ReliefWeb

Authors: Marcus Manuel, Alastair McKechnie and Maia King

Since the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra in 2008, there has been a growing awareness amongst the international community that low-income countries with fragile institutions are not simply more difficult cases of development, but require a fundamentally different approach to delivering development assistance.

In most cases, however, the way in which assistance has been provided follows the same procedures and uses the same approaches to assessing and managing fiduciary risks that are applied to stable countries. The cost of this collective failure to adapt the aid system to the needs of fragile states is borne primarily by the populations who suffer from the fragility and its symptoms, such as violence and a lack of access to infrastructure and basic services.

The tragedy is that in failing to take managed risks in the delivery of aid, countries are exposed to the much greater risk of renewed conflict. And the costs of containing such conflict is expensive: in Sierra Leone and Liberia the cost of the UN peacekeeping forces was five times that of aid flows to those countries at the time; spending on military support in Afghanistan is some 20 times higher than spending on civilian support.

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