Strengthen aid effectiveness for better service delivery on the ground in Africa

“We need to strengthen aid effectiveness in practice on the ground in Africa. Come up with concrete plans for better service delivery of services for people”. This call for action is from Ms. Buyelwa Patience Sonjica, Minister of Water and Environment, South Africa and, President of AMCOW. She kicked off and joined the seminar ’Aid Effectiveness in the Water and Sanitation Sector: Policies, Practices and Perspectives’, Stockholm Water Week 2010, which was organised by the European Union Water Initiative African Working Group (EUWI-AWG) and Sanitation and Water for All (SWA).

In the discussion the South African Minister stressed that significant increases in national budgets of water and sanitation linked to governance, accountability and transparency and reporting realities from the ground are essential. She admitted that the African water ministers have been struggling to convince the Finance Ministers to invest more money in sanitation. Even after the Heads of State in the African Union adopted the Ethikwini Sanitation Declaration in Sharm el Sheikh the finance ministers in Africa did not allocate more budgets for sanitation. The recently signed Ghana Compact with the Sanitation and Water for All initiative commits the government and the most important development partners in Ghana. The government has committed a more than tenfold budget increase per year for WASH service delivery. Asked what argument had won over the Minister of Finance, Mr. Yaw Asante Sarkodie, Team Leader, WSMP, the Water Directorate, Ghana said that job creation for youth involvement in improving water and sanitation was the argument that won over the Finance Minister.

The Paris Declaration on Aid-Effectiveness, the Accra Agenda for Action and the European Union Code of Conduct all commit the development partners to improve aid effectiveness. Yet the 2010 Global Annual Assessment for the Water Supply and Sanitation Sector (GLAAS) points to ongoing shortcomings in aid-targeting and usage in the water and sanitation sector.

The seminar brought together developing country governments, multi-lateral agencies, donors and civil society to contrast different stakeholder perspectives on aid-effectiveness in the sector. Through presentations, plenary and group interaction, the seminar addressed different dimensions of aid-effectiveness. What policies work? What are best practices? What needs to change to improve the effectiveness of available sector aid?

Civil society as watchdog

One concrete suggestion from this session was the setting up of a global technical fund to support developing country capacities especially those of the most neglected and off-track countries to develop actionable sector plans and to attract more aid money.

The Africa Civil Society Network on Water (ANEW) called for giving a role to CSOs to help in increasing transparency and accountability in use of the resources in the sector. This watch dog role is already taken up in Ghana where CSOs are monitoring water and sanitation projects funded by the World Bank with US$ 1.2 billion interest free loans. See Ghana: World Bank invites civil society to monitor its water and sanitation projects, in Source news April 2009.