U.K.: More Country Ownership

• Author: Sam Sharpe, Adrian Wood, and Ellen Wratten
• Position: Group Head/Acting Director/Team Leader in the Policy Division of the U.K. Department for International Development

Debating Aid. Many developing countries, particularly in Africa, will need substantially more foreign aid to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. But capacity constraints can make it difficult for them to absorb all the extra aid. F&D asked a leading donor, the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom, and the finance ministers of two African aid-recipient countries, Tanzania and Burkina Faso, to outline how they set about promoting aid effectiveness. The U.K. is the current President of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries, Tanzania has been living with relatively high levels of aid for some time, while Burkina Faso is just starting down that road.

"We in the developing countries must own the development agenda, and our partners have to align their support to our agenda, our priorities and the sequencing we have set for ourselves.... Development cannot be imposed, it can only be facilitated."

-President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, November 2004

In 1999, only 50 percent of Tanzania's children went to primary school. Now the figure is over 90 percent. There are similar stories in Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and other African countries. How has this happened? Because an elected government in Tanzania chose to expand educational opportunities and was able to use aid money flowing through its own budget, rather than into separate donor projects, to abolish school fees.

The UN Millennium Summit in 2000 articulated a new consensus about the urgency of poverty reduction and the importance of more and better aid to support it. For Britain, the change began in 1997, when poverty reduction became the sole aim of our international development policy. Over the past eight years, we have more than doubled our aid, to £4 billion a year, and committed ourselves to raise it much further, reaching the UN target of 0.7 percent of gross national income by 2013. During 2005, we have been pressing other countries to increase their aid substantially (including through debt relief and the U.K.'s proposed International Finance Facility). We give 90 percent of our bilateral aid to low-income countries and urge others to do likewise.

But the Summit, and its follow-up meeting in Monterrey, Mexico, recognized that more aid is not enough. Too much aid in the past was badly used, often because it was driven by the priorities and preferences of donors rather than of poor people and poor countries. Like many other donors, the U.K. has been convinced by past experience that the most promising path to better aid is a "country-led" approach, in which the governments of developing countries themselves define and lead the poverty reduction agenda.

The country-led approach was first put into action on a large scale under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries debt relief initiative, in which recipient countries were asked to formulate national poverty reduction plans to show how they would use the money saved on debt service. But the approach has since been extended by many-though not all-donors to other sorts of aid. It is now central to the U.K.'s aid program, and we are working with others to expand the scope of the country-led approach.

Development is a very long-term business, so it is still early to evaluate the success of the new approach. But we have already learned much about how to apply it, and about the challenges that it faces.

Guiding principles

Experience suggests five key principles for making the country-led approach work.

First, support country strategies. Donors...