Development & Aid, Headlines, North America

CANADA: NGOs Query New Focus on Bilateral Aid

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Dec 19 2003 (IPS) - Canadian NGOs and civil society groups are applauding the non-paternalistic tenor of the federal government’s latest aid policy, but raising an alarm about its emphasis on government-to-government funding.

Until now, Ottawa’s Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has bypassed governments in the South to provide direct funding to Canadian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), like Oxfam Canada, in projects that involve local NGO partners in developing countries.

“CIDA was one of the forerunner donor agencies internationally with respect to the idea that you need to work with civil society organisations and can do extraordinary and innovative things,” says Gerry Barr, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC), a coalition of about 100 groups working to end global poverty.

Civil society projects are now an accepted means of building citizen participation in developing countries.

But CIDA’s commitment is shifting, according to Barr. The agency’s financial support for NGO and university-sponsored projects has dropped by about 12 per cent since 1999.

At the same time, he adds, CIDA “is providing aid directly to national governments, who in turn are expected to roll out national programmes of development.”

At the core of CIDA’s new aid policy, says senior analyst Andrew Clark, is the concept of putting the South in ‘the driver’s seat’.

Under the principle of “country ownership”, and with an aim to reduce poverty, adds Clark, developing countries under the new policy “have a greater say in how these resources are allocated”.

“At the end of the day you want your aid dollars to be effective,” says Clark, who helped draft CIDA’s ‘Strengthening Aid Effectiveness’ policy document.

CIDA expects that southern governments receiving its bilateral aid will consider their country’s NGOs when allocating funds domestically, adds Clark. “The priorities that these countries were setting for themselves were as a result of consultation with their own civil societies.”

Both Barr and Joan Summers, a manager of programmes at Oxfam Canada, say they support CIDA’s aid effectiveness policy in the broadest sense.

At the same time, says Summers, that policy ignores the reality of tension between southern governments and their critics in independent civil society organisations.

“Where a strong civil society is often seen as a political threat, it is not always in the interest of (political leaders in the South) to support voices that might be asking for accountability or asking questions of its government that are not necessarily in agreement with that government,” says Summers.

Barr goes further, calling CIDA’s approach, “rather naïve and problematic”.

In the context of tough resource competition in the least developed and poorest countries of the world, “presidents and prime ministers have an imperative need for resources that are available to them (and) they are very unlikely to willingly part with those resources”.

Clark says that nothing in CIDA’s aid effectiveness policy indicates that more aid money will be allocated by government-to-government channels and that less will be available via NGOs. “This document purposely didn’t discuss budgetary allocations.”

The CIDA official also confirms the agency’s bilateral programmes will focus on nine least developed countries, the majority of them in Africa. NGOs that are sponsoring aid projects can still apply for funding through a separate Canadian partnership branch at CIDA, he adds.

Nevertheless, NGOs say they are apprehensive after it took about a year for CIDA to decide to fund a second stage of Oxfam Canada’s series of civil society projects in the Horn of Africa. After five years, the project’s first stage is slated to end in March 2004.

The Horn of Africa projects have been hailed within CIDA “in terms of building a model for effective civil society participation”, says Summers.

But their future was reportedly unclear because only one Horn of Africa country, Ethiopia, is included in CIDA’s list of nine nations.

Oxfam Canada was prepared to wind down the projects and lay off staff in Canada and in the Horn, which would have left local African NGOs to fend for themselves, says Summers.