ARE WE READY TO MEET TODAY'S DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES?

• by Bert Koenders and Talaat Abdel-Malek
• Friday, September 23, 2011
• Inter Press Service

The release on September 22 of the report Aid Effectiveness 2005-2010: Progress in Implementing the Paris Declaration, leads us to ask an important question: Are we any better at delivering aid effectively today than we were five years ago? The evidence from the survey is sobering. At the global level, only one of the 13 targets established for 2010 in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness have been met, and only by the narrowest of margins, write Bert Koenders and Talaat Abdel-Malek, Co-Chairs of the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness.

The world has changed profoundly since aid as we now know it began some 60 years ago. Today's development landscape is populated by fast-evolving realities. The past few decades have seen an explosion in the number of organisations and countries that support development, and the challenges faced by developing countries in managing them are burgeoning. In addition, transnational issues -such as health, security, employment, migration, food insecurity, and climate change- demand a coordinated response and, above all, strong political will to address them.

In this landscape, working together has become one of the great -if not the greatest -challenge to producing positive development results and reducing inequality, the authors write in this analysis.

(*) By Bert Koenders and Talaat Abdel-Malek, Co-Chairs of the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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