Accounting for Aid

Nobody likes the perennial debate about Cash Assistance to Government. Having send cash to, say, the Ministry of Education, I myself was primarily interested in whether the Ministry got kids into school and had them learning something. I didn’t want to know whether the Ministry had inept accountants, or accountants clever enough to cook the books. 

I will spare you the mind-numbing details, but the current inter-agency discussion on the harmonization of resource transfer modalities illustrates the different views, if not the lack of views, among development agencies about where our accountabilities lie. 

Are we accountable to our donors for the way developing governments spend funds which we pass on to them? Are we accountable for the end-use of funds, or for the results of our development cooperation? And whose results are we talking about? Is there anything such as shared accountabilities – as someone suggested? Can we pass accountabilities on to someone else? 

If you find this is splitting hairs and an unnecessary debate, I would very much like to agree. But unless UN agencies, donor agencies and developing countries share roughly the same accountability framework, I do not see a glimmer of hope that simplification and harmonisation of our procedures will go very far very fast. 

The complications arise because the funds that we provide are not meant to benefit us, but the people of the assisted country. There is no single straight line of accountability from the tax payer in a rich country to the person who is poor in a developing country, or vice versa. 

Before we liberally distribute accountabilities for the use of development funds – which also pay for salaries - let’s consider a situation where things go wrong. Do we still want to share accountabilities with someone who notoriously screws up? What do we do if the results were not achieved, in spite of all the good intentions? Who failed his accountabilities when mortality was not reduced and children were not protected from abuse and exploitation?

In my humble opinion, donor agencies are accountable to their taxpayers to entrust their taxes to a development agency who knows what it is doing. We as development agents are accountable to our Executive Board for providing good technical inputs and disbursing reasonably the resources entrusted to us. Governments of developing countries are accountable to their constituents for the good utilisation of budgetary resources, regardless whether raised in the country or provided through us. 

If a donor agency provides funds to the wrong agency, the Minister of Development may get fired. If we have poor planning skills and make reckless disbursements that don’t result in much, we may risk the trust of the donor and should be fired, too. If a developing government agency or institution consistently fails to produce results for children and women, we will have to change our mode of cooperation. Does it have to be more complicated? 

(23 April 2004)

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