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Foreign Aid Effectiveness

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Foreign aid has at times been a spectacular achievement and an unmitigated failure (The World Bank, 1998). (Lancaster, 2007) Defines foreign assistance as a voluntary transfer of public resources including grants, loans, or technical assistance from one independent Government to another sovereign Government, to a Non-governmental organization, or to an international organization that donors provide to recipients on concessional rather than commercial terms. The practice of giving foreign aid has existed for more than half a century; often referred as a policy. However, many scholars argue that it is not a policy, it is a tool of policy. The first legal statute dealing with official aid was passed by Parliament in the UK in 1929. However, immediately …show more content…

To improve the quantity of aid and effectiveness and its impact on development, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) came to the fore. It gives a series of specific implementation measures and establishes a monitoring system to assess progress and ensure that donors and recipients hold each other accountable for their commitments. The Paris Declaration outlines the following five fundamental principles for making aid more effective: ownership, alignment, harmonization, results and mutual accountability. By implementing these principles, the countries and organisations that endorsed the Paris Declaration are making breakthroughs in improving aid effectiveness, tackling issues that have hampered development for decades. Developing country governments and civil society are reaping the rewards in the form of better, more aligned and more predictable donor support (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, …show more content…

For example Haiti, From 1990 to 2003, Haiti received more than $4 billion in aid. U.S. contributions from 1990 to 2005 totalled about $1.5 billion. However, because of an unstable government, a weak public institutional capacity, an inadequate continuously deteriorating environment lack of government capacity generally and in aid administration specifically; lack of government support for or ownership of programs funded by foreign assistance; excessive aid dependency; and widespread dissension between President and Parliament. All of these factors have contributed to aid ineffectiveness on the Haitian side (Buss & Gardner,

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