Imitation is the best form of flattery, they say. So we’re happy that UK official development agency DFID is using our title for their recent assessment of aid effectiveness in Rwanda. And even happier that there seems to be some progress in the government holding donors to account there. But what about the funny numbers on DFID's blog?

Eighteen months ago we published an analysis of aid effectiveness implementation in seven countries. We called it “Turning the Tables: aid and accountability under the Paris framework”. Now DFID (who partly financed our aid effectiveness work) have an interesting piece on their blog “Turning the tables on the donors in Rwanda”. The title and the content are very complementary to ours.

In our report we argued: “the country case studies show that some welcome steps are being taken by donor and recipient governments, but this progress is patchy and partial. Donors are not doing enough to respect or support recipient country ownership over the development process. Donors still find ways to fund their priorities, selecting their favoured issues from national strategies or attaching conditions that push their policy priorities”. We went further, arguing that initiatives such as Cambodian and Mozambican government reports on donor performance were as yet rare positive examples of recipient governments taking accountability into their own hands. “Mutual accountability” as outlined in the Paris Declaration was “still aspirational” as “donors remain reluctant to make pledges which limit the control they enjoy through holding the purse-strings of aid payments”.

Now Martin Leach, who heads DFID’s work in Rwanda and Burundi, writes “this year it felt like the tables were turned on the donors”. How? Well at the Development Partners meeting (aidspeak for a donor/government roundtable negotiating session) “all donors were held to account by the Ministry of Finance for the promises they had made”. The ministry took a list of 18 commitments that donors had signed up to – such as delivering the money we had pledged, recording our aid in the Government budget, and giving clear indications of our future financial plans. Leach records that “Every donor’s score was put up on the screen for everyone to see, and there were some red faces round the room - the lowest score was 2/18. The UK was near the top, I’m pleased to say, but we still need to improve, as we only scored 12/18”.

The DFID blog also contains part of the Rwandan government's donor performance assessment framework. The chart breaks down DFID’s score but in fact gives just DFID a score of 10 out of 18, not 12. A slip of the keyboard by DFID's representative? But we welcome DFID posting that data.

The general importance of active information dissemination is also emphasised in the DFID blog. The presentation on a Rwandan government website which sets out the scores of all donors (PDF) is certainly something which needs to be followed up and imitated by other governments. At the moment, though, you need a high tolerance for aid management acronyms to understand it. Work needs to be done to interpret such stats for the average parliamentarian, journalist or activist who wants to help monitor public spending. (Some of the current challenges in aid transparency in Rwanda are outlined in a presentation they made to the donor meeting described by DFID).  

Publishing, disseminating, discussing and of course acting on such data is going to be one key part of making aid more effective and getting beyond the “golden rule - 'He who owns the Gold, makes the Rules'" syndrome, cited by Martin Leach in his piece. There are now several initiatives aiming to make breakthroughs in aid transparency, notably the Publish What You Fund campaign and the official International Aid Transparency Initiative.

An area we're keen to shine a light on in our ongoing aid effectiveness analysis is the question of procurement, including of technical assistance. Eurodad will be publishing case studies on this (Ghana, Namibia) before the end of 2009.