President John Agyekum Kufuor has challenged participants at the ongoing 3rd High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness to rise to the challenge of overcoming global poverty and to help wean all countries of aid dependence. The President also challenged donor partners to back pledges to support developing nations with demonstrable commitment reflecting in increased support and goodwill. He said such support must also reflect in the timeous release of resources for critical programmes in the shared country plans. “The releases should also be time-bound with benchmarks for implementation,” he said, explaining that such an approach will commit the two partners to a shared accountability to drive the effectiveness of aid. President Kufuor threw the challenges in an address he delivered at the Forum on Thursday hosted at the Accra International Conference Centre. President Kufuor noted that delays in development programmes that societies have bought into, frustrate expectations and tend to cause political disenchantment, rendering governments, “especially democratically elected leaderships vulnerable. “Harmonisation of development assistance in alignment with approved country development programmes is one way of improving releases from donors. In Ghana the multi-donor budgetary support funds form an integral part of expected receipts in the formal budget statement issued by the Minister of Finance to Parliament yearly.” President Kufuor stressed that in the face of multiple donors, harmonisation of assistance “reduces the strain and sometimes costly burden of dealing with them individually by a recipient country.” He noted however that harmonisation of aid should not impact negatively on whatever bilateral support a donor nation may agree with a recipient because of their special relationship. President Kufuor equally charged participants to further probe, with the view to enhancing the trend of aid flow to support capacity building of the private sector in recipient countries, since that sector remains the fulcrum of growth and one major objective of aid being capacity enhancement. “The mantra is that the sector is or should become the engine of growth so it should be helped and freed to become. It should be the destination of foreign direct investment and also the source of entrepreneurship to venture into the international markets as the economies of recipient nations gain strength.” He was grateful to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, organizers of the forum, for bring the all-important meeting, the latest in a succession of global gatherings on key development issues to be hosted by Ghana, and expressed the hope that the forum moves straight into action. “I hope that this forum moves straight into action as in the words of the Accra Agenda for Action, and I quote; ‘We have an opportunity today to reach for a future based on a shared commitment to overcome poverty, a future where no countries will depend on aid.’ I urge you sincerely to seize this opportunity.” Story by Isaac Yeboah