Concern Rises Over Aid Conference 'Flimflam'

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

A forthcoming international conference on improving aid effectiveness that looked as though it would be ignored as just another meeting on development is suddenly beginning to hot up.

The Accra Action Agenda (AAA) the basic document for the September conference in Ghana was dismissed by a specialist on aid delivery last Friday as "flimflam".

She told a meeting organised in London by the independent UK think-thank the Overseas Development Institute, "I remember reading the AAA and feeling depressed about the world!"

A raft of other criticisms included an attack by a staff member of Britains Department for International Development (DfID), who commented: "I find the complacency in the aid community shocking."

The attacks were the fourth recent indication that controversy of building ahead of the Accra aid review conference:

The Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief complained that 40 per cent of aid in Afghanistan returns to rich countries in corporate profits and consultant costs (see: Afghan Aid Misdirected, Report Warns, OneWorld news, 25 March)

The European Network on Debt and Development made a series of criticisms about aid (see: Patchy progress in improving aid, OneWorld News, 28 March)

On the day of the London meeting, the OECD (the grouping of industrialised countries) issued figures showing that financial assistance to developing countries had fallen for the second consecutive year (see Aid falls for a second year, OneWorld News, 4 April).

The job of the Accra conference is to discuss progress on the 2005 Paris Declaration, which set out a series of measures by both donors and recipients designed to make aid more effective. But many participants at the Overseas Development Institute meeting doubted that any concrete progress had been made at all.

In a background note for the meeting, the Institute's Nick Highton said

* aid continued to be unpredictable, causing enormous headaches for recipient countries

* attempts to improve technical assistance were proving far harder than expected

* lack of coordination by donors was continuing to caused major problems, and results from a European Union code of conduct to reduce confusion were "discouraging".

Traditional aid donors seemed unwilling to make the changes needed to reduce duplication of effort, he said. In addition, their spending was being overtaken by aid from new donors a group that includes 29 developing countries and private organisations: WorldVision alone spent $2 billion in 2006.

This proliferation, said Highton, "has prompted calls for a radical overhaul of the international aid architecture".

Another senior academic listed reasons why progress on the Paris Declaration has not been impressive and will continue to be difficult. He said aid predictability had worsened since Paris and technical cooperation had increased, although the effectiveness of technical assistance had not been proved; donors still believed they had most of the answers, continued to distrust developing country governments and were failing to untie aid.

Recipient governments, he said, were often more interested in maximising aid flows than in increasing aid effectiveness and rather than turn down aid sometimes accepted it even when they knew it was appropriate.

And he asked, Does the rest of the world hear us? in many countries, the US, France, Italy, nobody is talking about aid effectiveness. Theyll all sign whatever comes out of the Accra conference but theres a lack of political commitment that will trickle down and make an impact.

As the debate continued, dissatisfaction with the Paris process became more vociferous. Sarah Mulley of the UK Aid Network considered that the indicators and targets set at the Paris meeting were very limited. Matthew Martin of Debt Relief International commented: Frankly, developing countries had almost no input into the Paris Declaration. The Paris Declaration text on technical assistance was ridiculous and undefined, he said.

Its a minimum. Its a good place to start, but thats all it is, said Alison Evans, director of programmes for poverty and public policy at ODI. She called for robust criticism to ensure that agreement at the Accra meeting was more than simply incremental change.

She named the key factor as aid predictability: "Over and above anything else we should commit to predictability."

On technical assistance, she said we are re-stating the problem endlessly, and have been for years: she urged developing countries to take leadership, speak up and say what they needed.

She was supported by a DfID official, who said there needed to be a shift in the balance of power towards recipient countries in the aid system.

Tactically, the meeting came down to a difference of approach between those who think that, in the words of a participant, "Accra could be useful, but the process needs support", and those like Mulley who commented, "I'm not interested in getting a text [in the Accra conference] everyone will sign up to. Lets decide as a group to move ahead, and never mind the US and others."

In the end, Accra will offer the same choice as the Bali climate change summit last December and virtually every other international decision-making meeting: do you go for slow, incremental change to which everyone can subscribe, believing its all that can be achieved in an imperfect, imbalanced world, or do you persuade a group of like-minded governments to agree more far-reaching measures in the hope of setingt an example that others will follow.

That dilemma will be the basis of the negotiations at the Accra conference. The outcome will almost certainly be agreement to travel as fast as the slowest ship, with one or two small giveaways to keep the would-be faster travellers in the fleet.

* Paris Declaration

* Steering Committee for the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness

* ODI