Donor Platform - Joint Donor Principles for Agriculture and Rural Development

Joint Donor Principles for Agriculture and Rural Development

In Paris 2005, world leaders agreed to increase the effectiveness of the aid that they provide. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness has created a powerful momentum for change in the way developing countries and donors work together.

The Accra Agenda for Action, endorsed during the September 2008 Accra High Level Forum, has re-focused the political debate on the need for country ownership, more and inclusive partnerships and achieving development results and openly account for them.

The challenges arising from Accra is to advance the aid effectiveness agenda at sector level to enhance overall development effectiveness and impact.

Although the proportion of official development assistance spent to the agricultural and rural development sector is slowly on the rise after the dramatic hike in food prices in 2008, an effective agriculture-for-development agenda is still a far vision. This is despite the evidence showing that sustainable agricultural development centred on smallholders is the most promising and most sustainable approach to address rural poverty and hunger.

Therefore, the members of the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development have set up

to foster greater effectiveness of public investment in ARD.

Adjusted to the principles of the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action – namely ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results and mutual accountability – the Joint Donor Principles for ARD Programmes highlight the need (i) to include key stakeholders in decision making processes, (ii) to ensure coherent policies, (iii) to recognise the importance of inter- and intra-ministerial coordination, (iv) to support ‘internal alignment’, and (v) to focus on donors’ alignment with decentralised levels of government.

The Platform encourages development partners at the country level to use these principles as a benchmark that can be used when preparing and implementing country-specific partnerships.

The Joint Donor Principles focus on the process and modalities of achieving greater effectiveness of ARD programmes and do not provide a joint vision on the content of sustainable ARD programmes.

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 02 March 2010 )

The Joint Donor Principles in ARD

... on Ownership: 1. Support government leadership and ownership in ARD that are based on inclusive processes, promoting effective participation of key agricultural stakeholders. This includes remote rural farming communities and women farmers.

2. Support capacity development of key stakeholders and their institutions to participate more effectively in the design, delivery and monitoring of ARD-specific country strategies.
... on Alignment: 3. Focus on alignment with national ARD development strategies and country sytems that are ‘good enough’, strongly considering decentralised government institutions.

4. Support the strengthening of internal coherence of policies (internal alignment), enhancing cross-sectoral approaches to ARD.

5. Support consensus building on the role of government (civil society and private sector) in ARD.

6. Contribute to and sign up to existing country PRSP, thematic or sector working groups and national compacts (such as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Programme (CAADP) process); alternatively, elaborate national MoUs/CoCs/JPs between the national government and the donor group, reducing conditionality and increasingly improving the predictability of aid.
... on Harmonisation: 7. Use and support national development strategies, Joint Assistance Strategies (JAS), agricultural sector policies and common funding mechanisms via sector-wide and programme-based approaches, to bring about harmonisation.

8. Advance complementarity and country-led division of labour in ARD, reducing fragmentation.

9. Recognize the need for intra- and inter-sectoral harmonisation in rural development.
... on Managing for Results: 10. Support the tracking and reporting on measurable outcome and results indicators for ARD. These must be consistent with the national development strategy (such as the Poverty Reduction Strategy, and sectoral ARD strategies), should be set up at the start of any programme, and should use national M&E systems and be gender-specific.

11. Development indicators for ARD should highlight the role of smallholder agriculture contributing to equitable growth.
... on Mutual Accountability: 12. Join with partners to promote and to develop sector-level mutual accountability frameworks, which need to include roles for rural stakeholders (farmers, farmer organisations, CSOs and local governments).

13. Consider cross-cutting issues (particularly the roles of women in agriculture, and environmental or natural resource management issues) when drawing up mutual accountability frameworks for agriculture.

Tackling rural poverty, together

The Joint Donor Principles in ARD