Aid Effectiveness and Accountability among Faith-Based Organizations

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) are major health services providers in many developing countries. For example, a common estimate used by WHO is that FBOs provide approximately 40% of total health services in sub-Saharan Africa. Accordingly, the performance of FBOs constitutes a significant proportion of aggregate measures of aid effectiveness and accountability.

How do FBOs measure up? Data do not exist to give a definitive answer, but FBOs probably perform as well as other sectors, but are woefully negligent in conducting the monitoring, evaluation, and analysis that would enable a more authoritative accounting.

Measures of effectiveness and impact are seldom prioritized in the programs of religious communities and FBOs. Often they are motivated by a range of factors where effectiveness may be only one of multiple objectives. And too often, donors to FBOs are skimpy in budgets and do not provide adequate resources for measuring effectiveness.

There are many world class FBOs that have state-of-the-art accountability mechanisms, but too often FBOs, particularly at the grassroots level, are very weak institutionally, both with respect to their financial accounting capacity as well as with their ability to demonstrate and document the impact of their efforts.

There is a major need for FBOs engaging in development activities to understand the importance of responding to aid effectiveness and accountability concerns and for donors wanting to mobilize the extensive service delivery capacity of FBOs to provide funding and technical assistance to enable them not only to do their good works, but also to document them.