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.

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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.

Tariq Sayed Ahmad is a Researcher with the Aid Effectiveness Team at Oxfam America.

On Wednesday Raj Shah will release USAID’s internal progress report on its “USAID Forward” reform agenda. The report will provide a wealth of aggregate numbers that fill out the broad picture of the changes that have been brewing at USAID over the last half decade.

Here’s one such story of why this matters.

Photo: Alexis Huaccho Magro / Oxfam America

Manuel Dominguez, mayor of Alao in the San Martín region of northern Peru, had been trying for years to access funds from the Peruvian government to deal with the increasing piles of trash in his growing city. While Dominguez was fully committed to using his limited city budget as best as he could to tackle the problem, it was not until USAID began investing in the Ministry of Environment, that Dominguez and his staff succeeded in obtaining significant funds from the national government, working with the Ministry of Economy and Finance. (You can learn more about Dominguez’ story here.)

In Peru, Oxfam America’s own forthcoming research shows that US reforms are enabling USAID staff to find ways to work with those leaders who are doing the right thing, and to enable regional governments like the government of San Martín to respond to local needs.  In 2011 USAID got the chance to use its new risk assessment tool, the Public Financial Management Risk Assessment Framework (PFMRAF) with regional government officials.  As a result, USAID was able to understand and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of San Martin’s systems, and they “did not identify any insurmountable risks that prevent USAID/Peru from moving ahead in utilizing the financial and procurement systems of the regional government.”^[1] The regional government then took the initiative to manage USAID programs directly, enabling the US to provide more funds through Peruvian country systems to help leaders like Mayor Dominguez respond to the needs of his people.

Of course working through country systems can be tricky. Partner governments are not monolithic entities. Rather, they are a mish-mash of institutions, bureaucracies, with a varied array of talent, accountability, and professionalism.  As more capacity assessments have been undertaken under IPR however, USAID is seeing that many local institutions are very effective, and provide great investment opportunities for the US.

“What the USAID partnership allowed us to do was to bring together all these different needs, actors, and resources at national, regional and local levels, which already existed in Peru, to solve a shared problem,” says Rosa Salas, director of the project at the Peruvian Ministry of Environment, who joined forces with Magda Ushiñahua, a counterpart at the Peruvian Ministry of Economy and Finance.

Municipalities like San Martín Alao had been neglected before the decentralization process began and deepened in Peru, giving local civic leaders a greater opportunity to unlock domestic resources to protect the health and well-being of their citizens and the surrounding Amazon. The relationship between USAID and the Ministries is helping mobilize domestic resources in addition to US funds. Peruvian taxpayer money has now been allocated for 127 municipalities to participate, benefitting an expected 5.65 million people.

The success of the USAID’s work in Peru is not that USAID delivered benefits, but that the agency helped Peruvians utilize their own resources.  In 2010, USAID initiated USAID Forward, a series of seven policy reforms intended to change the way USAID does business, including Implementation and Procurement Reform (IPR) and Country Development and Cooperation Strategies (CDCS). USAID Forward changes internal rules and regulations to better utilize country systems to enable local ownership of aid, something for which Oxfam America has long advocated.  These reforms built on previous efforts to rebuild USAID’s staff numbers, to make sure the agency has the professional staff they need to make local investment work.

We’re keen to see what USAID’s report has found. Our research is finding that USAID Forward is identifying local partners where US foreign assistance can be used effectively and allowing the US to look in places they haven’t looked before.

Manuel Dominguez, for one, couldn’t be happier. He says,

“My people and I can stop pollution in our district. We just needed a partner. We know how to get it done.”

Photo: Alexis Huaccho Magro / Oxfam America

Mary Marchal is Partnerships Advisor on Oxfam America’s Aid Effectiveness Team. 

As sequestration looms, I can’t help but think—what do Americans and policymakers imagine when they think of developing countries and our assistance to them? Do massive federal budget cuts have human faces associated with them?

At Oxfam, many of the people we work with and talk about—and who will be directly affected by cuts to poverty-reducing aid—are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Majeda Begum Shiru comes to mind—a woman who rarely even used to go into government offices where she lives in southeastern Bangladesh.

“Even if I did, I felt uncomfortable,” she says.

After being trained in public speaking and leadership (provided by NGO Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha with support from USAID), Shiru was elected as a member of the District Public Policy forum.

Today, she has become one of the locally-elected officials she used to fear.

It is people like these who drive our work on Oxfam America’s aid effectiveness team and why we continue to advocate for better aid, despite a difficult budget climate and now looming sequestration.  Evidence tells us that US development aid works when resources are put directly into the hands of those people like Shiru, who are working every day to improve their communities.

The Pew Research Center last week released a new national survey on potential cuts in US government spending. For 18 of 19 programs tested, majorities want either to increase spending or maintain it at current levels. Unfortunately, the only exception was assistance for people who are poor in the developing world.

At less than 1% of the US federal budget, eliminating humanitarian and development aid won’t help us cover the budget gap. Cutting programs that serve people who are poor in the US won’t help either. It’s an argument we’ve made at Oxfam (and will continue to make) again and again.

So how do we give policymakers and the American public a chance to see foreign aid the way we see it? How can poverty-reducing foreign aid be associated with people like Majeda Begum Shiru, rather than nameless or voiceless people who receive a bednet or a bag of seeds?

In January, Oxfam America created a series of ads featuring stories of local “changemakers” who are holding their governments accountable, seeing results, and using US foreign assistance to get it done. Twenty-eight billboards in metro stations and at Washington DC’s National and Dulles airports were accompanied by print and online ads, op-eds, interviews, articles, and blog posts. The ads superimposed DC-insider buzzwords such as “job creator” and “beltway outsider” with decidedly non-DC imagery—people surrounded by fishing boats in Ghana, a plant nursery in Tanzania, a roadway in Malawi.

When the billboards went up, we started hearing that the images drove the buzz—colorful, intriguing, contextualized photos of powerful people, all of whom we know and admire and who helped shape the campaign. Thus far, it seems many audiences think we’re getting the protagonists right. (You can see a compilation of folks’ reactions on Twitter here, as well as one aid critic’s reaction here.)

However, we don’t yet know what will affect the US general public’s view of foreign aid. On the first day the ads hit, the New Media team reported that the first blog post was being shared more than average. Even though the campaign was focused on DC policymakers, this led us to invest in some sponsored Facebook ads with friends of Oxfam’s friends. Many people’s reactions were overtly negative however, and we feared this would overshadow the critical message. Clearly very few US citizens realize that less than 1% of the US federal budget goes to poverty-focused international aid. Oxfam America’s publication, Foreign Aid 101, and this campaign from ONE start the conversation, but there is a long way to go.

Regardless of what happens in Congress in coming weeks, we will continue to fight to make aid more useful to those leading change in their own countries. And we will continue to ask people like Majeda Begum Shiru, Emiliana Aligaesha, Manuel Dominguez, Martha Kwataine, and Nana Kojo Kondua IV to show us how.

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.

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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?

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

“Wear a dark suit. You’ll be wearing an over-sized cardboard mask.”

This is not a set of instructions I expected to hear in my new job as a writer, but here I was, being asked to play the Senate Majority Leader from Nevada.

As the newbie, what was I going to do? Say no?

The next day, my new colleagues scurried around as onlookers and the Congressional police force carefully eyed what we were doing. The image of the 18 foot high inflatable yellow duck against the backdrop of Congress’ hallowed halls was certainly a site to behold.

As I danced around to Benny Hill music with “Nancy Pelosi”, “Mitch McConnell”, and “John Boehner”, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think, “What have I gotten myself in to?”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5yTYh7pz9A&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

In the two weeks since my stint as Harry Reid, my time at Oxfam has been less eventful, but no less exciting. I’ve been drinking from a fire hose, manned (and womaned) by a group of intelligent, talented, and committed people in Oxfam America’s Washington DC office that I have affectionately named “The Wonk-tivists.”

As I read my team’s annual plan, it became clear that these are folks who know that people lift themselves out of poverty. That’s why they are focused on making international aid more effective and more responsive, a topic near and dear to my heart.

But first, we must protect the tiny proportion of poverty-reducing aid that is part of the federal budget, hence the need for the lame duck stunt. (Check out some of the media coverage here and here.) Humanitarian and development aid is less than 1% of the federal budget. And although cutting aid won’t prevent Congress from jumping off the fiscal cliff, it will prevent us from upholding our responsibilities to people around the world who are working hard to bring change in their communities.

Before coming to Oxfam, I worked with over 300 grassroots organizations in southern and east Africa. What is undeniable to me, in my decade of service in the international aid and philanthropy sectors, is that assistance to vulnerable families within their immediate locales builds on long-standing African traditions of community-level sharing of agricultural labor, assistance in times of drought and other calamities, and shared child care. In fact, across Africa, the poorest and most vulnerable people set up indigenous and resilient coping mechanisms such as self-help groups, church groups, burial associations, grain loan schemes, and rotating credit and loan clubs (Lwihula & Over, 1995; Mutangadura et al., 2000; Wilkinson-Maposa et al., 2009).

Earlier this year, the Aid Effectiveness Team at Oxfam America conducted research with these local change-makers in seven countries to help describe the experience of people living and working on the ground where US foreign aid is delivered. Their findings and collection of stories show how threats to Congress’ foreign aid budget puts the results accomplished by people like Emiliana Aligaesha at risk.

Emiliana Aligaesha of Karagwe, Tanzania. Oxfam/MaishaPlus2012

Emiliana Aligaesha and her fellow community members are part of a community group that formed a local private company in Karagwe, Tanzania. They sell coffee and beans and USAID and the World Food Programme have been among their clients. Local leaders declare Ms. Aligaesha’s farm exemplary, even though she has had little formal agricultural training. In addition to her farm’s productivity, Ms. Aligaesha has become a kind of researcher and innovator in the village, testing out new agricultural techniques for others to follow. Most importantly to this former teacher, Ms. Aligaesha’s nine children have all been put through college.

I know why I signed up. I’m here at Oxfam to support the people like Emiliana Aligaesha that are making our world safer, more prosperous, and better for us all.

So if asked to impersonate a 72-year-old Senator again at Oxfam, I’ll readily say yes.

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.

Tonight’s the last debate between President Obama and Governor Romney. This one is advertised as the “foreign policy” debate.

US foreign engagement is often described as resting on a three-legged stool; the three “Ds”. Defense, diplomacy, and development. The Obama administration, and Secretary Clinton in particular, has always emphasized that diplomacy and development are equal partners of the three. In past Presidential debates, US financial contributions to foreign assistance and reducing poverty were occasionally topics. During a 2000 debate, then-Governor Bush and Vice President Gore talked about their views, prodded by a question from Jim Lehrer.

I’m guessing that the last “D”, development, will be missing this time round.

CBS newsman Bob Schieffer will moderate tonight and has announced an agenda with topics ranging from Afghanistan to the Middle East, with a bit of terrorism thrown in. Also China. But no airtime for development, foreign assistance. There’s a lot to talk about, actually; the outstanding progress made on some counts and the terrible failure on others. The fate of initiatives launched by President Bush during his term to address AIDS and new foreign aid programs for poor countries with good governance. The new initiatives launched under President Obama on food security and health.

Some politicians (former and possibly future) still think it’s worth talking about and supporting.

But, in all likelihood, issues that matter to the roughly 1.3 billion people who live in and with poverty—and to the hundreds of millions of US taxpayers who pay for these programs—won’t make an appearance.

To make the debates go better, a lot of my friends play drinking games. They’re generally designed to crystalize and shatter the clichés, pierce the banality, and give life to the predictable.

So, I’ll make a game of it. If either candidate mentions “poverty” or “poor people” or even something close, I’ll give $25 to their campaign. If either candidate makes something like a defense of foreign aid, or talks about US obligations—moral and otherwise—to the least of us, I’ll donate $100.

Should make it more interesting.

Editor’s note:  At 9 pm tonight, hundreds of Oxfam America supporters will raise their voices to change the conversation by calling attention to the fight to end hunger and poverty during the debates. How? By signing up on Thunderclap to tweet and post to Facebook. Join us.  

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.

The aftermath of Tropical Storm Isaac in Haiti. Photo by Stephania Musset.

As Tropical Storm Isaac dumped torrential rains on Haiti this past weekend, many found a silver lining in the fact that only 24 Haitians died. True, it could have been much worse. Haiti continues to suffer from the effects of the devastating 2010 earthquake, and Isaac could have been yet another major catastrophe.

But the effects of Isaac will be felt for quite some time and could result in a much higher death toll. Haiti did not dodge a bullet. Agriculture losses, a looming cholera crisis, and homelessness are the real numbers behind Isaac. And what will happen the next time a tropical storm passes through Haiti if people remain displaced without adequate housing?

Agriculture provides employment for half the national workforce and makes up 28 percent of the GDP. Tropical storm Isaac flooded farms, devastated plantations, eroded soil, and swept away crops, resulting in fewer agricultural resources in a country with extremely high food insecurity.

Disaster prevention experts have begun preparations for a feared cholera spike as a result of flooding from Isaac that has left people living in waist high water. Combined with Haiti’s poor water and sanitation infrastructure, this combination has created opportunities for new and deadlier outbreaks.

Currently 390,000 remain in makeshift camps, down from the estimated 1.5 million after the earthquake. Many have now lost what little shelter they had as Isaac swept away flimsy homes such as tents and tarps, as well as personal belongings. What will it take to finally have a comprehensive housing policy In Haiti that will move people from tent cities to homes that can endure tropical storms?

To sustain the next Isaac, in addition to a sound housing policy, funding pledged by the international community is needed. Of the $5.5 billion pledged at the donors conference in New York in 2010 only 46% has been disbursed. Nigel Fisher, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator notes that “underfunding threatens to stunt growing relocation initiatives to safe housing…. It threatens to reverse gains achieved in the fight against cholera…. It threatens the very existence of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people still living in camps.”

Isaac has demonstrated that vulnerable people in Haiti will continue to face chronic hardship unless the international community live up to their commitments. Haiti faces three real crises exacerbated by Isaac—cholera, loss of agricultural productivity and housing—and funding only 46% of our pledges is just not good enough.

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.