Aid reform 'must speed up'

2008-09-05 10:50

Nairobi - Faster progress must be made in giving developing countries greater responsibility for spending international aid, participants at a conference aimed at improving aid effectiveness said on Thursday.

The Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which began on Tuesday, follows on from a 2005 meeting in Paris, where more than 100 countries and agencies signed up to the Paris Declaration.

Signatories committed themselves to improving the delivery and use of aid by 2010.

Participants at a roundtable in Accra said in a statement that progress since Paris had been slow and called on donor nations to move away from imposing unilateral conditions for spending aid and focus instead on accountability.

According to the forum organisers, international donors give $120bn in aid to developing nations each year, with private contributions adding up to $25bn.

However, charities and developing nations have complained that donor governments are reluctant to relinquish control of how this money is spent.

"The situation is still very colonial," Robert Fox, head of British charity Oxfam's delegation in Accra, told dpa. "Some countries, above all the USA and Japan, are rejecting stronger obligations."

Charities such as Oxfam charge that too much aid money goes to expensive international consultants, while others say that developed nations use aid for their own ends.

"As long as the donor community continues to see foreign aid as a tool for its foreign policy, full alignment with partner country priorities can not take place," Debapriya Bhattacharya, Bangladesh's Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations, said in a statement.

Part of developed nations reluctance to change comes from a perception of deep-rooted corruption in many developing nations, but Fox said that running a "parallel administration" was expensive and also blocked the possibility of employing local people.

Ministers were meeting on Thursday, the last day of the conference, to thrash out a final declaration on how to move forward. - Sapa-dpa

- SAPA