Developing Country Progress and the Effectiveness of International Aid

1. Developing Country Progress and the Effectiveness of International Aid Maarten Brouwer, Effectiveness and Quality Director Ministry of Foreign Affairs Netherlands

2. Introduction • Perspective of a donor person using development statistics • Need to know progress made in partner countries • Why is this still so difficult?

3. Netherlands experience with progress measurement in developing countries • Second biennial Results Report just published. • Purpose is to inform parliament and the Dutch public • Report revolved around country-level “result chains” • These show Dutch efforts are part of a set of country and donor inputs that lead to outputs, which lead to outcomes & impact • Report was well received • But doing the report was a challenge: weak monitoring and data systems, especially at the sector level

4. Towards a common results framework • PRSPs have good monitoring framework (although often not used for domestic accountability) • Sectoral plans continue to have weak result chains • Donor trend towards using country systems and more budget support. • This requires better performance assessment frameworks (PAFs) in partner countries. • But can we use country systems for PAFs?

5. Towards a common results framework (cont’d) • No • Monitoring data are weak and too little detail on policy measures • So donors develop their own PAFs for partner countries • This is undesirable: important to strengthen national PAFs for domestic accountability

6. Towards a common results framework (cont’d) • Weak progress in improving quality of country sector or thematic plans; • These plans do not have a clear result chain and a corresponding monitoring framework. • Why is this so? • Limited tradition and expertise within sector ministries to do outcome-focused planning • Donors are not helping enough with this either • Statistical data to measure monitoring indicators are lacking, and there is no harmonised donor approach to strengthen country statistical systems

7. What to do? • Donors are increasingly involved in strengthening national plans (2nd generation PRSPs) • Opportunity to help establish a country’s result chains and outcome-based monitoring frameworks; • National, sectoral and sub-national; and also for difficult cross-cutting areas such as governance and the environment • Donors need to put much more effort in strengthening a country’s national and sectoral statistics; and coordinate better among themselves.

8. Conclusions • Donors want to scale up their aid. • But need better country systems to monitor progress • Donors should therefore do three things: • Help countries build strengthen their sector and governance plans, make them outcome based and establish clear monitoring frameworks • scale up their aid to statistics at country level • Better coordinate their support to statistics