Poor countries have to spend too much time and money explaining how they spend western aid money and showing foreign dignitaries around aid projects, crown prince Willem-Alexander said in a speech in South Africa on Tuesday.

While there is nothing wrong with accountability, donor countries are forced to ‘continuously collect information so they can report at different times and in different formats,’ the prince said.
At the same time, visits by donors to check out how their money is being used ‘takes up resources, time and capacity’ at the expense of the very poorest, he said.
Prince Willem-Alexander was addressing a meeting of the inter-parliamentary union, a pro-democracy body which represents 150 national parliaments.
Speaking in his role as chairman of a United Nations committee to stimulate clean water supplies, Willem-Alexander called for the introduction of a ‘one-stop’ system for both donor countries and aid recipients so that aid programmes can be evaluated more simply.
This would allow everyone to focus on their ‘core business’ of stimulating development, he said.
Experiments with one-stop shop systems at the UN itself are proving extremely successful and popular, the prince told the meeting.