[ Aid effectiveness ]

Accra Agenda for Action

At a multilateral conference in Ghana in early September, governments of donor and recipient countries agreed on measures to improve the impact of aid. Civil-society organisations welcomed the consensus document as a step in the right direction, while arguing that a more radical reforms were necessary.

At the 3rd High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, donors have pledged to “use country systems as the first option for aid programmes” in the public sector. They also promised to “transparently state the rationale” whenever using other channels. In order to enable governments of developing countries to draft policies and to implement them coherently, the donors have also declared that they will provide “regular and timely information on their rolling three- to five-year forward expenditure”.

The governments of recipient countries, in turn, committed to strengthening budget-planning processes. They also pledged to systematically identify and address areas where capacities must improve in order to “perform and deliver services at all levels”.

The conference’s final document is the “Agenda for Action” (AAA). Among other things, it states that donors and developing countries will henceforth make public all conditions linked to disbursements as well as to review, document and disseminate good practices on conditionality. The AAA, moreover, emphasises the developmental role of parliaments, local authorities, civil-society organisations and the media. Critics had argued that, so far, donor action has been too strongly geared to the executive branch of partner governments.

Germany’s Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul said the AAA was an expression of “modern development cooperation” and a milestone on the way to the UN’s Financing for Development Review Conference in Doha, Qatar at the end of November. Wieczorek-Zeul is UN Special Envoy for that summit.

The follow-up conference to the High Level Forum held in Paris three years ago was hosted by the Ghanaian government in cooperation with the OECD and the World Bank. The goal was to speed up the implementation of the principles spelled out in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005. They include “country ownership” (responsible leadership by the developing countries in terms of policymaking and implementation), “alignment” (donor respect for procedures and systems in place in target countries) and harmonisation (better coordination and division of labour among donors).

Eckhard Deutscher, chair of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, stressed that it was essential to convince parliaments in donor nations of the usefulness of aid. According to him, the AAA will make doing so easier.

Speaking for a coalition of non-governmental organisations, Antonio Tujan of the Manila-Based Ibon Foundation said that the AAA fell short of expectations. While welcoming progress in the terms of greater transparency, better predictability and democratic participation, he argued that clearer language would have been necessary to achieve all targets of the Paris Declaration by 2010. The thus spoke of only “limited progress”. Civil Society Organisations applauded the role of the European Union in confrontation with other donors such as Japan or the USA that were reluctant to make commitments on reducing conditionalities and making use of country systems.

In respect to India, China and other rising powers, Tujan said: “We want all partners to adhere to the Paris Declaration, we do not exempt emerging donors from aid effectiveness.” He added, however, that the rising powers could only be expected to become part of the process “once there are more equal power relations”. The AAA explicitely “invites” emerging donors to follow its principles. Established donors tend to worry that aid from new donors may undermine their efforts to link aid to the improvement of governance.

Accra Agenda for Action

Development & Cooperation

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