The African Development Bank and the development communication network (DevCom Network) whose secretariat is hosted by OECD, are organizing the "Tunis Round-Table Conference on Multilateral Aid and the Broad Public: Improving Results Communication" from March 22-23, 2010, in Tunis, Tunisia. The joint initiative aims at improving the practice of communicating on multilateral aid. Over sixty communicators from multilaterals and bilateral donors institutions are expected to attend the event.

Communicators from bilateral ministries and agencies perceive communicating on multilateral aid as a controversial issue and define it as one of the most difficult tasks in their daily work. The challenges stem from the problems of explaining to members of parliament and the general public why large parts of official development assistance (ODA) go to multilateral institutions and development banks. Other questions include: What is the added value of dealing with multilaterals? How can multilateral aid for development results be managed? How can multilateral institutions support communicators in communicating on multilateral aid to their domestic constituencies?

The roundtable will bringing together communicators from multilateral and bilateral donor institutions with a view to starting a debate on current challenges and concrete responses to the need to communicate on multilateral aid. It also aims at providing an up-to-date overview on existing tools to communicate on multilateral aid by exploring experiences and sharing best practices among practitioners from various institutions, as well as seeking ways of helping multilateral and bilateral institutions work more closely in terms of development communication, in general, and results-based communication, in particular.

Contacts

Yolanda Nunes-correia