The European Commission here on Wednesday said in a press release that new figures confirm the European Union(EU) and its member states have kept their place as the world's leading aid donor in 2015.

The press release said that the EU and its member states provided more than half of the total Official Development Assistance (ODA) reported last year by members of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD-DAC), according to the figures published on Wednesday.

Preliminary figures show that EU collective (EU institutions and member states) Official Development Assistance has increased to 68 billion euros (77 billion U.S. dollars) in 2015 and reached its highest level to date.

Figures showed that EU collective ODA represented 0.47 percent of EU Gross National Income (GNI) in 2015, an increase from 0.43 percent in 2014.

Commenting on the release of the data, EU Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development, Neven Mimica, said that in 2015, faced with an unprecedented migration crisis, the EU and its member states were able to increase both their support to refugees as well as their development aid to developing countries."

In 2005, the EU and its member states pledged to increase their collective ODA to 0.7 percent of EU GNI by 2015. Despite a real growth in EU ODA of almost 40 percent since 2002, the economic crisis and severe budgetary pressures in most EU Member States meant that the EU did not meet this ambitious target in 2015.

The European Council affirmed in May 2015 a commitment to reaching this target within the time-frame of the post-2015 agenda, namely before 2030. Endit

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