DURING THE past five years, the Inter-American Development Bank, or IDB’s portfolio in Guyana totaled some US $326.9 million, distributed over six areas: Agriculture and Rural Development; Health; Reform/Modernization of the State; Transportation; Urban Development and Planning; and Others.  The World Bank and other donors  have also provided significant support to the  country’s loan  portfolio.
There is no underestimating the enormity of these resources being channeled into Guyana, both in terms of the sheer scale of what amounts to investment in the economy, as well as what it means for our local development, particularly  within the sectors that are supported by these resources.
After years, roughly over a decade, of working with donor-related projects, what I’ve noticed concurrent with the influx of donor funding over the past five years or so is a growing role for Guyana in creating and maintaining the parameters within which aid is disbursed. I remember years ago, when project proposals were either being undertaken completely by the donor agency staffers or by donor-appointed consultants without much input from key individuals working in the particular sectors.

Quote: ‘There is no underestimating the enormity of these resources being channeled into Guyana, both in terms of the sheer scale of what amounts to investment in the economy, as well as what it means for our local development, particularly  within the sectors that are supported by these resources’

Through what have been, by and large, mechanisms established by the government, working in tandem with the donor community, I’ve seen an increased capacity of Guyana, as a country, in the area of defining exactly how aid is channeled into developmental projects, via involvement in the conceptualization of project proposals, for example.  Today, more proposals are done by the country working in collaboration with the donor community.
I am of the view that any analysis done would bring out that the overwhelming majority of these projects are meeting the indicators they have been intended to meet, something I believe to be at least partially due to what has been the significant shift towards a more participatory approach to developmental aid projects.   Today, not only do you have the involvement of the individual sector officials, you also have much more involvement (particularly in social programmes) of the direct beneficiaries.
All that said, I still believe that there are some areas for improvement.  Were I to grade Guyana’s capacity for defining our engagement with donor agencies, I would say in a ascending scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the pinnacle.
I believe that there should be a formalized multi-sectoral mechanism for negotiation with the donor community, an established process which allows greater involvement of other sectors, even though the proposals revolve around a particular sector.   Such mechanisms do exist by default; what needs to be undertaken is an enhancement of them, from incidental arrangements to more deliberate, focused operations.  I doubt, for example, that as currently constituted those mechanisms allow for the adequate sharing of information among sectors, and information is the key tool any negotiation process.
An enhanced mechanism would include, as I have proposed in a previous column written almost a year ago, a structured database for the efficient storage and retrieval of information on donor funded projects, accessible to those in charge of policy formulation.
Understandably, the enhancement of existing mechanisms to the sort of overarching mechanism I am proposing would inevitably take some time.   Pending its the development, there are other focused, as opposed to incidental, ways to simulate it both in the pre-development and implementation stages of projects.  For example, in the recruitment of persons hired to directly support the implementation of projects, there is the reality of better qualified candidates being persons with expertise, obviously, in the sectors in which they are recruited.  Development is however, always contextual – inherent in the term sector is the presumption of a greater whole, and therefore some orientation mechanism could be put in place to provide persons recruited to individual sectors with a picture of the greater development environment in which they are operating.
Another option is to tailor the implementation of projects to benefit sectors other than that which the funding is granted, once whatever measures taken toward this end do not contravene the conditionalities under which the aid has been granted.
My point is that territoriality is counterproductive – there can be much more value-added with the involvement of other sectors in.  The very fact of Guyana’s smallness both creates the potential as well as the necessity for a more synergistic approach to managing aid.  We have already proven that we have the capacity to manage donor contributions to our development in keeping with the main indicators of the specific project.  However, we now have the opportunity to be creative in ensuring not only that we garner maximum value for money from aid, but also to find ways of ensuring sustainability in the event of the cessation or diminishing of that aid.  To act otherwise is to do so on the presumption that the donor funding we are receiving comes from some infinite source, which is anything but the reality.