Underlying all of the ambitious sectoral commitments made in 2005 was the commitment to mobilise an additional $25 billion in development assistance for Africa by 2010 and to spend this money effectively. Due to some clarifications, the total committed by the G7 is now an increase in official development assistance (ODA) from $15.8 billion in 2004 to $37.6 billion in 2010 - an increase of an additional $21.8 billion. Three years since the commitments were made, only $3 billion of the increase has been delivered by the G7 - leaving $18.8 billion still to be delivered. (In total, the OECD DAC nations committed to deliver a total of $26.1 billion in additional ODA to sub-Saharan Africa by 2010; to date, they have delivered $3.934 billion of that total.) In order to be on a straight-line trajectory to delivering the full commitment by 2010, the G7 would have needed to increase assistance by $5.88 billion between 2006 and 2007 - but with only $837 million in additional assistance in 2007, they have fallen $5.04 billion short of that target.
There is wide variation amongst donors, both in terms of the ambition of the original commitments and the progress against those commitments to date. On the whole, the EU G8 members made more ambitious commitments, but thus far have not delivered extensively. On the other hand, Canada, Japan and the US made relatively less ambitious commitments and yet are moderately closer to meeting them. In this year’s analysis, DATA used currently available budget information to estimate 2008 ODA levels from G7 donors. In total, DATA expects the G7 to increase ODA by $2.6 billion in 2008 - a much larger increase than has been made over the past few years, but still $3.8 billion short of the increase necessary to be on a steady track towards the 2010 targets. The pipeline analysis reveals that two donors - the US and the UK - have undertaken budgetary provisions that DATA estimates should allow both to at least come close to meeting their 2010 targets.
$21.8bnTotal additional ODA committed by the G8
for Africa by 2010.
The analysis also evaluates four measures of aid effectiveness using indicators agreed to by all G8 members as part of the Paris Declaration. In total, The DATA Report considers ten indicators across transparency and reporting, predictability, use of national systems and untying aid and local competitive procurement. Using these indicators, DATA has ranked countries in four groups from most effective ODA to least effective: the UK; Canada and Germany; France and Japan; Italy and the US.