Global Development: Views from the Center
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May 07, 2008
Delight About Donor Disclosure -- Now Kick It Up A Notch!
Posted by Nancy Birdsall at 10:17 AM
This is a joint post with Kate Vyborny
We have been trying for a while to convince official aid donors to report to recipients more detailed, timely information about their disbursements of aid. You might well ask: how is it that recipients do not know how much money they are getting? Money may be in projects completely separate from the government; or it may go to specific project units within ministry of education or health, for example -- even the health or education minister may not know who in his or her ministry has access to what money. This undermines the collective decisionmaking process over how funds are spent that is central in the role of democratic governments. The recipient government should be involved in deciding how the money will be spent -- mechanisms like budget support and our proposed "cash on delivery" aid allow this to happen automatically. But at the very least, donors should be keeping tabs and telling the recipient -- quite a low bar, especially considering the standards to which donors hold or exhort recipients.
We recently learned that donors and the government of Mozambique have launched a new database, ODAMOZ, through which donors report quarterly all their aid spending in Mozambique. To the donors who are funding this effort, the European Commission, UN, and the Netherlands, bravo!
But, as Karin Christiansen at DATA has pointed out, while this information is a big improvement over existing reporting, the most useful data for recipients would be funding aligned with their own budget categories -- the way that they spend money -- rather than the categories used by the OECD DAC to track the purposes of its own spending.
Richard Carey at OECD's Development Assistance Committee tells us that since we raised the issue at a recent brainstorming session with him in December, the issue of donor transparency has become part of the discussion on how to implement the Paris Declaration, the donor agreement to improve aid practices. We hope to see concrete proposals like expanding the ODAMOZ approach and making it compatible with recipient budgets raised in Accra this September when donors and recipients meet to follow up on promises made in the Paris Declaration.
A measure of donor transparency to recipients will be part of our new effort to measure the quality of aid. Since 2003 CGD has compared rich countries on all policies affecting development across the board in our annual Commitment to Development Index. The new aid quality scorecard will zoom in on the quality of foreign assistance in particular and will include many dimensions not in the CDI. We aim to release the first iteration this summer. We invite you to learn more about this new effort and welcome your comments and suggestions about the project, either posted as comments on this blog or by e-mail to Kate Vyborny.
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Comments
This is a really great example of being a catalyst for change by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes (many of CGD's successes have been like this). All the development agencies talk about harmonization at the country level - what better way to do that than use the country's own budget categories? Such a simple idea but it reverse the whole relationship from "we're giving you money, so jump through our hoops" to "what can we do to make this work better for you?" (After all, the recipient is the one with limited capacity, right?)
By the way, I love the acronym ODAMOZ! Sounds like an empire on a planet out near Alpha Centauri :-)
Posted by: William Savedoff at May 7, 2008 11:31 PM