There has been a lot of discussion about the debate between the candidates for Vice President, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, focusing on the lack of a train smash. But there was one important policy adjustment which has had very little attention. Joe Biden gave this answer:
IFILL: … I want to get — [...]
I’ve written about last week’s Accra meeting on the aidinfo blog and discussed it with Simon Maxwell in this week’s Development Drums.
The Guardian reports that the UK is pushing for greater transparency of aid in an initiative to be launched tomorrow:
The UK wants donor countries to provide full and detailed information of all the financial assistance provided to each country; details of individual projects and their aims; and reliable information on future aid flows so that [...]
I’ve posted about the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness on our aidinfo blog.
About 12-13 million Ethiopians need food relief or emergency assistance as a result of the failure of the short rains in southern Ethiopia, according to AFP:
The lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age five at risk from malnutrition, OCHA said. …
The United [...]
A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following:
The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced [...]
I’m very excited to have made an inaugural post on the new aidinfo blog. This is the website for the work we are doing to increase the transparency of foreign aid.
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Nancy Birdsall and Kate Vyborny at the Center for Global Development suggest six concrete steps for the Accra meeting on aid effectiveness:
Untie all aid, including technical assistance, and publish information on which providers get contracts in practice.
Tell recipients what donors are spending through a concrete set of standards for transparency.
Make all evaluations public, regardless of [...]
Yash Tandon, writing in Business Daily Africa says that that the Paris Declaration on aid is a form of collective colonialism by donors:
under the pretext of making aid more effective the Paris Declaration project is a form of collective colonialism by Northern “donors” of those countries in the South that (because of their weakness and [...]
Bill Clinton has finally been persuaded that investment in health systems is more important than funding “vertical” initiatives for particular diseases:
“That’s increasingly in the last few years what our foundation has been focused on - what is the most cost-effective way to mobilise a national health system,” Mr Clinton said.
“You can get the universal treatment [...]