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Ulla Tørnæs (the Liberal party) is responsible for Danida. Picture is from Information

The Danish newspaper Information has lately been publishing a series of articles criticizing DANIDA, which is the Danish office responsible for the billions of kroners spent on development aid projects around the world.

In today’s issue of Information several experts who have been hired to evaluate Danida programmes speak out about how they have found themselves being cut off from further work after having come with some critical comments.

I don’t know quite what is going on here – is this a case of Information journalists on some Danida witch hunt? To be honest, I doubt it. The amount of experts quoted in the article is pretty big.

Why should Danish tax-payers pay for development projects when Danida seemingly can’t handle getting some criticism? As we know, Danida has been de-centralized last years, as this article is pretty good at showing.

Information doesn’t have the whole article in the newspaper on-line, but they have a follow-up article up where Helge Adam Møller from the Conservative party (part of the government) says that the Danish Audit of the State probably should look at this.

For me, it is clear that Danida needs to be more open with their work. Why not share more of their projects with us? Why not share some of their successes – as well as failures – with us?

This leads me to another pet peeve of mine – my criticism of a lack of collaboration/cooperation between different donor countries who has well-meaning projects around the world. But that’s probably best for another post.