Accra Forum on Aid Effectiveness

In September 2008, the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra brought together ministers and officials, civil society organisations and development experts to discuss how to maximise the effectiveness of the $100 billion spent each year on development assistance. The meeting was a follow-up to the Second High Level Forum in Paris in 2005, where donor and recipient countries agreed on a set of principles and clear objectives for aid effectiveness in the Paris Declaration.

Despite consensus around the Declaration, monitoring shows that implementation has been limited. In the lead-up to Accra, ONE called on donor governments to set clear, time bound and specific actions to implement the commitments made in the Paris Declaration.

After long negotiations in Accra, ministers from developed and developing countries agreed on some important steps to improve aid effectiveness. Progress made in Accra includes:

Predictability: Donors agreed to provide regular and timely information on 3-5 year expenditure and implementation plans that developing countries can integrate into their medium-term planning and macroeconomic frameworks.

Use of country systems: Donors made specific commitments to use developing countries' own systems for delivering aid and also agreed to align their monitoring of aid flows and results with country information systems to make it much easier to compare and evaluate results.

Aid transparency: Donors agreed to make aid more transparent, reinforced by the launch of the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

In addition to these measures, donors acknowledged the problem of donor "orphans" and "darlings", and also agreed to include recipient countries in existing donor review mechanisms.

For developing countries, the Accra Agenda for Action on aid effectiveness (AAA) should provide more opportunity to hold donors accountable at the country level. Donors pledged to develop plans outlining how they would pursue principles such as harmonisation and alignment, although a lack of clear delivery dates for many reforms leaves much work to be done.