The Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness [1]was recently held in Accra, Ghana, from 2-4 September. The conference brought together heads of bilateral and multilateral development agencies and donor organizations, ministers from over 100 countries, and civil society organizations. "Their common objective," the official announcements stated grandly, "is to help developing countries and marginalized people in their fight against poverty by making aid more transparent, accountable and results-oriented." More specifically," the conference sought to "review progress in improving aid effectiveness; broaden the dialogue to newer actors; chart a course for continuing international action on aid effectiveness."

At the end of the conference The Accra Agenda for Action [2]was adopted, in which the overseers of the global aid and development industries predictably proclaimed their continued commitment to reducing global poverty, congratulated themselves on the progress achieved over the past fifteen years, and promised to accelerate progress by promoting country ownership over development among the developing countries, building more effective and inclusive partnerships for development among development actors, and delivering and accounting for development results.

Sweet rhetoric indeed, which, however, cannot sweep away the stubborn realities of underdevelopment, that over the past half century ‘aid' has been one of the nooses that has strangulated developing countries especially those in Africa, that it has enabled the so-called aid donors to cultivate networks of exploitation and engender unproductive cultures of dependency among the developing countries, that its primary role is not to promote sustainable development but to keep the engines of capitalist global inequality well oiled and running. That is why at these conferences the structural and ideological culpabilities of the global North and their allies among the ruling elites in the global South are never subjects of serious discussion.

Soft loans to Africa--that constitute much of the ‘aid' in the sanitized vocabulary of the development industry--will continue to be tied to stiff conditionalities set in Euroamerican rather than African capitals and tie Africa in enduring knots of indebtedness to the global North. Clearly, Africa needs more fair trade than 'aid' with its strings of conditionalities. But the grotesque anomalies and hypocrisies of trade protectionism in the global North and trade liberalization in Africa will remain following the failure of the World Trade Organization's Doha Round talks to free up global trade (started in 2001) in Geneva last July.

And when discussing ‘aid' not enough attention is paid to the role of Africa's contemporary diasporas, many of them reluctant migrants from structural adjustment programs imposed with market fundamentalist zealotry by the very donors that dominated the Accra conference including the international financial institutions. In 2006, African migrants remitted about $50 billion to the continent, more than all so-called foreign ‘aid'. Perhaps African leaders need to spend more time talking to their contemporary and historic diasporas to develop better mechanisms to mobilize the latter's enormous financial and social capital and channel it towards Africa's development.

The following commentaries elaborate on the conference itself and the ineffectiveness of ‘aid' for promoting African development and the need to develop different strategies that eschew the exploitative and addictive dependencies of ‘aid'. P T Zeleza, Editor, The Zeleza Post.

Reaching the Summit? Aid Ineffectiveness By Nastaysa Tay

Over the last week, all hotels in Accra have been booked out and streets closed to the chagrin of local taxi drivers, for the third time so far this year. The High Level Forum (HLF) on Aid Effectiveness - the third in its series - alongside the civil society Parallel Forum which aimed to prepare civil society organisations (CSOs) for the HLF discussions, consititute Accra's third major international conference this year. Of the three, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), talks on Climate Change, and this, the negotiation of a strategy to improve aid, this is by far the least sexy. Few outside the International Conference Centre (including disturbingly, a few inside) have detailed knowledge of the relatively technical aid effectiveness issues on the table. And everyone pretends to know what the acronyms mean - the ISG of CSOs meeting with the WPEFF and the OECD in the AICC at the HLF3 for the AAA.

Aid clearly isn't working. We are highly unlikely to reach the Millennium Development Goals in 2015. Why? The current aid system is hierarchical and the people at the bottom, whom aid is supposed to benefit, have little or no ownership of aid programmes. Too much aid is prescriptive and beneficiary countries are not given the freedom to make their own policy decisions. The most impoverished certainly have no say.

Given Ghana's ranking in terms of the human development index (135th out of 177 countries), the most interesting discussions I have had so far have not been with delegates, ministers or donors. My taxi drivers all have had very firm views on aid effectiveness issues, given that they live everyday in the poverty we're all here to attempt to alleviate. Shame they're not given the opportunity to voice their concerns - few even knew what the conference was about. Albert, my taxi driver who comes from the northern Volta region, asked me, "Why are you all just talking? What are you actually going to do? We are the ones who must live with what happens when you all leave."

Why are we all simply talking?

Yesterday, over 1 200 delegates from more than 100 countries met to agree upon an Accra Agenda for Action - a document that acknowledges the negligible progress on making aid more effective since the landmark Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness was signed in 2005, and maps a way forward. Or so one might think. The Accra Agenda for Action, or the ‘Triple A', is an agenda full of good intentions, but only marginal concrete commitment to change.

It speaks in lofty tones of prioritising ‘effective partnerships for development' and ‘strengthening country ownership', but provides only vague outlines of how this can be achieved and says little about when it should be achieved by. Civil society organisations (80 delegates were invited to join the discussions, the largest CSO engagement on this subject at this level so far) have been referring to it as the Accra Agenda for Little-Action.

Over the last few days, there has been much politicking in corridors, over drinks at wine receptions and behind the scenes in the press room, with progressive delegates muttering under their breath about the pigheadedness of the US and Japan, with the disclaimer " ... but don't say how I got my information". There are few actually in the room, making the decisions on the AAA. The others, with their ears pressed to the ground, have little choice but to lobby the remainders of their delegations outside.

The HLF was supposed to be a consultative process. Two days of roundtables to discuss the issues, followed by a third day of closed ministerial meetings to make the tough decisions. The roundtable discussions are all well and good, but have been taking place on the sidelines, while the quiet discussions of the Consensus Group take place down the hall - the ones who are actually drafting and finalising the AAA. So who's listening?

A colleague from a major international NGO gave an excellent summary of the whole HLF process. "Why should I attend interminably long meetings, to passionately lobby for reform, when countries like the US and Japan are refusing to sign on because of some ‘language issues' with the AAA? In the end, we will have worked incredibly hard to, if we're lucky, change a few words. And it's just another document."

Just another document indeed.

So little progress has been made on the goals of the Paris Declaration that one has to question the point of building upon it - when there appears to be little or no commitment on the part of some powerful governments to genuine change. When it comes down to it, it is the implementation of any ‘agenda for action' that will be the real measure of success. After all, the point of aid effectiveness isn't aid effectiveness - harmonisation, ownership and alignment are only tools - it is development. Sustainable development that should be measured in terms of improvements in the lives of people who need it most.

On Wednesday, civil society made a statement about the current aid system by building a human pyramid - the aid hierarchy with donors at the top, governments in the middle, and beneficiaries on the very bottom, tangled in the mire of ropes of tied aid and conditionalities. The use of acrobats to convey their message is so very relevant. The HLF has become nothing but a show. A show of good intentions - but its real successes will only be measured once the curtain has come down.

From Mail & Guardian [3]September 5, 2008

President Kufuor Calls for Aid to End Aid Dependency By African Development Bank (Tunis)

Ghanaian President, John Kufuor, has called on developing and developed countries to deploy and manage development assistance to enable poor countries exit from aid dependency.

"We have an opportunity today to reach for a future based on a shared common commitment to overcome poverty, a future where no country will depend on aid," Mr. Kufuor said while opening the ministerial session of the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-3) on Thursday in Accra.

He urged conference participants to come up with "bold and ambitious resolutions, to minimize existing impediments to Aid Effectiveness in recipient countries", to make way for sustained growth and development.

He added that the driving force for shared humanity behind these conferences shows that the concept of development partnership has attained a critical acceptance as a major vehicle to further enhance Aid Effectiveness in recipient countries.

The Ghanaian president underscored the need to empower developing countries in order for them to play proactive roles in the global village of interdependence, adding that the Forum had a responsibility to remove the "systemic indignities of permanent aid through social and economic empowerment of recipient countries".

With regard to the performance of Ghana's economy, Mr. Kufuor said the country was close to attaining the Millennium Development Goals. He said daily minimum wage was way above the US$1 dollar target while free and compulsory universal basic education was on course. In addition, the country provides adequate healthcare through its national health insurance scheme while pregnant women enjoy free birth delivery.

"Today, Ghana is able to issue bonds on the international capital market," he said, adding that the ultimate objective was to completely wean the nation from perennial and structural dependence on aid.

The Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Angel Gurría, for his part, said the primary task of the forum was to endorse an Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), a blueprint of what developing and developed countries must do to achieve their commitments under the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness by 2010.

Mr. Gurría noted that surveys, case studies and evidence from countries suggest that while some progress had been achieved in meeting Paris Declaration commitments, much more remains to be done.

"A large number of developing countries have improved their management of public funds. Donors, in turn, are increasingly improving their co-ordination at country level. Yet, the pace of progress is too slow. Without further reform and faster action, we will not meet our 2010 commitments and targets for improving the quality of aid," he emphasized.

Participants at the session included Liberian President, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Former Irish President, Mary Robinson, as well as the Presidents of the African Development Bank Group and the World Bank, Donald Kaberuka and Robert Zoellick, respectively, among other dignitaries. The 3-day conference attended by more than 1,000 stakeholders in the development business, had earlier conducted a general review of the implementation of the Paris process, launched a pictorial exposition competition on development business tagged "Marketplace of Ideas", and held nine round-table meetings on key commitments of the Paris Declaration.

From allafrica.com [4]

The Future of Aid By Yash Tandon

The following is an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Yash Tandon's new book, Ending Aid Dependence, published by Fahamu Books, September 2008. For more information please visit, http://www.fahamu.org/publications [5].

For far too long the debate on development aid has been constrained by conceptual traps and the limitations of the definitions provided by the donors. If the recipients or beneficiaries of aid are to own the process, as present trends in the development literature suggest, then the conceptual reframing of the issues must itself change its location from the North to the South.

The conceptual starting point is not aid but development. The horse of development must be put before the cart of aid. Growth, admittedly, is an important aspect of development, and indeed there is no need to labor the point (as some orthodox economists and the World Bank attempt to do defensively). But growth is not the same as development. In this [book], we have defined development, following in the footsteps of Julius Nyerere, the founding president of Tanzania and the first chairman of the South Centre, as ‘a long democratic process, that starts "from within", where people participate in the decisions that affect their lives, without imperial interference from outside, and aimed at improving the lives of the people and realization of the potential for self support, free from fear of want and political, economic and social exploitation'. We put it as a formula: Development = SF + DF - IF, where SF is the social factor - the essential well-being of the people; DF is the democratic factor - the right of the people to participate in decision-making that affects their lives; and IF is the imperial factor - the right of nations to self-determination and liberation from imperial domination.

This is in sharp contrast to the mainstream orthodox economists' definition as Development = Growth + Wealth accumulation, where Growth = Open markets + Foreign investments + Good governance (as defined by the West), and the wealth accumulation by the rich is assumed to ‘filter through' to the poor by market- driven forces.

The most critical aspect of our definition of development is its political economy and historical context. The developing countries have gained their political independence, but in most cases they are still trapped in an asymmetrical economic, power and knowledge relationship with the former colonial powers that continue to dominate the process of globalization, and the institutions of global governance (the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, WIPO, WCO, OECD, EU Commission, etc). The developing countries are making heroic efforts to disengage from this lock-in situation (demanding policy space, for example). Some of them (the so- called newly emerging industrialized countries of the South) have indeed succeeded or partly succeeded, but the bulk of the developing countries are still trapped in the shackles of history. Africa, especially, is identified as a continent that has not fared well. From this trap, Africa and others can liberate themselves only if they take matters of development into their own hands - and do not leave it to aid and its delimiting and colonizing conditionalities, such as the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank, and now the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

In other words, the national project, the project for self-determination, is still on the agenda of political action for developing countries. Its counter, the imperial project, is also still alive, but gradually weakening. Its ideology - the Washington consensus and globalization - crafted after the dominant paradigm of free market liberalism and Western systems of governance, democracy and the rule of law, has lost credibility and legitimacy. This is not to undervalue the importance of democracy or the rule of law. Without these there would be anarchy and oppression. But these values cannot be imposed on the developing countries from outside, and certainly not loaded on to the wagon called ‘development aid', followed by sanctions against those who fall short of Western donor expectations. The experience of Zimbabwe, tragic in its consequences, is an example of the curse of Red Aid, swallowed by a government and a people who had sacrificed so much to win their political independence. It is for this reason that the case of Zimbabwe has been analyzed in detail in this monograph.

The fundamental reason why the relationship between ‘aid' and ‘development' is not fully understood is because of the way both terms are defined in the OECD-DAC vocabulary, definitions which have also been adopted by the United Nations. These are self-serving, West-centric, value-loaded and arbitrary definitions. It is argued here, for example, that there is no good reason for excluding what I call Yellow Aid (or military and political aid) from the definition. This kind of arbitrary exclusion ignores the military and political assistance provided by countries in the South too, for example, the liberation of Southern Africa. Worse still, it places military aid under the carpet, outside of a rational discourse within its political and ethical context.

In this context, it is argued that the 0.7 per cent has acquired a ‘mythical' status. It carries an ethical-moral dimension, and provokes a lot of passion, particularly among civil society and in the North. This is an understandable reaction from NGOs and civil society organizations that have a strong affinity with the South on grounds of solidarity, but they have an imperfect understanding of the structural problems with the aid architecture. For the developing countries, the 0.7 per cent is a weapon to hold the North to their promises, even when the last 40 years' experience should have made them wiser. An extended and expanded version of the 0.7 per cent model is the ‘booster' model of aid. This is based on the assumption that the resource gap in developing countries (in particular, Africa) should be filled by a massive dose of aid over a number of years until the countries take off, like an aeroplane. The proponents of both the 0.7 per cent and the booster models need to question the resource gap theory. They will then understand that the developing countries do not have a resource gap. It is a gap unwittingly or deliberately created, directly as a result of the activities of global corporations and the misdirected policies of the IMF and World Bank. The irony is that the booster aid is still packaged within the framework of the very conditionalities that are part of the problem and not the solution.

This monograph provides a new taxonomy for development aid - in five hues - in a more rational and comprehensive classification. Development aid is placed along a continuum from Purple Aid (based on solidarity) on the extreme left and Red Aid (ideological aid) on the extreme right. In between are Orange Aid (which is really not aid at all, and should simply be called commercial transactions); Yellow Aid (already explained above); and Green/Blue Aid (whose three components - the provision of global public goods, non-tied humanitarian and emergency aid, and compensatory finance - are segments of the totality of financial and technical and technological assistance that are genuinely developmental. These are part of the global good not only from the national (recipient) country's perspective, but also from the global perspective. One implication of this classification, for example, is that global civil society in the North as well in the South might find they have more affinity with Purple Aid, and perhaps also with Green/Blue Aid, than with aid of the other three colors.

The body of the book consists of the seven steps that the developing countries need to take in order to exit aid dependence. The most difficult is the first step - the psychology of aid dependence. The dependence psychology has not only occupied the minds of leaders in many (if not most) developing countries, but it has also taken roots in mass psychology. It is not necessary to attempt to summarize the seven steps. Much more can be written on the subject than is contained in this monograph. The important point is that the process has to begin somewhere and very soon. It is an agenda that has to be captured by the people themselves at community and grassroots level. However, it also requires an enlightened and visionary leadership at national, regional, and continental levels.

It is argued here that the present aid and development architecture at the international level is an obstacle to the realization of the national project. Three power asymmetries - economic power, political power and knowledge power - are deeply embedded in the existing structures. It is a continuing battle for the developing countries to try and secure policy space within the constraints imposed by these asymmetrical structures.

The present debate on the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PDAE) is located in this larger context to explain the circum- stance in which the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and the World Bank and IMF are trying to retain their relevancy and legitimacy, both of which have been severely eroded as a result of the changing geopolitical and economic realities of the last decade or so. If the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF do not achieve what they hope for at the Accra conference on aid effectiveness (September 2008) and the Doha Monterrey Review Process (November-December 2008), then they could face oblivion within the next decade. For the DAC its oblivion is a historical necessity in any event. At best, it should remain as a body to coordinate policies for OECD member countries. As for the World Bank and the IMF, they can salvage themselves if they pull out of Red Aid, withdraw to their original missions, and give voice to those who have suffered most from the developmental failure of their policies and the financial volatility of the last two decades.

In this broad historical and political perspective, the Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) of the UN and the fast evolving South-South relationship can play a very positive role. However, it faces many challenges, and its future is still largely uncertain.

At the end of the day, we need a truly heterogeneous, pluralistic global society that is based on the shared values of our civilization, and the shared fruits of the historical development of the productive forces of science, technology and human ingenuity. Only on this basis can we build a global society that is free from want, exploitation, insecurity and injustice.

Yash Tandon is the executive director of the South Centre, Geneva, an intergovernmental think tank of the developing countries. Dr Tandon's long career in national and international development spans time as a policymaker, a political activist, a professor and a public intellectual. He has written over 100 scholarly articles and has authored and edited books on wide-ranging subjects from African politics to peace and security, trade and the WTO, international economics, South-South cooperation and human rights. He has also served on several advisory committees.