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Aid Modalities Guideline

Section A | Introduction

Development assistance can be delivered in a wide variety of ways involving different sets of relationships, responsibilities, and flows of resources. No two development activities are the same and different approaches are often appropriate in different contexts. Despite this, there are also a number of broad ways of structuring development assistance which NZAID has defined and refers to as Aid Modalities.
Section B of this guideline outlines and analyses a series of aid modality categories which NZAID has identified, and provides guidance to the choice and design of particular aid modalities.

Aid modalities are broad approaches rather than specific designs or formal agreements.  The detailed design can vary widely and should be tailored closely to the context and situation. This needs to be captured in more formal agreements which would normally cover both the nature of the partnership which will guide and govern the activity and the nature of the contracting ¹mechanisms that will underpin its delivery. This is represented below.

         

Different aid modalities with different types of partners and forms of delivery have differing ways in which the partnership can be documented, and similarly differing contracting mechanisms. In some cases, partnership documents and contracting mechanisms merge, where the partnership is effectively defined by the activity.  But where the partnership and associated expectations go well beyond the specific activity, it is more likely that separate documents are required. 
Section C considers the ways in which the partnership is documented for different aid modalities, while Section D considers appropriate Contracting Mechanisms.