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Jeroen Kwakkenbos

27 Jun 2018 15:31:35

On 2 July, the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD DAC) will decide whether to change the rules on how debt relief is reported as Official Development Assistance (ODA). There is a serious risk that these changes could create loopholes allowing donors that use debt-based instruments to inflate their aid levels at the expense of the poorest countries. Due to the switch from a cash flow basis to the Grant Equivalent (GE) system for reporting sovereign lending as ODA, the OECD DAC needs to revise the rules for how debt relief is reported. The reason behind this is that the GE system includes an ex ante adjustment for default risk, based upon country income classification: 4% for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and other Low Income ...

Jeroen Kwakkenbos

19 Apr 2018 08:16:57

Last week the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released their preliminary figures on the amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA), or development aid, raised in 2017. The week before I wrote a blog outlining Eurodad’s expectations for these figures – and the results are a mixed bag. While certain negative trends seem to be on the mend, overall the amount of aid raised every year has stagnated in volume and although there was positive economic growth across donor countries ODA dropped to 0.31% of Gross National Income (GNI). The continued inclusion of costs not directly linked to development and poverty eradication inflate the figures and undermines the credibility of the reporting exercise of a scarce resource ...

Jeroen Kwakkenbos

05 Apr 2018 11:08:38

Next week the OECD DAC will release preliminary figures for the amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA), or development “aid”, raised by its member states. Recent years have seen a significant increase in spending within donor countries and a steady decline of resources flowing to the world’s poorest countries: will the new figures demonstrate that the international community has begun to tackle these trends which diminish the credibility and effectiveness of ODA? Over the past two years the OECD DAC has celebrated a rise in overall ODA levels but, counterintuitively, the amount of aid going to the world’s poorest countries has declined. In a recent report the IMF notes: “Aid flows to [Low-Income Developing Countries] … have slipped significantly since 2013—declining ...

Jeroen Kwakkenbos, Jesse Griffiths

20 Feb 2017 12:56:01

Originally published by Devex It has been a busy couple of years for the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, the body in charge of determining what can and cannot be counted as “aid” to poor countries, or official development assistance. Major changes to aid have already been made during a year-long process of modernization of the ODA rules, but the biggest change in decades is yet to come. This March, the DAC will decide on how to include what are known as private sector instruments in aid. This could mean a dramatic increase in the use of aid to invest in or give loans to private companies, or to agree to bail out failed private sector projects through guarantees. Without strong safeguards and transparency standards there is a real risk that aid could be used as a backdoor subsidy ...