With the development community back from Busan, it’s time to break down what went right and wrong at last week’s meetings. The consensus seems to be that the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in Busan was a mixed bag – some promises, few commitments, little progress (see here for a good breakdown of the meetings from Nancy Birdsall).
Yesterday, I was happy to see the MCC finally publish aid data to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, the government’s one-stop-shop for foreign assistance budget and appropriations information. But upon further examination of the website, I couldn’t help but feel a little cheated when I noticed the dearth of new data available in the tool. Nearly a year has passed since the Dashboard was launched in December 2010, and the U.S. government has yet to come up with the majority of its promised haul of agency data.
It is now clear that donor coordination meetings are not the answer to making aid more effective, and donors such as USAID are becoming interested in a more decentralized ‘Google Maps’ approach to aid coordination, facilitating well-informed decisions by people on the ground. For this to work, donors need to publish detailed project level information in an open, reusable, internationally consistent data format. Some donors are not yet showing the necessary resolve.
We now know that the development system has met just one of the 13 targets it set in 2005 for making aid more effective. That is not surprising: the problems diagnosed in the Paris Declaration are real and important, but the solutions that have been pursued in its name have not been practical. There are better ways to achieve the aid effectiveness which the Paris Declaration envisages.