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Making Aid from Thailand More Effective
25 July 2008 - A Workshop on ‘Official Development Assistance (ODA) Data Management to Make Thai Aid More Effective’, organised jointly by UNDP and the Thailand International Cooperation Development Agency (TICA) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was held at the Amari Watergate Hotel in Bangkok. The workshop was held in the framework of a UNDP project aimed at designing a comprehensive database on Thai ODA.
Thailand is a trusted development partner in the Asia and beyond as the Thai Government provides significant financial and technical assistance to its various neighbouring countries. One prerequisite for effective management and coordination of ODA is the availability of accurate and timely information on the different aid activities. Currently, the Thai Government does not possess a central information repository on its ODA activities. This poses difficulties, on the one hand, in collecting the respective data in order to plan and coordinate the assistance, and on the other hand in being able to report about it to Thai citizens and the international community.
Against this background, the Committee on Technical and Economic Cooperation’s Policy has established a Sub-Committee on ODA Data Collection, which is chaired by TICA. In its role as Chair of the Sub-Committee, TICA - with support from UNDP - organised the half-day workshop attended by TICA, representatives from the Neighbouring Countries Economic Development Cooperation Agency (NEDA), the Office of the Higher Education Commission, the Ministry of Education, the Department of International Economic Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, as well as UNDP.
The workshop was a starting point for continuous discussions among agencies that provide ODA in Thailand, on how information sharing and coordination can be improved, and on how to achieve the longer-term objective of developing a joint ODA database that will facilitate data collection and processing.
In order to create this database, Mr. Jörg Nadoll, an ODA expert working for UNDP, recently conducted a work visit to Thailand. In the course of his mission, Mr. Nadoll worked closely with the TICA to collate the necessary data on ODA to develop a template for the database. He also met and interviewed various government officials from relevant Thai ministries and agencies, namely the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Public Health, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NEDA, as well as the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB). Discussions focused on what kind of information should be captured in a joint database and provided further guidance to Mr. Nadoll on how to develop and design the necessary tools for data collection and data management. His initial findings were presented at the workshop on ‘Official Development Assistance (ODA) Data Management to Make Thai Aid More Effective’.
The next steps in the project will be to set up a Task Force with participants from relevant ministries and agencies who will guide the ODA database system development, including the finalization of a template design, selection of IT firm, development of the data entry process and implementation of the joint central database. The database is expected to be launched within the next 6 months.
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For more information, please contact:
Dominique Larsimont: dominique.larsimont@undp.org 02 288 1814;
Punnipa Ruangtorsak: punnipa.ruangtorsak@undp.org;
02 288 2130
