allAfrica.com: Africa: More Financial and Technical Cooperation for Development (Page 1 of 2)

Civil society organisations call upon the membership of the United Nations to encourage the building of development partnerships that increase the volume and maximize the poverty reduction impact of the Overseas Development Assistance (ODA).

For the second year in a row, global ODA figures have fallen, and very few countries have met the target of 0.7% of GNP. Most donors have not made the substantial increases in ODA required to meet the Millennium Development Goals and the commitments from the Monterrey consensus. Much of the recent ODA has been due to debt relief, and to a lesser extent to emergency assistance and administrative costs of donors. In real terms, debt relief alone explains almost 70 percent of ODA between 2004 and 2005. ODA towards core development programs continue to remain subdued.

At the same time there is little progress towards the availing of long-term resources to the international financial system, coupled with democratic reform of the international financial institutions to ensure development effectiveness and increased resource flows to regional and sub - regional institutions and funds. These reforms and increased flows are needed to allow the regional and sub - regional institutions and funds to adequately support sustained economic and social development, technical assistance for capacity-building, and social and environmental protection schemes.

Improvements in aid effectiveness have been patchy and piecemeal both at the global and national levels. At the global level, there continues to be little effort to build mechanisms that enhance the overall effectiveness of national institutions, through increased country ownership, operations that raise productivity and yield measurable results in reducing poverty and inequality, and closer coordination with donors and the private sector. In the same vain unreformed supply-driven technical assistance is continuing to favour policy conditionality and undermine ownership.

Civil society organisations therefore call upon the membership of the United Nations to encourage the building of development partnerships that increase the volume and maximize the poverty reduction impact of ODA.

In particular we call upon donor and recipient countries to:

1. Intensify their efforts to enable effective partnerships among donors and country recipients, based on the recognition of national leadership and ownership by developing countries. The outcome document of the Doha conference should include a commitment to end all donor-imposed policy conditions. It should recognise that such conditions undermine democratic ownership.

2. Commit to give aid to eradicate poverty and inequalities and to promote human rights, gender equality, full employment and decent work and environmental sustainability as central development goals. The outcome of the Doha conference should interpret the terms of national country ownership as democratic ownership and elaborate on its implications in the context of countries' obligations to international Human Rights law, core labour standards, and international commitments on gender equality and sustainable development.

3. Commit to end the practice of using aid for their own foreign and economic policy interests and priorities, and military interventions. In addition, an effective and transparent international mechanism must urgently be put in place to improve aid allocation so it goes to those most in need.

4. Untie technical assistance from the disbursement of aid and reform technical assistance to be aligned to national strategies, which respond to national priorities and build capacity. The right of recipient countries to contract according to their needs should be respected. More effective South-South forms of technical assistance should also be promoted.

5. Commit to the highest standards of openness and transparency. This should include: timely and meaningful dissemination of information, particularly during aid negotiations and about aid disbursements; and the adoption of a policy for automatic and full disclosure of relevant information, in languages and forms that are appropriate to concerned stakeholders, with a strictly limited regime of exceptions. Southern governments must work with elected representatives and citizens' organisations to set out open and transparent policies on how aid is to be sourced, spent, monitored and accounted for. This requires that government ministers and officials are accountable to their citizens, with effective mechanisms of answerability and enforceability, based on improved transparency of information

6. Mutually agreed transparent and binding contracts to govern aid relationships would make partnerships more effective. Aid terms must be fairly and transparently negotiated with participation from and accountability to people living in poverty and inequality. Donors and recipient governments should agree to base future aid relationships on transparent and binding agreements including clear commitments by donors on aid volumes and quality,

7. Develop multi-stakeholder mechanisms for holding governments to account for the use of aid in both partner and donor countries. The mechanisms should be open, transparent and structured, with room for citizens to hold their governments to account in their respective constituencies. As a universal and multilateral institution the UN, through a considerably strengthened ECOSOC Development Cooperation Forum should become a multi-stakeholder for democratic involvement in the design and monitoring of conceptual and operational aspects of the emerging aid architecture.

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