African Development Bank and Others to Support The Gambia

The African Development Bank (ADB), The European Union, and The World Bank, on Tuesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Government of The Gambia for General Budget Support Programme (GBSP) delivery mechanism in The Gambia.

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According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Finance, Signatory parties are signatories to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals through alignment and harmonization agenda. The release adds that the MOU sets a partnership framework for a common approach to Budget Support, with the main objective of harmonizing development partner’s budget support programs within existing administrative and statutory provisions stipulated in bilateral financing arrangements with participating development partners.

The rationale of the Budget Support program is to support the Government’s own growth and poverty reduction objectives as stated in its Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) II, maximizing the reliance on country systems and procedures.

The Government of The Gambia and signing parties issued the following statement:

“Development partners welcome corrective actions undertaken by The Gambia in the areas of institutional, structural and macroeconomic reforms aimed at improving its systems, procedures and processes toward improving aid effectiveness in the country”.

The MOU partnership framework according to the release creates a common approach to development programming, implementation and evaluation between the Government of The Gambia and Development Partners. “The program will provide direct and non-targeted general budget support for the attainment of PRSP II’s objectives, with a particular focus on the social sectors (health and education). Disbursements will be partially linked to the achievement of agreed target levels for selected performance indicators” the release said. The release indicated that the program will also contribute to the Public Financial Management (PFM) reform, Civil Service reform, the revitalization of the groundnut sub-sector, and improving roads maintenance.

EU opens web addresses to all European languages

Businesses and organisations across the European Union (EU) can register .eu web addresses from today that contain characters from all 23 official languages of the EU.

The move will allow those registering domain names to use characters such as à, ą, ä, ψ or д from alphabets such as Greek or Cyrillic under any .eu domain.

The change came after the European Commission (EC) decided that the European top level domain should offer characters in all official EU languages. Internet oversight body Icann gave the green light to IDNs earlier this year.

Prior to this announcement, many countries could not use their full alphabet for web domains. For example, the Czechs could only use 27 of 42 characters, and Lithuanians 23 of 32.

Viviane Reding, EU information society commissioner, said that the launch of international domain names responded to the needs of a multilingual and multicultural Europe.

There are now more than three million registered .eu domain names since its launch in 2005.

The changes could open up the possibility of people registering new or similar name variations of sites, but Robin Fry, a partner at law firm Beachcroft LLP, said that the days of significant cyber squatting are over.

Fry maintained that highly effective dispute resolution processes with the World Intellectual Property Organisation, and clear legal precedents, make it unnecessary for organisations to own portfolios of unused domain names.

"Search technologies and users are all savvy enough to find their way to the right web site," he said.

The EC is also working towards the introduction of internationalised domain name variants for .eu, for example '.eu' in Greek or Cyrillic characters, as soon as possible.