1. National Ownership and Leadership April 29 2008
Group Number 1
National Ownership and Leadership
April

2. Introduction(1)
The Paris Declaration states that aid recipient countries should exercise effective national ownership of their national development policies and strategies around which donors should coordinate their support/resources;
There are two key facets of this ownership, namely: democratic ownership which requires the participation of all stakeholders in policy formulation, implementation and monitoring of the strategies. The second facet is country leadership and capacity development;

3. Introduction(2)
A common understanding of what ownership is all about is critical. A country should have a vision with strong national leadership.The vision should be translated into programmes and strategies with strong participation of Parliament and CSOs. The vision should be all encompassing in terms of gender issues and all cross cutting issues including peace and stability;
Ownership is about designing programmes around own resources.

4. Constraints to Ownership(1)
There is no genuine ownership for most of the countries except for those that are not aid dependent. However, what exist are joint/shared partnerships.
There are several constraints to ownerships for most countries:
There is tension between partnership and national ownership. In the current state, partnerships are more dominant for most of the countries;
The division of labor amongst development partners is not always synchronized with national priorities. There are donor lags in responding to the changes in the priorities of national Governments;

5. Constraints to Ownership (2)
Lack of monitoring and evaluation mechanisms of the national strategies at all levels, with emphasis on the participation of CSO and local assemblies. These mechanisms should also be applied to donors to account for their performance on their commitments;
Donors are channeling their support through Non Governmental Organizations, which brings about redundancies in terms of national programming and thus undermine national ownership. Poaching of skilled staff from the civil service to parallel project implementation units and CSOs compounds the problem;
Donor conditionalities, while designed with good intentions, undermine national ownership.

6. Actions to strengthen Ownership(1)
There is need to move towards country ownership. And alignment is what gives ownership meaning;
Develop clear aid management policies and frameworks as a platform for exercising ownership and leadership;
Capacity of the leadership needs deliberate enhancement;
Avoid donor driven programmes;
Need for systems for policy dialogue and communication between Governments and donors;

7. Actions to strengthen Ownership (2)
Conditionality should be transformed to mutually agreed actions, with mutual accountability mechanisms. There is need to reduce policy conditions and ultimately eliminate them;
Development agenda should be widely accepted and not known only by Government;
Need for meaningful division of labour among donors which takes into account national priorities;

8. Actions to Strengthen Ownership(3)
Review frameworks of monitoring and evaluation of national strategies to bring on board all the stakeholders including donors, local assemblies, CSOs and central Government. – (need for a decentralized framework);
Devolve power structures to allow DP country offices flexibility to align to national priorities and systems, and also emerging national issues.
Find ways to make the PD legally binding on all parties to it.

9. Comments on AAA
Alignment issues and leadership are missing especially in paragraph 10. There is need for donors to agree to take national priorities seriously;
Building leadership capacity is omitted;
M and E issues are missing;
Conditionalities should be eliminated and replaced with mutually agreed actions to be mutually monitored.