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DAKAR, 20 December 2011 (IRIN) - At the global aid effectiveness forum in Busan, South Korea, in November and December this year, the “G7+”, a group of nations which includes 19 fragile and conflict-affected states, agreed a New Deal on fragile states, which sets out concrete and, they hope, more relevant ways to improve peace- and state-building goals.
The New Deal will be piloted in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste, with help from Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA.
It identifies five peace- and state-building goals as prerequisites for development without which “no MDG [Millenium Development Goals] will be met”, said Marcus Manuel, director of the Budget Strengthening Initiative at the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), one of the architects of the New Deal.
The goals include legitimate politics, security, justice, economic foundations and revenues and services. “If you don’t sort them [these criteria] out, no matter how many schools you build, if you haven’t figured out the payroll, you won’t be able to move forward,” Manuel told IRIN.
For years donor governments have struggled with how to approach development support to fragile states, which lack the systems or resources to process aid effectively, and often have high levels of corruption leading to low value-for-money.
Aid to fragile states has often propped up corruption, rather than weakened it, says the World Bank.
Some 1.5 billion people live in conflict-affected and fragile states, most of which are not on track to meet a single MDG.
However, the recognition that fragile states need a different approach to aid altogether, has gradually turned from policy and discussion - at the Paris and Accra aid fora and declarations for action - into a more concrete action plan, said Manuel.
New approach
Under the proposed changes (to be presented to member states at the UN General Assembly in September 2012 ) “compacts” with countries will be agreed, i.e. there will be a shared understanding of aid modalities and priorities drawn up by donors, recipient governments and civil society.
Rather than each donor assessing a recipient’s fragility, countries will be encouraged to carry out their own fragility assessments, which should create more apt solutions, Manuel told IRIN. For instance, the government of Timor-Leste deemed the need to re-house internally displaced people as a security priority once the conflict was over, and proposed giving each displaced family significant cash sums to do so. Donors said this approach was too expensive and would not work, but it did, and paid off, says the ODI.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=94502
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