Facilitating Partnerships

Ethiopia

Just two years ago, Ethiopia, one of the largest recipients of development assistance, lacked a system to manage the more than $1 billion in official aid that donors give each year. Today, that has changed. The once cumbersome system of spreadsheets has been replaced by the Aid Management Platform (AMP), an integrated system for tracking development assistance.

AMP has helped transform aid management practices in Ethiopia. Replacing manual tracking systems with a secure, virtual workspace, AMP has enabled the government to have a comprehensive view of all aid activities, resulting in more informed decision-making and planning. The Ethiopian government has dramatically reduced transaction costs and saved time through the creation of customized donor reports. With this reporting feature, users can easily create reports, filtering by a host of fields—sector, donor, project, status—and displaying commitments, disbursements, and expenditures.

“The government owns the source code and can make future modifications ourselves with local resources at local rates,” Fisseha Aberra of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, the entity that first piloted the program. “The license also gives us the ability to distribute the code to other agencies within our government.”

AMP is not just a turnkey technical solution. To implement AMP, staff from Development Gateway trained the Ethiopian users on the software to ensure the sustainable use and maintenance of the application.

With the successful adoption of AMP, the Ethiopians were able to share their knowledge and experience with other countries in the region. In 2006, the government hosted a delegation of staff from Ghana. For three days, they met with their Ghanaian counterparts to demonstrate the technology, discuss the policy environment, and share lessons learned.

Ethiopia has benefited from the technology and processes associated with AMP. Now it is able to assist other countries in the region improve aid management.