Ms Ida McDonnell:

I thank members for their very interesting questions regarding civil society. We have been working on this issue for the past three years in our team, drawing out some of the lessons we have seen coming from our reviews of how governments, as donors, and NGOs, whether they are based in the donor country or in developing countries, work most efficiently together to deliver development and to have a development impact.

It is interesting to know that some $19 billion a year of ODA is channelled to or through NGOs. These are predominantly the northern NGOs - the Concerns, Trócaires and Oxfams of this world - and a large share of this money is for humanitarian assistance. It makes sense in some ways that, as deliverers of humanitarian assistance, the NGOs are involved in that. They are well co-ordinated through the UN agencies responsible for delivering humanitarian assistance, and there are modalities around this that are quite effective.

Clearly, a large amount of money is involved and the members of the Development Assistance Committee have not come up with a recommended best practice for how donors should engage with civil society organisations. However, based on a lot of consultation with the organisational equivalents of Dóchas in the OECD member countries and the responsible people in the aid agencies, we carried out a survey and came up with some ideas. There are three key areas which we believe NGOs and the governments should recognise as important with regard to being more effective and efficient in delivering. First, there is an important role for consultation around policies and good practices so NGOs and governments actually talk to each other, dialogue and listen. Second, NGOs have a comparative advantage in being close to the ground, and they can raise some of the needs that are important to be addressed through the policies. Third, the funds and modalities need to be looked at carefully.

We have different ranges of size in the NGO sector, which is probably why there are no recommendations on how best to work with NGOs, so one would match the way an NGO is funded to its capacity to deliver and to absorb resources. A condition on the funding to the northern NGOs would be that they work with the developing country NGOs, and there is a large capacity building dimension through that, so it is not really a channelling of aid to other northern bodies. We have seen that one can provide programme-based financing to NGOs which have very good reputations through due diligence and can demonstrate capacity to deliver because they have good priorities on hunger, basic needs and so on. Then, there is the ear-marked funding, where one tries to have synergies between the donor's aid programme and using the NGOs to help deliver that aid programme. We are now attaching more and more results to the frameworks for engaging with these NGOs and they must be able to report back on results. This comes with a warning that one also needs to be sensitive to the nature of their work, in that one cannot quantify everything and it is long-term work, in order that one does not skew their projects on the basis of setting up short-term indicators that will not necessarily have a development impact over the long term.

Those are some of our lessons. It is a very complex and diverse world of civil society and NGOs. A minimum of $20 billion of ODA annually is going through NGOs and the question of the accountability of NGOs arises. They are working on that together at EU level, they are part of Busan and there is the CSO development group.

That is their area of work, which they must develop themselves. It is not up to individual governments to tell them how to develop their accountability. Having said that, development NGOs are generally very advanced in their accountability mechanisms because their fund-raising efforts tend to bring them very close to the public. Over the years, they have demonstrated good practice in terms of their transparency in dispensing aid.