A section of Participants during the African Women's Regional Consultative meeting

May 26, 2008

International agencies supporting programmes in Africa have been urged to align aid to national priorities in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.

Speaking during the African Women’s regional Consultative meeting on Aid Effectiveness and Gender Equality on May 26 in Nairobi, Ms Fatma Alloo, Secretary to Board of African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) called upon donor agencies to adhere to “the five partnership commitments being ownership, alignment, harmonization, managing for results and mutual accountability” to make aid for development more effective.

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PD), she said, is seen as a positive commitment to a “new paradigm” for aid between the principles of aid effectiveness and the practice and impact of aid on the ground.

The regional women consultative meeting dubbed “Road to Accra,” was told that there was no aid effectiveness without gender equality and that women’s rights will not be effective “and will not reduce poverty and achieve the MDGs.” Gender equality, environment and human rights, the meeting was told, are crucial to development effectiveness and should be considered as cross-cutting issues central to all deliberations on aid effectiveness.

The two-day meeting in Nairobi, which is in preparation for the next High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-EFF) that is to take place in Accra, Ghana in September this year also heard that from the analysis by women’s organisations, money and financial flows are inherently political issues and influencing them is critical to any strategy for development.

Participants concurred that the women’s movements have been actors in development processes and urged fellow women to safeguard and further those gains adding that the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness committed by 90 partner countries, 30 donor countries and 30 development agencies including the United Nations and the World Bank, should not just be a matter of delivery but should go beyond and focus on the real purpose of aid.

As the women movement prepares for the September Accra meeting, participants deliberated on the need to formulate an effective strategy to help understand fully what the Paris Declaration is all about. “We need a strategy which would make sense to ourselves as a collective body. This strategy is not only for the parallel Civil Society Organisations’ (CSOs) event but also to the HLF-EFF meeting,” said Ms Fatma Alloo, FEMNET Board Secretary.

The Declaration, she said, has five specific goals, namely, advancing country ownership, harmonizing of donors and creditors and alignment with country-led strategies. Others are managing for development results and mutual accountability for the use of aid.

Ms Alloo noted that it was timely that the consultative meeting was taking place in Nairobi “to make sure that gender issues are seriously put into the document at Accra,” adding that it was important for more women organisations to join the CSO steering group. She called upon the participants to produce easily accessible information and disseminate it to help raise awareness amongst CSOs and women’s organisations about the PD agenda.

She further called upon participants to engage the media effectively throughout their global networks.

Participants were drawn from Zambia, Mozambique, Cameroon and Mali others were drawn from Senegal, Ghana, Kenya,DRC and Nigeria.