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Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness

Ministers from over 100 countries, heads of bilateral and multilateral agencies, donors and many international solidarity organizations gathered in Accra from 2 to 4 September 2008 for a High Level Forum(HLF) on Aid Effectiveness

Accra is the third Forum on Aid Effectiveness and follows on from Rome (2004) which laid the foundations for this process and Paris (March 2005) which adopted the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PDAE).

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra High Level Forum

The Paris Declaration focuses on 5 core commitments:

1. Aid ownership by developing countries: to scale up recipient country leadership in defining and piloting their development policies;
2. Alignment of aid interventions with national development strategies: donors base their support on partners’ priorities by using their institutions and procedures;
3. Aid harmonization: to strengthen complementarity among donors and develop common approaches in order to reduce aid transaction costs;
4. Results-based aid management: results-oriented aid assessment and notification frameworks in order to improve decision-making and monitoring processes;
5. Mutual accountability for results: to measure donors’ and partner countries’ respective progress in achieving their commitments.

One of the specificities of the Paris Declaration is that it sets out 12 indicators to measure progress and defines specific targets for each indicator to be met by 2010.

The Accra High Level Forum (HLF) will make a mid-term review of progress in the implementation of the Paris Declaration and identify appropriate measures to scale up progress where it is lagging. >> Find out more about the implementation of the Paris Declaration

An unprecedented preparatory process

Over the past 12 months the OECD has engaged in unprecedented preparation for the Accra HLF. This has been piloted by the “Working Party on Aid Effectiveness” which has an original equal configuration by bringing together 23 DAC members and a group of 23 South countries.

The OECD has built on this equal dimension which comes in response to criticisms that the Paris Declaration process was to a great extent piloted by donor countries. It has scaled up consultation workshops (regional workshops with regional development banks, national workshops, workshops with civil society organizations, sectoral and thematic approaches in partnership with OECD working groups). The overall process has been widely participative.

In addition to this participative process, considerable expert research has been conducted (evaluations of the implementation of the PDAE in 20 donor and recipient countries, study on progress made on the PDAE indicators, working group summaries …). >> Find out more about AFD and Aid Effectiveness

Priorities highlighted by South countries

South country members of the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness outlined key topics which they felt should be a focus for the Accra Forum. These topics are:

• The use of national systems

• Untying aid

• Predictability of aid flows

• National capacity building

• Division of labour

The OECD urged countries participating in the Accra preparation process to give priority to the request of South countries. Their full adhesion to the Paris Declaration would, indeed, appear to be one of the conference’s major targets.

European Union : a key role

The European Union (EU) is at the core of the process. The EU together accounts for over half of global aid and the bulk of DAC member aid increases since the early 2000s. It makes up 15 out of the 23 DAC members and thus has the majority, even if there is no voting system.

The EU played a decisive role in the formulation of the Paris Declaration and pushed more reserved donors into going beyond what they had initially intended.
The EU has been engaged in a considerable preparatory process for the Accra HLF and adopted the Council’s conclusions (in July 2008) which set out a number of proposals for Member States. They may also, where applicable, become common commitments for donors within the framework of the Accra Forum conclusions. This document may not differ greatly from the Accra Action Agenda (AAA) in terms of the topics it addresses, but it is clearly more ambitious in the measures it puts forward. As was the case with the Paris Conference, the EU has high ambitions, in particular under the impetus of the Nordic countries, and is putting quite some pressure on other donors.

France, under its current Presidency of the Council of the European Union, has a mission to promote European donors’ actions to enhance aid effectiveness. It will, on the basis of the Council’s May 2008 conclusions and the guidelines adopted in July, strive to ensure that the texts of the AAA will be ambitious, notably in terms of the division of labour, the use of national systems, mutual accountability and medium-term predictability. The aim is to achieve a second generation declaration on aid effectiveness at the 4th High Level Forum scheduled in 2011.
>> Find out more about France’s position >> About AFD and Europe

Official Web Site

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Accra Agenda for Action

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Conference proceedings

The conference held from 2 to 4 September 2008 in Accra, Ghana, and gathered more than 1 000 participants. It was preceded by a “Civil Society Forum” on 31 August and 1 September gathering 300 representatives from civil society organizations which had a delegation (around 80 participants) at the HLF.