Accra conference has failed on firm commitments

Accra, Sept. 4, GNA - As the Third High Level Forum (HLF3) on Aid Effectiveness came to a close in Accra, civil society organisations still maintain that the conference failed to deliver on establishing concrete deadlines and specific actions toward removing conditionalities, untie aid, including civil society and ensuring full ownership of development programmes by recipient countries.

Mr. Vagn Berthelsen, Secretary General of Ibis Denmark, an NGO in capacity building in poor countries told journalists that Accra had been nothing more than just one more talk shop with very little or no progress towards the realisations of the five main principles of the Paris Declarations.

"The 31-point Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) remains as vague as ever with not clear and specific commitments - in fact it could best be described as Accra Agenda for Inaction (AAI).

"It is obvious that after Accra we are still heading toward missing deadlines on the five main principles of the Paris Declarations," he said.

He noted that even though the AAA spoke about including civil society in more sustainable manner in aid talks, no concrete actionable framework was put in place to ensure greater inclusion of civil society.

Mr Berthelson said that, after the Accra conference it was obvious that the aid system remained a pyramid, with the donors at the top ready to give aid with ties and conditionalities and demand time-consuming reports and accountability from recipient, who should be using their limited time to work for their poor citizens instead.

His concern is indeed not different from those of 80 other civil society organisation who put out a pictorial expression of how the aid system was a pyramid with the donors at the top holding on to the knot of a red rope (of conditionalities) with which they have tied poor countries.

"It is a fact the recipient countries fund between 60 to 80 per cent of their budgets from their own resources whiles donors complement that so the governments of the poor countries should be working for their taxpayer whose money is used for projects instead of working for donors who only support budgets with between 20 - 40 per cent," he said.

Mr. Berthelson, who is also President of the European-based Alliance Towards the Eradication of Poverty (ATEOP) said due to conditionalities, the value of aid was reduced by 25 per cent even before it was applied, adding that in the applications, a further 35 per cent was lost to technical assistance comprising of moneys used in paying experts from donor nations.

He noted that, the real impact of aid was better measured in terms of quality and not quantity, saying that it was not enough for donors to keep boasting about how much money they give to poor countries but to what extent those moneys benefited the poor and vulnerable.

"Donors cannot keep donating to projects that served their interests in poor countries whiles the real sectors needing aid to make life better for the poor in recipient countries go unattended to," he said. Mr. Berthelson said Accra would have been a success if it had at least, succeeded in getting donors to commit to a more sustainable ways of developing the capacities of and making use of experts in recipients for aid projects instead of importing expensive experts from donor nations.

He however, stated that Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) would continue to play their watchdog role on both sides of the aid system, to ensure transparency and less corruption and abuse of the system. "We believe that even the recipient countries and some of the CSO involved in direct aid funded projects should be critical of themselves as they themselves have been criticise about corruption and misapplication of donor funds," he said.