It is great when all  the pieces come together. At the final plenary of the International Conference on Family Planning in Dakar earlier this month, I was struck by how State Minister Kesetebirhan Admassu of Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health connected the importance of country ownership and aid effectiveness with access to reproductive health and family planning.

Ethiopia has made great progress on reproductive health in recent years, increasing contraceptive prevalence from 14 percent to 29 percent since 2005.   Minister Kesete (as he is known) shared the five strategies that he believes have led to their success.  They do not pertain to just family planning. Or even just the health sector. They are applicable to every sector in development and reflect a growing movement toward country ownership and good governance. And they are a constant theme in the work carried out in MLI countries

Country ownership has led to an increase in rural access to clean water and sanitation services in many sub-Saharan African countries according to a report released this week by The World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) in partnership with the African Development Bank, UNICEF, and the WHO. “ Pathways to Progress: Transitioning to Country-Led Service Delivery Pathways to Meet Africa's Water Supply and Sanitation Targets,” reported that economic growth, debt relief, and increasing political stability have allowed for many countries to take charge of their water supply and sanitation sectors while developing sustainable service delivery pathways.

The report states that this success could not have been achieved without development partners’ funding; however the large impact of donor money was attributed to countries leading the implementation of services through their own systems:

“Country performance is not only the result of greater funding but also the nature of that funding. As aid modalities have shifted from donor-driven projects to country-led programmatic approaches to service delivery—along the lines of the Paris Principles for aid effectiveness—line ministries have increasingly used core government systems (public financial management systems and decentralized service delivery capacity) and capacity in the wider economy (markets, civil society, and private sector).”