Accounting for Poverty Reduction in Norwegian Development Aid to Mozambique

Poverty reduction is the overarching goal of Norwegian development assistance as expressed in the "Government Plan of Action for Combating Poverty in the south towards 2015", and the Norwegian Agency for Development Assistance (Norad) aims to be the centre for evaluation, quality assurance and dissemination of results in its "Strategy Towards 2010". At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Norad acknowledge that we know too little about the results of development aid and that Norway must make greater demands both on itself and its partners for documenting results (see "Norad's Strategy Towards 2010").

A number of initiatives are currently under way to improve the documentation of the results of Norwegian development aid for poverty alleviation - both within the confines of the project and programme development cycles and vis a vis the interested public at large. As part of this effort, this project will assess the system of monitoring and evaluation of the impact and results of Norwegian aid to Mozambique - which is Norway's second largest partner of cooperation in Africa. Total Norwegian aid to Mozambique is NOK 330 million (2006), of which 50 percent went to sector support in the areas of health, energy and fisheries, 25 percent to budget support and 25 percent to other projects.

The main objectives of the study are:

1) To assess the relevance and level of precision of the current system of monitoring and evaluation of the results of Norwegian development assistance to Mozambique on poverty reduction.

2) To come up with possible suggestions as to how this can be improved within the context of the current project development cycle, as well as in relation to the need to make the results of Norway's development aid more accessible to the interested public.