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Association for Women's Rights in Development

Aid Effectiveness: Women's Rights Concerns

By Kathambi Kinoti - AWID

For different reasons development aid often fails to achieve its intended
results. Moreover, even in cases when aid does come close to achieving the
intended results, more often than not it fails to achieve the best results
for the intended beneficiaries. The question of aid effectiveness has
occupied governments, aid agencies and development practitioners for a
number of years.

What hampers aid effectiveness?

Although it has long been recognized that gender equality is critical to
development and peace, this recognition has not been translated to adequate
allocation of money to bridging gender inequalities.  The concept of gender
mainstreaming has all but lost its meaning, and women's empowerment as an
aspect of gender equality has been neglected. Women's empowerment is not
placed at the heart of development efforts. Aid cannot be effective if
funding for women's empowerment is inadequate.

Frequently, on the part of donors there is a lack of transparency and
accountability. Bilateral and multilateral donors often give aid with
political strings attached and therefore the direction of development
initiatives is largely determined by the donor without enough consideration
of the needs of the recipient. The strings attached could be based on the
donor country's strategy in the acquisition of resources, its security
agenda, or the ideological concerns of its policymakers. The 'global gag
rule' for instance restricts the kind of information and services that
recipients of US aid can obtain in relation to sexual and reproductive
rights and health. The rule impedes women's access to proper and adequate
information and thereby compromises the health and well-being of many women
in the Global South.

In many cases, since aid is given on the basis of strategic geopolitical
concerns and the political landscape changes from time to time, the
conditions of aid are unpredictable to the recipient country. In giving
aid, donor countries frequently require that whatever goods and services
are needed in using the aid should be procured from the donor country
itself.

Aid effectiveness is also hampered by donors' 'cumbersome, overly technical
and sometimes irrelevant approaches to measuring impact and results.' [1]
The pre-set indicators are not responsive to the complex social, political
and economic dynamics of the aid recipients' contexts.

Recipient countries of bilateral and multilateral aid also hamper the
effectiveness of aid through corruption, inefficiency and other forms of
poor governance.

The Paris Declaration

At a global level there are a number of processes and agreements aimed at
improving aid effectiveness. One of the key agreements is the Paris
Declaration on Aid Effectiveness signed in 2005. This Declaration, which
has the endorsement of over one hundred countries in the North and South,
sets out five key principles that guide the giving, receiving and
utilization of aid; ownership, alignment, harmonization, managing for
results and mutual accountability.

The Declaration fails to recognize the centrality of gender equality in aid
effectiveness and this is a key weakness of the agreement.

The Paris Declaration acknowledges the need for recipient countries to own
the development policies and processes funded by aid. For civil society,
ownership must be democratic and this means among other things that poor
women must be properly represented. The Declaration also stresses donor
countries' alignment with recipients' existing priorities and strategies.
For women's rights this means support to existing commitments such as
CEDAW. The element of harmonization means that policies and institutions
that support aid and development must be in tandem, including commitments
to women's empowerment across the board. Sex and gender disaggregated
information is critical to managing for results, and policies and
programmes need to be measured in the light of such information as well as
human rights principles.

The Paris Declaration, even in its emphasis on the principle of mutual
accountability, fails to take account of the role of civil society in aid
effectiveness. This is despite the obvious watchdog role that civil society
organizations play in the development paradigm. Nevertheless, civil society
has been active in fostering debate and providing critical analysis on the
aid effectiveness agenda. 

Upcoming processes

The third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness will be held in Accra,
Ghana in 2008 to assess the progress in the implementation of the Paris
Declaration. In the run-up to the Forum, civil society organizations have
been involved in a number of activities. At the 2007 World Social Forum in
Nairobi, a steering committee was formed to organize civil society
engagement with the High Level Forum. An NGO forum is planned to prepare
for the Accra meeting, and it is critical that women's organizations are
represented at this forum. In February 2008 there will be a
Multi-stakeholders Forum on Aid Effectiveness, organized by the Canadian
International Development Agency and the Canadian Council for International
Cooperation in Ottawa. These are some of the spaces that provide
opportunities for women's organizations to be a part of the aid
effectiveness agenda and ensure that the women's empowerment becomes
central to the whole agenda.

_____________

Notes:

1. From a speech by Zawadi Nyong'o at the Commonwealth Foundation Civil
Society Preparatory Meeting on the 8th Commonwealth Women's Affairs
Ministers Meeting.
8-10 June 2007, Kampala

AWID is preparing fact sheets about the Paris Declaration and they will
soon be available on our website.

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