For those who live on less than $1.25 a day, aid effectiveness is not a bureaucratic issue; it’s a personal and practical one, of providing food, education and health care to millions of people worldwide. For development actors, aid effectiveness is an evolving concept. While official donors emphasize the process of aid delivery, civil society organizations (CSOs) have been working to shift the emphasis to the results aid is intended to achieve. The term development effectiveness encompasses both the impact of development actors’ actions and the promotion of sustainable change that addresses the root causes and symptoms of poverty, inequality and marginalization.

Aid effectiveness is an issue that spans InterAction’s national and international work. Nationally, we are engaged in efforts to modernize U.S. foreign assistance; internationally, we participate in two civil society-led processes—Better Aid and the Open Forum on CSO Development Effectiveness.

Better Aid
The Better Aid process seeks to improve the effectiveness of bilateral and multilateral aid in the context of the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and its next iteration in 2011.

Open Forum on CSO Development Effectiveness
The Open Forum looks internally at the effectiveness of our community’s work. Its mandate is to work with CSOs globally to define the key principles of development effectiveness and the enabling conditions necessary for CSOs to operate effectively.

Additional information on aid effectiveness is available from the OECD.