The challenge: The United Nations Millennium Declaration represents a global social agreement: developing countries will do more to ensure their own development, and developed countries support them through aid, debt relief, and better opportunities for trade. Progress in each of these areas has already begun to yield results, but developed and developing countries have fallen short of targets they have set for themselves. To achieve the MDGs, increased aid and debt relief must be accompanied by further opening of trade, accelerated transfer of technology, and improved employment opportunities for the growing ranks of young people in the developing world.

Canada's contribution: In addition to focusing its aid program toward achievement of the MDGs, Canada has moved quickly to increase the flow of aid and non-aid resources to developing countries:

• Increased aid spending. Canada made its commitment to the new development compact by pledging to increase development assistance by 8 percent per year in order to double its total aid between 2001 and 2010. An increase of $3.4 billion over the next five years for international assistance delivers on this promise.

• Greater debt relief. From 2001 to the end of June 2005, the combined debt savings to heavily indebted developing countries from the Canadian Debt Initiative and Canada’s participation in the Paris Club amounted to approximately $702 million.

• Providing access to affordable essential drugs. In 2005, Canada became the first country to change its patent laws to allow for the manufacturing of lower-cost versions of patented medicines in order to export them to those developing countries with insufficient or no manufacturing capacity. The legislation contributes to Canada’s coordinated strategy to fight epidemic diseases in developing countries.

• Greater access to Canadian markets for developing-country exports. In 2001, at the Fourth World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar, Canada announced duty-free and quota-free access to virtually all imports from the 48 least developed countries. Imports from least developed countries nearly doubled, going from $633 million in 2002 to $1.2 billion in 2004.

• Building trade capacity. Canada has invested $74 million in Africa since 2001 for trade-related technical assistance and capacity building so that developing countries may benefit from trade liberalization.

• Improving availability of new technologies. Canada has developed a number of programs to facilitate transfers and provide benefits of new technologies to developing countries. Connectivity Africa and the Institute for Connectivity in the Americas are but two such programs providing greater access to technology in the developing world.

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