Bunge-Lenye-Meno-A-Parliament-with-Teeth-for-Tanzania-LAXNNAJ547

Introduction
devised to shift the ‘ownership’ of development policy from aid
agencies to recipients. The World Bank, for example, requires
governments to submit a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) as
a condition for funding. Britain’s Department for International
Development (DFID) aspires to support policies which enhance
“permanently” the internal capacity of recipient states to manage their
own affairs. 2
For the agencies tasked with international development, finding
productive ways to spend increasing aid budgets can be daunting.
Projects which cost an annual budget of, say, US$20m may turn out to
be ill-suited to disperse US$40m, and so on. Priorities and methods vary
widely between agencies. European donors, for example, have been
early converts to General Budget Support (GBS), a policy which
channels development aid directly into the treasuries of qualifying
states. USAID, the official American aid agency, prefers conventional
‘Project Aid’ under which the agency manages construction of bridges,
schools or hospitals. Others contribute via ‘Basket Funds’ focused on
specific sectors such as water and sanitation.
As befits a donors’ favourite, Tanzania has experienced just about every
approach. Since 2004, the proportion of GBS has risen from less than
a quarter of all foreign aid to Africa to almost a third – a higher
proportion than in other regions. Tanzania is a test case. By 2008,
Britain’s DFID spent 80% of its budget for Tanzania in the form of GBS
– more than any other British aid programme. Instead of telling
governments how to manage aid money, the basic premise of GBS is
that the resources should follow performance. As Mr Cheyo observes in
this paper, the logic behind untied aid is that donors vest greater trust in
recipient governments – a scenario known, in development jargon, as
‘post-conditionality’.
2. Clare Short MP, former Secretary of State for Development. Centre for Policy Studies, 1999.
19