The problems underlying the gulf between official and real aid are not new.
Donors have signed up to numerous international agreements to improve the quality of their aid. Yet this agenda has made little headway. At the heart of this failure there lies a lack of accountability on the part of donors for either the amount of aid they commit, or the quality of that aid. Meanwhile, donors continue to make excessive demands on recipients for ‘upward’ accountability, attaching rafts of intrusive policy conditions to their aid, and restricting the ability of developing countries to plot their own development paths.
This report argues that the share of real aid in official aid flows is unlikely to increase unless this ‘one-way’ accountability is replaced by a system of genuine mutual accountability, which balances the legitimate interests of donors, recipients and, most importantly, poor people.