In early September I blogged on the upcoming Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (More Effective and Efficient Aid - A Realistic Goal?) in Accra, Ghana, September 2-4. The goals for the forum were to review progress relative to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, adopted at the 2005 High Level Forum, and to adopt measures designed to bring about quicker and more complete compliance. The dust has now settled and it’s possible to take a measure of how closely the assembled dignitaries in Accra came to achieving those goals.
The Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) is the statement approved by the assembled ministers of both developing and developed countries, committing themselves to accelerate and deepen the implementation of the Paris Declaration. There are some positive features:
- Donors agreed to strengthen and use developing country systems “to the maximum extent possible,” with commitments to provide 66 percent of aid in the form of program-based disbursements, and to channel 50 percent or more of government-to-government assistance through recipient country systems;
- Donors agreed to reduce the fragmentation of aid, with a commitment to start a dialogue on international division of labor across countries by June 2009;
- Donors agreed to deepen their engagement with civil society organizations;
- Donors agreed to increase the medium-term predictability of aid, and to make amounts and implementation procedures more transparent.
For their part, developing country governments agreed to take on stronger leadership of their own development policies, to broaden country-level dialogue on development and to strengthen their own leadership and management capacity. So far, so good.
But agreements are one thing – action is another. Political realities and bureaucratic inertia make achieving desirable goals like reducing fragmentation and making greater use of country systems highly problematic – especially in the absence of concrete targets. The 50 percent commitment on use of government systems is only in the aggregate – it doesn’t commit individual donor countries to anything. And, discouragingly, the forum made no real progress on “untying” aid. Donors did agree to “elaborate individual plans to untie their aid to the maximum extent,” but with no further specificity. The U.S. Government, in particular, pushed back against efforts to reduce tied aid, blocking any mention, for example, of the words “food aid” (all of which is tied).
Still, the general consensus is that Accra did constitute a step forward and that the U.S. representatives were more “forward-leaning” than many had expected. It now remains to be seen how this apparent increased willingness on the part of the U.S. to consider collaborative approaches translates into action.
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