AID:Agreement will bind all countries to new systems that will make international aid to poorer countries more effective, writes Clare MacCarthyin Accra
IN A RARE display of united political dexterity, European Union member states have forced a new global deal on the way development aid is channelled from rich to poor nations, outmanoeuvring both the United States and Japan, who favoured shallower reforms.
"The EU showed great political will. Under the French presidency it has the courage of its convictions," said Louis Michel, EU Commissioner for Development.
The deal, the "Accra Agenda for Action", was adopted late on Thursday in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, following three days of intense negotiations involving some 100 governments and a host of international bodies including the EU, World Bank and OECD.
The meeting also featured substantial input by civil society, with hundreds of delegates from NGOs such as Trócaire, Oxfam and Bono's ONE achieving at least some of their demands for quicker action on eradicating poverty.
"Ireland is delighted with what was achieved in Accra. It was more substantial than what was originally envisaged. It binds all countries to new systems and protocols which will ensure that international aid is much more effective," said Peter Power, Minister of State for Overseas Development.
The Accra summit followed from a declaration made in Paris in 2005 to make aid work better by giving more say to recipient countries, cutting down on bureaucratic duplication, and introducing wider auditing to ensure promises are kept.
Since Paris, the need to harmonise donor initiatives has emerged as one of the most contorted problems in the aid arena. The fragile civil service infrastructures of many developing countries are being swamped by delegations of well-meaning donors from the West. Vietnam, for example, played host to three donor delegations a day last year. Officials in Dar Es Salaam, meanwhile, spent valuable time penning 2,400 reports for various donors and some 8,000 audit reports for multilateral development financiers.
Brian Hammond, an OECD development expert, told The Irish Times that the donor deluge kept Tanzanian health workers so busy during office hours that their proper jobs " vaccinating babies or checking their mothers' well-being" had to be done during evenings and weekends. "It's unfair and unsustainable," he said.
The new focus on harmonising donor missions contained in the Accra accord will do much to take the strain off overworked health operatives in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. The deal also obliges donors to give reasonable timetables as to when promised funds will arrive in recipient accounts. Unpredictability - never knowing when the promised cash will arrive - plagues many development projects. "There's nothing more disheartening than a half-completed white elephant of a bridge left unfinished because we didn't know when or if the funds would arrive," one delegate noted.
From Accra, a meeting designed to tackle the quality of aid, international attention will now switch to more tangible tasks. A meeting in Doha in November will focus on quantity, and the gap between pledges and actual remittances.
"After you've made aid effective, afterwards you've got to have instruments to create jobs and growth," Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank, told The Irish Times.
The establishment of venture capital and private equity funds by western countries, she said, would create African jobs and deflect the demographic time bomb of young and unemployed Africans either turning to crime or dying trying to get to Europe.
According to the Danish government, which has just launched an ambitious pan-African effort to find ways to tackle youth joblessness, Africa's share of the world's population of under-24s will grow from 15 per cent now to 25 per cent in 2025.
And unless jobs are created, Ms Okonjo-Iweala says, the negative impact will be widely felt. "Over 1,000 illegal immigrants died on their way from Senegal and elsewhere to the Canary Islands in the first quarter of 2006, and this migration trend can only be reversed when the youth secure jobs at home."
But Ms Okonjo-Iweala (who was recently awarded an honorary degree by TCD) said the current situation was "an opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of".
"Small neutral countries like Ireland and Denmark, which are not former colonial powers, can be valuable catalysts in development," she said. "They are not seen as a threat."