South-South Cooperation – Another Way of Sharing Knowledge

Attendants of a high level conference "Organising Inclusive Ownership" which took place in Brussels in May heard of the success stories of a Dutch financed South-South Cooperation programme between Benin, Bhutan and Costa Rica.

The three countries have come together sharing skills and knowledge on agriculture, environmental issues and much more, using funds from the Netherlands. From their Costa Rican counterparts, Beninese farmers have learned how to grow organic pineapples while Costa Ricans learnt from colleagues in Benin how to use edible insects to feed their cattle.

"Since the beginning of our cooperation we managed to help Beninese farmers doubling their pineapple production," explained Alberto Chinchilla, a Costa Rican farmer helping Beninese farmers grow organic pineapples. "But the most interesting is that this project builds long lasting capacities and leads the way to short and long term sustainability".

South-South cooperation, the speakers argued, increases cost effectiveness, promotes transfer of appropriate technologies and ensures local ownership, leadership and capacity building.

“South-South cooperation is a visionary idea that is starting to pay off today," said Rene Castro, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Costa Rica. "Due to their first-hand familiarity with the problems on the ground, actors in South-South cooperation can be more efficient and effective in identifying and implementing solutions.”

The term ‘South-South’ has been used by policy makers and academics to describe development cooperation between developing country partners. However, it’s worth pointing out that these terms, ‘North’ and ‘South’ are imperfect. Not all developed nations lie in the northern hemisphere, and not all southern nations are developing countries.

While such knowledge sharing programmes are to be applauded, it should also be pointed out that peer to peer support such as farmer to farmer support and decentralised cooperation, such as cooperation between geographical regions, have existed for a long time and are not specific to South-South cooperation.

Nonetheless, the Dutch-financed South-South cooperation programme presented at the European Parliament is an interesting example of decentralised and multi-polar knowledge sharing.

On the question of whether South-South cooperation should take over from traditional North-South Cooperation, Mr Castro’s message was clear.

"North-South cooperation is a trigger in many ways. For example, it can provide technical or financial inputs that are not abundant in the developing countries. The two types of cooperation are complementary," Mr Castro said.

"In the projects presented today," he added, "the seed money comes from the North, but then, the projects evolved towards a sustainable one. We should say thanks to those countries helping us with the seed money and show them the results."

Obadiah Mailafia, Head of Cabinet the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Secretariat, went a step further in acknowledging the limits of the concepts and suggested to move away from South-South and North-South concepts by including emerging economies like China in a triangular cooperation.

"There is a lot of synergy to be gained by working with emerging economies," he explained. "Industrial and emerging economies need to work together to bring knowledge and technical assistance to developing economies."