Post-Busan group meet for the first time in Paris

The Busan Partnership Interim Group (BPIG) met for the first time earlier this week in Paris to decide what the post-Busan architecture on aid effectiveness will look like. As well as looking at how the Busan Partnership will be implemented and managed, they are also making the important decision of what indicators will be used to monitor progress, and how these will be applied to the task at hand.  One of the more popular options is a “country-heavy, global-light” mechanism that monitors progress mainly in a country-specific context. We’re keeping a keen eye on the proceedings and there are a number of key issues in this process that we feel need highlighting.

Firstly, that any monitoring mechanisms used are targeted at a country level and with a small number of global indictors. It’s imperative that one of these indicators is transparency, as derived from the commitments made at Accra and Busan on transparency.

Secondly, that whatever monitoring framework is used, it must be open and transparent. One way to ensure this would be to use an IATI – International Aid Transparency Initiative – approach, as opposed to the proposed monitoring survey. An IATI approach would mean that all involved parties would publish their own data in an open format to the IATI standard, as many have done in the past. All published data would then be collated to give a whole picture; this would be a far less cumbersome way of operating an open and transparent system than the use of a monitoring survey.

The outcomes of this first meeting will be made public in March and we’ll be reporting on them here along with any recommendations we have for further amendments. The final draft proposal comes out in June and we’ll be covering the process on here until then… watch this space for the next instalment.