“Strengthening Country Ownership” DAD CoP 2014 Report emphasizes the role of the full country ownership of the DAD as a critical prerequisite to maximizing the potential benefit of the Development Assistance Database as an development management tool. A vital policy function of many DAD systems is to bring donor funded projects into better alignment with the country government’s priorities, reducing duplication of effort and waste, while increasing sustainability. In particular, the countries which have most successfully implemented DAD have done so thanks to a clear and unified national Aid Policy framework.
The specifics of individual Aid Policy frameworks vary widely between countries depending on the development priorities, governance structure, and most prominent foreign development partners. Such policies help to lay the groundwork for the DAD by defining the institutional structure for aid coordination, data collection and analysis needs, as well as identifying key aid stakeholders.
The paper also speaks about the emergence of Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) and results-based management for aid projects and publicly-funded programs across the global development sector, and demonstrated how DAD systems are adapting to this shift in policy.