Thank you very much. It's really a great pleasure to be here.
Globalisation is a dominant feature of our time and many talk about the global village.
The low level of ODA flowing from the north to the south in this world shows that we do not have a global village, we have a world full of deep and dangerous problems. There is a lot of talk about donor fatigue. I think one of the problems here is that many expectations have been unrealistic. Against that background it's important to clarify the fact that development co-operation and assistance has in fact worked. When we look at many of the childhood diseases in the world some of them are eradicated, others have much less of an effect that they used to.