AidWatch April Newsletter

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Philippine CSOs affirm convictions, assert stances and signify principles on development issues

The nationwide Civil Society Organizations-National Economic Development Authority (CSO-NEDA) consultation workshops on the Country Level Evaluation (CLE) in the implementation of the 2^nd phase of the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness in the Philippines were conducted in Luzon (October 29), Visayas (December 1) and Mindanao (December 14).

In the said workshops, 83 CSOs under AidWatch Philippines, convened by the Council for People’s Development and Governance (CPDG) and IBON Foundation and its network organizations were able to strongly give their stances on the evaluation conducted by NEDA’s commissioned evaluators.

NEDA-Project Monitoring Staff head, Director Roderick Planta presented the CLE for Luzon and Mindanao while Ms. Lirio Abuyuan, one of the commissioned evaluators, presented the CLE in the Visayas leg. Planta and Abuyuan also answered questions raised by workshop participants in the open forums of each workshop.

More importantly, the CSOs made the workshops as venues for them to reaffirm long-standing convictions that “genuine development should benefit the people” and assert the negative impacts of ‘development’ including massive violations of human rights and the failure of many Official Development Aid (ODA)-funded projects to deliver its promise of development.

For its part, AidWatch presented the basics of the Paris Declaration, the CSO initiatives after the 2008 formulation of the Accra Agenda of Action (AAA) and the active involvement of CSOs inside and outside the country both in the aid effectiveness process and its parallel, development effectiveness process.

Moreover, AidWatch plans to come up with its own evaluation of the government’s implementation of the Paris Declaration, using indicators that will be formulated by the CSOs under its wing.

In each of the workshops, CSOs were able to map out general plans and activities towards the Busan High Level Forum in November this year.