One of the debates at the first high-level meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation in Mexico City. Credit: Mexican government

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

Making international cooperation more effective requires a civil society with greater influence in the negotiations of the development agenda that the world’s governments are to adopt in 2015, civil society representatives said at an international meeting in Mexico.

The first High-Level Meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) was held Apr. 15-16 in the Mexican capital, where civil society organisations demanded that a human rights focus be incorporated in international development aid flows.

At the gathering, the GPEDC also called for international cooperation to include a more enabling environment for civil society organisations (CSOs), as well as greater transparency and better accountability.

“There are two key issues: preserving the Partnership, which is complex due to its plurality and diversity of opinions, and improving the monitoring of issues,” the executive director of Oxfam Mexico, Carlos Zarco, told IPS.

The GPEDC, which brings together over 100 governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), emerged in Busan, South Korea in November 2011 with the aim of finding novel approaches to development aid.

That aid is now flowing along new paths, such as growing South-South cooperation, with an expanding role of emerging nations as donors, and triangular cooperation, where one developing country cooperates with another, with financial support from a nation of the industrialised North.

Against that backdrop, the United Nations members are negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be adopted in 2015 to extend and expand the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed by the international community in 2000, which have only been partially met.

Three years after Busan, “There is a shrinking space for CSOs, with more restrictive policies. Governments choose which CSOs to consult with, there are limited public consultations with CSOs,” María Theresa Lauron, an activist with the Asia-Pacific Research Network, told IPS.

Lauron said there was a growing trend to restrict access to information. She also mentioned new forms of financing that limit the effectiveness of NGOs, and growing pressure on CSOs that voice criticism, to get them to align themselves with the governments of aid recipient nations.

The first high-level meeting of the GPEDC drew some 1,500 delegates of governments, academia, international agencies and civil society, who focused on issues like mobilising development aid resources at a national level, South-South and triangular cooperation, and participation by the business sector.

At the start of the meeting, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for continued strategies of oversight, transparency and accountability and efforts to fight corruption, and said a strong commitment to reducing poverty was needed – a reference to the first of the eight MDGs, which is to halve extreme poverty from 1990 levels.

CSOs complain that a portion of development aid goes to financing infrastructure works like large hydropower dams, gas pipelines and roads that violate the rights of local communities and generate conflicts in recipient nations.

The principles established in Busan call for ownership and leadership of development strategies by aid recipient countries, a focus on results that matter to the poor in developing countries, inclusive partnerships among development actors based on mutual trust, and transparency and accountability to one another.

They also emphasise the need for recipients of development aid to work together and form partnerships, to have a greater influence in designing development strategies, and to guarantee that the funds will be used effectively in projects.

The report “An enabling environment for civil society organisations: A synthesis of evidence of progress since Busan”, which was analysed at the meeting, found practices that reduce social participation in international cooperation.

It cited, for example, multiple, vaguely worded regulations; costly, complex procedures for registering organisations; vague arguments for not allowing an organisation to register; legal proceedings against activists critical of government policies; and blocked access to international financing.

“Governments decide where CSOs can work,” Vitalice Meja, executive director of Reality of Aid Africa, told IPS. “Areas such as environment, human rights and extractive industries face threats. We need to revise the punitive laws and establish a national dialogue with governments and CSOs.”

One example is Bolivia, one of the 12 countries studied in the report. The “Pilot study on Enabling Environment Bolivia” found that there were leaders of social organisations questioning the work of NGOs and their role as intermediaries in the management of resources, as well as government criticism of NGOs for supposed meddling in projects.

“The calculating position of some NGOs in response to the risk that the current government will accuse them of being traitors or of opposing the process of change, lead[s] them to silence their critical voice,” concludes the report by Susana Eróstegui of the National Union of Institutions for Social Action Work in Bolivia.

These conditions, the report says, hinder the work of NGOs in the post-2015 agenda.

For that reason, the GPEDC launched the Civil Society Continuing Campaign for Effective Development, which from now to the end of 2016 will work to assert the right of NGOs to participate in development policies.

The goal will be to establish development aid policies that are clearly influenced by civil society’s positions on human rights, democratic ownership and inclusive partnerships, and global, subregional and regional dialogue to push for international standards on an enabling environment.

During the high-level meeting, Mexico’s conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto presented an inclusive cooperation strategy, whose focus, IPS learned, would be a plan for Africa managed by the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation, seeking to emulate programmes that Brazil has carried out in Africa.

One new phenomenon is that emerging economies such as Brazil, China and South Africa are taking on different roles in the field of development aid, and are reluctant to accept the same standards as those followed by traditional donors from the industrialised North.

“There are many requirements for traditional aid, and none for emerging economies,” said Oxfam Mexico’s Zarco. “These have to accept standards” in terms of national ownership, transparency, accountability and inclusive development, he added.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) presented “Making Development Cooperation More Effective: 2014 Progress Report”, which found a slow pace of compliance with the Busan agreement and “mixed results”.

“Much more needs to be done to transform cooperation practices and ensure country ownership of all development efforts, as well as transparency and accountability among development partners,” says the report, which is based on data from 46 countries that receive development cooperation.

The report was drawn up under the auspices of the Global Partnership, which is jointly supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the OECD.

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.”

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.