At the Table or in the Kitchen? (September 2004)

Executive Summary available here in pdf

Full Report available here in pdf

The Halifax Initiative Coalition and the Canadian Council for International Co-operation have co-authored the report "At the Table or in the Kitchen: CIDA's New Aid Strategies, Developing Country Ownership and Donor Conditionality," which seeks to understand the implications of three converging elements in CIDA's implementation of its 2002 policy the agency's reliance on PRSPs to define country priorities for poverty reduction, its support for program based approaches to deliver increasing aid budgets for poverty reduction, and its increased coordination with the World Bank and other major donors in these PBAs.

Do CIDA's PBAs in practice respond effectively to the conditions and priorities of the majority of people whose lives are circumscribed by poverty? Or have PBAs actually further deepened CIDA's complicity with donor imposed conditions, largely determined by the World Bank and the IMF, for aid transfers that substantially undermine recipient ownership over appropriate policy choices?