[PDF] Department For International Development eBook

Author : Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher : The Stationery Office
Page : 44 pages
File Size : 12,29 MB
Release : 2010-01-26
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780215543455

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Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. The Department for International Development provided £312 million to Malawi between 2003-04 and 2007-08, rising to a planned £80 million for 2010-11. The Department has contributed to progress in Malawi's development in areas such as reducing hunger and substantially improving the capacity in the health system. And its programme complies with many internationally-agreed good practices. But the Department needs better measures to assess its contribution, and evidence of the value for money of its spending in Malawi is hard to find. Much of the Department's programme is routed through the Government of Malawi's systems. The Department funds governance and scrutiny processes, but these are not yet fit for purpose. The Department needs to do more to strengthen governance in Malawi if it is to continue support through Government systems.The report found that to improve the programmes it funds the Department is limited by weaknesses in the information it has on their implementation and results, and is not helped by a weak set of targets for its own performance. There are opportunities for the Department to drive improved value for money from the services it helps to fund in Malawi through quicker and more robust responding to emerging issues and results.The Department has also faced the challenge of disbursing steeply rising amounts of aid with fewer staff to oversee it, as a result of cuts in its administration budget set by the Treasury. The Department has cut staff numbers in Malawi, and the Committee questions whether current staffing is sufficient.

Author : Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: International Development Committee
Publisher : The Stationery Office
Page : 52 pages
File Size : 19,31 MB
Release : 2007-11-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780215037329

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The Committee's report reviews the Department for International Development's 2007 annual report (HCP 514, session 2006-07, ISBN 9780102945195), focusing on issues of efficiency and effectiveness. The Committee welcomes the increase in the DFID's budget under the Comprehensive Spending Review Settlement for 2008-11, in line with the target of 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income to be allocated to Official Development Assistance by 2013. However, it notes the significant challenge for DFID in using this funding effectively when it is also required to reduce its administrative costs, and therefore staff numbers, at a time when its focus is shifting increasingly towards fragile states where providing assistance is resource-intensive. Concerns are raised that DFID continues to emphasise inputs rather than outcomes, although DFID's new Public Service Agreement Delivery Agreement and the plans to establish the Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact should make it easier to identify whether DFID's expenditure is effective in reducing poverty in developing countries. Four areas for improvement in DFID's work are highlighted relating to gender equality, climate change, governance and agricultural development.

Author : Simone Dietrich
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 39,26 MB
Release : 2021-11-11
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1316519201

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Explores the different choices made by donor governments when delivering foreign aid projects around the world.

Author : Great Britain: National Audit Office
Publisher : The Stationery Office
Page : 80 pages
File Size : 11,96 MB
Release : 2008-02-08
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780102951325

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Budget support is aid provided directly to a partner government's central exchequer, and aims to reduce poverty through helping to fund the poverty reduction strategy of the beneficiary country. DFID's use of budget support has risen to £461 million, representing nearly twenty per cent of bilateral expenditure. This study examines the aims of budget support, what it is achieving, how DFID manages the risks of using it and how DFID takes individual funding decisions. The report finds that budget support has: often enabled partner governments to increase expenditure on priority areas; resulted in partner governments providing more services, particularly in health and education; helped increase the capacity of partner governments to plan and deliver services effectively and to develop better poverty-focused policies; helped partner governments to strengthen their financial management systems and encouraged other donors to support such reforms; facilitated donor alignment to, and support for, the developing nation's own strategies; and reinforced existing economic stability and good economic management. But evidence on whether budget support has yielded better value for money than other forms of aid is not conclusive. While budget support has some advantages compared to other forms of aid, it also carries significant risks which need to be better managed. Monitoring achievement is challenging, and DFID does not always set out what it expects to achieve or by when. Formal monitoring frameworks do not always track progress in remedying weaknesses in financial systems. And monitoring of human rights - one of the key criteria for giving budget support - is not yet systematic. Weaknesses in available statistics continue to limit the ability to monitor results. Developing country governments may not be capable of using UK funds efficiently and effectively or may misuse them for political reasons or through corruption.

Author : Stephen Brown
Publisher : Springer
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 21,2 MB
Release : 2016-02-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1137568828

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Security concerns increasingly influence foreign aid: how Western countries give aid, to whom and why. With contributions from experts in the field, this book examines the impact of security issues on six of the world's largest aid donors, as well as on key crosscutting issues such as gender equality and climate change.

Author : Leslie Christine Groves
Publisher : Earthscan
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 41,88 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1849771707

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Rapid and profound changes are taking place in international development. The past two decades have promoted the ideals of participation and partnership, yet key decisions affecting people's lives continue to be made without sufficient attention to the socio-political realities of the countries in which they live. Embedded working traditions, vested interests and institutional inertia mean that old habits and cultures persist among the development community. Planning continues as though it were free of unpredictable interactions among stakeholders. This book is about the need to recognise the complex, non-linear nature of development assistance and how bureaucratic procedures and power relations hinder poverty reduction in the new aid environment. The book begins with a conceptual and historical analysis of aid, exposing the challenges and opportunities facing aid professionals today. It argues for greater attention to accountability and the adoption of rights based approaches. In section two, practitioners, policy makers and researchers discuss the realities of power and relationships from their experiences across sixteen countries. Their accounts, from government, donors and civil society, expose the highly politicised and dynamic aid environment in which they work. Section three explores ways forward for aid agencies, challenging existing political, institutional and personal ways of working. Authors describe procedural innovations as strategic ways to leverage change. Breaking the barriers to ensure more inclusive aid will require visionary leadership and a courageous commitment to change. Crucially, the authors show how translating rhetoric into practice relies on changing the attitudes and behaviours of individual actors. Only then is the ambitious agenda of the Millennium Development Goals likely to be met. The result is an indispensable contribution to the understanding of how development assistance and poverty reduction can be most effectively delivered by the professionals and agencies involved.

Author : David Mosse
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 26,84 MB
Release : 2011-04-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0857451111

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Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development’s discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.