(KJ*) Over the last two years, humanitarian assistance has made a decisive contribution to the stabilization the Central African Republic while the country’s condition was at its most critical. Back from the brink of collapse, the benefits of peace and stability now would have to be spread much wider throughout this desperately poor country, if the patient were to recover successfully. However, while humanitarian assistance is levelling off and may well decrease in 2009, development support is still lacking too far behind to pick up the thread. The looming recovery gap now jeopardizes CAR’s fragile progress, as data from the country’s new aid management system shows.

Improving aid effectiveness

In November 2008, the Central African Republic (CAR) and its partners launched a new aid management system (DAD). Widely used in Asia but still rare in Africa, the goal of this online database is to make humanitarian and development aid more transparent, coordinated and effective. Previously, no central data source existed to help decision-makers understand who finances projects, who works in which sectors, in which locations, and where the gaps are. As in many other African states critically dependent on foreign support, the absence of reliable data was a stumbling block to improved aid effectiveness. Less than four months after the system’s launch, detailed financial, sector and geographical data for almost 300 projects is now available online. While the usual caveats on aid statistics apply (the data will not account for 100 percent of all transfers), the numbers are nevertheless already a reasonably good reflection of the realities in CAR.

Good numbers on the surface

At first sight, the recent data on aid to the Central African Republic looks encouraging. Between 2005 and 2007, total foreign assistance to CAR more than doubled from about $117m to $242m. The increase is particularly significant, given that CAR had long been a forgotten crisis. While aid to Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole went up by more than 90 percent between 1985 and 2006, it fell by almost 50 percent for CAR. During this time, the country’s development catastrophe slowly turned into a humanitarian emergency, directly affecting more than a million people and forcing up to 300,000 into displacement. CAR now ranks 178 out of 179 on the UN’s Human Development Index. More than two thirds of the population live in poverty. Reaching the Millennium Development Goals has become a distant dream. Continue Reading »

The Central African government and its humanitarian and development partners (HDPT) have jointly launched the aid management system DAD to improve aid coordination and effectiveness in a country where it is needed most.

The public online database will allow anyone to easily find detailed information on humanitarian and development assistance in the Central African Republic (CAR). Flexible lists, graphs and interactive maps will help donors, aid agencies and the government understand better who contributes, and who does what where.

Unlike in most other countries, data on external assistance will not become fragmented, but will be organized centrally following OECD standards. The launch of DAD represents an important milestone for the HDPT’s information management team, building on its success with innovative and user-friendly advocacy, mapping, and knowledge-sharing tools. By late November, donors had already entered data on more than 170 activities (or roughly two thirds of the total), documenting expenditures of more than $145 million in 2008.

Widely used in Asia but still rare in Africa, aid management systems have become a key element in improving aid effectiveness. Seeing CAR’s post-conflict situation Continue Reading »