Axel van Trotsenburg's blog

Small groups of representatives from donor and borrowing countries met to tackle one of the most difficult and pressing development challenges facing the world today during the recent Spring Meetings. That is, how to make sure the world’s neediest get the support they need amid a seismic shift in how aid is collected and allocated—the very architecture of aid. The topic lies at the heart of everyone’s future. This is why.

I am flying out of Busan after a very stimulating discussion on the new aid architecture at the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. We organized this panel discussion with the goal of learning what our development partners, particularly new partners, think about the future of aid—the challenges and opportunities.

I have some good and some not so good news about aid. First, the good news. The aid landscape has seen three important changes during the last decade that have had a transformative, positive effect on the very nature of aid.

One of these changes has been the increased focus on the quality of aid—especially on the results being achieved on the ground. The World Bank and IDA, the Bank’s fund for the poorest, have placed a premium on having a real impact in the work we support, and the results show.

As we heard last month during the MDG Summit at the United Nations, progress has been made but much work remains if we are to come close to halving poverty or reaching other targets we all agreed to in 2000. These issues are very much at the center of the Bank-IMF Annual Meetings this week in Washington.

Making development aid more accountable, transparent and effective is at the heart of this week’s discussions. New partnerships and players are emerging. Donor and client governments, along with their constituents, are demanding measurable results.  That said, it is challenging to measure aid when there are multiple channels and types of assistance, from bilateral to multilateral, from loans to trust funds, and the data generated is not always presented in a comparable way.

It’s been 10 years since the World Bank signed on to the Millennium Development Goals. At the time, I managed the Bank's HIPC initiative, providing debt relief for the most heavily indebted countries, and I remember the hope we all felt.  I am now responsible for IDA—the World Bank’s fund for 79 of the poorest countries, for whom the MDGs are critical, and I can say that our commitment to these goals remains as strong today, if not stronger. 

We have made considerable progress on many of the goals. Growth over the past decade has contributed to reductions in extreme poverty.  In 1990, over 40 percent of the population in developing countries lived on less than $1.25 per day.  By 2005, that share fell to roughly 25 percent and is expected to fall to 15 percent by 2015, more than meeting the goal to halve extreme poverty.