Evidently it was Huge, and very ‘High Level’ -- the Forum on Aid Effectiveness which just ended in Accra, with 1,700 attendees.  I wasn’t one of them. But I read and talk to people. The sense is that at the end of the day some promising steps may have taken place.  Mark Nelson was there, blogging already about the Parallel Forum with civil society, and the main declaration points of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which was improved at the 11th hour.

The 1700 people who came to Accra for the big aid effectiveness conference this week are packing their bags, but the agreement they managed to cobble together here looks to leave a lasting impact.

More than 100 ministers were on hand here for what many called a watershed.  As I noted in an earlier posting, the Accra conference was preceded by a major conference of civil society organizations (CSOs).  Then starting on Tuesday at the official conference, 82 CSOs were given seats and played a major role in the proceedings.  That CSO presence, combined with a strong push from some of the official delegations here, produced an agreement that goes much further than ever before towards transparency, civil society engagement, and fostering stronger developing country leadership in the $100 billion-a-year international aid business.

What factors conspire to cause a development project to fail? Poor project design and management of course. Also lack of client ownership. And capacity constraints. And corruption. 
 
Corruption puts assistance projects at risk at every step of the project’s life, and even before that projects exist on paper.  "Corruption warning signs: is your project at risk?" is a toolkit recently developed by the Latin America and Caribbean unit of the World Bank that lists these pitfalls phase by phase throughout the project's life.  The toolkit is addressed to Bank project managers and teams.  Here's a quick synthesis of these warning signs. 

Governance is integral to everyday happenings around the world.  They don't always make the big headlines.  Corruption, lack of transparency and accountability in government, censorship, abuse of and by the judiciary, regional conflicts and state-sponsored aggression, are some of the common manifestations of misgovernance.  By contrast, there are also notable instances of good governance and integrity in many institutions around the world. 

We have been blogging about many of these before, but a blog entry is one selective take on a particular issue, whether news that day or not.  So we thought that it is worth also giving some broader snapshot of the governance news of the day.

I'm sitting in the audience at the "CSO Parallel Forum on Aid Effectiveness" in Accra, Ghana, listening to speaker after speaker read a list of demands that ought to come without saying.

CSOs are civil society organizations, and this is a very engaged group of activists, more than 500 strong, who came here to offer their opinions and inputs before the big official "High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness" that starts here on Tuesday.  At that time, more than 100 ministers and a total delegation of more than 1200 people are expected to descend on this pleasant capital in West Africa to take stock of the $100-billion-a-year international development aid business.

 
There is such an obsession with rankings.  And being at the top in medal standings seems so important to so many.   So much so that larger issues got overlooked during the Olympics. 

And in spite of such obsession, nobody seems to get the medal ranking race straight.  Who really won?  Hard to tell, for unsuspecting reasons.  Lets see.

For starters, the media in the US tends to show us tables which rank countries according to the total medal count.  That puts the US at the top, having accumulated 110 gold, silver and bronze medals, against 100 medals for China.

 Officially, the IOC tries not to officially rank countries, but their tables list countries ranked by their number of gold medals (see Sydney and Athens’ results).  Following this criterion, as it is common in the much of the rest of the world, China comes out clearly on top, with a total of 51 gold medals, against only 36 for the US.

It’s an impressive, almost blinding sight: a big pile of sparkling diamonds, hundreds of precious stones piled up in front of the President as if they were pebbles. The head of state grabs a handful. The glitter reflects in his eyes as he looks at them, millions of dollars worth. 

 Corruption in public procurement is a very sensitive issue, not only because it squanders scarce and valuable resources, but also because when bribing is systematic it shatters the confidence that people have in their governments.

The ADB/OECD Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia Pacific recently published “Fighting Bribery in Public Procurement in Asia and the Pacific,” a seminar compilation about the experiences by experts.  Some options discussed for that region: