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CSOs urge donors to ensure aid effectiveness
Judy Waguma, Business Daily
September 04, 2008

http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9811&Itemid=5813

More than 1.4 billion poor people in Africa have no clue what donor effectiveness is all about.

But the Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) argue that for real results to be delivered, there is need for clear time-bound commitments from the donors and citizen involvement to hold governments accountable.

At the 3rd High Level Forum on Aid effectiveness, over 600 representatives from 325 civil society organisations met in Accra, Ghana, to debate what action could be taken to reform aid.

"We need the donors to reduce the burden of conditionality by 2010 so that aid agreements are based on mutually agreed objectives," they said in a joint statement.

The CSOs want donors to stop short-term aid and commit to ensuring that a greater percentage of aid is committed for at least between three to five years by 2010 to achieve the intended results.

Civil society says lack of commitment is a political and, not a technical, challenge which can be reversed to see change from the current financial, food, energy, and climate change crises.

"We call on officials present in Accra to respond with urgency," they declared. "The Paris process looks like a failure, the survey shows that donors in particular have a long way to go in delivering what they pledged and Accra must deliver a major change in implementation and change how "effectiveness" is measured by setting new targets and indicators."

There are also not enough opportunities for citizens, and civil society organizations to make their voices heard in decision making processes. This constitutes a systemic obstacle for citizens to hold governments in donor and recipient countries accountable.

Ms Bernadette Ouedraogo, President Action for Development of Rural Women (GRADE-FRB) in Burkina Faso, said mechanisms should be put in place to allow for citizen participation which will ensure that governments are more open and transparent.

"There are mechanisms in place, but there is no clear outlines of how citizens can participate," she said.

"Majority of the poor people are women, and Accra should discuss how we can achieve results that are geared towards the eradication of poverty, inequality and social exclusion" says Cecilia Alemany, of the Association for Women's Rights Development.

Alemany said the CSO should strengthen their role as the watchdog to improve on monitoring aid effectiveness by adapting existing Paris indicators and by integrating new indicators from the Accra Agenda for Action by 2009.

She said all governments must increase the democratic accountability and transparency of their use of aid resources, policies and activities.

"Accra is an opportunity to advance towards a broader agenda of development effectiveness and after this forum, there will be a major United Nations meeting in New York and Doha that will confirm the huge gap between what has been promised and the lack of progress in the achievement of the internationally agreed development goals," she said.

She added: "At the heart of many of these problems is a lack of accountability and transparency."

"There is not enough reliable and timely public information about aid flows, or the policies and conditions associated with them and also minimal independent evaluation of donor performance or the impact of aid on the ground," says Cecilia.

Among other recommendations by the CSOs, are that all donors must set out detailed plans and individual targets showing how they will meet their commitments to broaden the definition of ownership so that citizens, civil society organizations and elected officials are central to the aid process at all levels.

A more ambitious target is to make recipients accountable by developing and implementing new standards for transparency by 2009. The statement also states that as the Paris Declaration recognizes many of these problems in principle, donors have proved unwilling to resolve them in practice.

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