Aid Effectiveness
The quality of development assistance is just as important as the quantity of resources provided.
The Challenge
For development assistance to achieve its full impact, it should be transparent, predictable and delivered in partnership with recipient countries. There have been some improvements in the way donors deliver and recipient countries process and manage development assistance in recent years, but progress needs to be accelerated.
First, donor and recipient countries need to account to their parliaments and citizens for how external and domestic resources are used for development. This will allow donors and recipient countries to hold each other mutually accountable for improving aid quality. Secondly, for better management of external and domestic resources, further improving recipient country systems to encourage their use by donors is important. Strengthening these systems requires the efforts of both donors and recipient countries. Finally, the transaction costs of providing development assistance must be reduced. Managing aid is expensive for donors and recipient countries and will only get more expensive as aid volumes increase. When donors utilize similar approaches for delivering development assistance and use country systems, transaction costs can be reduced and the impact of aid is increased.
The Opportunity
Development assistance has facilitated tremendous results over the past decade, proving that it can work, especially when donors and recipient countries each do their part to improve the quality of resources provided for development. However, more must be done to stretch precious development assistance dollars even further. In 2005, more than 150 countries, multilateral organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) agreed to a common set of principles to guide the provision of development assistance to poor countries. By signing the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005, signatories agreed to monitor their progress in improving the quality of aid provided against specific indicators, most of which have targets for 2010. At the Gleneagles G8 Summit, the G8 committed to 'implement and be monitored on all commitments we made in the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness, including enhancing efforts to untie aid; disbursing aid in a timely and predictable fashion, through partner country systems where possible'. In September 2008 these commitments were reiterated and reinforced at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held in Accra, Ghana.
Learn more, read the full Aid Effectiveness Issue Brief...
Related Campaigns
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Accra: Improve Aid Quality
August - September, 2008
ONE members from around the world sent tens of thousands of letters and made hundreds of phone calls to Development Ministers in donor countries, calling for increased aid effectiveness. The Ministers responded with a new level of commitment to providing more predictable and transparent aid. More
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Related Press Releases
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ONE welcomes the OECD’s review of EU development assistance while Council negotiations on the post-2013 budget gain momentum
Anti-poverty group ONE today welcomed the OECD’s assessment that European Union development assistance has improved, but stressed that more must be done to ensure it is as effective as possible. More
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Aid figures reveal worrying trend
Responding to the publication of the OECD’s figures on overseas aid today, Adrian Lovett, Europe Executive Director of ONE, said: “Alarm bells should be ringing across Europe following the confirmation that 12 EU countries have cut overseas aid in the wake of the global economic crisis. More
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ONE response to Lords' report on overseas aid
In response to the Lords' report "The Economic Impact and Effectiveness of Development Aid" in which the House of Lords Economic Affairs Select Committee recommended scrapping the 0.7% target, Adrian Lovett, Europe Director of anti-poverty campaign ONE, said: “The Lords committee has chosen to ignore the evidence of the impact UK aid will have. If we maintain our commitment to the 0.7% aid target, as the Chancellor and Prime Minister have promised to do, British aid will provide over 80 million children with vaccines against life-threatening diseases, saving an estimated 1.4 million lives." More
Quick Facts
Untied aid is 30% more effective
than tied aid, which is a development assistance package including goods or services that must be procured from a certain donor country or group of donors.
150 countries signed
on to the Paris Declaration, a set of principles to ensure development assistance achieves its maximum impact.
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