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Dr. Christoph Kohlmeyer
Co-Chair, Global Donor Platform for Rural Development
Head of Division, Rural Development and Food Security, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Bonn
“We’ve got to go to governments as a united group”
Nater: What else has gone wrong in rural development?
Kohlmeyer: Donors persist in their flag-planting attitudes. We’ve been particularly guilty of this, producing a patchwork of small rural development ‘islands’, with no broader impact. The net result was fruitless competition and government confusion in partner countries.
Of course, we can’t ignore reality: each donor agency has to go back to their respective funding sources or legislators every year to convince them of the value and usefulness of what they're doing. For example, Germany’s parliamentary budget committees want to see projects clearly marked ‘Made in Germany’, and that's understandable, given the need to show taxpayers how their money is being spent.
But we can still meet that need even when, for instance, Germany, France and the World Bank negotiate as one donor, as a single team, with partner-countries.
What’s to be done?
Here’s where the Global Donor Platform comes in. Our work on the new modalities of aid can provide us with a shared, common empirical and analytical basis to devise the right approaches and then talk to governments as a united group and say, “Here’s how we propose to do it.” This is essentially a policy dialogue, and the Platform is perfectly suited to do it, because we donors have real impact when we put this message out as a united group.
“We’re often too heavily wrapped up in our own affairs, administering our own separate inputs and devising ever-more onerous reporting requirements.”
As a group, then, how to get from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’?
We donors have all got our own management structures and cultures, each with our different rules and demands. The result is that we’re often too heavily wrapped up in our own affairs, administering our own separate inputs and devising ever-more onerous reporting requirements, instead of agreeing on the most efficient ways of working together in support of our partner-countries.
The solution is so simple and so obvious that we tend to overlook it. What counts are the principles of any good marriage: transparency and dialogue. And this is where the Global Donor Platform is making daily progress. We’re building mutual trust — that’s a basic condition for continually improving ways of working together. I’m delighted to see that we’re all starting to agree that what really counts is aid effectiveness. And the  Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in March, 2005, provides us with backing at the highest level for our pilot-project work on donor harmonisation and alignment in rural development. The Global Donor Platform is well-positioned to make important contributions here.
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