What is Country Ownership? (A look at a success in Cape Verde)

School feeding program in Cape Verde. Photo: UN

By Diana Millner

That question continues to be hotly debated among development professionals, policy wonks, and other stakeholders working to make aid to poor countries more effective.  By definition, it is a concept best illustrated by the country doing the “owning,” not something batted around by folks in Washington.

But still, there is a need to understand how donor country policies can better support the process of country ownership in achieving development outcomes.  Most agree that this requires, at a minimum, a commitment to responding to locally-driven solutions and to strategies designed by the countries themselves.  Supporting country ownership also requires a commitment to building the capacity of the partner governments and other stakeholders to drive development in their country.

There was a remarkable report on Cape Verde a few weeks ago that is a great example of how country ownership is a process.  It may have flown below the radar screen of the international media.  The World Food Program (WFP) partnered with Cape Verde for decades (beginning well before the U.N. Millennium Development goals (MDGs) were established) to create a national food security program.    The program includes a universal free school meal initiative, critical because school lunch is the only nutritious daily meal available to many Cape Verdean children.

The school lunches are not only a critical tool in the fight against hunger but also serve as an incentive for parents to send their children to school.  Today, 92 percent of Cape Verdean children attend school. 

There are many successes in this story.  But the most relevant to country ownership is that as of this month, the Cape Verdean government is taking over the national school feeding program.  The country is now solely responsible for both the management and the financing of the policy.

As we learned about the full transition of the WFP school feeding program to Cape Verdean authorities, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) announced that  its Cape Verdean “compact” had just become the first to be completed. Compacts are large-scale grants to promote sustainable economic growth; the $100 million Cape Verde compact was awarded in 2005 for economic growth initiatives.

 The Cape Verde compact had several positive outcomes; it helped strengthen the country’s investment climate, improved infrastructure, increased agricultural productivity, and achieved key policy reforms necessary for sustained economic growth.  Cape Verde has successfully moved to the next level and is now working on its second MCC compact – the first MCC partner country to do so.

Cape Verde’s school feeding success and its completion of the MCC compact lend support to the concept of country ownership as a development principle. They also serve as an important reality check: the process of social and economic change through supporting country ownership takes time, intense engagement, and long-term investments.