EuropeAid welcomed new Director General

24/01/2014. EuropeAid – or DG DEVCO – is responsible for designing EU development policies and delivering aid to reduce poverty in the world, while ensuring sustainable development and promoting democracy, peace and security. In November last year, EuropeAid welcomed new Director General, Fernando Frutuoso de Melo. capacity4dev.eu took a camera to his office for an informal conversation on the context of European development cooperation in 2014.

Trained as a lawyer in his native Portugal, Fernando Frutuoso de Melo has worked with the European Institutions for the best part of the last 26 years. He has held positions as Director in the Secretariat General responsible for relations with the European Parliament, as Deputy Head of the President’s Cabinet, and most recently as Deputy Director-General in DG Human Resources.

“We often see development aid as something totally outside the rest of what the Commission is doing, what Europe is doing,” he said. “It is not: it is part of an overall effort to develop Europe for the EU citizens but also to help our partner countries and have better cooperation with them.

“And there are many areas where the EU and the Commission and other services and Institutions can contribute to the development of third countries - think about not only traditional services like Agriculture or Fisheries, but also Environment, Climate Change, Energy, Transport, Enterprise Development. There are all kinds of areas of cooperation where we can be useful to them, and they to us.”