education. There are a number of rules in the sense that puts an eye on that. And then we also said that usually it would be home offices the metrics on those rules. But we also said that the reporting agent, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which submits the ODA figures to the DAC, also has a responsibility to vouch for the accuracy of the reporting that that takes place. So we tried to put in some safeguards. And then we also, of course, all urge countries to be slightly conservative. There's a judgment called in many of these reportings, that's very clear, but to be slightly conservative in the way that they do the reporting. The big thing, of course, is whether the 2023 data will be at the same level of the 2022 data. In 2022, we saw an increase in assistance to Ukraine going up from 1 billion in 2021 to 16 billion by natural assistance in 2022. We saw a surge in the donor refugee cost moving from I think 16 billion dollars over and over in 2021 to almost 30 billion dollars in 2022. Now that was, of course, everybody could understand that. Ukrainian refugees coming into Europe, an exception of certain states and that. So we all had to cope with that. Now the number of Ukrainians have decreased. Maybe other asylum seekers and refugees are moving into Europe at the same time. So we will see when we get the 2023 numbers in April, whether this huge level of donor refugee cost is actually still the same in 2023 as it was in 2022. Or whether it's going down or how much it's going down. It peaked before in 2015 and 2016, then it went down again in 2017-18 and up again in 2022. So it's cyclical in many ways, but responding to crisis situations. But we will need to see and we also then need to see whether we have to take this issue up again and the discussion in the back. The OECD generally and the DAC have done great work on accountability and transparency. And I have a question here about the private investments framework. So how do you see the cooperation between DAC and the sector generally? I think that if we take as point of departure that we need more private finance in order to reach the SDGs. We cannot do that with ODA alone. Domestic resources will still be the most important source of financing for development, but domestic resources need to be supplemented with more investments, more trading opportunities. If you take an African country, then you say, okay, can we inject more private investment that can bring a lot of benefits to a country? Can we basically develop more trading opportunities? Can we reach the content level of products and basically the value added of products that goes for sale from African countries to Europe? It all has a great meaning to use ODA for that. But we have to walk the thin line between this being a necessary incentive to doing things and not being basically a subsidy for what you are already doing. And I think that's the thin line that's at the basis of all this. And we don't want to create you know, another subsidy competition between the European countries using ODA to the best possible. We need to limit this use to where it's actually necessary in order to make the investment. We have a lot of discussion about risks. There are country risks, there are currency risks, there are project risks. And on project risks, the sense is that we need, and that's also one of the things from the High Level Meeting Communique, we need to look a bit more on the way that we assess risks. The sense is that some of the data that we have on risk will contradict the popular assumption that risks are verified. So the notion is that we need more transparency on this data. And then we need maybe also to have a discussion with the rating agencies on this because there is maybe a perception out there and that's the indication that the assumption for the work that we're going to take on this, that there an overestimation of the risk level that means that a lot of investments do not take place because the risk is set too high. And if we can set the risk more realistically, maybe we can actually make more investments happen. And that's, it's not an ODA issue per se, but it is basically an issue where ODA play a role in de-risking and bringing down risk and also in funding of a lot of the development finance institutions. So we do have an interest in that specific level, but just one final note on this, that what we did with the agreement on private sector instrument was also to say we now set in motion a system for reporting and we would review this system again in a few years time when we have more data. It cannot be done tomorrow because it takes time to make this new system work, but we actually will try to review that in 2030 and see whether these things that are that we have put in motion, how they actually worked. And we also give the secretariat a bit more cloud to engage with member states if they see things that are basically very strange in the way that member states do reporting on ODA on private sector instruments. So that's also a more assertive role for the secretariat in these discussions and as part of the agreement. Yeah. You're absolutely right about the STG's financing. I mean, we only ever envisaged that ODA would be more or less a drop in the ocean, that in the needs of this vast agenda would acquire a huge investment by the private sector. And sometimes that is lost sight of that it was never going to rely entirely on ODA. The question of the partnership with Africa, Karsten, can you say a little bit more about that? Because in many ways, not only do we want to make sure that Africa is not disproportionately affected by the current crisis as it is, but I think it makes sense that the tax would reach out to the low income countries in Africa. How do you intend to go ahead with that? I think that that's a discussion we can have in the dark, but it's also important that that discussion is also taken in all member states. Because if we somehow, if we still maintain, I think we should, that the main emphasis on ODA should be on low income countries, LDCs and other low income countries. The majority of those are in Africa. Those LDCs that you find in other places in Africa are on their way to graduation from the LDC status. So it's very much, if you look at what can call poor countries, least developed countries, low income countries, the bulk of that is in Africa. It's also where we have a huge demographic challenge and huge economic challenge. And also basically where the issue of migration, of irregular flows of migrants, where the issue of security in terms of risking terrorist activities and hotbeds in a right outside European frontier, where a whole issue of instability is most urgent. We see the numbers for demographics that Africa will double its population from 2020 to 2050. The majority of young people in this world will be living in Africa in 2050. So there has to be jobs, there has to be economic opportunity, and we have an interest in assisting African countries making that move in order to be able to cope with increased population and create pathways for young people that can either stay in country or leave in a part of regional migration schemes or whatever they want to do and what we can negotiate in times to come. So I think that Africa would need to be the main emphasis. The challenge of course is that Africa, if you look at it from a climate change perspective, Africa is less than 4% of all global emissions. So from a climate change perspective, mitigation issues are not at very high on the agenda or Africa. Adaptation is. How can you, because climate change will happen, we saw the new numbers from the UN the other day, change will happen. It will affect livelihood, precipitation patterns and livelihoods for a number of African countries. So there will be a lot of change in African countries due to climate change, and adaptation to that will be a key issue for ODA. And that's the reason that we have an ongoing discussion about the balance between mitigation and adaptation. Because at the end of the day, this is also a discussion about middle-income countries which would benefit much more for investments in mitigation and low-income countries that would benefit much more from investment in adaptation. So that knows that balance and the strive to increase the relative share of adaptation in ODA, I think is hugely important. But it's something that we have to deal with and it's something that I think adds to the emphasis of Africa because the link, we have an HDP nexus, Humanitarian Development piece, which we OCD formalized in 2019, which basically says that we need to be more coordinated with our humanitarian systems, our development systems, and our political diplomacy systems. So those three systems that we all have need to be more integrated in the way we approach situations in countries. Now we also need to be sure that we take care of climate change issues in that nexus, not as a fourth pillar, but integrated across the nexus. I think that would be a real challenge for us and that would also mean that somehow it's also a way to mitigate the pressure from climate, from humanitarian, on development, on the core of development cooperation. If we can, through the HDP nexus and integrated approach to climate change, can bring these things together, more together and avoid this kind of pressures that pressures on the core of development. Thank you, Carsten. Let me advise you any questions from the audience. We have a few minutes left. Thank you very much, Carsten, and thank you for a really fascinating presentation. And just to pick you up there on the diplomacy and diplomatic systems, you've become the face of the DAC and the recent report on PSIs as well, I think was very well received. And I know that you move around a lot to various countries. I was wondering when you were talking about getting new members for the DAC, whether the association of a reputation, for a positive reputation, for accountability and involvement in the DAC is something which assists you, for example, in non-like-minded countries where we might not share the same value systems politically, but in terms of the DAC, that there is a benefit for them in being seen and being peer-reviewed globally, basically, that might assist you in your diplomatic efforts. Thank you. It's a really good set of questions. The DAC membership is limited to countries that are members of the OECD. So we have a limited number of countries that can be members of the DAC. Of OECD members, six are not members of the DAC. It goes for Israel and Turkey, and it goes for the four Latin American countries that we have as members of Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, of course, the longest serving of those members. Those four are not members of the DAC. And the reason that they are not is that they have traditionally also been members of G77, and they have traditionally also been identifying as developing countries. So to make the move, even if you have become a member of the OECD, to make the move from that to be actually in a donors club has not taken place yet. But what we have done now is that we also have created the status of associate in the DAC. So we can actually become a DAC member with voting rights. We don't vote, but basically with the full rights, even if you're not a member of the OECD. And that's something that we just decided if you want to go. And the interest of that, of course, is to see whether we can find others that will actually do that. And some have indicated a certain interest in that, very preliminary, of course, but basically to go for their donor activities, go get closer to the DAC and join the DAC work. And we're very interested and very open to do that. Whether it will transpire, I don't know, but I'm hopeful that we can get in that direction. But there's still a lot of old North-Souths atmospherics around the OECD, around the DAC. The OECD is now still very much the rich countries' club. Okay, Colombia is a member, so it may be not that rich. But still that kind of atmospherics is still there. And it's very much the case with the DAC, but reaching out to other providers of ODA. Also, too, we had discussions with Indonesia the other day, and they have interest in maybe exploring this kind of associated states with the DAC. There's still a huge recipient of at least climate-related assistance from DAC members, but they also have their own development program. So that's double identity here as both being a recipient and a donor, which is maybe the answer to the complexities of this world, that you can be both things at the same time. And I think we need to encourage that, and we want to encourage that. So I think we would get a less... My hope is that we get a world that is much more confusing than it is today, because I don't like this kind of North-South divide. I think it hampers us utilizing all the little things that can combine all the countries of this world, and we don't want to create the kind of traditional North-South divide that we saw in the 70s and 80s conferences North and South. But I do hope that the complexity of the world and the fact that a lot of the middle-income countries are moving quickly upward and becoming... Basically, what we see is, if you look at China, China is a developing country today. China will reach the average level of the cut-off point for ODA within the next few years. We don't know exactly when, when it's on world bank data, but if you have a DNI per capita around $13,000 a year, you will graduate from being an ODA recipient. That's the rules. And China will reach that point within a few years, and at some point in time over the next five, six, seven years, we will actually probably take a decision that China is no longer legible for development assistance if we look at the numbers that we now have. And that's basically looking, just looking at how things will develop in economies. And that will basically create a new situation around one of the big players in the global economy. And it also illustrates the complexities of which countries are which. For example, I think it was made this book about the rise of the rest. And that is basically what we have seen in recent years and what we continue to see, that a number of developing countries emerging in power economies will actually increase their economic growth considerably and change the way that the tix or possible world will look quite different. And that division or south will be splintered and replaced by much more, much different world. And somehow we need to make sure that the concept of ODA will fit into that and that the emphasis on the poor countries, on the low income countries, on those groups of people in these countries that have no recourse to other finance than the support that they get through all the, will still be the main targets for the system. Great question. I'm on favor over time now. We probably have to bring it to a halt unless there are any, I suspect that you have to go to your next appointment. That's why, okay. Thank you very, very much, Carsten, for making us available this morning at the Institute. We've really benefited hugely from your presentation and from the Q&A session now. I hope you'll come again. And I think you have lots of friends in Ireland and we wish you well in your new role and for which you're ideally suited. So best of luck. Thank you.