• Aid harmonisation

Aid harmonisation

The chronic fragmentation of aid delivery is one of the core issues that the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) sought to address. However, although the Declaration details a number of mechanisms to improve cooperation – i.e channeling aid through country systems; joint donor missions; and the increase in recipient government ownership of programs, etc. – it provides little guidance on how donors and recipient governments would, in practice, plan and implement such modalities at the country level. So, with the recent Accra Agenda for Action providing fresh impetus for the Paris Declaration’s commitments - including aid harmonisation - how have donor agencies and recipient governments responded at the country level?

Joint country assistance strategies have emerged as a preferred method to coordinate and harmonise aid. This mechanism brings the recipient country and its donors together under an agreed assistance framework and helps ensure that donors and the government form a common vision with shared monitorable results/benchmarks, and pursue common sectoral strategies aligned with national plans.
This paper determines that, to date, donor teams and recipient governments have come together in at least 12 countries to prepare joint strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to report on and draw lessons from the experience of the newly enacted strategies, illuminate the experience to date, and possibilities to take the process forward. The authors detail a number of lessons learnt and conclusions, including:

• while the government may have identified a lead agency to work with donors on the joint strategy, other government agencies may be insufficiently aware of and engaged in the strategy process. This is bound to create problems during implementation, since government ownership may not go much beyond the lead agency
  
• separation of Poverty Reduction Strategy processes from the joint country strategy process may be preferable in cases where the government’s capacity to manage both the preparation process and interaction with donors on their engagement is limited and combining the two processes could lead to serious overload
  
• an inclusive, thorough and effectively managed process has a greater chance to create the trust, cooperative spirit and follow-through during the implementation phase than one that stresses the production of a quality report without adequate venting of differing views and interests
  
• the donor community may wish to identify one agency as the presumptive leader among donors for aid coordination on the ground in countries where governments do not have the capacity or the will to take clear leadership of the aid coordination effort

The African Development Bank, the author highlights, is indeed positive about recent harmonisation efforts:
“[donor harmonization including joint country assistance strategies have] triggered an intensive process of
communication and alignment within the donor community. Separate negotiations between donors and
government are increasingly being replaced by a round table approach.”

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