December 2, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Can development projects in a poor country have too many donors?
If the donors are not working well together, then yes, says Neil Squires, a human-development adviser in Mozambique with the British Department for International Development.
Mr. Squires writes on the agency’s blog that Mozambique is a “donor darling,” a reflection both of the great needs and the government’s transparency.
But, “whilst being a donor darling brings the benefit of increased funding, it also brings the challenge of coordinating large amounts of donors,” writes Mr. Squires.
His blog post includes a pie chart showing the many donors who support improvements in health in Mozambique. Financial support from foreign donors in 2008 was $147-million, about the same as the funds provided by the Mozambique government.
One of the biggest donors is the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria. While Mr. Squires says the Global Fund’s money is significant and welcomed, the process of applying for and reporting on that money is overly complex. The government of Mozambique is already producing progress reports for many other donors through an agreed-upon set of performance indicators.
“Keeping 26 agencies happy, with regular reporting on the performance and expenditure, has huge administrative costs for Ministries of Health in poorly resourced countries,” writes Mr. Squires, “and one of the things we’ve been working on in Mozambique is the development of a common framework for reporting and measuring progress, with a single set of indicators that all donors can buy into.”
Do you agree that a lack of donor collaboration can impede development? Are there good models for a common framework for assessing progress?
