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DEVELOPMENT: Aid Fragmentation Worse Despite Paris Declaration

Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Mar 10 2009 (IPS) - Civil society representatives agree with the recent finding of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that fragmentation of international cooperation has increased instead of diminished, in direct contradiction to the so-called Paris Declaration where over 100 countries called for effective dispensing of aid.

In its Development Co-operation Report (DCR) for 2009, released on Feb 19, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) concludes that the ever-growing number of donors and aid agencies and mechanisms across the world is making ‘‘aid increasingly fragmented and reducing its effectiveness’’.

As a result, the DCR 2009 says, ‘‘the international development effort now adds up to less than the sum of its parts’’. The DAC, a forum for major bilateral aid donors, is the principal body through which the OECD deals with issues related to cooperation with developing countries. The forum releases a DCR once a year.

The DCR defines fragmentation of international development cooperation as aid ‘‘that comes in too many small slices from too many donors, creating high transaction costs and making it difficult for partner countries to effectively manage their own development’’.

African countries with between 24 and 30 active donors are the following: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Zambia, Lesotho and South Africa.

Countries where between 15 and 23 donors account for less than 10 percent of the country’s aid are: South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, the DRC, Cameroon, Egypt, Tunisia and Senegal.

In an interview with IPS, Barbara Unmuessig, a member of the directorate at Germany’s Heinrich Boell Foundation and former counsellor at the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development, concurred with the DCR findings.

The Heinrich Boell Foundation, which is affiliated with Germany’s Green Party, describes itself as an ‘‘(environmental) think tank and an international policy network’’ which main tenets are ‘‘ecology and sustainability, democracy and human rights, self-determination and justice’’.

According to Unmuessig, ‘‘during the last two years alone, more than 14 new bilateral and multilateral international mechanisms for the financing of environmental development policy have been created, making coherence and complementarity of international cooperation even more difficult.’’

Unmuessig complained that practically every single international organisation participating in development cooperation creates ever new instruments. ‘‘For developing countries, it is extremely difficult to cope with this endless flow of new agencies and mechanisms,’’ she added.

‘‘This growing fragmentation of aid demands more competent personnel and institutions in developing countries, represents an insurmountable challenge, and erodes the effectiveness of cooperation,’’ Unmuessig claimed.

Fragmentation of aid compels government officials, doctors, teachers and aid workers in developing countries to spend much of their time filling in reports or being bogged down in meetings with donor governments and agencies or accompanying monitoring missions.

Aid fragmentation can also create overlap and wasted effort among donors, with some working in sectors where they have less expertise.

As an example of the fragmentation of aid, Unmuessig described the disjointed management of German cooperation policies by saying: ‘‘The ministry for international cooperation coordinates less than 40 percent of all German development aid,’’ she pointed out.

‘‘The rest is managed by different ministries and even by regional agencies, thus opening the door to all forms of administrative jealousies, contradictory interests and even local irresponsibility.’’

That this anarchic management hinders a strategic view of aid goes without saying.

The evidence that the fragmentation of aid has become worse since 2005 is overwhelming. According to the first full ‘‘survey on aid allocation policies and indicative forward spending plans’’ carried out by the DAC, ‘‘aid is often spread thin’’.

In total, 15 of the DAC members that replied to the survey have an aid concentration of less than 50 percent, meaning that a large part of their assistance is distributed among a relatively high number of developing countries.

For developing countries, this means dealing with a high number of donors giving sometimes relatively small amounts of money – and more bureaucracy just to keep track of them.

Some critique of present development aid goes beyond the mere reference to its fragmentation and ineffectiveness. Some aspects of the Paris declaration are seen as ‘‘neoliberal concepts’’.

For Jens Martens, executive director of the Global Policy Forums Europe, which monitors policy making at the UN and advocates for accountability of global decisions, ‘‘the indicators that the Paris declaration set out to measure the improvement of effectiveness of aid are clearly of neoliberal inspiration’’.

This is particularly true for the objectives and indicators of public financial and purchasing management, Martens told IPS. ‘‘In these areas, the Paris declaration uses criteria that are clearly addressed at promoting the further liberalisation of trade and privatisation of public services in developing countries,’’ he warned.

Mertens said that the promotion of development in the countries of the South must not be dependent on international aid.

‘‘Instead, South-South cooperation either through new donors, such as the People’s Republic of China, or new regional financial institutions, such as the Banco del Sur in South America, and the drastic increase of public income in developing countries through coherent, progressive fiscal reforms can be powerful tools for development,” Mertens said.

In the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, signed on March 2, 2005, delegates from over 100 developed and developing countries ‘‘resolve(d) to take far-reaching and monitorable actions to reform the ways’’ in which international aid is delivered and managed.

The declaration established that ‘‘while the volumes of aid and other development resources must increase to achieve the (United Nations Millennium Development) goals, aid effectiveness must increase significantly as well to support partner country efforts to strengthen governance and improve development performance’’.

This will be all the more important if existing and new bilateral and multilateral initiatives lead to significant further increases in aid, the declaration added. It also set 2010 as the deadline to meeting the effectiveness targets.

At that time, the OECD praised the Paris Declaration as being ‘‘more than a statement of general principles. (It) lays down a practical, action-orientated roadmap to improve the quality of aid and its impact on development,’’ the OECD said.

The organisation, which represents rich countries, referred in a communiqué to the ‘‘56 partnership commitments… organised around the five key principles: ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results, and mutual accountability’’.

Four years on, not only the OECD finds that aid has become more fragmented, and thus less effective but the DAC plainly says that the world is not on course to meet the 2010 targets of the Paris Declaration.