Moving Towards a Shared South-South Cooperation Policy

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The broadly worded South-South policy recommendations, signed off at the recent international event in Bogota, reflect a cautious step towards an international consensus.

Hundreds of participants gathered in Bogota last month to discuss South-South Cooperation. The three-day event produced a carefully worded statement on South-South Cooperation with broad recommendations to develop ahead of a 2011 High Level Forum on aid effectiveness in South Korea.

Many donors, like the EU, are supportive of the need to move beyond the traditional North-South aid perspective.

The Bogota event gathered numerous real life examples in the form of SSC case studies, which are summarised in this initial report on the South-South Opportunity website.

A Perspective from Sierra Leone

A recent paper, ‘South-South Cooperation in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone’, which appeared in the April 2010 issue of the UNDP magazine “Poverty in Focus” recognises that SSC is positive, but not without pitfalls.

“South-South cooperation is promising, but it should be viewed with care,” write authors Herbert M’cleod and Fatamata Sesay Kebbay from the Office of the President in Sierra Leone.

While South-South cooperation is procedurally and administratively less cumbersome than traditional relations with Northern donors, southern aid carried its own risks, write Mr M’cleod and Ms Kebbay.

In Sierra Leone, the institutional framework for receiving aid is geared towards Western countries, write the authors. There is not always the capacity or robust strategy necessary to manage southern cooperation agreements.

Take, for example, the negotiation process:

“Sierra Leone has yet to institute a system to ensure that bad memoranda of understanding leading to bad agreements are not negotiated,” write Mr M’cleod and Ms Kebbay. “Recent agreements for the purchase of public assets, the development of housing facilities and energy production illustrate the danger.”

In Sierra Leone’s experience of South-South cooperation, the line between charity, solidarity and plain business interest is not always clear. That, indeed, may also be a feature of North-South cooperation, demonstrating that many of the risks associated with cooperation schemes are the same, no matter whether partners are from the North or the South.