On 2-4 September, over 800 representatives of multilateral and bilateral donors, developed and developing country governments and civil society will gather in Accra, Ghana, for the OECD-DAC's Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. Ahead of this forum on 30 August - 1 September, civil society organisations hosted a Parallel Forum on Aid Effectivenes, bringing together more than 400 CSOs, including Eurostep and its partners, to discuss and finalise their recommendations to the High Level Forum decision-makers.

Civil society organisations including Eurostep have criticised the contradictions between the principles of the Paris Declaration of 2005 (country ownership, alignment to country priorities, harmonisation of the terms for aid, management of aid for results, and mutual accountability for these results) and their methods of implementation.

A press statement following from the Parallel Forum explicitly sets out the concerns and demands of the CSOs, including calling on the High Level Forum to "set time-bound and monitorable targets to stop short-term aid and commit to ensuring that 80% of aid is committed for at least 3-5 years by 2010", and to "reduce the burden of conditionality by 2010 so that aid agreements are based on mutually agreed objectives."

The full statement is available at www.betteraid.org.

A paper on this subject produced by Eurostep and its partners can be found at: component/option,com_docman/task,doc_view/gid,275/Itemid,41

Sources:

http://www.interaction.org/newswire/detail.php?id=6370

http://www.betteraid.org