Tackling rural poverty, together

Extract

THE PARIS DECLARATION ON AID EFFECTIVENESS of March 2005 defined a number of commitments on the part of donors and partner countries, and a set of indicators to measure progress towards 2010.

This document (Volume 1: Overview of the Results) is the first part of the first Baseline Survey on Monitoring the Paris Declaration covering 34 partner countries with data from 60 donors. The overall survey is divided in two volumes. Volume 1 (120 pages, presented here) presents an overview of key findings across the 34 countries (Chapter 1), assesses the survey process (Chapter 2), and sets out some key conclusions and recommendations (Chapter 3). A statistical appendix provides all the data that underpin the analysis. Volume 2 (400 pages) includes a detailed analysis for each of the 34 countries that undertook the survey. The Executive Summary covers the key conclusions and recommendations of the full report (Volumes 1 and 2).

KEY POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

THE SURVEY FINDINGS and the discussions that have taken place around them point to six major priority areas that need policy makers’ attention right now if countries and donors are to accelerate progress towards achieving the Paris Declaration commitments.

1. Partner countries need to deepen their ownership of the development process by engaging their citizens and parliaments more fully in planning and assessing their development policies and programmes. They should also increase efforts to link their plans much more closely to their budget and results frameworks.
2. Donors need to support these efforts by making better use of partners’ national budgets to align their programmes with country priorities. They also need to improve the transparency and predictability of aid flows by sharing timely and accurate information on intended and actual disbursements with budget authorities.
3. Partner countries need to take the lead in determining priority programmes of capacity development, especially those needed to improve country systems. Donors can help by better co-ordinating their technical assistance with country priorities and fully involving partners when commissioning technical assistance.
4. To further harmonisation, donors must work aggressively to reduce the transaction costs of delivering and managing aid. They should give special attention to enhancing complementarity and rationalising the division of labour; increasing use of local harmonisation and alignment action plans; increasing use of programme-based approaches; expanding reliance on delegated co-operation and other innovative approaches; reducing the number of project implementation units and better integrating them into ministries; and increasing efforts on untying as encouraged by the DAC recommendation.
5. To promote managing for results, countries and donors should make greater use of performance assessment frameworks and more cost-effective results-oriented reporting. This, too, will require donors to invest further in capacity development and increase their use of country results reporting systems.
6. To begin addressing mutual accountability commitments, countries and donors should clearly define a mutual action agenda and discuss aid effectiveness progress and development results more explicitly at country level by using country dialogue mechanisms (e.g. revamped Consultative Group and round table meetings) and developing credible monitoring mechanisms where needed.