International donor agencies exist to provide developing countries with various forms of mostly project-based human and technical support aimed at taking or supporting initiatives which, in one way or another, contributes to the enhancement of national life in the receiving countries.
The international donor community in Guyana comprises both multilateral agencies – like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on the one hand and bilateral agencies like the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the United States Agency for Inter-national Development (USAID) on the other. Both sets of agencies, however, are funded mostly by developed countries – primarily the United States – either through the UN system or directly through state agencies.
Funds assigned to projects in various countries by donor agencies are part of the assistance to the people of the countries requiring those projects under the various bilateral and multilateral between and among the receiving countries and the various donor agencies. Aid received from donor agencies, however, must be administered by an approved and, equally important, competent body and here in Guyana as in other parts of the world it is the government that is deemed to be the most suitable entity to engage the donors on behalf of the country.
Last Friday’s engagement between representatives of the donor agencies and local stakeholder groups can be described as a collective public relations initiative by those agencies to reach more deeply into the society that they exist to serve. Indeed, by the admission of the donor agencies themselves what they do is generally known only to a limited section of the society. Another equally good reason has to do with the fact that the public perceptions of what donor agencies can do and can reasonably be expected to do is often fuzzy.
Reaching out to the beneficiaries of aid received from donor agencies is the responsibility of both the government – in its capacity as trustee of the beneficiaries – and the donor agencies themselves and the initiative by the donor community likely reflects their own lack of satisfaction with just how good a job has been done in this regard. They understand only too well that where people are detached from the institutions and processes that create projects from which they benefit the likelihood becomes much greater that they will be less appreciative of what is done for them. The other point to be made of course is that it is not at all a bad thing if government can sometimes play a less interventionist role thereby allowing for more direct discourse between donor agencies and recipients of the projects that they provide. Apart from the fact that such an approach reduces the possibility that the work of these agencies will become affected by politics, discourse between donors and recipients allows the former to come to a much more effective understanding of what is required. In other words such an approach allows for more choices on the part of the recipients and greater flexibility on the part of the donor agencies.
And while, understandably, the respective donor agency representatives were delicate in their handling of questions about transparency and accountability in the administration of funding allocated to projects it is no secret that serious questions have arisen about the disbursement of donor agency funding in several countries and that those questions have included issues to do with graft, nepotism and corruption. In fact, some donor agencies have been continually upgrading their internal systems in order to reduce the incidence of corrupt practices. Concerns have also been known to arise about the wisdom of undertaking some projects and whether or not these may not have benefited from rather less consultation with the real stakeholders than was necessary.
Part of the challenge facing the donor agencies as they seek to enhance the quality of their rapport with their real target audiences is that in many, perhaps most cases they may have to work through various stakeholder groups including political parties and the thicket of non-government organizations that have mushroomed across Guyana. Targeting those groups for attention still fails to take account of significant groups of people who are either recipients or would-be recipients of donor-funded projects. If, therefore, the donor agencies are serious about a genuine dialogue with a wider range of stakeholders they will have to devise mechanisms that go beyond what – for the moment at least, appears to be a dependence on stakeholder institutions many of which have their own deficiencies. It could well come to a situation in which, from time to time, donor agency officials will have to roll up their shirt sleeves, go down into to communities and meet the people who need their projects and who benefit from them eyeball to eyeball. What happened on Friday is, however, a good start and the donor community presumably understands that it will be held to its stated intentions.
