Luca De Fraia
Deputy Secretary General, ActionAid Italia
Realizing the commitments to providing traditional ODA timely and consistently has always been a hard task for the majority of the traditional donors. The response to a poor aid performance has taken different routes, including the revision of the reporting directives with the stated intent of keeping the pace with an everchanging development landscape. The conversations within the community of the official donors on ODA modernization took off in 2012 and have been steadily evolving so as to comprise a new metric. As the 2030 Agenda made its debut in 2015, the new statically measure took the semblance of TOSSD, namely Total Official Support for Sustainable development.
The official definition from the Reporting Instructions reads: The Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) statistical measure includes all officially-supported resource flows to promote sustainable development in developing countries and to support development enablers and/or address global challenges at regional or global levels. In plain words, TOSSD will track not only official resources, but also private flows mobilized thanks to public money; more accurately: private resources mobilised by official interventions, where a direct causal link between the official intervention and the private resources can be demonstrated. There are other key features that mark a departure point from traditional aid: concessionality is no longer a prerequisite; the new metric will report on activities with development impacts on the global and regional levels. Such novelty is reflected in the fact that TOSSD is organized around two areas: Pillar 1 on cross border flows, similar to aid; Pillar 2 on support for global enablers.
The official narrative is that TOSSD will enhance transparency in financing for development, which will then allow to better allocate resources for the benefit of the Partner countries; consistently, one major priority is to capture under the new metric as many flows as possible. There is a huge potential to broaden the picture of the finance for development with some of the elements missing at the moment, for instance non-concessional finance or South South Cooperation. Also, multilateral providers will report directly regardless of the original source of funds, official or private sector, which may in turn strengthen a recipient perspective in reporting.
The Reporting Instructions for TOSSD have been developed by the global Task Force that started working in late 2017 and that brings together experts from traditional and emerging donor countries with the OECD with playing a key instrumental role; at the moment, the Task Force is cochaired by the EU and South Africa. As the discussions on th role of the co-custodian organizations are still open, TOSSD has been submitted into the UN led process on the SDGs monitoring as an additional indicator under 17.3; a final decision is in the calendar for March next year under the 2020 Comprehensive Review. Backgrounders and reports from the Task Force meetings are available from a dedicate web page. CSOs have been engaged over the past two years in a variety of ways including face to face meetings (the latest of which on Oct 1st in Washington back to back the ninth meeting of the Task Force), submissions (available from the official TOSSD page) and pilots at the country level.
The dialogue with the Task Force has been productive, but still there are concerns especially on the quality of data as well as about making sure that the new metric will not undermine exiting global commitments despite the best intentions stated in the Reporting Instructions. On the first count, reporting parties will be allowed some latitude when reporting on certain aspects such as development impacts, including direct links to SDG indicators and goals. In general, it is assumed that reporting will take place in bona fide with obvious implications when it comes to areas such as the safeguards that apply to peace and security driven spending.
As for the second count, quality issues may get sidelined, surely in the early stages of TOSSD implementation when there is a pressure to broaden the picture as much as possible. From this angle, it is telling that the principles for effective development cooperation are acknowledged, but, on the other hand, it is also understood that there are limitations as to the possibility of assessing the actual implementation of the principles. In fact, reporting takes place at the activity level, which includes different kinds of modalities, from projects to budget support; data gathering is managed at the donor level. It is then legitimate to question how it is possible to assess that each single activity is consistent with the effectiveness principles, bearing also in mind that global reporting on effectiveness – led by the GPEDC – is carried out through the global light, country heavy approach.
Also, TOSSD will very likely generate totals much bigger that the current volumes of ODA: the public opinion’s attention may well be directed to the new numbers with aid commitments heading for oblivion. It is not just that: inflation may be actually taken to entirely different level with much more severe optical problems than the one we have been facing with the tradition in-donor costs. TOSSD will place donors in a unique position as they will be allowed to report significant shares of their own domestic budgets on the assumption that there is a global impact. A very clear point in case is climate spending and gas emission reduction projects in particular, whose global impact is taken for granted regardless of where they are implemented. Along this route, a donor country will legitimately cut its ODA and invest in planting trees at home without affecting its total TOSSD performance.
With the findings from the first global TOSSD survey to be published soon, CSO engagement will be even more important to make sure that the new metric delivers on its promise of greater transparency for the benefit of the development countries. There are challenges, but this is not time to step back.