Progress in harmonising development cooperation in education
In the context of Nuffic’s management of the NFP, NPT and NICHE programmes, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked Nuffic to look at donor harmonisation. After a series of meetings, conclusions are that in most countries only limited coordination of development efforts is possible. There is, however, room for improvement, for instance by preventing overlap in activities.
These conclusions were reached in Madrid on 4 and 5 October at the annual meeting of Nuffic and its sister organisations. Like Nuffic, its sister organisations administer funding for educational, research and scholarship programmes for developing countries. These are, among others: SIU, Universidad.es, VLIR-UOS, CUD/CIUF, OeAD, DAAD, CIMO, IFP Secretariat, Danida FC, and ICOS. The issues were previously discussed in Norway (2011) and the Netherlands (2010), focusing on inter-agency cooperation and donor harmonisation.
Ambition
Another conclusion is that although in some countries donor harmonisation does structurally happen at national or institutional level, in most countries only limited coordination is formally arranged. This is due to the variety of programmes and their diverse characters. Although the ambition to harmonise is good, we need to remain realistic about the possibilities.
Learn from each other
To improve the quality of services in a changing political landscape, the sister organisations acknowledged they can learn from each other and draw more from each other’s experiences, both in policy development and implementation as well as in the practical translation of them. That led to an agreement to establish subgroups of organisations to facilitate this thematic sharing of experiences.
A number of initiatives to prevent overlap and connect interventions have already been taken up. Staff of agencies do consult each other more often before designing new activities.
Positive effect
The outcome of the annual meeting will help the agencies and participating donors (ministries) to link policy and practice. As such, it will eventually have a positive effect on the policies, programmes and services, not in the least for the receiving countries and institutions, but also for their European partners.
Paris Declaration
The focus meetings were organised by Nuffic, in cooperation with its Norwegian sister (SIU), after the Dutch ministry’s request to look at donor harmonisation of programmes such as NFP, NPT and NICHE. The discussions were held with an eye on what was earlier agreed on these issues by the governmental signatories of the 
Paris Declaration (2005) and Accra Agenda for Action (2008).