Hanoi, February 5:

Aid experts from the World Bank, UN and other development agencies and banks met in Vietnam Monday for a four-day conference aimed at making global development efforts more effective.

The Hanoi meeting, also including some 40 nations, will study ways to ensure that international aid — which, organisers said, reached a record $87 billion in 2005 — meets its target of boosting development. The credibility of the donor community rests on its ability to deliver results for the world’s billions of poor, said the World Bank’s new vice-president for East Asia and the Pacific, Jim Adams.

“Foreign aid budgets across the world are growing sharply, and as they grow, donors and partner countries, like Vietnam, are increasingly looking to measure progress, make good decisions based on reliable information and involve everyone in building the best strategies,” he said. The meeting aims to help countries develop national action planning processes and better collect statistics and allow public servants to use the latest information management systems.

Donor countries should not just measure their successes by “the number of kilometres of roads or the number of schools,” they build, said Jeffrey Gutman, the World Bank’s vice-president of operations.

Rather they should focus on wider outcomes, such as “whether we actually get some results in terms of quality of education, in terms of changing economic opportunity by access to those roads,” he said. Host Vietnam has been praised for its poverty-eradication programmes, and has been chosen as a pilot country in which separate UN agencies will streamline their operations to work under a common leadership and budget.

The World Bank in Vietnam plans tomorrow to announce that it will provide Vietnam with over four billion dollars in interest-free credit until 2011 to continue its poverty reduction and development efforts.

The Hanoi meeting is sponsored by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), African Development Bank, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank. The conference, the third International Roundtable on Managing For Development Results, follows similar meetings in the US, Mexico and Morocco in recent years.

At a 2005 meeting in France, 60 donor countries and 60 aid recipients endorsed the Paris Declaration to increase aid harmonisation and accountability and improve the decision-making powers of countries receiving aid.