Demanding a right to health at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan in 2011. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Apr 1 2014 (IPS)

Major foreign assistance donors have once again delayed the release of a report meant to measure transparency, accountability and cooperation of aid effectiveness.

The repeated delay of the voluntary U.N.-guided report, which was originally slated for release in January but was bumped for at least a second time last week, has prompted some aid groups to question donor countries’ commitment to aid transparency. The report would be the first of its kind."If your donors aren’t going to disclose where they’re going to build, how does a farmer know to grow a crop for export or for domestic consumption?” -- Gregory Adams

“If you don’t let state business leaders know where you’re going to build a new road then business owners can’t plan their investment,” Gregory Adams, the director of aid effectiveness at Oxfam America, an anti-poverty group, told IPS.

“We see this play out in the development sphere. If your donors aren’t going to disclose where they’re going to build, how does a farmer know to grow a crop for export or for domestic consumption?”

The push for this novel report emerged in 2011, when government officials, industry representatives and civil society members met in Busan, South Korea, at a conference hosted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of wealthy countries.

The conference spurred donor governments, along with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the create a new body, the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC), which emphasises the “ownership” of aid recipients over development strategies alongside strengthened transparency and accountability for aid programming.

The global monitoring framework on aid effectiveness would assess and track progress on the agreements made in Busan, and was slated for release in early 2014, but it has been postponed several times.

The Busan principles call for the ownership of development projects by developing countries themselves, a results-oriented approach, inclusive partnerships with aid beneficiaries, and mutual accountability and transparency. They emphasise collaboration and partnerships with aid beneficiaries to give them a greater input into the design of development strategies while allowing them to ensure that aid money is used on actual, effective development projects.

“It’s a fundamental question of who drives development. At Oxfam, we believe that … aid doesn’t cause development, people cause development,” Adams said.

“Aid no more cures poverty than a shovel digs a ditch or a hammer builds a house. You actually need people who drive that, and if you deny people who drive your development basic information about what you’re doing, you’re not only missing opportunities but also frustrating the people you’re trying to help lead their own development.”

The report was originally slated for release before an upcoming GPEDC meeting on Apr. 15 in Mexico City, so that donors could assess progress made on the Busan agreement while developing new strategies for their implementation.

While it is unclear why the report’s public release has been repeatedly delayed, some analysts see a political motive. It appears the report’s findings will highlight the lack of progress made in implementing the Busan reforms.

Little progress

Oxfam and other watchdog groups have raised concerns regarding the report’s delay and, more generally, the implementation of the Busan principles from both developed and developing countries.

“The early findings of the GDEPC monitoring evidence show that overall little progress has been made, though they are being sold as ‘glass half full’,” Oxfam America wrote last week in a blog post. “For a number of indicators, it is too early to tell.”

“But of particular concern are the indicators that measure aspects of country ownership … Unlike previous reporting on aid effectiveness, data on how individual governments have performed will not be made available in the full monitoring report, with the exception of the transparency indicator.”

Hannah Ryder, a team leader at the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), also notes that while the report measures 10 indicators, the individual success of each country is only ranked on one indicator – transparency. She says this is purely for political reasons, suggesting that some donors are unwilling to publicly disclose their performance on most indicators.

“UNDP and OECD are organisations that are not independent of the countries and organisations submitting the data,” Ryder wrote last week in a DFID blog entry. “And this is why ranking is too political for them.”

Ryder continued: “The key reason why transparency is able to be ranked in the report is that there is already an independently published report on transparency that has become well-known and well-respected … But for the other nine indicators and issues raised in [the] forthcoming report, no such credible, independent rankings exist yet.”

She refers to the Aid Transparency Index, published by the global watchdog group Publish What You Fund. The index also relies on a reporting framework that stems from the commitments donors made during the Busan conference.

While Oxfam’s Adams said that transparency and aid disclosure is a relatively new concept for development organisations, he stressed its importance.

“When that data is out there, it permits people to do two things,” he said. “One, they can think in a more sophisticated way about how they themselves can invest to best take advantage of these development investments. And secondly, it allows them to demand accountability for what’s being promised.”

Adams pointed to Malawi, where donor transparency in recent years has yielded tangible medical benefits for local communities.

“Additional information on where pharmaceuticals were being distributed allowed communities to better understand where those pharmaceuticals were stocked,” he said. “So it meant service delivery was able to improve.”

The increased emphasis on funding transparency and an inclusive, results-driven approach to aid comes at a time when all donor countries, including the United States, are undergoing tightened fiscal constraints.

“I think [monitoring and evaluation] has been bubbling around for a while now, but over the last two years it’s really coalesced into this specific focus as we’ve seen downward pressures on the budget,” Casey Dunning, a senior policy analyst at the Centre for Global Development, a think tank here, told IPS.

“I think it can be directly tied to budget austerity and the shift away from new programming. The emphasis has shifted to how we are using our resources and how we are making the most of what we actually have.”

The United States’ main foreign assistance agency is getting widespread plaudits for new data on a series of internal reforms aimed at aid improvement, but some development experts are pointing to a persistent opaqueness from the agency.

In a first-of-its-kind report released this week, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has laid out the progress it has made under a key reform initiative undertaken over the past three years.

“This report does provide a nice, concise summary with policy descriptions and challenges, but it could go further in its attempt to be transparent,” Sarah Rose, a senior policy analyst on the Rethinking Foreign Assistance team at the Center for Global Development (CGD), told IPS.

The report focuses heavily on new evaluation policies aimed at increasing accountability and country ownership, incorporating new technologies (“from improved seeds to mobile phones”) and leveraging “high impact” partnerships, specifically with the private sector.

In the past, USAID has been widely criticised for a lack of transparency. While the agency is currently in the midst of a massive overhaul of related policies, just this past October an advocacy group called Publish What You Fund ranked USAID just 27th out of 43 foreign aid agencies, in terms of transparency.

To address such criticisms, in 2010 President Barack Obama unveiled a policy directive that spurred the new round of reforms. At the forefront of its objectives were the development of “robust … budget and evaluation capabilities”, progress toward which the new report outlines.

For instance, a new policy has been introduced that requires every major U.S. aid project to undergo a rigorous evaluation conducted by an independent third party. The report touts that this new policy has already been called “a model for other federal agencies” by the American Evaluation Association, a professional association for evaluators, and that it has led to budgetary changes in a third of the cases examined.

Some aid organisations have also expressed enthusiasm about increasingly collaborative partnerships between the United States and recipient countries, a break from the old structure in which the host countries were seen as less active participants in project design.

“The progress demonstrated in the report, especially on promoting sustainable development through high-impact partnerships, demonstrates a commitment to ensuring that people are the leaders of their own development,” Gregory Adams, Oxfam America’s director of aid effectiveness, said in a release.

They point particularly to the development of Country Development Cooperation Strategies (CDCS), five-year plans drafted collaboratively by the United States and recipient countries that identify the needs of partner countries and detail specific paths forward. CDCSs ostensibly give host countries more of a stake in USAID development projects.

The new report finds that the percentage of USAID funds allotted to local institutions grew from 9.7 in 2010 to 14.3 in 2013. That puts the agency at the halfway mark of a five-year goal of 30 percent by 2015.

Transparency concerns

Still, many see room for improvement in USAID’s partnership strategies.

“USAID has done a good job refurbishing its human capacity and bringing on additional people,” George Ingram, the co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Aid Assistance Network (MFAN), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“But it needs to do a better job providing its employees with training and advanced managerial skills to help them keep abreast of new developments.”

Transparency and accountability concerns are also central. Although the report outlines a 50-percent increase in local partnerships by USAID, it lacks detail about what local institutions were partnering with USAID.

“There are a number of stakeholders who want to know exactly what those local partnerships are,” CGD’s Rose told IPS. “Doing so would allow stakeholders to do their own analyses.”

Similarly, although the paper reported that USAID had increased its public-private partnerships by 40 percent over the past three years and leveraged an additional 383 million dollars of non-U.S. government money toward development goals, the report made little mention of the companies or projects involved in those partnerships.

For some, the greatest threat to increased transparency could be a greater reliance on private-sector funds in development assistance. This has been at the core of a decade-long shift in USAID projects, and now looks set to continue to increase.

“In a world where foreign direct investment flows vastly outpace development assistance,” the report states, “we have to enable global investment and local private sector entrepreneurs to serve as engines of sustainable growth for even the most vulnerable communities.”

MFAN’s Ingram says that public-private sector initiatives can indeed be complementary in supporting economic growth in host countries.

“To some extent, government organisations are good at formulating plans about what needs to be done,” he says. “But the private sector knows how to get those things done – on the ground, in the marketplace, for their clients.”

But Ingram also notes looming barriers to public-private cooperation, highlighting the possible obstacles to transparency that a strengthened public-private partnership would imply. There is a degree of “public trust”, he says, to which government agencies are beholden by virtue of operating on taxpayer funds.

“In honouring and respecting that public trust, [government agencies] end up developing a lot of rules and regulations to make sure that the way they conduct business is open to public scrutiny,” he says. “In the end, there has to be some balance between the rules and responsibilities that come with public funds, and the private sector that isn’t used to that.”

Indeed, the private sector’s inclination toward efficiency and profit at the expense of oversight and accountability is precisely what concerns many development advocacy groups here in Washington.

In a conversation with IPS earlier this month, Janet Redman, director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, expressed concern about public-private aid collaboration blurring the line between two very different measures of progress.

“The danger lies in pretending gross domestic product and foreign direct investment are the same thing as making economies more sustainable and enabling them to meet the needs of their citizens,” she said.

Demanding a right to health at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 2 2012 (IPS)

As a major international deadline on foreign assistance transparency draws closer, a new index shows that while donors are becoming more open with their data, still less than half of foreign aid information is openly available.

“Progress is being met, things are getting better, but that progress is modest,” David Hall-Matthews, the managing director of Publish What You Fund, a global initiative advocating for aid transparency, said in unveiling the organisation’s Aid Transparency Index 2012 here in Washington on Monday.

Nearly two-thirds of the organisations that Publish What You Fund surveyed both last year and this year showed improvement, with the average score across all donors going up from 34 percent to 41 percent transparency.

“Although progress is being made, 41 percent is a long way short of good practice – it’s not quite a pass mark, and most aid information is still not public and not being published in compatible format,” Hall-Matthews warned.

“The number of organisations that fall into the ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ category is smaller than last year, but those still contain nearly half of all organisations that we sampled, including some of the world’s largest donors.”

The index, which tracks 43 transparency metrics, is still a new initiative, having begun only last year, in collaboration with the One Campaign, an anti-poverty advocacy group. This year’s undertaking was expanded to 72 donors, including six separate agencies within the U.S. government as well as the first-time publication of an aid transparency report card devoted specifically to the U.S. government, the world’s largest donor.

For the first time, the index awarded a “good” score to two organisations, the World Bank and the U.K.’s aid agency, DFID, meaning that they scored at 80 percent or higher.

Others in the top 10 include the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme; the aid agencies of the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden; and the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation, a specialised agency that deals only with certain countries deemed highly accountable.

At the other end of the spectrum is China, Hungary, Cyprus, UNICEF (the U.N.’s children’s agency) and, a bit further up, the U.S. Defence Department. The very last place went to Malta, which somehow scored a zero on the index’s transparency metrics.

Overall, multilateral, international agencies fare generally better than national governments on the index, while European groups are also seen as stronger on transparency than are U.S. counterparts (though with notable exceptions for Germany and France).

“Looking at the index, we’re doing only pretty good,” Paul O’Brien, with Oxfam America, an aid agency, says. “If we have another food crisis like we had in 2008, we’re going to have tens of millions drop back into poverty. Many of us in the development field really hear the clock ticking: we’re going to spend a trillion dollars in aid over the next 10 years, and we’ve got to get it right.”

The index itself was launched last year at a high-level U.N. meeting on aid efficiency in Busan, South Korea. There, foreign aid agencies from around the world, including the U.S., agreed not only to begin publishing their aid information but also to do so under a common international standard, known as the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).

According to the index’s rankings, the top 16 countries and agencies are all signatories of IATI. At Busan, there was also agreement on a timeline for this new push for transparency, with full compliance with the new standard by the end of 2015.

“It’s now time for decisive implementation of IATI,” Hall-Matthews said Monday. “Donors should publish ambitious implementation schedules by the end of this year, and then they should start publishing as soon as possible – and certainly by next year. If they don’t do that, it will be impossible to deliver on the Busan commitment of full implementation of IATI by the end of 2015.”

Politics, power, information

The aims of increased aid transparency are multiple, with proponents pointing to significant benefits all along the spectrum from donors to recipients.

“At the end of the day, what we’ve learned is that effective development that actually leads to sustainable outcomes isn’t about (development experts) at all; it’s about institutions on the ground functioning effectively, working with each other,” Oxfam’s O’Brien says.

“And that’s about politics and power more than anything else. The way you transfer power is having the right kinds of information presented in the right way to change the power dynamic.”

He continues: “So why is it the Europeans are doing better than the U.S. in transparency? They didn’t come to transparency as an incidental consequence of trying to improve quality; they came to it as a reason for being.”

The focus on transparency also helps donors to coordinate among themselves.

“If you respect your partners, then you have a website that they can go to, where they can point and click on any country around the world and see what you’re doing,” Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator for the U.S.’s central aid agency, USAID, says.

He notes that the U.S. government is about halfway to that point right now, currently in the midst of building a massive, first-of-its-kind database that collates the roughly 30 billion dollars a year that the United States spends on official foreign assistance. Just last week, the U.S. government released a major directive offering guidance on how exactly it would be bringing itself into full compliance with IATI.

“We’ve already seen tremendous benefit from this,” Steinberg says. “We saw it in the Horn of Africa with the famine situation, where our partners were able to identify where we were doing business and where we weren’t doing business … (offering) additional information on what we should be doing in that space.”

Steinberg and others have also suggested that the aid transparency initiative might already be falling behind the times in its sole focus on major multilateral and bilateral donors. While 50 years ago, development assistance represented 85 percent of the flow of capital to developing countries, today that figure is only around 15 percent, including around a trillion dollars in private-sector investment.

Hillary Clinton at Busan Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
BUSAN, South Korea, Nov 30 2011 (IPS)

Women toil in the fields for most of their lives producing food and strengthening the largely agricultural economy of African countries, but when their fathers, husbands or older sons die, they are no longer welcome on land they may have tended for years.

This observation was made by Hillary Rodham Clinton, United States secretary of state, at a special session on the status of women at the ongoing Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in thi sSouth Korean port city.

Some 2,500 delegates, including members of ministerial teams from 160 countries, civil society leaders, experts from multilateral organisations and academics are attending the HLF4 to discuss international principles and rules to improve development co-operation.

Many agreed with Clinton’s observation that created a strong image of the status of women in Africa and Asia who earn their livelihoods from natural resources.

“Many years ago I travelled to Africa and everywhere I went there were women working in the fields, gathering firewood and in market stalls, and so I asked an economic analyst, how do you account for these contributions by women? And, he said that they didn’t. Because it wasn’t in the formal sector.

“If these women could stop working, even for a day, that would have a huge impact on the economy.”

The situation has not changed significantly for many women in Africa and Asia.

“Women still account for at least 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living in abject poverty. Women work two-thirds of world working hours, produce at least half of the food. Yet, they only earn a paltry 10 percent of world income and own a negligible one percent of world property,” said Michelle Bachelet, executive director of U.N. Women, an entity concerned with gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Despite statistics showing that countries that engage women and recognise their contribution achieve greater growth, many African countries are only too willing to offer lip service to the course of gender equality to improve their image at global conferences such as in Busan.

Said Bachelet: “We are saying that this is the time to move from speech line to budget line.”

“I can sense the same frustration in Bachelet’s voice as she made a case for gender equality. The same frustration that I feel. I ask myself, how much longer do we have to make this case?” Clinton said.

Clinton said this is in spite of the fact that credible sources such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have shown that the gross domestic product and per capita income could be higher if women were recognised and integrated into development.

From Clinton’s passionate plea for more commitment to gender equality in relation to better implementation of aid, she made it clear that discriminating against women hurts the economy.

“In Asia, statistics show that the economy loses about 89 billion dollars every year because of discriminating against women within the labour force. Sadly, this is a region with countries working hard to emerge as leading economies,” Bachelet said.

Leading champions of gender equality said women are empowered when they are given an opportunity to go to school, their children are better fed and they too stand a better chance of accessing a good education.

A majority of women remain poor with few opportunities to access work that is remunerated, little or no money and little chance to give their children a decent meal. During the recent drought in the Horn of Africa, U.N. statistics showed that of the four million people on the brink of death, two million were children.

But this could change. The Busan forum, that ends Thursday, can take this chance to redeem itself with a new and practical solution towards improving the lives of millions of women.

What is measured gets noticed, Clinton said. “We are now working on developing data on whose basis gender status can be improved. Today, I am pleased to announce a new initiative, the Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE).

“EDGE is a new initiative to improve the availability and use of statistics that capture gender gaps in economic activity. It capitalises on the United States’ call to action at the May 2011 OECD ministerial session on gender and development and builds on recommendations of the U.N. International Agency and Expert Group on Gender and Statistics.”

Often, Clinton said, loans are given to small business enterprises without assessing how many of these are owned or run by women. “Consequently, she said, “women continue to face difficulties in accessing credit.

“In many countries, a man and a woman can go to the same lender for credit and even have similar collateral, but a woman will be treated differently. We can reform credit policies that discriminate and disadvantage women.”

Clinton lauded the Busan forum saying that it created an opportunity for new initiatives and partnerships critical to advancing the struggle for gender equality and the empowerment of women.