Lai Yahaya

Read the original post on the ONE Africa Blog

My experience of nearly two decades working for and with development agencies in sub-Saharan Africa has led me to join the rapidly growing campaign for greater aid effectiveness. The more than $100 billion spent annually on overseas development assistance, with over 80,000 on-going projects around the world, armies of “fly-in/fly-out” consultants, aid workers and service providers deployed in every conceivable sector, is clearly not delivering the intended results.

In my country, Nigeria, aside from DFID’s Infrastructure Advisory Facility and some useful donor interventions in health and education, it really is difficult to identify projects that can be said to have been either a good return on investment or ostensibly to have done much to reduce incidences of poverty. In a climate of global fiscal austerity, taxpayers the world over are understandably questioning the value of continuing to fund an industry that rarely provides value for money.

The evolving aid effectiveness movement, which seeks to rationalize aid and make it more transparent, is encouraging and has gone far in promoting dialogue on transparency. But the 2005 Paris Declaration, where governments and aid agencies committed to improved aid effectiveness, remains a donor-centric initiative with little input, let alone ownership, from either the developing world or the actual aid beneficiaries. And it is likely that we may just see more of the same donor-centric talk at the next High Level forum on Aid Effectiveness taking place in South Korea later this year.

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