ACT Campaign Asking the Government to ACT on Aid Effectiveness, by making our aid more: Accountable. Creative Transparent

HOW instead of WHAT Past initiatives focused on increasing amount of money spent, and changing what the money is spent on. Seeking to promote a more sophisticated message than the traditional “0.7%” Asking Canada to ACT on aid effectiveness – making our aid more: Accountable, Creative, and Transparent.

PURPOSE, The HOW, not WHAT Advocacy campaign HOW, not WHAT Goal is to create the political will to provide the space/support to increase the effectiveness of Canadian development policy HOW, not WHAT

ISSUES, Accountable Aid chronic lack of feedback and accountability tendency to focus on measuring what they are putting into a project – inputs – rather than trying to measure what they get out – outputs – because inputs are easiest to measure feedback loop is broken – negative assessments rarely acted on – turning a blind eye to failure and waste for fear that publicizing it will undermine support for development

ISSUES, Creativity delivery of aid needs to improve, and there needs to be new solutions found to some of the more pressing problems in Africa, particularly, around helping to increase agriculture yields require aid that is creative and flexible, rather than conventional and averse to learning/risk modeled on venture capital terms rather than bureaucratic terms

ISSUES, Transparency National homepages of Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – allows the user to see exactly where the organization’s money is going CIDA website – provides only vague background information on the countries it operates in – statistics that only allow the reader to see the broad picture of spending hinders the ability of local journalists and activists to hold CIDA and its partners to account for delivering what they have promised

ISSUES, Transparency $4 billion a year of official aid spent with little information about the impact of these dollars Cornerstone of a democracy is the availability of information – full disclosure of this information will keep our institutions honest and go a long way in strengthening public trust

ACCOUNTABLE Means: – We are accountable to meet our international promises around aid – We hold ourselves accountable to assessing the results of our aid by committing to sharing a rigorous assessment to a “triple bottom line” of stakeholders – the Canadian public; partner governments that receive our aid; and citizens in partner country governments.

ACCOUNTABLE To do: – Create a standard for tracking and reporting on major international aid commitments, committing to use it, and inviting other G8 countries to follow our lead – Establish an expert, independent, arms-length development evaluation agency to assess the results from Canadian aid

CREATIVE Means: – Investing in innovation by piloting and scaling up promising ideas distinction between innovation and invention – Modeling a portion of our aid on venture capital principles flexibility to find the higher-risk and unexpected solutions to difficult problems

CREATIVE To do: – Set up a 150M$ venture-focused Implementation Innovation Fund to fund the expansion of promising initiatives would complement the research-focused Development Innovation Fund provide later stage financing to take ideas to scale

TRANSPARENT Means: – Making information about aid more accessible to inspection from others key to enabling constructive dialogue and improvement

TRANSPARENT To do: – Sign on to the International Aid Transparency Initiative aims to make information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand many of the world's leading donor organizations already signed – Publish comprehensive, openly available data about all CIDA projects and programs on its website should allow the user to track any project from the initial proposal through all stages to project implementation