Multi-Donor Trust Funds to improve aid effectiveness in the UN system

 The UN Development Group unites the 32 UN funds, programmes, agencies, departments, and offices of the UN system playing a role in development. The common objective of the UNDG is to deliver more coherent, effective and efficient support to countries seeking to attain internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals.

New financing modalities have been implemented by the UN bodies to best serve the interests of the beneficiary countries, especially  those affected by conflict and disasters. Donors have been exploring a range of possibilities, including Multi-Donor Trust Funds (MDTFs). 

The increasing use of this funding mechanism responds to the need to provide flexible, coordinated and predictable funding to support the achievement of national and global priorities such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the application of the Aid Effectiveness Agenda and the UN Reform initiative "Delivering as One".

MDTFs can be classified into three major categories:

• Trust Funds that respond to disasters.
• Trust Funds targeted for particular global development goal or set of goals.
• Trust Funds focusing on the humanitarian needs of a specific country. 

Where the funds are goingWhere the funds are coming from

Further readings:
Articles:

The World’s Largest Multidonor Trust Funds: A Primer

EU to Form Multi-donor Trust Funds

Official Reports from the United Nations:
Discussion Note. Strengthening the system-wide funding architecture of operational activities of the. United Nations for development 

Publications available on Amazon
Joint Evaluation of the UNDG Contribution to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness
Better Aid Aid Effectiveness: A Progress Report on Implementing the Paris Declaration
Paris in Bogota: Applying the Aid Effectiveness Agenda in Colombia (IDS Working Paper)
Trust Funds under International Law: Trustee Obligations of the United Nations and International Development Banks

The history of aid effectiveness from the Millennium Summit to Busan - 1st part

In September 2000, after a decade of conferences and summits, the UN Member States adopted in the Headquarters in New York the United Nations Millennium Declaration which involved all the Nations to a global partnership to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of world’s people suffering for extreme poverty.
Decades of development demonstrated the need for a more systemic approach.  Only bringing in local perspectives and participation it is possible to provide tangible benefits to poor communities and produce sustained impact. The new global challenge to promote widespread and sustainable development demands a new agreed strategy, not merely based on the amounts of aid given, but mainly concerned with effective criteria and methods of aid delivery. For this purpose, the political engagement is essential to move the agenda forward.

The 8 Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Summit of 2000 represented a historical turning point for setting the aspirations, defining the results and strengthening accountability in the development cooperation sector.

Geocoding, further step towards effective development finance

Institutions participating in the AidData project developed in collaboration with the World Bank a new service to gather more precise information on aid projects implemented worldwide. Through this new search option, users can not only find the details of a particular project or check the amount of resources allocated in a certain country in a specific field, but also locate the areas of intervention and measure with more accuracy effectiveness, results and ratio of projects.
The project involved for a period of 6 weeks, a team of 13 people who geo-referenced the documentation of  the 1,216 active World Bank projects, made publicly available through the Open Data Initiative archive.
 The complete list of maps is accessible on the Mapping for results page. Further details on this geo-coding project  are on the AidData blog The First Trance. The dataset used in this project was built using the ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF and the ArcGIS Server technology from Esri (information found on the apps for development blog)

Map displaying the number of aid projects and
poverty conditions in Kenya's provinces

Another interesting project is the Haiti Aid Map initiative developed by InterAction, in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Civic Leadership Center with funding from FedEx. The map provides detailed project-level information on the work being done by NGOs in Haiti.

Haiti Aid Map homepage

Geo-referencing for its capacities to ensure better information accessibility, coordination and accountability of donors and participation of recipient institutions is becoming a valuable knowledge organization tool to support the implementation of coherent policies for development.

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness

Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness إعلان باريس بشأن فعالية المعونة - ARABIC Dèclaration de Paris sur l'efficacité de l'aide au développement - FRENCH Erklärung von Paris über die Wirksamkeit der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit - GERMAN Declaração de Paris sobre a Eficácia da Ajuda ao Desenvolvimento - PORTUGUESE Declaración de Paris sobre la eficacia de la ayuda al desarrollo - SPANISH The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness expresses the international community’s consensus on the direction for reforming aid delivery and management to achieve improved effectiveness and results.  The Paris Declaration is grounded on five mutually reinforcing pillars: Ownership: Partner countries exercise effective leadership over their development policies and strategies, and coordinate development actions. Alignment: Donors base their overall support on partner countries’ national development strategies, institutions, and procedures. Harmonization:  Donors’ actions is more harmonized and transparent. Made as cost-effective as possible through the elimination of duplicate efforts and the rationalization of activities. Managing for results: Managing resources and improving decision making for development results. Mutual accountability: Donors and partners are accountable for results. Commitments. The Paris Declaration contains 56 partnership commitments to improve the quality of aid. For example, under ownership, partner countries commit to exercise leadership in developing and implementing their national development strategies, and donors commit to respect partner countries’ leadership and help strengthen their capacity to exercise it. Indicators and Targets. The Paris Declaration also sets out 12 indicators to provide a measurable and evidence-based way to track progress, and sets targets for 11 of the indicators for the year 2010. Monitoring. A first round of monitoring of the 12 indicators was conducted in 2006 on the basis of activities undertaken in 2005 in 34 countries. It suggests that important efforts are still needed if we are to achieve the commitments agreed in the Paris Declaration and realize the full potential for improving development effectiveness at the country level. In the run-up to the Third High-Level Forum, another survey was conducted in early 2008 in 56 countries to assess progress in implementing the Paris commitments and prompt tangible improvements in the way aid is delivered.