Implications for the Paris Declaration in Busan
and Beyond
“Global problems require global solutions” is not just a
truism—it’s a reality. Yet until recently, the field of international development placed little emphasis on accepting and
acting on the need for holistic, coordinated, sustainable solutions to problems such as widespread hunger and poverty.
The international aid effectiveness movement began taking shape in the late 1990s. Multilateral institutions, donor
countries, and countries in the developing world alike are
making efforts to make development assistance more effective. A single statistic—the world is home to nearly 1 billion
chronically undernourished people—is enough to show that
these efforts are urgently needed. We must use development
resources efficiently because the lives of millions of people
and the quality of life of hundreds of millions more depend
on it.
The current effort to assess progress to date is the Fourth
High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (Busan, Korea, from
November 29, 2011 to December 1, 2011).
The Journey to Busan
Experience over the past decades teaches us that coordinating development assistance and development programs
will, quite simply, improve our results. Coordination helps
build transparency, accountability, and legitimacy in global
poverty reduction efforts. Yet to a large extent, these programs continue to be fragmented.
Aid that isn’t coordinated erodes opportunities for progress, including the prospects for achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs are an unprecedented worldwide effort to make progress by 2015 on
collectively identified, achievable goals whose progress can
be measured. The eight MDGs include targets for reducing
hunger, deep poverty, child and maternal mortality, environmental sustainability, and the toll taken by diseases such as
AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. The MDGs also call for a
global partnership between developed and developing countries.
A key obstacle to an effective partnership is that donors
have varied requirements and procedures to design, assess,
monitor, and evaluate aid. Donors often have different timetables for reporting since their fiscal years end on different
dates, making it necessary to make several field visits to a
given country in one year. It is a time-intensive and financially costly process for everyone, especially partner countries.
For example, the 2008 Paris Monitoring Survey found that
Vietnam had received 752 missions from donors during the
previous year.1
The sheer number of meetings took significant time and
energy away from implementing development programs and
added to the pressure on already limited government capacity. In Morogoro, Tanzania, district health officials spent 25
working