Development cooperation between the European Commission and the Government of Suriname has hit a rocky patch of late. But the small South American nation is forging ties with the Asian economic giant, China that could offer some alternatives to the EC’s technical cooperation, according to Volker Hauck and André Debongnie, who facilitated a TC learning event in Suriname in October.
The European Commission and Government of Suriname have recently experienced a series of bottlenecks in the implementation of technical cooperation in transport, tourism, support to NGOs and growth of the private sector in Suriname.
A small country of 450,000 people on South America’s Gulf Coast, Suriname has found EC procedures overly heavy and laborious, putting a high burden on the authorities compared to workload Chinese support entails.
According to the National Authorising Officer, cooperation with China - through loans - has over recent years enabled the rapid construction of a number of much needed infrastructure projects, like in-country roads, with a minimum of bureaucratic and procedural inertia. 
Recent successful cooperation projects with the EC - through grants - in the banana sector bogged his small ministry down in heavy procedure, said the NAO. With a staff of only eight to ten professional staff, his team lacks the capacity to deal with all the procedural issues that EC projects and programmes require. The workload on his Ministry has become excessive, he said.
In a bid to enhance relations between the EC delegation and their counterparts in the NAO, Volker Hauck provided a series of learning events with the assistance of Andre Debongnie in the Suriname capital Paramaribo in October 2009.
The sessions helped staff from the EC and NAO offices and the technical assistance Programme Management Units see their mutual day-to-day work as more than just a business-based relationship. The focus on capacity development drew the attention of the stakeholders to the essence of this relationship, which is meant to jointly overcome existing planning and implementation hurdles to the benefit of reaching sustainable development results.
Sector contexts matter substantially, which requires communicating effectively to identify where openings for change exist and to signal well in advance potential risks of non-sustainability.
This can be caused by wrong analysis in the project or programme implementation arrangements or by the inability to follow though with commitments once a project has been agreed. Communicating effectively entails a constructive exchange about making use of existing tools in a way which can facilitate capacity development.
These lessons are to be translated into results as part of the 10th European Development Fund, which will include short-term technical assistance inputs financed from the Technical Cooperation Facility Programme.
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