ECHO (European Commission) - European Parliament Report

European Parliament Report

The Committee on Development (CD) of the European Parliament (EP) commissioned the Overseas Development Institute to undertake a project on the effectiveness of international development assistance from the European Commission. The project focused on the cases of Cambodia, Mozambique and Peru. The findings and policy suggested can be summarized as follows:

1. Harmonisation and alignment (H&A) is crucial for state capacity and should be expanded from sharing and spreading information to increasing joint activities in the short-term.
2. Donor harmonisation efforts need to be scaled up to include agreements on joint technical assistance and the streamlining of systems and procedures
3. Extremely fragmented aid systems impose unreasonably high transaction costs on the government, drains valuable resources, and fundamentally weakens state capacity.
4. EC procedures and structures remain highly complicated and bureaucratic.
5. Much of the success or failure of cooperation depends on individual interactions, specific innovators and appropriate staffing levels to carry out the tasks at hand, but the costs are also quite high.
6. Country Strategy Papers could improve aid effectiveness — but their quality is uneven.
7. Relations between HQ and delegations needs to be improved.