Grassroots monitoring and aid effectiveness: does greater community involvement matter?

By Gilbert Musinguzi

How can the donor community reduce leakage and increase the impact of aid? Transparency and grassroots monitoring, though not an absolute panacea, are powerful contributory factors in seeking remedies to the problem.

There is growing evidence that in many developing countries a substantial percentage of public funding for sectors such as health, education and infrastructure never reaches the intended beneficiaries. It is common knowledge that only a fraction of government programmes reach the intended beneficiaries. Estimates of "leakage" vary widely, but there is no question that corruption, mismanagement and local capture substantially diminish the impact of international aid and other types of public sector financing.

It is now widely realised that in many developing countries, the low quality of public services and governance can limit the scope for poverty reduction and growth. Micro-level studies reveal that improved accountability plays a significant role to reduce corruption and improve the quality with which critical public services are provided.

Grassroots monitoring involves putting poor people at the center of service provision; enabling them to monitor and discipline service providers, amplifying their voice in policymaking, and strengthening the incentives for service providers to serve the poor.

Experiences from good governance oriented civil society organisations have shown that local community members have strong incentives to track how funds are being spent in their own localities, but to do that better they need detailed public expenditure information and political space to conduct an effective oversight role. Thus in this vein, information is also a powerful deterrent to the diversion of grant funds at a local level.

The Government needs to scale up the Private Public Partnership with civil society in raising community awareness and participation in grassroots monitoring not just at national level but down to the last person at service delivery points.

This is because household knowledge on how to report inappropriate behaviour by bureaucrats and unsatisfactory quality of services does help to not only reduce the incidence of corruption but is also associated with significant improvements in service quality.

The writer is the quality assurance manager of the Uganda Debt Network