Asian Development Bank - hindering or helping?

This is changing. The Australian Government is increasing its monitoring of international financial institutions, and Oxfam welcomes this. But this monitoring must go beyond top-level assessments to include information that looks at development outcomes on the ground. Through AusAID, the Australian Government has in-country desks which can provide the channels to gather this type of information.

The Australian government should make this information publicly available and use it to advise International Financial Institutions to help them improve their operations.

Finally, the Australian Government should explicitly assess the effectiveness of international financial institutions’ initiatives to help developing countries fight the effects of the financial crisis. The current proposals for monitoring funding to International Financial Institutions are improved, but appear targeted towards monitoring of the overall effectiveness. Given the context of the G20 decision as a response to the global financial crisis, the government must track carefully whether the initiatives proposed by the international financial institutions to deal with the crisis are in effect serving to reduce its impacts on the poorest of the poor.

These actions will move us one step further to ensuring that aid money facilitated through the G20 is indeed well spent.