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Does official development assistance have a future?

Crawford School of Public Policy | Development Policy Centre

Event details

Seminar

Date & time

Wednesday 03 July 2013
12.30pm–1.30pm

Venue

Crawford School Bldg 132, Seminar Room 8

Speaker

Simon Scott Head, Statistics and Monitoring Division, Development Cooperation Directorate, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Contacts

Macarena Rojas
02 6125 7922

The end of official development assistance (ODA) has been confidently predicted for decades. But a funny thing happened at the end of the 90s. A set of development targets identified by the OECD mutated into the Millennium Development Goals and political momentum returned to the aid effort. Annual ODA rose by two-thirds in the decade leading up to 2010. But the knives are out again in finance departments around the world, and critics charge that ODA measurements are inflated in any case. Will ODA always be with us?

Simon Scott heads the Statistics and Monitoring Division of the OECD’s Development Cooperation Directorate. He oversees the collection and analysis of data on flows of ODA and other resources, and advises the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee on ‘performance against its members’ ODA volume commitments’, trends in financing for development and questions relating to the scope and limits of the concept of ODA. Before joining the OECD in 1993, he worked for AusAID for 14 years. He is the author of Philanthropic Foundations and Development Co-operation and Measuring Aid: 50 years of DAC statistics, and co-author of Innovative Financing to Fund Development.

This seminar was presented by the Development Policy Centre at Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.

Light lunch provided.

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