Development
The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is an important forum within the OECD in which donor countries coordinate policies and seek answers to common problems on a variety of development issues.
The DAC synthesizes good development practices and prepares guidelines and toolkits on issues like poverty reduction, good governance, conflict prevention, environmental conservation, and gender equality in developing countries.
U.S. Goals
The DAC helps advance key U.S. foreign policy and foreign assistance objectives, including: coordinating US foreign assistance initiatives with other donors; increasing the volume and quality of aid and distributing the burden; and improving the effectiveness of aid.
The DAC seeks to improve the effectiveness and accountability of official development assistance by focusing on development results, encouraging harmonization of donor practices and building donor-recipient partnerships, as articulated in the Paris Declaration, the Accra Agenda for Action, and many other DAC-issued recommendations, best practices and guidance documents.
The United States, along with our development partners, is collaborating to achieve this goal by adopting a model of development based on partnership, not patronage.
U.S. Benefits Regarding DAC
The OECD is the only venue where the heads of all bilateral aid agencies meet to coordinate economic assistance policies. As such, it has been an important forum for advancing U.S. interests in areas such as aid and development effectiveness, post-conflict relief and reconstruction (Afghanistan and Iraq). The Development Assistance Committee also tracks all official development assistance by OECD Members, and issues annual reports on the amounts and types of assistance provided. As these reports indicate, the U.S. is the world's largest donor.
AID Effectiveness
Effective aid helps people in need improve their lives and developing countries achieve peace, security, good governance and economic prosperity.
For the U.S., effective aid is ultimately measured in terms of results, for example: fewer babies dying; more children in school and finishing at least primary education; small farmers marketing higher value produce; better managed public finances; less corruption; and fewer deaths due to natural disasters.
Internationally, aid effectiveness has become a top priority recognizing that it is the key to sustaining increasing aid levels. It is seen as putting developing countries in the driver's seat, increasingly aligning donor programs to their national development plans and strategies, strengthening and progressively using country systems, better coordinating donor programs and simplifying donor procedures, and then measuring results based on common frameworks.
The Paris Declaration:
Ministers and Donor Agency Heads from over 100 developing countries and donor institutions, including the USAID Administrator, endorsed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness on March 2, 2005.
The OECD/DAC co-sponsored the high level forum that led to the Declaration. The Paris Declaration encourages locally developed action plans and coordinating processes based on franker recipient-donor dialogue and more equal partnership.
It expects developing countries to take the lead in defining their national development plans and strategies and donors to increasingly align their programs with these plans, while strengthening and progressively using country systems, better coordinating their programs and simplifying their procedures, and then measuring results based on common frameworks and mutual accountability.
U.S. Support:
The U.S. DAC delegate plays an active role in the preparations and negotiations, which includes U.S. government interagency input and agreement. The U.S. Government strongly supports implementation of the Paris Declaration.
We endorsed most of the Paris targets subsequently negotiated and reserved on those relating to country public financial management and procurement systems. The U.S. has concerns with the methodology for defining and assessing quality procurements systems and financial systems being reformed. We also support the improvement of country systems. We are working with the DAC to address these issues. USAID and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) programs are actively engaging with developing countries and donors to advance the Paris agenda.
Measuring Progress on Implementing the Paris Declaration:
The OECD/DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness established a task team on Monitoring the Paris Declaration tasked with coordinating international monitoring of indicators.
The first baseline survey covering 34 developing countries was undertaken in 2006 and a comprehensive report issued in July 2007. A midterm progress survey was done in 2008 and a final survey will be conducted in late 2010.
A fourth High Level Forum on aid effectiveness is scheduled to take place December, 2011 in South Korea. The surveys will be used to aggregate information on indicators across a range of countries and donors to be summed up in periodic progress reports. The country monitoring exercise is designed to encourage and build on local coordinating and reporting processes.
Additional Information:
For further details and reports, visit the OECD Web site at: http://www.oecd.org/dac/