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Aid Effectiveness

International development donors still have to make a serious effort to improve the amount and the effectiveness of their aid if they are to deliver on their promises.

We live in a world where more than one billion people are living in extreme poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where GDP per capita shrank by 14 percent, poverty rose from 41 percent in 1981 to 46 percent in 2001, resulting in an additional 150 million people living in extreme poverty (World Bank data). In April 2008 the World Bank warned that the surge in food prices could push 100 million people into deeper poverty.

The realisation that millions of people were not being helped out of poverty in spite of decades of aid has led to calls for "a quantum leap in scale and ambition" of development aid (United Nations, 2004). The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set out the aims of this scaled-up approach. With revised assessments of aid effectiveness during the 1990s, the international development community recognizes that more aid is not enough; more effective aid is needed.

In 2005 over 100 donors and partner countries endorsed the Paris Declaration and committed to improving ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results and mutual accountability. At the Accra High Level Forum in September 2008 the international community plans to take stock of how well they have done on the Paris Declaration commitments and what remains to be done.

Mokoro experience

Mokoro has been involved in aid management issues for many years. Our approach to aid management has always emphasised the basic responsibility of the recipient government for aid coordination and the need to see aid as one aspect, and preferably not the dominant aspect, of overall resource management. Recent work has focused on the interlocking commitments by donors and partner countries to move energetically towards the greater use of country systems in the delivery of aid.

Mokoro consultants have considerable experience and expertise in the area of aid effectiveness, including the implementation of the Paris Declaration. Mokoro has worked on aid effectiveness at the policy level (e.g. revision of EC sector-wide approach guidance, DAC good practice on sector programming), on the implementation of Paris Declaration commitments at country level (e.g. Lesotho aid effectiveness study) and on evaluations of aid effectiveness (e.g. evaluations of Danida country programmes to Mozambique and Uganda; reviews of Irish Aid development assistance modalities in Ethiopia, Uganda, Palestine and Lesotho; the OECD DAC multi-country Joint Evaluation of General Budget Support). Mokoro provided support to the Rome and Paris High Level Forums (through involvement in harmonisation and alignment work leading to the Rome Declaration and the OECD Volume II as background for the Paris Declaration). Mokoro is currently finalising an important study (the SPA/CABRI Putting Aid On Budget Study) to better equip governments to lead processes for bringing aid on budget.

We have worked with a wide array of clients in this area, including: Danida, DFID, the EC, Irish Aid, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway, Sida, World Bank.