“We have been trying for a while to convince official aid donors to report to recipients more detailed, timely information about their disbursements of aid. You might well ask: how is it that recipients do not know how much money they are getting? Money may be in projects completely separate from the government; or it may go to specific project units within ministry of education or health, for example — even the health or education minister may not know who in his or her ministry has access to what money. This undermines the collective decisionmaking process over how funds are spent that is central in the role of democratic governments. The recipient government should be involved in deciding how the money will be spent — mechanisms like budget support and our proposed “cash on delivery” aid allow this to happen automatically. But at the very least, donors should be keeping tabs and telling the recipient — quite a low bar, especially considering the standards to which donors hold or exhort recipients.
We recently learned that donors and the government of Mozambique have launched a new database, ODAMOZ, through which donors report quarterly all their aid spending in Mozambique. To the donors who are funding this effort, the European Commission, UN, and the Netherlands, bravo!” Keep reading…
