The brilliant blogger and economist Owen Barder yesterday clarified the total amount of money spent on aid since it began in the 1960s. According to OECD DAC statistics, together donors have given $502 billion ($866 billion in today’s prices) to sub-Saharan Africa; a far cry from the ‘over a trillion’ quoted by aid sceptics, who may be relieved to find out it is in fact only ‘billions’ worth of aid that ‘hasn’t worked’.
Doug Hadden, Vice President of Products at FreeBalance, asks how corruption might best be understood and tackled in a Sustainable Public Financial Management blog post last week. Hadden starts with the common (if unarticulated) public feeling that recipients are largely responsible for the loss of aid money by corruption.
Uganda is a country that receives a lot of aid; over $1.7bn in 2009 alone. There’s a simple question to ask: How much aid is going to Uganda, and how large is it compared to government tax revenue? (The ODI looked at all aid to Uganda from 2003-2007, and found double the amount of aid […]
Ahead of the 7 July International Aid Transparency Initiative Steering Committee meeting in Paris, CSOs from around the world urged development ministers to support an aid transparency standard which ensured more effective foreign assistance. On 28 July CSOs sent follow-up letters encouraging IATI signatories to continue their participation in advance of the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in November 2011.
The 2010 EU AidWatch Report was launched this morning in Brussels. Having ‘tracked the EU’s progress towards achieving its aid quantity and quality commitments’, the report states that most donors are yet to adequately address the important issues of aid transparency, conditionality and accountability.
