Improving Donor Harmonisation Through Joint Monitoring

Improving Donor Harmonisation Through Joint Monitoring The EC offers three concrete proposals.

At the 2nd Joint Monitoring Seminar, The European Commission proposed three concrete steps that donors can take towards better harmonisation through joint monitoring of common development projects.

The European Commission delivered proposals to strengthen the collaboration inter agencies in terms of monitoring, which are in line with the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda on improving aid effectiveness.

"Donors should work together to avoid duplication of reports when it comes to the monitoring of projects they co-finance", explained Nicolas Leroy, Quality Officer of Europe Aid's Results-Oriented Monitoring unit, to several European Development Agencies, UN agencies and to the World Bank who attended the seminar. However effort in pursuit of donor harmonization and division of Labour between donors should not come at the expense of greater alignment with partner government systems but as complementary and reinforcing process.

The goal is to "be more efficient in terms of costs and time invested by the different partners" and to be less time consuming for Partner Government.

To watch a video interview with Mr Leroy, click on the icon above.

The seminar, which took place in April, is a follow-up to a first seminar on options for Joint Monitoring held in January 2009.

To promote donor harmonisation the EC suggested three steps forward which can be implemented on a short term basis:

1) To identify in each donor agency a focal point for project monitoring related issues. The idea would be to enhance communication and dialogue and foster a more interactive process between donors;

2) To make monitoring reports accessible online with the aim of providing greater transparency and systematic sharing of results.

3) To jointly analyse the results of the monitoring reports and to jointly decide on the follow up actions to take.

On a mid term basis the EC also proposed that participants to the 2nd Joint Monitoring Seminar carry out, on a voluntary basis, test multi-donor monitoring joint missions in the field.

"Working in the field with other donors on monitoring of common project can help us see in practice the differences and similarities between other donors' monitoring systems", said Mr Leroy. This learning process should reinforce the understanding and trust between agencies and in a long term perspective could lead to a division of task including monitoring and evaluation of joint projects.

At the moment, concepts and definitions, like ‘monitoring’, ‘evaluation’, ‘joint monitoring’, ‘multi donor monitoring’, still vary considerably from donor to donor. This reflects the different approaches donors take to monitoring and evaluation, which can make it difficult to draw accurate comparisons between projects.

“The idea is not to impose a common methodology but we certainly to promote a common approach,” Mr Leroy said.

The European Union, composed of the Member States and the European Commission, is the world’s biggest aid donor. The EC uses the Results-Oriented Monitoring (ROM) system in order to monitor EC financed aid projects during their implementation and provide external, objective and impartial feedback on their performance.

ROM covers all regions and all countries that fall under the Commission's external cooperation activities, producing 1,600 reports annually. ROM reviews are conducted on approximately 40% of all EC development projects and programmes.

To read more about ROM, read the ROM information brochure.