OECD and UNDP have produced the first progress report on implementing the Busan Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. The report shows virtually no progress since 2010 on untying or using country systems, and three indicators – on civil society space, private sector engagement, and use of country results frameworks, are still being “piloted.” The only clear areas of progress are on aid transparency, putting aid through country budgets, and tracking allocations for gender equality. Interestingly, the report shows that South-South providers perform better on putting aid on budget, and on predictability. Much more will need to be done to meet the targets set in Busan for 2015.

DFI held discussions with UN agencies and CSOs in Washington and New York about future cooperation on government spending data and analysis, as well as on ensuring that monitoring of government spending is a key component of the monitoring framework for the post-2015 global development goals. For more details please contact Matthew Martin. 

UNESCO have commission DFI to deepen the Government Spending Watch analysis of education spending by disaggregating it by level (pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary), type (capital, wages and non-wage recurrent) and funding source (government revenue and donors) for approximately 50 countries. The database and an analytical report will form a background paper for the 2014 Education for All Global Monitoring Report and be available thereafter on the GSW site as a public good.  

DFI (with Eurodad and Development Initiatives) produced a report for the European Parliament on “Financing for Development post-2015: Improving the Contribution of Private Finance”. The report underlines that official finance remains more important for low-income and vulnerable countries, due to large private finance outflows. Public finance is also more predictable, counter-cyclical and targetable at development goals. It catalogues major problems in using official finance to leverage private finance, including lack of additionality, transparency and ownership by governments and citizens, and poor evidence of development impact. It recommends that the EU focus instead on investing public finance in public services which promote investment (education, health and infrastructure), on changing policies such as investment and trade treaties which encourage tax evasion, and on supporting fair debt workout procedures and responsible private financing standards to maximise development impact. More information is available in this blogpost by Development Initiatives. 

DFI moderated a panel on lessons from the experience of a health sector PPP in Lesotho, based on a study from Oxfam. Experts from Oxfam, the Lesotho Consumer Protection Association and IFC exchanged views, agreeing that PPPs are a high cost and high risk option for financing, best used in conditions where private sector expertise is worth the extra cost, and that it would be desirable to review the Lesotho contract. To read the Oxfam report, click here. 

DFI provided technical support for the OIF Ministerial and Technical Meetings of the Finance Minister’s network on financing for development. The Ministerial Meeting focussed on discussion with the OECD of current plans to track “Total Official Development Support” and to change definitions of ODA concessionality and content. Ministers urged that aid should continue to flow to LDCs, LICs and LMICs with high levels of poverty and other needs, and that any definitions should encourage continued aid flows and be coherent with recent IMF concessionality definitions. They agreed to make further inputs to the OECD at technical and ministerial levels over the next six months. The technical meeting discussed current findings and next steps in a comprehensive study of how to increase tax revenue in Francophone LICs, with a particular emphasis on progressivity and reducing global tax evasion. 

DFI presented in a seminar at New Rules for Global Finance on how the G20, FSB, IMF, World Bank and tax governance institutions currently assess their impact. The seminar was well-attended by senior officials from the institutions, and conducted a comprehensive review of the institutions’ impact assessment methods, which will feed into an improved impact assessment methodology for the 2014 Global Financial Governance and Impact Report (GFGIR). To read the 2013 GFGIR, click here. 

The first ever Global Financial Governance Impact Report, assessing the performance of the G20, IMF, World Bank, FSB and Tax-related bodies was launched in London at ODI on April 1st . It used GSW data and analysis to assess whether the IMF is delivering on increasing MDG-related spending in countries where it has programmes. For the full video of the event, see here. 

On 10th March 2014, the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé hosted a regional conference to discuss ways to leverage resources to finance infrastructure projects. The event gathered senior policymakers from the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), academia and private sector representatives, as well as experts from international institutions who reviewed types of financing available for infrastructure projects such as loans or PPPs. Details of this event organized by the IMF and Cameroon – agenda, presentations, speakers’ list – are available here, among which this presentation by the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department entitled Managing Fiscal Risks from Public-Private Partnerships. 

DFI took part in a World Bank-led DeMPA mission to Port-au-Prince. This mission focused on assessing Haiti's debt management in keeping with DeMPA methodology, in a context where public debt management has been transferred from the Budget department to the Treasury. This mission was an opportunity to highlight the urgent assistance needed in terms of the regulatory, institutional and organisational framework and to support a more dynamic management of the information system via a three-year reform plan.