The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness expresses the international community’s consensus on the direction for reforming aid delivery and management to achieve improved effectiveness and results.

Principles. The Paris Declaration is grounded on five mutually reinforcing principles:

1. Ownership: Partner countries exercise effective leadership over their development policies and strategies, and coordinate development actions.
2. Alignment: Donors base their overall support on partner countries’ national development strategies, institutions, and procedures.
3. Harmonization: Donors’ actions are more harmonized, transparent, and collectively effective.
4. Managing for results: Managing resources and improving decision making for development results.
5. Mutual accountability: Donors and partners are accountable for development results.

In order to measure progress on achievement of the Paris Declaration, the 3rd High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness called on developing countries to partner with donor communities to ensure good statistics are produced to facilitate development results.

In a parallel event organised by the Statistics for Development in the 21st Century (PARIS 21) on the development of the national statistical systems, the session dubbed Role of Statistics in the Aid Effectiveness highlighted the importance of good statistics for measuring the key pillars of  the Paris Declaration. These would also include accountability and managing results.

. . . . . but gender inequality still exists

Three years since the Paris Declaration was signed by 56 countries progress appears dim and far between.

In a study commissioned on 12 of the 24 African countries that signed the 2005 Declaration, only four have started implementing government-donor coordination systems of aligning donor support with national development strategies.

Why Paris Declaration might not be effective

Officials from various African governments accused donors of making it difficult to produce results using donor money.

Preliminary studies indicate that effective country ownership of development cooperation is almost certainly stronger and has been reinforced by the Paris Declaration.

According to Dr Bernard Wood, who evaluated some of the Paris Declaration projects, ownership remains heavily weighed in favour of central players rather than sector or local authorities.

Wood said that in all examined cases of donors’ performance, the Paris Declaration provides a significant reinforcing influence and platform for change.