Zahira Kharsany
Alignment calls for donors to support the recipient country’s national development strategies, institutions and procedures to alleviate poverty within the recipient country.
Invert the aid pyramide..!
Civil society is concerned that real political differences are “threatening our hopes of achieving the 2010 benchmarks” for aid effectiveness, Paul O’Brien, director of the Aid Effectiveness Team at Oxfam, warned participants at the round table discussion on alignment of aid yesterday.
“Alignment, which is the test of donor commitment to ownership, isn’t even a possibility unless and until donors and states agree that the core objectives of development aid is to support states and their citizens to help themselves out of poverty,” O’Brien said .
He was one of several delegates who called not only for the alignment of aid objectives between donors and recipient countries but also the need to look beyond national alignment to local and regional government alignment. Alignment calls for donors to support the recipient country’s national development strategies, institutions and procedures to alleviate poverty within the recipient country.
“Genuine alignment means challenging developing countries to achieve real outcomes for the poor, not micro-managing them on how to get there; yet we hear that donors like the World Bank still believe in policy conditionality,” said O’Brien.
Maaten Brouwer, director of the effectiveness and quality department at the ministry of foreign affairs in Netherlands asked “how do we cope with the issues of alignment?”
The roundtable touched on various issues including aligning policies and objectives; whether conditionality was compatible with alignment; the role of partner countries in facilitating alignment; and, what type of aid predictability was most needed.
“We need performance based partnerships and need to build credible dialogue with transparency with donors and recipients,” said Brouwer, adding: “We must organise dialogue and invest in data collection.”
Progress in such transparency has been negligible and participants heard that in many cases, improvement in partner countries’ public finance systems has not been matched by donor alignment. In many instances, partner countries were hampered by having to prepare too many reports for donors.
Speaking to IPS after the meeting, O’Brien said that Mongolia was one of the countries which had suffered: “They have improved their systems for the management of aid but there is still no aid to the country. They are just one of the countries which have not seen donors fulfill their obligations. Even when recipient countries have measurably improved their PFM [Public Financial Management] and procurement mechanisms, donors are not sending any signals that the progress matters by actually using those systems. ”
Recommendations included suggestions that donors need to change their incentives and policies, as well as having partners and donors working on a joint agenda. Delegates also called for partner countries to submit concrete programmes but noted that the aid objectives of partner countries should be left to the recipient country.
They all agreed that the opinion of the local authority was to be taken into account as decentralised cooperation added value to the development effort.
“For every failed indicator on alignment, the cost is paid not by donors or by CSOs, but by the people waiting for their governments to provide education, health care and the chance to lift themselves out of poverty,” said O’Brien.
