The Objective of the DHG Forum is to share expertise and experiences, to enhance co-operation among donors and capacity development programmes implementing agencies, or relevant resource organisations like the International Association of Universities, the World Bank, UNESCO, the AAU and others. Initially the DHG was set up to bring the Paris Declaration (2005) into practice, hence the name donor harmonisation. However, at the first meeting in Scheveningen in 2010, that objective proved to be unrealistic as most educational co-operation programmes had a strong reciprocal benefit policy. But the idea of trying to prevent overlap in activities, to find ways to collaborate with each other, and share expertise and experiences formed a solid basis for these annual meetings.

The initiative for the first meeting in 2009 was taken by both the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir) and Nuffic. The organising committee for the DHG in 2022 consists of representatives of HK-dir (Ingvild Hope, Hilde Haaland-Kramer and Hilde Granås Kjøstvedt) and OBREAL Global (Elizabeth Colucci, Nicolas Patrici, Ramon Torrent) as the host organisation.

The location of the DHG Forum changes annually. The past 10 meetings took place in Scheveningen, Bergen, Madrid, Bonn, Helsinki, Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm, Copenhagen and London. In 2021 the 11th DHG Forum took place in Basel, Switzerland. Because of Covid-19, the DHG Forum was arranged as two webinars in 2020. OBREAL Global, supported by other Barcelona-based educational and research organisations, has offered to host the 2022 forum in Barcelona, and link it to an important policy dialogue meeting which will facilitate the participation of several international development cooperation partners from Africa, Latin America, India and Southeast Asia.