Sectoral aid in practice

Since the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, developing countries and donors have increasingly favoured the development of sectoral aid, which represents a substantially different approach from the way aid was provided in the past.

In light of this, AFD decided to carry out a review in order to better direct its actions towards sectoral approaches and to mobilise its funding instruments more effectively to support the public policies of partner countries. The Strategy department has undertaken an ex-post analysis based on four case studies from West Africa: Education in Mauritania, health and education in Niger and education in Burkina Faso.

The aim of this capitalisation exercise is to review AFD's experience of sectoral aid and identify courses of action for improving it in practice. By means of a summary, this note reminds us of the context of this work and suggests a definition and a typology of sectoral aid. It then presents the main observations of these experiences and outlines some recommendations for AFD. The complete report and the country reports are available on the AFD website.