Maravi

Envoys to review aid effectiveness

Envoys to review aid effectiveness
By Joan Chirwa
Monday September 01, 2008 [04:00]

INTERNATIONAL development community representatives will tomorrow gather in Accra, Ghana to review progress and assess bottlenecks in improving aid effectiveness. Ministers from over 100 countries, heads of international financial institutions, donor organisations, and civil society organisations from around the world will gather for the third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.

Speaking ahead of the meeting which convenes tomorrow, Elliott Harris of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s Policy Development and Review department said the meeting would present opportunities to chart a course for strengthening aid, as the past three years had shown how difficult it had been to change processes and priorities that governed actions of donors and the beneficiaries.

The IMF noted that it had been difficult to bring about necessary changes to the processes, preferences, and priorities that have governed actions of donors and recipient countries for decades.

In months of preparation for the September 2-4 event, the IMF staff has worked with others to help define a consensus on the meeting agenda, in particular stressing the need for predictable aid flows.
According to the IMF, the Accra meeting comes at a crucial moment.

It is just past the midpoint to the 2010 target date set by the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and halfway toward the 2015 deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set by the United Nations.

"Besides reviewing advances in, and assessing obstacles, the High Level Forum aims to broaden the aid effectiveness dialogue to newer actors and chart a course for strengthening the aid effort," IMF stated.

And Harris said the meeting was "very important" as it presented an opportunity to deepen implementation of the Paris Declaration by establishing an action-oriented agenda - the Accra Agenda for Action.

The Paris Declaration, endorsed on March 2, 2005, is an international agreement to which over 100 ministers, heads of agencies and other senior officials adhered and committed their countries and organisations to continue to increase efforts in harmonisation, alignment and managing aid for results with a set of monitorable actions and indicators. Zambia is party to the Paris Declaration.

Labels: ACCRA, DEVELOPMENT, IMF

posted by MrK @ 3:56 PM