Q&A: OECD DAC chair on ODA, COVID-19, and safeguarding policy

WASHINGTON — As chair of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee, Susanna Moorehead has a unique vantage point on current development trends. Devex spoke with Moorehead for her thoughts on official development assistance, COVID-19 response funding, and the implementation of new safeguarding measures agreed to by DAC last year. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Do you have a sense of how much ODA funding is going to COVID-19 response? What trends are you seeing from DAC members? It depends very much how you define “going to COVID.” There's additional resources going specifically into health, but then there are all the resources going into other parts of the system. There's a whole range of things. In short, we don't know. It's too soon to tell. What DAC members are doing is, firstly, a lot of reprogramming for the immediate urgent stuff. I think it's going to be a very tough next six months, particularly in terms of food crises. That sort of humanitarian burden is not just going to be on the health side; there's been quite a lot of front-loading — so, pulling resources forward. I would point to what the World Bank has been doing with IDA [the International Development Association]. Remember, most of the biggest IDA donors are DAC members, so that's all official development assistance. Many DAC members are under huge financial and economic pressure at home. Every set of macroeconomic figures that we read are pretty frightening. Some have said that they'll be able to ride that impact short-term because of the way they do multiannual programming. Others have said they're pegged to a proportion of GNI [gross national income], and the GNI goes down then and it may go down for a while, but then that will depend on the shape of the recovery. My overall takeaway from all of this is: Much, much more resources will be needed. ODA is a relatively small part of that. So we've actually got to redouble our efforts on the whole financing-for-development piece. “There is a growing recognition that because this is a global pandemic, if we don't have global solutions, it will go round and round.” --— Susanna Moorehead, chair, OECD DAC How can we make the ODA we have to work harder? How can we really make sure that it's reaching the people who need it most in a timely manner and delivering good development outcomes? But then how are we going to get the private sector back into this space? How are we going to really work the balance sheets of the development banks as hard as we can? How are we going to encourage development finance institutions to take on more risk? All of this is under very, very active discussions. But that's what we've got to do. In June, the European Union was pushing for the DAC to create a new metric to specifically track COVID funding. Where do those efforts stand? That's still under discussion in our statistical working party — under very active discussion but not yet agreed. I'm sure that it's likely there will be some kind of metric for it. But as I said, it sounds really simple but it's actually really hard. It's not just PPE [personal protective equipment] and ventilators and all that sort of thing; it's the whole piece. One of the very important things about the DAC is its statistical integrity. So, the statisticians are — rightly — very, very strict. So what they don't want to do is to rush into a metric that is actually not accurate. There is growing concern about an increasing demand for aid in developing countries as a result of the coronavirus crisis and a failure by the world’s richest countries to step up. You wrote an op-ed published on Devex in March pushing for the importance of ODA. Why hasn’t there been a greater global response? This is really difficult. There is a massive domestic preoccupation at the moment. I think that there's just a bandwidth thing — that's the first thing. The second is: The G-20 [Group of 20, composed of leading rich and developing nations] obviously has said quite a lot on this issue, but we're not seeing yet real global leadership on the need to manage a global pandemic globally. The World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund] have lent into this space. Certainly the DAC — you've probably seen the statement that we did in April in which we said we would strive to protect ODA. But what you're not seeing is all the richest countries in the world saying, “Let's prioritize the impact on developing countries.” That may change. I think there is a growing recognition that because this is a global pandemic, if we don't have global solutions, it will go round and round. I wish I had an answer to how we get the world thinking about a genuinely global response. And I think we just have to chip away. And I think CSOs [civil society organizations] have a really important role to play to make a more compelling case. Given that need, what do you make of the United Kingdom’s decision to cut £2.9 billion ($3.7 billion) of the government’s planned ODA spend? I'm not going to talk specifically about the U.K. because in my current role, I represent 30 members. What I would say is: When the 0.7 target [the goal to spend 0.7% of GNI on ODA] was first promoted in the international community, it was on the assumption that our economies were growing and would continue to grow. And those who meet or exceed 0.7 are the most generous donors in the world. Some have a target, some have a ceiling, some have a degree of cross-party consensus that means that there isn't that sort of political pressure on it. But I think it's very hard to criticize the most generous donors who meet a commitment to a percentage of GNI when their GNI falls. I actually think it's counterproductive to go after those who meet the target when it goes down. It’s been just more than a year since the DAC members agreed on a new standard on preventing sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment. Where does the implementation of these policies stand? At the time, it was a landmark statement — we were the first international body to come up with the recommendation. So what's happened since then? Let me start with bad news, which is that we were supposed to have a big roundtable at the ministerial meetings where this was on the agenda. And of course, they've had to be postponed. But the good news is this is hard-wired into the new program of work, budget that we agreed that kicks off in January 2021. In my office, I've got a new staff member joining from Ireland whose focus is gender, including this. There's been a huge amount of effort in different member countries, agencies, and a lot of sharing of what best practice looks like and a lot of very active conversations going on bilaterally on the back of peer reviews. We're in the process of revising the peer review methodology so this will be part of it. However, I think it's really important to say that at the end of the day, this is about cultural change, and that takes time. That takes a lot more than a year. And to be honest, the tipping point is when individuals realize that this is no longer acceptable, so peers call each other out. That is a generational change. It's empowering people who are subjected to this behavior to be able to stand up. It is making sure that we're not having these individuals going from one agency to another. So, it’s a work in progress. We'll be having a high-level ministerial meeting in November; we will certainly discuss this. I'm very struck by how much we talk about it in a way that even a year or two ago, this was not a sort of part of everyday conversation. So I think it is a work in progress. Transparency, accountability guidelines, behavior change — none of these are quick fixes, but we're working on it.