METHODOLOGICAL NOTE FOR COUNTRY PROFILES
The country profiles provide an update on the population and reproductive health assistance programs of the 20 donor nations included in PAI’s 1993 report, Global Population Assistance: A Report Card on the Major Donor Countries. No profile of Luxembourg, also a member of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, is included owing to its relatively small population size (less than one million people) and low level of involvement in population assistance. However, the profiles include the European Commission, the only institutional member of the DAC, in light of its emerging importance and great potential as a donor in the population sector.
All the donor profiles draw on UNFPA’s annual Global Population Assistance Reports (GPARs); The Reality of Aid: An Independent Review of Development Cooperation, published by a coalition of European nongovernmental organizations; and the OECD’s Development Cooperation 1997 Report. Information for the individual profiles also came from the OECD/DAC peer reviews of each member country’s development cooperation program, government documents, and interviews and personal communications with aid officials and advocacy colleagues in each donor country.
The country profiles also draw on reports submitted by donor governments to the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) for UNPFA’s Global Resource Flows for Population Project, for information on the geographic and programmatic allocation of 1996 population funds.
Data analysis also faced a number of limitations. In some cases, reporting is incomplete. For example, UNFPA’s GPAR for 1996 estimates Japan’s population assistance based on 1995 levels and includes only partial data for European Commission funding, excluding NGO cofinanced projects. In some cases, limitations are methodological. While most of the profiles use the GPAR data to discuss trends in population assistance, because of changes in definitions, data on donor funding for 1995 and 1996 are not strictly comparable either to each other or to 1994 and earlier years. Moreover, some donors appear to be using a far broader definition of population assistance than the standard definition used by UNFPA.
Readers should note that all population assistance figures throughout the text and tables of this report reflect current U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated.
