Voices & Views

The Secretariat of OECD's Development and Assistance Committee has drawn up an inventory of existing approaches to capacity development among its member countries and multilateral donors. The inventory is a useful tool for comparing donors' capacity development policies, how those policies are put into operation, and to what extent the Accra Agenda for Action priorities have already been incorporated.

With the support of the Learning Network for Capacity Development www.lencd.org, sector-specific in-country learning events are now offered for donors and partners.

Measures to reform how the European Commission delivers aid by rethinking approaches to technical cooperation, have been welcomed by a leading Southern representative in Aid Effectiveness, Talaat Abdel-Malek, recently appointed as co-chair of the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness in the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. 

For almost two decades, a collapsed government and battling warlords have made Somalia a byword for anarchy.

Can the complexities and challenges of public sector reform be explained in understandable language and clear terms? Test it yourself - for this is what the new reference document produced by unit E4 in EuropeAid sets out to do.

In this recent provocative paper, "The Challenge of Reforming Budgetary Institutions in Developing Countries", author Richard Allen bridges an important gap in the existing literature on Public Expenditure Management, offering a thought provoking yet practical guide to help countries design and implement new PEM legislation and procedure.

Donors struggle to translate policies on governance to practical actions in the field. One promising avenue for improvement leads donors to pay more careful attention to governance in sectors. To help in this journey, EuropeAid has developed and published a guidance tool for its staff that has already picked up internal and external attention.

European Commission staff are already participating in online discussion forums and recently, a discussion group was launched on decentralisation and local governance, feeding into a workshop in Brussels in July. "I am a task manager for local governance and civil society in A. I only arrived a month ago and I am therefore still trying to get my head around this very complex issue. I greatly welcome this initiative both in terms of support but also in terms of having a good channel of communication with other delegations."

The Director General of EuropeAid, Koos Richelle, has circulated the new Guidelines on Making Technical Assistance More Effective and urged staff across the European Commission to take a leading role in implementing technical cooperation reform. "Your dedicated involvement and leadership are critical to achieve, in the coming months, tangible improvements in the way TC programmes are designed and managed," said Mr Richelle in an instruction note to staff and delegations.

The European Commission delegation in Guyana is working on an Action Plan to implement the Backbone Strategy on technical cooperation reform in a rather original way, using an external consultant to develop a more comprehensive document. Read more to see how they fared.

Whether you work in the headquarters or in the European Commission Delegations, you may at some point have to present and communicate on the subject of technical cooperation reform. You might be asked to contribute at a country-level or regional seminar, a training session, in meetings with partner countries representatives or other stakeholders, perhaps at an international conference or simply partake in internal events.

At a recent debate at the European Commission's EuropeAid headquarters, Theodore Trefon, who is also a contributor and editor of the 2005 book, "Reinventing Order in the Congo", sparked a lively debate with his hard-hitting assessment of donor short-comings in Africa's largest nation.

The Backbone Strategy on "Reforming Technical Cooperation and Project Implementation Units" for External Aid Provided by the European Commission and its workplan starting in October 2009: This key policy document presents EuropeAid's strategy to reform TC and PIU.

You'll find here internal documents related to EC technical cooperation reform such as minutes of the Steering Committee meetings, working tools, reports, etc; which will help you follow the implementation of the Backbone Strategy. Minutes of Steering Committee Meetings: