European Year for Development

A hand holding a globe, in front of which a plant grows. The inscription '2015 EUROPEAN YEAR FOR DEVELOPMENT' arches above the globe. The country code 'BE' appears below the hand, with the mint director's mark and the Brussels mint mark (the helmeted head of Archangel Michael) to the left.

The year 2015 stood, in European politics, under the sign of global responsibility: in September of that year the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and in parallel the EU member states had declared the year the "European Year for Development". It was the first EU year devoted entirely to foreign policy and development cooperation - with the explicit aim of showing European citizens how and why the Union contributes to fighting poverty, humanitarian aid and global structural change. Belgium, as a founding member of the European Communities and host to key EU institutions in Brussels, has traditionally been closely tied to European foreign and development policy.

Belgium itself has a long, if ambivalent, history in development cooperation: as a former colonial power in what is now Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, the country bears a particular historical responsibility towards parts of the Global South. Since these countries gained independence in the 1960s, Belgium has engaged in bilateral cooperation through state institutions such as Enabel (the Belgian development agency), with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Against this background, the European Year for Development carried specific domestic resonance in Belgium that went beyond a purely symbolic EU programme. The Belgian 2-euro commemorative coin of 2015 recalls this particular focus of the year on international solidarity and development partnership.