Key recomendation for developement

Another article I found really inspiring gives 4 recomendations about the development funds and how to improve our 'donor' performance:
I quote:
...'
• Remove the disbursement pressure. I have worked with donors where it was in reality forbidden to discuss this – and most senior donor staff continue to pretend that the disbursement pressure is manageable. Yet I have never, over more than 20 years working of intensively with donors, met any field staff who did not complain about the disbursement pressure. It is there, it is real, and it is destructive. Spending big sums of money faster than it can be absorbed effectively can be outright harmful. Budget support modalities are not exempt from this curse – they just make it easier to spend the cash.

• Adapt business processes to country cycles. The TC reform argues for a mental shift in how we work. Donors have to focus on the partners’ programmes and help the partners in getting their programmes right. Then, they have to define their support to these programmes and not, (as implied in some donor-speak) see the partner as a ‘counterpart’ to the donor project. But this mental shift is hardly compatible with compressed identification and formulation procedures which, at fixed calendar times every year, have to produce identification and action fiches according to a Brussels-convenient calendar. The standard operating procedure of calling in consultants for three weeks to ‘do’ the identification and formulation is yet another mismatch: they do, nearly by default, end up being driven by the donor’s priorities and demands, not by the country partner’s.

• Recognise that field staff are doing development work, not (supposedly less worthwhile) administrative work. If staff have no time to get out of the office and engage in informal dialogue and networking, they cannot add the needed value to the money transfers. As said in Lusaka, we are in the relations-business – and that takes time.

• Spend small when opportunities are limited. Adapting to the heart beat of those we seek to assist implies sometimes spending very small catalytic money (and a lot of staff time). There must be room for that.

There is a lot of discussion about the Technical Cooperation and aid effectiveness. Very pertinent contribution.