Too many donors?

First the UNDP warned in June 2007 that sub-Saharan Africa, at its present rate, would fail to achieve any of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals adopted by world leaders in 2000. Then the UK’s new Prime Minister sounded the alarm: "The calendar says we are half-way from 2000 to 2015”, Gordon Brown told the UN in New York in late July, 2007. “But the reality is that we are a million miles away from success.”

Next, in mid-September, 2007, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon convened an emergency meeting of top development officials to salvage the MDGs from failure. “We are concerned that many African countries are off track, particularly for the countries in sub-Saharan regions”, Ban Ki-moon told a press briefing. “That is the only region in the world where not even a single country is on track.”

More hands to the pump

Backed by the African Union, the EU, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the IMF and the World Bank, Ban Ki-moon’s initiative launched the MDG Africa Steering Group. This new body will oversee a separate “operational” working group and has pledged to “spare no effort” to put sub-Saharan Africa back on the MDG track.

But will yet another well-intentioned donor initiative make any difference? For some, one of the reasons for sub-Saharan Africa’s sorry performance to date is precisely that already far too many individual bodies are involved in channelling aid money.

Heading for disaster

Donor proliferation makes huge and wasteful demands of paperwork, time and patience. A central aim of aid reform is to drive down these so-called transaction costs. But immediate prospects are not promising. According to the European Commission, a certain unnamed African country was obliged to receive 800 individual donor missions in 2006, meaning an average of three per day, not counting weekends.

On May 15, 2007, the European Council of Ministers adopted the innocuous-sounding EU Code of Conduct on Complementarity and Division of Labour in Development Policy. The code’s 11 guiding principles are voluntary, not binding, and apply only to multilateral and bilateral donor agencies in EU member states.

A code to reshape development

But the EU’s member states account for half of all the world’s aid money: if enacted, the code could dramatically reshape the way development policy is designed and carried out all over the world.

The code limits the operations of each donor to a maximum of three sectors, and also the number of active donors per sector to between three and five. It stipulates the delegation of one “lead donor” per sector to serve as chief government interlocutor and as manager of the donor funds pooled for that purpose.

Sacrifices needed

Non-EU donor agencies may well escape the painful sacrifices in prestige and independence that the EU’s proposed “division of labour” will entail – for now. But a sober new realism is palpable throughout the rural development community.

Kevin Cleaver (read as well the interview he gave in the Platform Speaking series), until recently director of agriculture and rural development at the World Bank, is now assistant president for programmes at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN agency based in Rome. As the Berlin conference wound to a close, he made this sombre assessment: