Empowering Developing Countries to Lead the Aid Partnership

The first step in empowering developing countries to lead the aid partnership should be for them to be in a position to assess the quality of donor aid. Yet, in spite of recent initiatives to harmonise donor practices and align aid behind a PRSP-based partnership between developing country governments and donors, there is no systematic monitoring by developing country governments, at an individual country level, of whether donors are living up to their pledges on aid quality and support for the PRSP framework, or behaving consistently across countries. Even more important, developing countries are not systematically empowered to lead monitoring of improvements in aid quality themselves – donors still lead the process in most countries.