Aid fragmentation and donor coordination in Uganda: A district-level analysis

Aid proliferation and a lack of coordination are widely recognized as serious problems for aid effectiveness, and donors have repeatedly promised to tackle them, e.g. in the Paris Declaration in 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008. In this paper, we employ geocoded aid data from Uganda to assess whether the country's donors have increasingly specialized and better coordinated their aid activities at the district and sector level. Our findings point in the opposite direction: over the period 2006-2013, aid of most major donors in Uganda became more fragmented, and the duplication of aid efforts increased. There is tentative evidence that donors were more active in poorer parts of the country, which would provide some justification for clustered aid activities.