The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and Accra Agenda for Action

28 March 2009

Aid works, but it could work better. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is an historic agreement to improve the quality of aid. It was signed in Paris in 2005 by more than 100 donors, developing countries and NGOs.

The declaration’s commitments and targets reflect the lessons donors and partner countries have learnt about how to make aid more effective in reducing poverty. 

The declaration outlines a set of five inter-related principles:

1. Ownership: Developing countries must exercise leadership over development policies and strategies and co-ordinate development assistance. This is important because the overwhelming evidence is that aid works when countries set their agenda and fails when donors try to impose their own.
2. Alignment: Donors must base their support on the recipient country’s national development strategies, institutions and procedures. This is important because donors often set up parallel project management teams which bypass government systems. This can drain governments of their best staff, leading to a vicious cycle of weak capacity. Evidence shows that working to strengthen, rather than bypass government systems, is the key to effective and sustained capacity building.
3. Harmonisation: Donors need to improve the co-ordination of their actions and adopt simple and transparent procedures for providing aid. This is important because there are now over 50 bilateral donors and 230 international organisations, funds and programmes. If donors don’t co-ordinate, then government ministers and staff are dragged away from essential business to respond to different donor requirements. For example, in Cambodia, the government has to deal with over 400 donor visits each year – more than one a day.
4. Managing for results: Aid should be managed in ways that focus on desired results and use information to improve decision-making. It is important to make sure aid has maximum impact and that recipient governments, parliaments and civil society know where money is being spent and what it is achieving. Investing in a developing country’s own statistical systems is more helpful than establishing separate donor reporting systems, as shown by St Vincent, a tiny island of 117,000 people, where the government was asked by different donors to monitor over 190 indicators on HIV and AIDS.
5. Mutual accountability: Donors and partners should be answerable to one another and to their citizens for development results. This is important because the relationship between donors and partner countries is inherently unequal. There is strong evidence that truly mutually accountable relationships between donors and partners can lead to improvements in donor behaviour.

The Paris Declaration commits donors and partners to make comprehensive and practical changes in these areas. A set of quantified targets, monitored every two years, is used to assess progress and hold donors and partners accountable for achieving results.

At the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra in September 2008, donors and developing countries endorsed the Accra Agenda for Action. This contains new ambitious undertakings by donors and developing countries to speed up the process of fulfilling the Paris Declaration’s pledges. 

DFID played a key role in agreeing the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action and we continue to push for faster and deeper progress in putting these agreements into action.