For many African countries, development aid which is underpinned by development cooperation remains a very critical aspect of financing of development. And indeed the purpose of the 2005 Paris declaration on Aid effectiveness is to improve aid delivery in a way that best supports the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. It highlighted the importance of predictable, well aligned, programmed, and coordinated aid to achieve results. The declaration is an action-orientated roadmap for aid reform built around five main themes with corresponding objectives. The themes are ownership (partner countries should exercise leadership over their development policies, strategies and coordinate development action); alignment (donors should support partner countries’ national development strategies, institutions and procedures); harmonization (donors should be more harmonized and transparent); managing for results (managing resources and improving decision making for results); and mutual accountability(donors and partners are accountable for development results).

The volume of aid
Quantity of aid flows into the continent still remains critical. The volume of the flow as well as the sectors of flow will greatly determine the pace at which development is realized in the continent. Developed countries in 2005 through the Gleneagles’ G8 summit committed themselves to scale up aid by 2010. The question remained, however, whether these pledges would be followed by real aid flow and concrete pro-development policies. AFRODAD in collaboration with other civic organizations in the next three years intends to focus on increasing the pressure on donors to meet their 0.7 per cent of GNP as a way of increasing the aid flow in the continent. In this regard aid mapping and profiling will be in providing information to our partners both in the North in the South in their quest to have donor governments increase aid flows into the continent.

Conditions 

Increasingly, donors are attaching harmful conditions to the flow of aid and debt relief. Closer monitoring of new resource inflows from emerging lenders such as China, India, Brazil, Venezuela, Libya, South Africa et al will be critical in monitoring the quantity and the quality of aid flows into the continent. 
As a Forum and Network on Debt and Development, AFRODAD’s mission is to secure policy responses and policy changes at the national, sub-regional and global levels for achieving equitable and sustainable development process in Africa and in particular effective aid delivery. AFRODAD will therefore focus on monitoring the flow and the utilization of aid flows with regard to aid effectiveness, structural and institutional reforms and development impact. AFRODAD will strengthen its participation and therefore its role in the Aid architecture and Aid policy formulation environments and will also continue to monitor development aid through the Reality of Aid projects at the global and Africa level.  

Emerging lenders

The changing aid architecture demands that AFRODAD engages in research and advocacy on the impact of the emerging lenders (China, Brazil, Russia and India) on Africa and in particular the China and India engagements. The whole idea will be to ensure that the aid deals between these lenders and the recipient governments is effective, accountable, transparent and participatory: information must be available to recipient governments, affected communities, and other stakeholders as well as the general public.

The AFRODAD approach will be to generate a data-base of to cover the following; 

1) Aid flows (including financial flows, in-kind aid and administrative costs), including data on aid planned, pledged, committed and disbursed, disaggregated according to internationally agreed schema by region, country, geographic area, sector, [disbursement/delivery] modality and spending agency; 

2) Aid agreements and related documents, including information on all conditions, prior and agreed actions, benchmarks, triggers, and interim evaluation criteria ;and details of any decisions to suspend, withdraw or reallocate aid resources

3) Procurement procedures, criteria, tenders and decisions, contracts, and reporting on contracts, including information about and from contractors and sub-contracting agents; 

4) Assessments of aid and aid effectiveness including monitoring, evaluation and audit reports. 

The main objectives of this programme are:

a) To contribute to a sustainable and effective aid architecture/ To secure that development aid has a positive impact on Africa’s development
b) To contribute to ending Aid dependency/contribute to exit from aid dependency

Areas of Focus:

i) Aid flows, 

ii) Aid effectiveness agenda, 

iii) Aid architecture, national aid management and coordination, absorption capacity, and explores links with aid and other development finance flows (e.g. trade, FDI).

iv) New and emerging donors and instruments

v) Mapping of aid architecture

vi) Aid database; profiles

vii) Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action: update and progress

viii) CSO Development Effectiveness: update and progress

viiii) MDG#8: update and progress