The Better Aid Blog

Most people would agree that follow up to the 2008 Accra aid effectiveness high level meeting has been too slow. But there are some rays of light. The Rwandan government is acting on mutual accountability, by pressing donors there to account to make progress on certain targets they have agreed to. UK aid agency DFID has published a blog post on this, and Eurodad has responded on its blog querying DFID’s score and plans.

Martin Leach, who heads DFID’s work in Rwanda and Burundi, writes “this year it felt like the tables were turned on the donors”. How? Well at the Development Partners meeting (aidspeak for a donor/government roundtable negotiating session) “all donors were held to account by the Ministry of Finance for the promises they had made”. The ministry took a list of 18 commitments that donors had signed up to – such as delivering the money we had pledged, recording our aid in the Government budget, and giving clear indications of our future financial plans. Leach records that “Every donor’s score was put up on the screen for everyone to see, and there were some red faces round the room – the lowest score was 2/18. The UK was near the top, I’m pleased to say, but we still need to improve, as we only scored 12/18”.

I responded on our blog welcoming DFID posting this and other aid effectiveness data, but querying this figure. I looked at the Rwandan government’s donor performance assessment framework. This breaks down DFID’s score and in fact gives just DFID a score of 10 out of 18, not 12″.

Now Martin Leach, head of DFID in Rwanda, responded saying “you queried the DFID Rwanda score: I am trying to fish out the final donor scores (the chart on the web was only the draft), and will comment later”.

So much on the numbers themselves. On the more general issue of information transparency as a way to break donor dominance I commented that

“the  presentation on a Rwandan government website which sets out the scores of all donors (PDF) is certainly something which needs to be followed up and imitated by other governments. At the moment, though, you need a high tolerance for aid management acronyms to understand it. Work needs to be done to interpret such stats for the average parliamentarian, journalist or activist who wants to help monitor public spending.
Publishing, disseminating, discussing and of course acting on such data is going to be one key part of making aid more effective and getting beyond the ‘golden rule – He who owns the Gold, makes the Rules’ syndrome, cited by Martin Leach in his piece. There are now several initiatives aiming to make breakthroughs in aid transparency, notably the Publish What You Fund campaign and the official International Aid Transparency Initiative”.

On publication of data, Mr Leach responds

“I checked with my colleagues in the relevant bit of DFID and was told ‘DFID is committed to improving the transparency of information on aid flows and aid effectiveness. This is in line with our obligations under the International Development (Transparency and Reporting) Act (2006). We already report progress to the UK public and parliament every year through our annual report, performance reports, evaluations and publications such as Statistics in Development.’

In addition, I know that DFID leads the International Aid Transparency Initiative and is trying to get international agreement to common standards for sharing information by December 2009″.

No specific answer on this type of mutual accountability data (which I believe donors should make available systematically to their audiences, not rely on people to go to a corner of a Rwandan or similar recipient website to find. But this was a useful post-Accra exchange.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.