Aid transparency should be the lowest hanging fruit on the aid reform tree.  Donors know how much money they are investing, and where; why not just disclose that info?

And yet, within the US government, disclosing this data has been a long, slow, un-anesthetized root canal.  US foreign assistance is balkanized across twenty-two US government agencies.  But until yesterday, only USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) had published information on their expenditures to the Foreign Assistance “Dashboard” at foreignassistance.gov.  No wonder that US government agencies (MCC excepted) generally get poor scores on Publish What You Fund’s (PWYF) Aid Transparency Index.

For months we’ve been watching foreignassistance.gov, looking for new data.  Suddenly last night it arrived.  At some point yesterday, the US government finally pulled back the curtain on two more agencies.  Aid data from the US Treasury Department and Department of Defense finally was posted to the dashboard.

This is not a lot of new data.  In FY11, Treasury and Defense accounted (respectively) for about 6% and 3% of US government aid spending obligations.  But politically, this is an important signal of progress.  Prior to yesterday, the only US government agencies who had reported spending data to the dashboard were under the authority of the Secretary of State—USAID and MCC.  Both identify aid as their primary mission.  But Treasury and Defense have other jobs; foreign assistance is in fact a much smaller portion of their mission.  The fact that they are sharing their data gives new hope that the dashboard can deliver on its promise to be a truly comprehensive tool for knowing where the US government is investing all of its aid dollars.

Not time for transparency champagne yet. Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images

But don’t pop the cork on that champagne yet.  It’s great that Treasury and DoD have added their data alongside USAID and MCC, but that data overall is still pretty pathetic.  You can see nice pie charts of overall US spending to a particular country or sector, but the dashboard won’t let you drill down to the level of detail that people in developing countries actually need.  For example, if you are a DC-based advocate who wants to see how much the US government spent on agriculture in Tanzania in fiscal year 2011, the answer is relatively easy to find; $39.1m.  But if you are at the Agricultural Council of Tanzania, trying to help your members understand how local food markets might be impacted by aid investments, the dashboard can’t provide you anything beyond that top line number.

All this means that the dashboard remains what it has been since its launch in November 2010—all sizzle, no steak.  Without project-level data that helps people understand how aid is being invested and how we are measuring success, the dashboard fails to actually help US aid dollars work better.

So what’s the hold up?  No question there are significant technical hurdles to be overcome.  Those 22 agencies that deliver US foreign aid all have different computers and different methods of compiling data.  Never mind apples to apples; the intrepid but overworked dashboard team at the State Department’s F bureau faces enough of a challenge turning all this diverse stuff into something that vaguely looks like fruit.  And as frustrating as absent data can be, wrong data would be worse; once false data is out in public and replicated, they can become un-killable zombies, popping up again and again, fueling false conclusions.

But as difficult as these technical challenges are, they have solutions.  Other donors have figured it out; the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) and the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) are leaders.  (It’s no surprise they rank first and second respectively on PWYF’s rankings.)  Even the US government has figured this out in other places.  Check out “recovery.gov”, where you can track every dollar of the 2009 Recovery Act.  You can drill down to the zip code, and see disbursements and results data.  This is exactly the kind of data that citizens and leaders in developing countries are asking for.

As usual, the real challenge seems to be lack of political will.  Getting the recovery.gov website up and running was not easy either, but that effort had a couple political advantages. It had the President’s prestige committed to getting it done, and it was required by the Recovery Act legislation itself.  The US government put in resources to get that effort done because the President’s reputation was on the line, and Congress was looking over his shoulder.

Soon we expect that Congress will reintroduce legislation to require US aid transparency.  Last year, the State Department spent months actively opposing the legislation before finally yielding to the inevitable.  Unfortunately, Congress adjourned before the Senate could take up the bill.  This year, the State Department has a chance for a do-over, whether or not the State Department supports the legislation introduced by Congressman Poe and Senator Rubio. Last year, Senator John Kerry supported the bill; here’s hoping he will do so again as Secretary of State.

We’re all waiting to see just how serious they are about aid transparency.

This is a cross-post from the Gates Foundation’s Impatient Optimists blog.

Aid does not cause development; people do.  I’m talking about the local leaders who can access and actually use that aid effectively towards development outcomes.  Oxfam is hearing that local leaders are starting to give the US government better marks for how the US invests its aid.

These local leaders are not telling us that the US government has fixed all its problems.  And they still have many criticisms of the US approach.  But they are observing positive changes in how the US government seeks to engage them and support local priorities.

For too long the aid that the US government provided was not a useful tool for local leaders.  Too often it actually undermined what they were trying to accomplish.  But over the past few years, as the United States has confronted the limitations of this approach, a number of US policymakers and political leaders have increasingly tried to reorient US development policies and programs to make them more responsive to and useful to local partners.

But have changes in US government development policies in Washington changed practice on the ground?

The beginning of the current reform trend can perhaps be dated to the establishment of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, but since then, it has gained momentum.  The US government now has a range of policies designed to support and leverage the leadership of local partners, such as:

• Millennium Challenge Corporation – investing in locally-defined priorities and rewarding good governance;
• Feed the Future – Increasing support for and investments in national agriculture plans, and engaging smallholders in an effort to boost their success;
• Country Development Cooperation Strategies (CDCS)  – restoring investment choices to the country level, and doing it via a deliberate process that begins with country priorities;
• Implementation and Procurement Reform (now called local solutions) – actually making direct investments in local leadership.

Oxfam has applauded these policy approaches along the way.  They are not all directly related or comparable, but they all have the same DNA; they are built around the priorities and agency of local leaders.

But we wanted to know:  Have changes in US government development policies in Washington changed practice on the ground?  Do local leaders see a change?  And do they like the changes they see?  So we conducted extensive field interviews with citizens, civil society representatives, business people and public officials in Bangladesh, Ghana, Malawi, Peru, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Senegal to find out.

The overwhelming response we heard?  YES: 83% of the local leaders we surveyed saw a significant, positive change in the US approach over the previous few years.

This is not to say that local leaders are completely happy with the behavior and practices of the US government.  In fact, we often heard continued frustrations about difficulties working with the US government, as well as demands for the US government to continue to improve partnerships.

Oxfam spoke to a narrow number of people in a group of countries where US reforms are most advanced.  Thus it would be wrong to generalize too broadly about how what we heard might apply in other cases and contexts and it is much too early to draw conclusions about the developmental impact of most of these still short-lived reforms.

But, what we can say is that we are getting early positive feedback on how local partners are observing changes in US approaches.  Those we interviewed overwhelmingly observe increased US alignment with partner country priorities, more stakeholder engagement, and ultimately, more opportunities for local leaders to build partnerships with the US government that they didn’t have before.

In particular, the US government has a lot more work to do to close the feedback loop with local actors.  While three out of four of the people we surveyed told us they were having more and improved communication with US government development personnel, two thirds still felt they lacked influence over US government decisions regarding development in their country.  This information can help inform how these steps in the right direction are taken forward and strengthened.

The fight now is not only to ensure that these reforms prevail politically in Washington, but also to help improve their implementation and accelerate their progress, in order to restore the United States’ historic role as a global development leader.

These US government reforms to support local ownership have been hard to implement, both politically and practically.  But Oxfam believes this remains the most direct path to supporting local leadership over the development agenda.  One civil society leader in Bangladesh framed the ownership challenge thusly:

“If you have a direct road or a diverted road, which way do you go?  You go the direct road.”

You can read the survey findings and Oxfam’s recommendations by clicking here. 

Right before recess last week, Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA) re-introduced the Global Partnerships Act (H.R. 1793), the first major rewrite of foreign assistance legislation in decades. The bill is an enormous accomplishment, created through a three-year effort led by former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman, Howard Berman.

Source: Brookings Institution, 2006.

A rewrite of the Foreign Assistance Act is long past due. US Foreign Assistance programs have not been reauthorized since 1986; the underlying law dates from 1961. The problem isn’t just the quaint and kitschy references to Kampuchea, East Pakistan, or Zaire; it’s the fact that good legislation should actually help US government implementers do their job well, and should help Congress conduct effective oversight. On both counts, the existing system is failing miserably (see chart).

Like most huge pieces of legislation, this one offers something for (almost) everyone—Pollyannas and pessimists alike. Cynics will be quick to point out that, with 889 pages and no Republican co-sponsors, this bill is hardly on a fast track to enshrinement in the US Code.

But such cynicism misses the point. An effort like the Berman/Connolly bill is not only important once it becomes law. It can also be important for the conversation it drives among different stakeholders. As we’ve noted before, the most important reason to update foreign aid legislation is to try to get a new consensus between the President, the Congress, and the American people about what we’re actually trying to achieve with our development programs and what success looks like. And the Berman/Connolly bill provides a wealth of specific improvements for policymakers to convene around, including, but not limited to:

• linking US funding priorities to country-level planning (Sec. 1018);
• greater aid transparency and predictability (Sec. 8301); and
• better coordination of US efforts to promote trade & investment in partner countries (Sec. 7002).

Oxfam has heard from local leaders in the field that recent US reform efforts are starting to get noticed. But few of these reforms have actually made it into law. Without legislation to protect these reforms—and more important, without political consensus around them—it’s possible many reforms won’t stick long enough to really pay off for people in the developing world.

We don’t expect Congress is going to swallow the Berman/Connolly bill whole. But it’s worth them spending some time chewing on it, trying to figure out where they can make real progress towards a new political consensus around US development efforts.

***

Here’s what else I had to say about the bill from last week’s InterAction Forum:

Five Minutes at Forum with Greg Adams from InterAction on Vimeo.

ren·ais·sance  (REN-nay-sahnce and Re-NAY-Sahnce)

(noun)

a. A revival or rebirth of intellectual or artistic achievement and vigor.

b. The period of such a revival.

A couple of years ago, a number of new initiatives and reforms were introduced to change the model of how parts of the US government provide poverty-reducing aid to developing countries.

These reforms—the four Oxfam examined included Implementation and Procurement Reform (now called Local Solutions), Feed the Future, Country Development and Cooperation Strategies, the Millennium Challenge Corporation—all bring attention to country ownership of aid.

Photo: Rajendra Shaw / Oxfam

Ownership is the idea that countries, governments, and citizens,—not donors like the US—are the lead actors in development around the world.

So with these reforms in place, Oxfam set out to talk to people living and working in seven developing countries, leaders in recipient governments and civil society, to find out how they think the US is doing as a donor.

Oxfam surveyed 148 non-US government officials of the total 257 people who participated in in-depth interviews. The survey was not intended to be a statistically significant sample of development stakeholders; rather, Oxfam intended to capture a quick, but broad snapshot of how officials who are familiar with US foreign assistance witness changes in US practice.

Oxfam today will share that local development leaders are noticing—and valuing the change. Of the people Oxfam interviewed and surveyed last year, 83% said they see that the US government is a better donor than they were four to five years ago.

Those interviewed observe increased alignment with country priorities, more stakeholder engagement, and ultimately, more opportunities for local leaders to build partnerships with the US government that they didn’t have before.

Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America

Oxfam found that US reforms are helping the US government’s ability to work with partners in two important dimensions: 

The Power to Decide—Changes to US policy and practice are helping the US government to invest more aid in the things citizens and governments say they need and want.

Photo: Patrick Brown / Oxfam America

The Power to Execute—New policies allow the US to partner with local institutions in ways that strengthen them, support domestic accountability, and ultimately help citizens find long-term solutions that do not require US assistance.

Photo: Patrick Brown / Oxfam America

The policy changes have aroused opposition in Washington DC among those interests that want to protect the status quo. So now is the time for the US government to accelerate and deepen these reforms if it hopes to meet the expectations of people in developing countries.

Despite the promise of increasing the impact of US assistance through country and local ownership, respondents remain unsure of the future direction of US policy reforms.

Respondents in Oxfam’s interviews overwhelmingly wanted to know…

Will the US government continue down the same path? 

Read the report summary and Oxfam’s recommendations here. 

Malawian health advocate Martha Kwataine is working to make sure her national government responds to the needs of Malawians in rural areas, not just those living in the capital.

As Mayor of San Martin Alao, Peru, Manuel Dominguez is working to better manage his own municipal funds to clean up waste blighting his town.

Village Chief Kojo Kondua IV of Abuesi, Ghana, is making sure national officials enforce fishing regulations fairly, ensuring his village’s source of jobs and food for the future.

Tanzanian farmer Emiliana Aligaesha and fellow farmers formed a successful private company; she now trains other farmers to improve their yields and market access.

Monday is Inauguration Day. As President Obama takes the oath of office for the second time, his foreign policy team is getting a makeover. Obama’s nominations of John Kerry for State, Chuck Hagel for Defense, and Jack Lew for Treasury will put new faces in the three US government cabinet roles with the most impact on America’s global development efforts.

Congress will soon be grilling Kerry, Lew, and Hagel in their confirmation hearings. Senators will likely ask questions about the nominees’ plans to protect key US alliances. No doubt many of these questions will focus on America’s military, diplomatic and trade relationships.

But some of the most powerful alliances America has aren’t with governments—they are with ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things. This week Oxfam America’s Aid Effectiveness team launched an ad campaign featuring four of these American allies. (Click on the images to learn more about each of them.)

The basis of these alliances is the tiny amount of US assistance that the United States invests in fighting poverty around the world. It’s less than one percent of the federal budget—but it’s the tool that helps local leaders like Kwataine, Dominguez, Aligaesha, and Kondua deliver powerful results.

America partly does this because we’re generous. But more important are the selfish reasons; when local leaders like these four are successful in improving their countries and communities, it delivers a world that is fairer, more peaceful, and more prosperous—which, after all, is the stated goal of much of America’s foreign policy.

Local leaders like these four need a few things from the United States to be successful. First, they need America to be honest and transparent about our goals and policies, so they know how to work with us. Second, they need us to be willing to work directly with them, and invest our time, money, and effort in their success. Finally, they need us to be willing to trust them to know what works best for their own communities and countries, rather than impose our own politics and processes on them.

So now is the time to make sure Senators ask the right questions in these confirmation hearings. How do the nominees plan to protect and deepen our development alliances with people like Kwataine, Dominguez, Aligaesha, and Kondua? Will they support strong development policies that put more trust in local leaders like these? Will they faithfully pursue policies that give local leaders in developing countries the information, capacity and control they need to solve their own problems?

The answers could determine whether President Obama is able to build a lasting legacy on fighting global poverty.

***

Related Pages

Slideshow: Don’t cut aid. It’s working.

Ray Offeneheiser, President of Oxfam, in the Huffington Post: Don’t cut aid. It’s working.

Coming to a billboard near you: A very different portrayal of aid, by Jennifer Lentfer on Oxfam’s First Person blog

Press release: Novel ad campaign urges no cuts to poverty-fighting foreign aid

Storify compilations of tweets about the ad campaign: A very different portrayal of aid and Is Oxfam America just like all the others?

***

Note: Oxfam America does not take U.S. federal funds, but we do support effective development programs.

With the 2012 election over, the lame-duck Congress is diving back into its unfinished business. First on their to-do list: funding the federal government for next year, including America’s efforts to fight global poverty and save lives. Will Congress protect life-saving aid? Or will Congress duck fiscal reality and common sense as they waddle through the budget gridlock?

Aid to fight poverty and help out in disasters is one of America’s proudest traditions—and smartest investments. For decades, American aid has helped people escape poverty and survive war and hunger.  US aid has helped end polio, fuel the Green Revolution, and rebuild shattered economies. It has also helped build some of America’s strongest allies, like Turkey, South Korea, and Poland. When you look at that record, and then consider the cost—less than one percent of the federal budget—your elected representatives in Washington would have to be quackers to vote to cut aid.

And yet aid, despite this legacy of success, global poverty assistance always seems to end up the ugly duckling of the federal budget. Perhaps it is because aid has a complicated story to tell. Of course aid doesn’t lift people or countries out of poverty—people do that themselves.

People like Cyiza Eliab in Rwanda who started a farm cooperative with his neighbors to grow corn and beans to help feed their families and earn an income. With a little help for USAID’s Feed the Future program, Cyiza‘s cooperative built a storage shed where corn is hung to dry, which reduced rot and increased profits.  With the additional income, Cyiza can educate his children and brighten their futures.

Or Kim Nay Heang, a 57-year-old entrepreneur from Cambodia who got USAID support to transform her household fishpond into a profitable business venture. With this income, Heang helped her family survive a dramatic spike in food prices—and provided an education for her five grandchildren.

Or Jose Ordoñez, a Honduran corn farmer who started to plant more profitable crops, like papaya, and is now able to transport the fruits to a market where they fetch a good price, travelling on rural roads constructed using U.S. assistance. He is now earning enough to secure his family’s future.

Farmers, entrepreneurs, nurses, teachers, watchdogs who call out corruption and abuse—these are America’s partners in the fight against global poverty. For decades, assistance from the US government has been there to help. Sure, we don’t always do it as well as we could. But when it pays off, we get a world that is better, safer, and more prosperous for everyone.

But telling how aid works is hard; holding up the example of money going to shiftless foreigners is easy. No wonder some politicians try to feather their own nests by saying aid is a waste. You can expect a flock of critics to peck holes in the foreign aid budget over the next few weeks. But don’t fall for it. Don’t let them wash poor people—or America’s values and interests—down the drain. Stand up and protect America’s poverty-fighting and life-saving aid.

Aid is a vital tool in the fight against global poverty. But too often, aid delivers less than it promises.

If you follow the debate over development aid, you’ve probably heard that there was a big conference last year in Korea that was meant to make aid work better. Oxfam’s new briefing paper—“Busan in a Nutshell”—is intended as your guide to what happened at that conference, the “Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.” “Busan in a Nutshell” explains what happened at Busan, and how implementers and advocates need to work together to make sure the global community delivers on its promise of more effective aid.

Since the Paris Declaration of 2005, donors, recipients, advocates, and others have been working to improve aid so it delivers better poverty fighting results. Last year, in Busan, these groups met to form the “Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation,” which sets the international standard on the principles of effective aid and good development to which all development actors should subscribe.

“Busan in a Nutshell” documents the commitments made at Busan, and recommends how to ensure aid effectiveness commitments are implemented. These principles include:

• country leadership and ownership of development strategies;
• a focus on the ‘right’ results that matter to the poor in developing countries;
• inclusive partnerships among development actors based on mutual trust and transparency and accountability to one another.

Alice collecting some of her ground nut crop, Copperbelt, Zambia (2006) Emma Walsh/Oxfam

All development stakeholders—including traditional donors and emerging providers—must respect and uphold these key principles by fulfilling the promises they made at Busan. For this to happen, the Global Partnership will need to rely on strong vision, high-level political engagement and a robust but flexible global accountability mechanism.

The US government has already begun its efforts to implement its Busan commitments. A few big changes include their efforts to increase transparency of the aid they give, put more American aid dollars through local systems, and end complicated rules that make local investment difficult. Ultimately, however, the real verdict on US efforts will come from how well citizens and leaders in developing countries think the US is supporting their efforts to develop themselves.

Check out “Busan in a Nutshell” to learn more about what is at stake for the leaders of the Global Partnership at their first meeting next week in Tokyo.

Sounds like the start of a really lame joke, right? In fact, it’s a clue to the breadth of the coalition that wants the US to invest more aid dollars directly in the success of local governments, community groups, and businesses in poor countries. Yesterday this broad coalition of activists, companies, NGOs, and think tanks wrote to USAID Administrator Raj Shah to support USAID’s efforts to put more development dollars directly in the hands of the leaders and activists who are trying to change their countries from the ground up.

Over the last several years, we’ve had the privilege to work with many of these leaders to get the US government to change the way it gives aid—to put poor people and their leaders in the driver’s seat. Some are local entrepreneurs who think aid should do a better job of helping firms in poor countries create jobs and opportunity. Some are human rights lawyers and anti-corruption whistleblowers who want the US to fund reforms in their governments to improve respect for rights and the rule of law. And some are US firms—like Nike—who know that there are huge opportunities for American businesses if we can help poor countries lead their own development.

With her successful fish farm, Kim Nay Heang is a leading entrepreneur in her village of Kampong Preh, Cambodia. USAID support for mending value chains is transforming livelihoods for villagers and providing growth opportunities for women. Omar Ortez/Oxfam America.

These leaders are all voicing their support for USAID’s Implementation Procurement Reform (IPR)—a package of reforms meant to direct more aid to where it can do the most good, strengthening citizens and governments in the fight against poverty. And by implementing the reforms at the institutional level, we can effectively fight corruption and ensure that aid reaches those who need it most.

But don’t take our word for it—take the word of the heroes who are fighting to make their countries and communities more just and less poor. USAID’s reforms make sure that US aid dollars are working best to support these brave men and women on the front lines of the fight against poverty and injustice.

“His stomach lurched as he realized that tinny, tiny sound was coming from his own midriff. He could barely believe it. The recorder he had taped to his stomach, its wire lead and microphone stuck to his breastbone, had somehow switched into ‘play’ mode. The voices of the two men before him were now being relayed back, potentially exposing him as what he was: spy, sneak, mole . . . He scoured his two colleagues’ faces for signs of suspicion. If they had noticed what had happened, he could expect to be arrested that night, his office sealed, staff sent away, files seized, house raided . . .”

So begins Michela Wrong’s gripping book, It’s Our Turn to Eat, the story of John Githongo’s effort to uncover corruption inside the administration of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki. The book tells the story of how Githongo risked his life and livelihood to help make his country more just and accountable to average Kenyans—and the challenge that entrenched corruption poses for development.

Caption: John Githongo participates in a policy workshop on country ownership in Washington, DC. Credit: Oxfam.

Githongo is a compelling figure and a true hero—the very type of person you would expect the United States to seek as a partner in fighting corruption and injustice in developing countries. But too often, the United States makes it hard for anti-corruption fighters to actually do their job. The problem is that Congress is still too often focused on avoiding corruption in developing countries, rather than actually working with others to do something about it. In this effort to avoid the risk of corruption, the US government has often bypassed local organizations and governments rather than working with them, missing opportunities to help local watchdogs root out corruption and strengthen democratic institutions, reducing waste, fraud, and abuse for the long-term.

Thankfully, USAID is seeking to fix this problem. A new reform called “Implementation and Procurement Reform,” or IPR, is designed to help countries deliver for their own people and help people hold their governments accountable. The agency plans to spend 30% of its funds through local actors, whether they’re local nonprofits, businesses, or governments, by 2015 (up from 11% in 2011). After assessing public financial management systems to manage for risks, USAID will boost its funding through host country systems to reach 25 country governments directly; they will cut out the middleman by hiring 576 local nonprofits directly instead of spending through contractors.

USAID officials say they are moving cautiously but deliberately to change their practices.  But Congress is still nervous; recently, several Members wrote to USAID asking for more information about these reforms. Githongo and his peers are more enthusiastic; this week, Githongo and fifteen other anti-corruption and human rights activists sent an open letter to Congress, expressing support for USAID’s reforms. They write:

“USAID is strengthening its ability to partner with us by eliminating large, inflexible contracts and by working more directly with local governments, businesses, and civil society organizations like ours. These are crucial requirements for fighting corruption and defending human rights . . . Bypassing local organizations and governments defeats the purpose of aid, which is to help countries help themselves.”

It might seem strange that anti-corruption activists would support direct funding of this sort flowing to their countries. But they support it precisely because they know that Washington can’t solve developing countries problems for them. As Githongo says:

“Ownership is ni sisi. It is up to us. It is us who own our problems. And it is us who will come up with the solutions.”

You can add your own voice to that of these anti-corruption heroes. Send a note to your Member of Congress asking them to stand with anti-corruption activists around the world.

Last November, in Busan, Korea, donors reaffirmed their past promises to make their aid more useful to people developing countries. They also agreed to measure themselves so the world could track how well they were implementing these promises. But the debate over *how* they are willing to be measured is still raging—and won’t be decided until June. At the World Bank on Friday, Oxfam will be hosting an event to talk about progress towards implementing the Busan Partnership. New research by Oxfam and others provides new data as to how important keeping score is for driving political change—as well as suggesting how to best measure the promises made at Busan.

Bureaucracies are hard to move; they seldom ever move when bureaucrats feel comfortable. So, one of the key components of forcing political change is being able to make policymakers uncomfortable enough with the status quo that they make hard changes.

One thing that gets policymakers’ attention is being compared to one another. A government that is shown to be falling behind its peers can be shamed into making changes to catch up. But that shaming requires good, comparable data that governments cannot hide from. Naturally, governments are often reluctant to endorse effective scorecards because it shines a light on their behavior.

This new research affirms that keeping score on implementation of the Paris Declaration helped push implementation of Paris principles. Signatories to Paris instituted a global monitoring framework to measure and account for how well governments were living up to their promises. A review of donor peer reviews conducted by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee indicates that the global monitoring system was a success in incentivizing policy changes in donor capitals.

The Busan Outcome Document emphasizes that the focus of work to make aid more effective should be “global-light, country heavy”; in other words, the emphasis should be on progress made at the country level. And development progress indeed happens at the country level. Nonetheless, accountability for such progress requires comparing the progress of different countries against one another. In fact, the research shows that Global Monitoring is a huge guiding factor in determining the strength of national results frameworks. To quote one partner country respondent, “The Paris framework was crucial to getting donors to agree that they should be monitored.”

Of partner countries who are successfully implementing National Monitoring Frameworks (NMFs):

Some research respondents went so far as to argue that the biggest constraint to a national framework was the lack of political commitment on the part of their donor partners. In fact, some respondents said most donors were not willing to increase their national level obligations beyond what Paris called for.

So from this evidence, what conclusions can we draw about what the Busan monitoring system look like? Here are some thoughts:

• You need globally comparable indicators to drive country level change. A key feature of the Paris monitoring framework was the ability to hold stakeholders accountable by comparing them with their peers.

• The framework needs to monitor all major Paris, Accra, and Busan commitments, in line with the Busan Partnership Declaration. Rule #1 of development strategy is, “what’s measured is meaningful.” If any particular commitment is left out of the final monitoring framework, it will inevitably be deprioritized by stakeholders.

•Civil society stakeholders should be included in the design, implementation and accountability of the global monitoring framework through a transparent and representative process. If civil society isn’t actively engaged and does not have the space to hold their government accountable, the monitoring framework won’t push those changes that poor people most need.

•The new monitoring framework must integrate cross-cutting gender equality and women’s empowerment targets in all commitments measured, as stated in the Busan Partnership Declaration. Again, without measuring against these criteria, gender issues could be neglected.