nextNobody 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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