What has been achieved?
Much has been achieved since 2003:

• The amount of aid delivered has passed the USD 75 billion mark, reaching USD 77.8 billion (in 2002 dollars) in 2006 (although close to USD 7 billion of this went to Iraq).
• The proportion of aid going to the poorest countries has risen significantly, from 40% in 2003 to 46% in 2006 for bilateral aid, and from 47% to 49% including multilateral aid.
• A higher proportion of aid is now untied, in other words, is not restricted to purchasing services from the country supplying the aid.
• Aid-recipient countries are gaining greater independence by increasing their expenditure on public services, such as health and education, and raising their revenues.

Where have we missed the mark?
Several measures, however, have not been reached:

• The bulk of the increases registered in aid have not been in the form of “programmable aid”; in fact, much of the increase has been in the form of debt relief.
• The proportion of aid going to countries that have been good performers has declined.
• The need for emergency and humanitarian aid – in particular in response to man-made emergencies – has not diminished.

Where do we need to know more?
In many areas, it is still not clear how donors are scoring on the measures Manning proposed in 2003.

• In fragile situations – for instance in states emerging from conflict, or where policies are inequitable – donor interventions must be much more carefully structured to help rebuild local systems and ensure equity.
• Efforts to align aid with local recipient-country systems, programmes and priorities are still unequal, both on the side of donors and of recipient countries.
• The advances in working together among donors to minimise transaction costs are still uneven, varying from 12 to 80%, for example, in joint analytical work.
• What is reported as “technical co-operation” still varies widely among donors, making it difficult to measure whether there has been progress in making efforts more co-ordinated and country-owned.

Are we making the progress needed on the MDGs?
In weighing progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the last and perhaps the most important of the measure – Manning notes that we still lack much of the definitive statistical information that we need to make positive conclusions. The progress on the poverty goal is encouraging; if present trends continue it will be reached at the global level well before 2015, thanks particularly to poverty reduction performance in China and India. Yet those countries’ will still count hundreds of millions of people below the poverty line. And while there are indications of accelerating and encouraging progress on the other goals, it is still unlikely that the MDGs will be reached by 2015 in many countries and regions. Sub-Saharan Africa, followed by the Pacific, stand out as the regions where least progress is visible.

The DCR 2007 sets out a series of lessons learned from the experience of DAC peer reviews. By looking at what has and has not worked in the past, it offers important guidance on how to produce the positive development results that are needed.

To learn more, read the summary of the Development Co-operation Report 2007 or the full Report.

Arrested development: The costs of conflict
Conflict is an obstacle to robust, equitable development. The human costs of conflict are devastating and their impact on the political, social and economic evolution of a country, and often its surrounding region, is profound. In this light, the value of investing in peace building to promote better functioning, less dependent governments is substantial. The DAC Network on Conflict, Peace and Development Co-operation (CPDC) is active on many fronts to support this process.

The CPDC is carrying out a series of country consultations to help local actors put in place DAC guidelines on security system reform, bringing together programmers and civil servants in places like Burundi, the Central African Republic, Bolivia and Haiti to work through difficult issues, in the local context. To support more systematic lesson learning and improve impact, the CPDC and the DAC Network on Development Evaluation are also developing guidelines for evaluating conflict prevention and peace building activities. Timely analysis of the causes of violent conflict can help to anticipate – and avert – potential crises. The CPDC has recently joined with the Fragile States Group to find ways of better integrating early warning and response within international programming.

Fragmentation: The more the merrier, or too many cooks?
When there are many donors in one country giving small amounts of aid, the results might be more negative than positive. One of the questions donors have to ask themselves is, Does it all add up to results?

A survey of aid allocation policies conducted by the DAC formed the basis for a Policy Workshop on the Challenges of Scaling up Aid at the Country Level, held at OECD headquarters on 11 December 2007 in the framework of OECD’s Global Forum on Development – a three-year programme to address development financing issues. Within this year’s focus on ownership, the workshop looked at ways of dealing with the growing number of actors in development assistance, the need to improve the medium-term predictability of aid, and the importance of linking resource provision to national priorities – and with results.

Improving the predictability of aid, one of the pillars of the Paris Declaration, is key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Most Ministers of Finance in aid-recipient countries have only limited information about the external resources they can expect to receive in a given year, let alone for the following two to three years. This makes it impossible for them to produce sound medium-term budgets. And while many donors have policies to produce multi-year financial frameworks with their key partners, it is not yet clear that these policies are yielding the firm planning data that finance ministries require.

Another key issue is the number of donors that partner countries need to deal with – and the transaction costs generated by these dealings, for both donors and recipient countries. New DAC analyses and maps show the degree of fragmentation of donors in many countries and, conversely, of concentration in others, providing a baseline for improving donor coordination and selectivity.

The participants in the Forum concluded that partner countries want poverty reduction results for their own good, not to impress donors. This means that they need to make major efforts to strengthen local accountability and monitoring, and to build on existing initiatives rather than imposing new ones. The conclusions of this Forum are feeding into a new initiative by the UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon to accelerate progress towards the MDGs in Africa.

In 33 partner countries, fragmentation is a major issue,
with more than 15 DAC donors providing just 10% of their CPA.

The road to Accra
Nine roundtable topics defined
One and a half of the three days of the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra will be devoted to roundtable discussions that will feed into the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), a focused list of deliverables designed to produce results where they are most needed to meet the targets of the Paris Declaration by 2010. While discussion is already underway on this agenda, the roundtables – more of a process than an event – will offer opportunities for countries and donors to ensure that important concerns on very complex, crosscutting issues are addressed.

The first five roundtables are centred on the principles that form the “pillars” of the Paris Declaration: Ownership (by countries), Alignment (with country systems), Harmonisation (among donors), Results (to produce impact on the ground) and Mutual Accountability (among donors and countries, and between these and their constituencies). The remaining four roundtables are being organised around the role of civil society in aid effectiveness; situations of fragility and conflict; sectoral applications of the Paris Declaration (including health, education and infrastructure); and aid architecture (including traditional and new systems and donors for financing development).

Work on the roundtables is already underway, including identifying relevant sources of information, fine-tuning the issues that will be covered as well as the focus on them, pinpointing areas where consensus is lacking, and ensuring that key points are taken into consideration in formulating the AAA. One of the major opportunities for reaching consensus will be through a series of regional events that have been organised in the lead up to Accra.

Fifty-six countries signed up for monitoring survey
As of this writing, 56 countries have signed up to take part in the 2008 Survey on Monitoring the Paris Declaration. In doing so, they have agreed to measure their own progress in fulfilling the commitments they made when they signed the Paris Declaration, and to identify where they have fallen short. Their answers will provide vital input into the process leading to Accra and beyond. The data from the survey will be compared to the baseline that was established in 2005, demonstrating where extra effort and attention are needed to reach the Paris Declaration targets by 2010.