Ownership in Name, But not Necessarily in Action
Comment on “It’s About the Idea Hitting the Bull’s Eye”: How Aid Effectiveness Can
Catalyse the Scale-up of Health Innovations”
Abstract
A recently-published paper by Wickremasinghe et al assesses the scalability of pilot projects in three countries
using the aid effectiveness agenda as an analytical framework. The authors report uneven progress and
recommend applying aid effectiveness principles to improve the scalability of projects. This commentary
focuses on one key principle of aid effectiveness – country ownership; it describes difficulties in defining and
achieving it, and provides practical steps donors and recipient governments can take to move forward towards
country ownership