Coordinate science aid
Over the past two decades, development aid has been given increasing importance by many developed countries. The result has been a sharp rise in the number of individual, often uncoordinated, projects.
At one time in the 1990s, for example, Tanzania was home to more than 1,500 projects in the health sector alone, each with its own monitoring mechanisms, and funded by 50 separate organisations.
In 2005, recognising that such fragmentation wastes time and effort, aid agencies within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) committed to harmonising their aid strategies. At the same time, they encouraged recipient governments to use aid in a more focused and coherent manner.
So far the agreement, enshrined in a document known as the Paris Declaration, has had mixed success. But there is little doubt that, supported by countries such as Sweden, many nations (including Tanzania) are slowly using development aid more effectively, for example by channelling it through coordinated national plans.
Aid agencies now need to commit themselves to applying the approach to funding science in developing countries, which has so far largely been absent in efforts to implement the Paris Declaration. Greater coordination at both ends would be to everyone's advantage.