   
Dear members,
Countries of the Asia Pacific have - without doubt - been trail-blazing the implementation of the Paris Declaration (PD) and Accra Agenda for Action (AAA). As part of Accra High Level Forum consultations partner countries requested that donors provide longer term capacity development to support country level achievement of the PD and AAA. In March 2009, partner countries jointly designed with ADB, Japan, UNDP and the World Bank the Capacity Development for Development Effectiveness (CDDE) Facility - a partner country led facility responding to specific capacity development demands for accelerating aid effectiveness at the country level.
Given the CDDE Facility was launched in Manila just nine months ago, the progress we have seen is encouraging. A range of initiatives identified at the launch, have been led and implemented by a range of partner countries from the Asia Pacific, with support from the CDDE Secretariat. These initiative, such as the Timor Leste-led and Cambodia-hosted exchange on Aid Information Management Systems, have all aimed to respond to common issues identified by different countries. They have been guided by philosophy of building capacity through south-south exchange of ideas and in-depth practical advice. More needs to be done to review impacts at the country level and to ensure that the CDDE Facility initiatives continue to add value to existing capacity development and implementation processes in-country but we are on the right track!
Another core feature of the CDDE Facility’s work programme has been to respond to partner countries’ concern that the international policy processes such as those of the OECD DAC and UN could do more to listen systematically to partner country needs and interests. The Articulating Voice from the Asia Pacific initiative led jointly by Cambodia, Nepal and Sri Lanka provided an example of how partner countries could increase their voice by feedingtheir views on the HLF4 preparatory process and the implementation of country level actions plans into the OECD DAC and UN Development Cooperation Forum. Despite these efforts there is more to be done to ensure that needs and interests from the Asia Pacific are responded to and we will need to address this as we move into the workplan for 2010.
All-in-all we have done much collectively to reach out and extend an understanding of the aid effectiveness agenda within the Asia Pacific amongst different stakeholders (see the article on Parliaments in a board range of countries.) and in a broad range of countries. We still need to do more to link with those involved in driving different aspects of development finance (see the article on climate change for example) and to link more systematically with operations at the sector and decentralized levels. We might say that whilst 2009 saw greater outreach in terms of engaging different and new actors into the aid effectiveness debate; 2010 will need to see this operationalised in terms of supporting these actors to implement the agenda and effect real change for development processes in-country. As we approach HLF4 we must be determined to see how improvement in the management of aid can really impact on development effectiveness.
ADB is committed to see the CDDE facility continue supporting partner countries until the HLF-4 in Seoul, South Korea. We are pleased to inform that South Korea has joined the CDDE steering committee as a special invitee. We will of course be working closely on the up-coming South-South Cooperation meeting in Seoul on 4th February (see South–South article) and hope that we will see many of you there where we aim to organize a side meeting to consult on priorities for the 2010 workplan. For those who will not be there please do keep sharing your ideas and proposals for the work of the CDDE Facility in 2010 at cdde@aideffectiveness.org.
On behalf of my co-chair, Mr Lava Awasthi Joint Secretary Education, Government of Nepal may I welcome you to this newsletter and to 2010 – a year in which I hope we will continue to work together in pursuit of the better use of aid in contributing to development effectiveness.
Why climate change matters for aid effectiveness: Countries from Asia and the Pacific face different threats from climate change. In the Himalayan nations of Bhutan and Nepal, the most urgent threat from climate change arises from floods from glacial lake outburst as glaciers melt. The melting of the Himalayas glaciers will also impact Asia’s rivers which provide water for millions of farmers in south Asia and China – by first worsening flooding and then leading to a long term decline in water availability. In many Pacific nations,
it is sea level rise that may undermine the very existence of the nation. While in some of emerging economies, such as China, the challenge is to move towards a development path which is both resilient to climate impacts and reduces the level of green house gas emissions. To respond to this urgent agenda, aid practitioners need to integrate climate change into the criteria for effective aid – otherwise many aid programmes may not be the achieving their development objectives.
Why aid effectiveness matters for climate change: There are also the opportunities and risks associated with the growing amounts of aid that will be channeled into addressing climate change. The UN Climate Change Conference in December 2009 in Copenhagen saw much debate on the quantity of financial resources that should be invested in climate change mitigation and adaptation globally (see below). Some of the amounts of that were discussed are significant, particularly the pledge by developed countries to raise $US 100 billion a year from public, private and alternative sources of funding up to 2020 (for comparison, global ODA flows are currently at about US$ 120 billion annually).
Already in the run-up to and during Copenhagen, commitments were forthcoming towards the short term target of $30 bn with pledges of immediate funds by the EU of $10.6bn, Japan $11bn and the US of $3.6bn. This aid presents a huge opportunity for achieving development outcomes, but also a risk in terms of whether the funds will be used effectively. Many questions remain unanswered and will need to be agreed in the next year or so: how will the funds be raised, how will they be managed and coordinated, will they be additional to existing ODA funds, and what criteria will be used to allocate funds between countries and within countries. Asian Pacific countries, particularly low incomes countries which are likely to be able to access these funds need to be actively involved in these discussions and negotiations over the coming year.
 Ministry of Finance and aid practitioners need to take a larger role: Many countries in the region have seen significant increases in climate change related funding in the past few months. But so far the lessons of aid effectiveness do not seem to be learned. Too many off-budget, vertical financing mechanisms are being set up which are not fully integrated into national budgets. To ensure the effective use of existing and future aid for climate change, Ministries of Finance need to be more involved. Ministries of Environment should provide technical advice on the science of climate change impacts, but should withdraw from implementation and financial management of climate related aid. Climate negotiators and aid effectiveness practitioners need to work much more closely to ensure that climate finance is consistent with effective aid management as set out in the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action – otherwise both aid effectiveness and climate change objectives will not be achieved.
Parliamentarians potentially have a key role to play in improving the quality of aid and strengthening the accountability with which all resources are used for development. But members of parliament are notoriously busy and come from all walks of life: few of us have the patience or the technical background to make sense of literature on aid effectiveness.This is why the Capacity Development for Development Effectiveness (CDDE) Facility made it a priority to produce a practical guidance note for members of parliament on aid effectiveness.
The draft note is available now at the CDDE website – please visit www.aideffectiveness.org/parliaments. It has been prepared by a team led by Alan Hudson of the UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI), which draws on expertise from around the world. The peer review group which includes several MPs to ensure “ownership” of the process by parliamentarians themselves. I am one of such MPs along with Mr. Abdillah Toha (Indonesia), Mr. Bob McMullan (Australia), Mr. François De Donnea (Belgium) and Dr Minendra Rijal (Nepal, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Culture and previously an MP).
The note is relatively short, some 20 pages, and includes practical illustrations and examples drawn from parliamentary experiences within the region and beyond. It aims to be very readable both for MPs who know a lot about aid issues (but could use an easy reference tool) and for beginners. The note will be very useful in helping parliamentarians focus their limited resources on the really essential points that can help make aid effective or render it useless.
After various tries at an outline, the review group agreed to one structured along the three main stages of the aid cycle, namely, planning, implementation and monitoring. The note looks at the practical entry points for parliaments to engage in each stage, taking account of the role of parliament - and of individual MPs - in legislation, representation and oversight. Since capacity constraints vary greatly from parliament to parliament, the note presents the most common situations and shows practical ways to redress them.
Please do download the draft guidance note here and send your feedback to the CDDE and IPU team by 17 February if possible. Your ideas can really help ensure this note gives parliamentarians concrete suggestions on how they can play their role in strengthening aid contribution to development. This guidance note outlines what opportunities parliamentarians have and what capacities are needed. But it is only a start. We hope – with CDDE, IPU and others’ support in 2010 – to make strong progress in building capacities at country level to help turn these opportunities into ground realities.
The 2008 Accra Agenda for Action underlined that South-South Cooperation (SSC) and Capacity Development were essential to enhance aid effectiveness and achieve development results. Yet we need to do more to ensure our efforts to promote aid effectiveness are enriched with the practices and experiences of SSC, and that we seek out the complementarities between SSC and traditional North-South cooperation.
The Task Team on South-South Cooperation (TT-SSC), established under the aegis of the DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness, can support us in these efforts. It was tasked with clarifying how the aid effectiveness principles could inspire and contribute to SSC and how SSC itself might feed into to the aid effectiveness agenda – particularly with regard to developing national capacities. The TT-SSC’s activities are integral in defining the role of partner countries and Southern perspectives in the evolving global aid architecture.
The Asia-Pacific region is rich with examples and experiences of SSC between countries of the region. The Asia-Pacific Meeting of the TT-SSC on 4 February 2010 in Seoul, Republic of Korea, will seek to take stock and review some of these examples. It provides countries with an opportunity to showcase their best examples and some of these will feed into the Colombia High Level Event on South-South Cooperation and Capacity Development on 24-26 March 2010.
How and what can you contribute? Please share your SSC case stories on recent South-South cooperation initiatives that aim to foster capacity development for aid and development effectiveness.
For more information, visit www.southsouthcases.info or contact southsouthcases@gmail.com
At the CDDE Launch, the 92 country colleagues present voted on what guidance notes would be most useful to them. Top of the list was practical guidance on Aid Information Management Systems (AIMS). For us in Timor-Leste, this has been key as we are about to establish a system and want to make sure we learn from others’ experiences and get off on the right track.
We don’t want to invest significant amounts of money and time unless we can be sure an AIMS is what we need. We want to ensure that any new system will help us tackle the core challenges of promoting more accountable and effective aid.
We already benefitted from two very useful exchanges with other countries in our region. The first was hosted by Cambodia and gave us many insights into the factors behind their successful AIMS. The second was hosted by CDDE in Bangkok in August, and also provided a regional consultation on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).
We are delighted that CDDE, together with UNDP, have commissioned the guidance note that my colleagues and I asked for at the CDDE launch in Manila last year. It answers many of the questions that are relevant to us: What are AIMS? How can they help promote more accountable and effective aid? How can they be set up? How much do they cost? What lessons have we learned in Asia-Pacific and further afield?
The second draft is available on the CDDE site at www.aideffectiveness.org/aims. Please do download it, and be part of the peer review group! We need your feedback so that together we can make this note as useful as possible – drawing on the best (and worst!) experiences from across our region and beyond. Please send your feedback by 24 February to Aidan Cox at cdde@aideffectiveness.org. Thank you!
The aid effectiveness portal now gives you access to guides to major topics and debates related to aid effectiveness. It also provides you with resources on tools and methodologies to improve aid effectiveness at the country level.
Over the last few months, country pages for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kiribati, Kyrgyz, Laos, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Timor Leste, and Vietnam have been added. Click here to explore these pages.
Want to edit and add resources to your country page? Do you have a website you want us to help promote by linking to? Contact cdde@aideffectiveness.org
2010 will be a critical milestone on the journey on aid effectiveness. 2010 is the year for meeting the Paris Declaration’s targets for improving aid effectiveness: actions and behavior changes that we make now will be critical to show evidence on progress. 2010 will also be a busy year in the global development agenda – with the UN Development Cooperation Forum and the MDG High-Level Event in the horizon. The challenge for the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness (WP-EFF) is to keep our focus by continuing to make progress at country level.
As an outcome of the eventful “WP-EFF week” on 30 November – 4 December 2009, the WP-EFF outlined a clear path forward on how to accelerate the implementation of the Paris principles in country and identified the key milestones towards the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Seoul at end of 2011. Some 200 participants – including from eight partenr country members and observers from the Asia-Pacific region – low and middle income countries, civil society organisations, parliamentarians and representatives of the Bretton Woods and regional development organisations took part in the rich discussions.
Agreement was reached on an initiative to catalyze faster implementation at the country level of the Paris Principles on aid effectiveness. The co-chairs of the Working Party are ready to support developing countries who request their assistance in unblocking barriers to progress. This support will range from the technical – applying lessons of best practice developed– to the political – holding members to account for implementing the commitments they signed up to in Paris and Accra. The first application of this initiative will be in Ghana, which has requested support to ensure that donors use its public financial management, procurement, auditing and accountability systems.
One key meeting was the partner country caucus – bringing together some 40 low and middle income countries to prepare a joint position on aid effectiveness priorities for the period up to HLF-4 (Box 1). This is the only forum of this kind: no other regular forum for aid recipients to discuss and reach common positions on development assistance exists – and it is hosted by WP-EFF.
Other highlights of the week included a high level seminar “making aid make a difference” which posed challenging questions to leaders and policy makers of bilateral and multilateral aid agencies on the effectiveness of the special sector and thematic funds they create to support global priorities (eg HIV/aids, climate change, food security). There was also a discussion of aid allocation, aid fragmentation and aid orphans – marking the fulfillment of one of the commitments in the AAA to begin a dialogue on cross-country division of labour.
South Africa, Brazil and China were represented throughout the week. Colombia is well advanced in its plans to hold a major South South Meeting on aid effectiveness at the end of March 2010 (24-26 March) in Bogota, Colombia. The meeting is expected to endorse the Bogota Statement, which will outline the action ahead on SSC towards HLF 4. Korea, as vice-President of the WP-EFF – is devoting considerable effort to its role as the host of the next High Level Forum in Seoul at the end of 2011, and will host as well, a workshop on the evolving development cooperation architecture after the G20 meeting at the end of 2010.
As we move towards 2010, the Working Party will work on elaborating a basic framework of a roadmap to HLF-4 – identifying key events and decision points towards this important international event. The Asia-Pacific region – particularly the CDDE – will be critical in consolidating partner country’s voice and transmitting valuable lessons and good practices on making aid more effective at the regional and global levels. As HLF 4 will be the first – and perhaps only – Forum to take place in the Asia region on aid effectiveness, the WP-EFF continues to look forward to steps taken in this dynamic region.
Greater Aid Transparency: Crucial for Aid Effectiveness, ODI Policy Brief (January 2010). Available here.
Development Effectiveness: Towards New Understandings, by the North South Institute (September 2009). Available here.
Report on “Aid to Better Health”, Health as Tracer Sector Initiative, by OECD (December 2009). Available here. More information.
Dep endent Communities: Aid and Politics in Cambodia and East Timor, by Caroline Hughes (2009). See review.
Aid Effectiveness and Local Government – understanding the link between governance and development, by Local Governement Alliance for International Development (November 2009). Available here.
The Aid Trap, by Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan (2009). See review.
Sector Budget Support in Practice: a Literature Review, ODI (November 2009). Available here.
Know a publication that you think should be featured? Please tell us about it at cdde@aideffectiveness.org
Task Team on South-South Cooperation, Asia-Pacific Meeting, Seoul, 4 February 2010 (more information)
Capacity Development Global Event, 17-19 March 2010, Marrakesh (more information)
South-South Cooperation High Level Event, 24-26 March 2010, Bogotá (more information)
Working Party on Aid Effectiveness Executive Committee Meeting (closed), 26 March 2010, Bogotá
Second Asia-Pacific Aid Effectiveness CoP Meeting, June 2010, Bangkok (tbc)
UN DCF High Level Symposium, 3-4 June 2010, Helsinki, Finland
UN Development Cooperation Forum, 28 June onwards (TBC), New York
United Nations MDGs High Level Event, 20-22 September 2010, New York (more information)
Workshop on Evolving Global Aid Architecture, Date TBC between November 2010 – February 2011
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