Projects and programmes

Project support

Even though Belgium fully subscribes to the principles of the Paris Declaration, a considerable part of development aid still is in the form of project support.

A project is a set of resources (money, equipment, expertise…), activities and results on which a donor country and a partner country agree. A project wants to achieve specific objectives within a set time frame, in a specific geographical area and with a certain budget.

Projects follow a four-phase cycle: identification, formulation, execution and evaluation.

• The identification describes the general context of the project, the location, the needs and the form of cooperation, as well as the budget and the duration of the project. The partner country is politically and legally responsible for identification.
• The formulation is the detailed project description. It verifies the conclusions of the identification, describes the technical and financial feasibility of the project and the quantitative and qualitative data that are needed to execute the project. BTC has the exclusive competence to formulate projects in consultation with the partner country.
• The execution is performed by BTC and the partner country.
• The evaluation usually is conducted two to three years after the end of the project by the Special Evaluation Office of the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation.

Programme approach

Through a programme approach the development support is focused in a coordinated way on a programme of the beneficiary country itself, such as a national poverty reduction plan, a sector programme for education or a thematic programme to promote women’s rights.

The programme approach has four specific characteristics:

• The lead of the programme is in the hands of the beneficiary country itself;
• It regards a single all-inclusive programme with its own budget;
• The coordination between the donors is formalised, and the donors use harmonised procedures for reporting, financial management and procurement;
• For the development, execution, financial management and monitoring and evaluation of the programme the systems of the beneficiary country are used as much as possible.

Belgium provides mainly project support, following a reduced set of execution modalities. In the spirit of the Paris Declaration, the challenge for Belgium is to evolve towards a more flexible mix of modalities and meanwhile using the whole range of tools, including a larger share of budget support. The fact that Belgium allocates an important part of its aid to vulnerable states forms a special challenge with respect to alignment.

Micro projects

BTC also executes the micro-projects programme. This programme aims at participating to small-scale development initiatives that foster self-sufficiency and originate from the most disadvantaged groups in society.

The general objective is to encourage sustainable economic, social and cultural human development by strengthening the social fabric in the partner country.

The programme wants, more specifically, to help legally established or de facto groups and associations, which

• emanate from civil society and local authorities (villages, communities, etc.),
• aim at developing their own community, and
• show that they have the capacity to identify and execute themselves the micro-intervention that they propose and to acquire more autonomy, which enables them to take the development of their own community at heart more easily.

Funding applications of micro-projects must be submitted to the Belgian Embassy in the country concerned.