Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

In which Andrew Mwenda might be getting what he wants… sort of

Aug 30

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Aid, Development | 2 Comments

Much like Ray Stantz, Andrew Mwenda should be careful of what he wishes for

Be careful of what you wish for. You might just get it.

Recently, Andrew Mwenda and five other prominent African intellectuals wrote to the Telegraph suggesting that Africa does not in fact need British development aid. Rather, they would be much happier if Britain contributed to the scrapping of the Common Agricultural Policy as a way of helping Africa.

Unfortunately, it seems like the Conservative-Liberal coalition Government might be giving them half of what they want – and not the good part. Yet another DfID-related leak has revealed that the British aid budget will from now on be allocated with a much stronger emphasis on UK security; in effect, moving aid away from being a stand-alone policy area and into a branch of a foreign policy drive aimed at ensuring the safety of the British public. Cynics will say this is nothing new, but it is surely more explicit and more closely felt than at any time since DfID’s formation.

Just to be clear: the leaked document does not suggest that Britain stop funding schools, or healthcare or even economic growth per se. DfID could continue to be a paragon of virtue in international development circles. What it does mean is that whenever DfID want to spend on these things, it will need to justify them on UK national security grounds. Since UK national security is best served by stable, prosperous, well-educated countries existing around the world this isn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster.

However, it’s another indication that the new Government want to make DfID, hitherto one of the best aid agencies to work with from a developing country point of view, more of a tool for an overall UK Government strategy founded in ideology and realpolitik. This is a real worry. Like the news from a few weeks back that DfID was dropping a number of commitments previously agreed, allegedly including the Paris Declaration, it is an indication that the Government wants to free up DfID to respond to its own priorities first and foremost.

Up til now, one of the reasons why DfID has developed such a good reputation was because it had a fairly high degree of operational independence from the rest of Government. This gave it the flexibility to pursue better aid allocations in the context of wider donor and Government spending, sometimes by taking on risk through budget support and other times by improving resource allocation procedures (budgeting, Parliamentary oversight and the like).

Giving DfID a requirement to justify what they do based on UK national security introduces an important restraint to them: it means that they cannot simply respond to country needs given the allocation of other resources, but needs to ensure it’s own resources pass a fitness test at home. What’s more, this all but rules out general budget support (from the recipient point of view, the best way of getting aid, if you care about building the ability of Government to allocate and account for funds), since there can be no guarantee on where this money will be spent.

All in all, this is a worrying sign though not a guarantee of catastrophe.

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Africa, the safest web region?

Aug 26

Posted by Matt in Africa, Research | 2 Comments

Despite the masses of negative publicity heaped on the continent by the famed Nigerian spam industry, Africa is actually one of the world’s safest places to go online in—featuring seven of the ten nations least attacked by malware.

Virus-checker company AVG surveyed 127 million computers in 144 countries and calculated the average rate of attacks—with the African nation of Sierra Leone emerging as the least assaulted, with only one virus event logged per 692 web users.

Really? My experience (admittedly primarily limited to the offices of Malawian government) is that you should treat any internet-capable computer south of the Sahara as a instant death.

Since internet and e-mail access on the continent tends to be a less reliable and more expensive, a lot of information transfer is done using memory sticks. Even if computers aren’t subjected to very many attacks from the outside,  it just takes one infected stick and a few marginally motivated employees to spread a virus to every other computer in the office. Many of these are the nasty, older viruses/trojans/worms which knock out the antivirus program’s ability to function, which means that AVG can’t see them.

This can happen astonishingly quickly. Tired of spending five minutes scanning my colleagues’ USB drives every time I wanted to get an Excel table from them, I once tried to quarantine and clear every computer in my department,  installing new (trial) antivirus on each cleared system. Unfortunately I missed a couple of computers, and within month when the trial software stopped working, the entire department had been reinfected.

It’s possible that AVG’s results are due to pretty extreme selection bias  on two fronts:

  1. AVG users are probably a little more concerned and careful than those who don’t bother to update (as most don’t).
  2. As I mentioned before, many attacks can knock out AVG, which means no reporting.
  3. Many don’t bother to update AVG’s virus definitions, leaving the program incapable of detecting or reporting new viruses.

So yes, Africa might be a safe continent to go online by yourself in a locked room with tape over your USB drives, but any file-swapping outside the net should be handled with extreme caution.

Hat tip to Chris Blattman’s Google Reader shared items.

The migrant’s dilemma

Aug 23

Posted by Matt in Development, Political Economy, Research | 3 Comments

Where would people end up if there were no barriers to movement?

The folks at Gallup, who recently produced some interesting figures on the large number of people from developing countries who  would like to permanently emigrate, have followed up with new data on where people would like to move to.

Using their survey data to predict the proportion of the population who would move if all barriers were dropped, they constructed net migration indices, basically showing the increase/decrease in adult population which would result if everyone got their wish. For example, below we have the top gainers (in percentage terms):

Read the rest of this entry »

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Religion and the Legal System do not Mix

Aug 20

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Governance, Middle-East | 4 Comments

From the Grauniad:

A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals whether they would punitively damage a man’s spinal cord after he was convicted of attacking another man with a cleaver and paralysing him, local newspapers reported today…

Abdul-Aziz al-Mutairi, 22, was left paralysed after a fight more than two years ago, and asked a judge to impose an equivalent punishment on his attacker under sharia law, reports said.

Fortunately:

King Faisal specialist hospital said that it would not do the operation. The article quoted a letter from the hospital saying “inflicting such harm is not possible”, apparently refusing on ethical grounds.

No doubt Wronging Rights will come up with something pithy and insightful to say about this, so I’ll sign off with this: gah.

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We’ll always have Paris…

Aug 17

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Aid, Development, Governance, Worst practices | 2 Comments

Of all the Declarations, in all the world...

News from this weekend suggests that DfID will be reversing its hitherto strong backing to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. My initial reactions were of shock and disappointment. Shock because DfID has been an ardent supporter of the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action. Disappointment because it was so unexpected: it has a strong, highly competent aid effectiveness department and has also used the Declaration to push Government reform.

I’ve noted after viewing the original leaked memo that the original advice was in favour of maintaining the Paris Declaration as a commitment by DfID. Most of the other commitments dropped simply serve to cut the amount of ringfencing of DfID’s budget and therefore increase its flexibility to meet the needs of different developing countries.

The decision to rescind their commitment to the PD is a much more problematic one, however. The issues essentially break down as follows:

What has DfID Reversed?

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PD) is an agreement signed by donor agencies and Governments and aid-recipient Governments in 2005. The Declaration establishes a number of best practices in aid management that all parties promise to adhere to, and twelve targets which all parties are to be assessed on. These targets and commitments were strengthened by the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) in 2008.

The idea behind the PD and AAA is to make it easier for Governments to manage, use and report on aid by simplifying the way aid is contracted, disbursed and evaluated. It also seeks to maximise the benefit to the developing country by untying aid and ensuring that aid be channelled through the working local process of the aid-recipient Government. Thus aid is promised to be channelled through the local budget process, use the local accounting and audit procedures and be evaluated according to local processes. It further stressed the need to make aid as flexible as possible by using fungible General and Sector Budget Support.

Recipient Governments also made pledges to improve their own systems: of audit, budgeting and so on, and to be assessed independently on them.

The Paris Declaration has two very big positive points. The first is that it seeks to increase the ability of local actors to respond to their own problems flexibly and not be dictated to by a multitude of individual donors. It thus helps reduce the coordination problem of aid and encourages local solutions and visions of development.

The second major benefit, related to the first, is that it moves the lines of accountability of aid. Instead of aid money being handled by the donors, in which case the donors are accountable to their own taxpayers and no-one else, it creates dual accountability. First the donor gives money to the recipient Government to use. That Government is thus accountable to the donor, and must show that the money was used appropriately. But far more important than this, because aid money is now on budget and managed by local Governments a second line of accountability is created: of the recipient Government spending the money to the local electorate. Through the budget debates in Parliament, these people have the chance to contest the use of aid through their elected representatives; they also have the ability to vote a Government out of power if it doesn’t use aid money well. The Government now has to justify aid money in the same way it does tax money.

Additionally, the PD addresses lots of smaller, niggling issues that seriously hamper the capacity of Governments, for example setting a target for the reduction of cumbersome and time consuming donor missions by combining them.

Read the rest of this entry »

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A Massive Blow

Aug 16

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Aid, Development, Worst practices | 3 Comments

DfID have gone all Anderson Silva on the fight for more effective aid management.

A leaked memo reveals that DfID will be dropping its commitment to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

This is a massive blow. The PD (as it’s known)  is very imperfect, and even the refinements we made in Accra in 2008 left plenty to be desired. But it’s the only real commitment the international community has made to improving donor systems for the management of aid – to making it easier to use, receive, negotiate. What’s worse, it’s one of the few places where recipient Governments are tied down to improvements in the way they themselves manage aid and their domestic resources.

DfID have been one of the biggest motors behind improving the PD and getting the simplification of access to and usage of aid money improved. This is not insignificant. Anyone who has spent time in a developing country Government can see how much of the recipient Government’s time is spent on managing, applying for and reporting on aid – not to mention following up on problems in its access, flow and predictability, all of which are covered by the PD. A conservative estimate for a heavily aid dependent country like Malawi is about 60% of Ministry of Finance time. Probably as much in the most aid dependent sectors, too. (To clarify – dropping the PD does not mean that DfID are abandoning the fight for better aid – but they are dropping their biggest weapon in the fight for better aid management.)

Dropping the PD means DfID have just lost a massive amount of moral authority in the fight to improve the way aid is used, and equally in the fight to improve the way Governments manage their own resources.

I’ll collect my thoughts for a more detailed post.

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The More Things Change…

Aug 13

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Governance | 1 Comment

A paragon of transparency

A paragon of transparency.

Today’s Guardian runs an eye-opening piece on expenditures made in the last year of the Labour administration. The Tories are, in their drive for transparency, publishing expenditures made by various Government departments online. The documents relating to the Department of Communities and Local Government show:

Among the expenses revealed was £1,673 to a company called Stress Angels, which offers massages, acupressure, Indian head massage and reflexology…

Then there was £626 on a trip to a nature reserve in Nottingham and £539 on an awayday to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Accommodation at a hotel – the Rubens, opposite Buckingham Palace – cost £17,000. Another £3,670 went to Halfords cycle shop.

The litmus test for the Tories will, of course, be whether they maintain their drive for transparency when it is going to expose even their own Government.  We see this kind of thing happening all the time in Africa, relating to corruption. A new Government comes in promising change and a war against graft. For the first year they push hard to identify and punish culprits, making high profile arrests and prosecutions. These arrests and prosecutions damage the previous administration, normally the opposition party in Parliament.

Then as time goes on, the anti-corruption agency exhausts its ability to prosecute the opposition. It’s eyes turn towards current or recent corruption scandals – those that implicate the current regime. Suddenly, the political will dissipates – they’ve ‘done enough to show that corruption will not be tolerated’. Quietly, the support and direction of senior officials is withdrawn. The old bad habits reassert themselves and the Government continues to make merry with public funds.

Eventually they get voted out, and the whole cycle starts again. This happened in Kenya (though it all went a bit pear shaped when John Githongo showed the tenacity of a bull-terrier); it happened in Malawi and in almost identical circumstances, in Zambia.

It’s easy right now for the Tories to attack the culture of expenditure in Government, because the punches are landing on their opponents. The real win will be when they let the expenditures be published on a monthly or quarterly basis, and let the whip fall on themselves. After all, this is what we demand of developing country administrations. Why should the standards we hold for ourselves be different?

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Return to the poverty safari

Aug 11

Posted by Matt in Africa, Poverty porn | 9 Comments

Kennedy Odede, who grew up in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, reflects on poverty tourism in the New York Times:

I was 16 when I first saw a slum tour. I was outside my 100-square-foot house washing dishes, looking at the utensils with longing because I hadn’t eaten in two days. Suddenly a white woman was taking my picture. I felt like a tiger in a cage. Before I could say anything, she had moved on.

On the educational value of these trips:

To be fair, many foreigners come to the slums wanting to understand poverty, and they leave with what they believe is a better grasp of our desperately poor conditions. The expectation, among the visitors and the tour organizers, is that the experience may lead the tourists to action once they get home.

But it’s just as likely that a tour will come to nothing. After all, looking at conditions like those in Kibera is overwhelming, and I imagine many visitors think that merely bearing witness to such poverty is enough.

A few months ago Ravi Kanbur wrote an interesting paper suggesting that development workers should have to go on routine ‘exposure’ trips, where they spend a few days staying in a rural village to get a better perspective on poverty. Several others thought this would be a good idea, but I remain concerned that this would be nothing more than a glorified poverty safari, akin to earning a merit badge in the Boy Scouts.

The very first post on this blog was on poverty safaris. What do you think of them?

Hat tip to Aid Watch for the link.

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Randomized trials are so 1930s

Aug 9

Posted by Matt in Economics, Research | 4 Comments

Jim Manzi, the CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies (a randomized trial software firm), reminds us that we’ve been subjecting public policy to experimental methods for quite some time:

In fact, Peirce and others in the social sciences invented the RFT decades before the technique was widely used for therapeutics. By the 1930s, dozens of American universities offered courses in experimental sociology, and the English-speaking world soon saw a flowering of large-scale randomized social experiments and the widely expressed confidence that these experiments would resolve public policy debates. RFTs from the late 1960s through the early 1980s often attempted to evaluate entirely new programs or large-scale changes to existing ones, considering such topics as the negative income tax, employment programs, housing allowances, and health insurance.

So the randomistas aren’t so much as a “new wave” as the “next wave.” More interesting though, are Manzi’s thoughts on external validity:

By about a quarter-century ago, however, it had become obvious to sophisticated experimentalists that the idea that we could settle a given policy debate with a sufficiently robust experiment was naive. The reason had to do with generalization, which is the Achilles’ heel of any experiment, whether randomized or not. In medicine, for example, what we really know from a given clinical trial is that this particular list of patients who received this exact treatment delivered in these specific clinics on these dates by these doctors had these outcomes, as compared with a specific control group. But when we want to use the trial’s results to guide future action, we must generalize them into a reliable predictive rule for as-yet-unseen situations. Even if the experiment was correctly executed, how do we know that our generalization is correct?

One example he discusses the frequent experimentation used in crime-prevention, and how the (very few) subsequent attempts:

Criminologists at the University of Cambridge have done the yeoman’s work of cataloging all 122 known criminology RFTs with at least 100 test subjects executed between 1957 and 2004. By my count, about 20 percent of these demonstrated positive results—that is, a statistically significant reduction in crime for the test group versus the control group. That may sound reasonably encouraging at first. But only four of the programs that showed encouraging results in the initial RFT were then formally replicated by independent research groups. All failed to show consistent positive results.

My biggest fear about the current trend in social science RCT work is not only the failure to confirm positive results, but the failure to confirm negative results. While there is a small, but real incentive to repeat a ‘proven’ randomized study in a new setting, there isn’t much being done to confirm that a negligible treatment effect doesn’t improve elsewhere. While big RCT research groups do care about external validity, it is the initial findings that get seared into the mind of the policymakers. Flashy graphs which generalize without concern don’t help.

Here’s part of the closing to Manzi’s piece, which is a must-read if you’re interested or involved in this type of work:

It is tempting to argue that we are at the beginning of an experimental revolution in social science that will ultimately lead to unimaginable discoveries. But we should be skeptical of that argument. The experimental revolution is like a huge wave that has lost power as it has moved through topics of increasing complexity. Physics was entirely transformed. Therapeutic biology had higher causal density, but it could often rely on the assumption of uniform biological response to generalize findings reliably from randomized trials. The even higher causal densities in social sciences make generalization from even properly randomized experiments hazardous. It would likely require the reduction of social science to biology to accomplish a true revolution in our understanding of human society—and that remains, as yet, beyond the grasp of science.

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Questionable parentage

Aug 9

Posted by Matt in Development, Research | 4 Comments

Gabriel Demombynes over at the World Bank blog has s0me more interesting things to say about the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). There’s one claim he makes a claim which I find particularly interesting:

The MPI is a descendant of the earlier Human Development Index and is similar to the various Unsatisfied Basic Needs indices long used in many countries.

Several others, including Duncan Green, have also stated that the MPI is a natural follow-on from the Human Development Index (HDI), which I’m not sure is correct, as the two have a very different conceptual basis.

As its name implies, the MPI falls into a class of indices known as poverty measures. While they can get quite complex and opaque, the more basic of these have a similar approach: First we have to pick a welfare measure. This could really be anything that is measurable, but is most commonly income, consumption or asset wealth. Then comes the surprisingly contentious task of choosing a threshold, under which people will be classified as being poor if they do not meet it. These poverty lines can be absolute or relative, the latter indicating a greater concern for inequality than absolute deprivation. Counting the poor gives us a final tally of those living below the poverty line.

The MPI is an extension of this approach, instead using a range of indicators wrangled together a multidimensional poverty line. While single-dimension poverty lines make very precise statements about people along one dimension (Person i can only be not-poor if their income Xi exceeds the poverty threshold P (Xi >P), multidimensional lines can classify two households as being poor even when they face vastly different circumstances. For example: two people might be equally unhealthy, but one has enough asset wealth to be classified as “not-poor”. The MPI also tries to include information on the severity of poverty, for those that face many different deprivations all at once, a conceptually similar approach to the poverty gap and squared poverty gap indices.

The MPI, like the other poverty measures that came before it, focuses on a particular segment of the population, discarding all information about the non-poor. Because it is derived by counting individuals whole fall into a pre-specified condition, it is best thought of as a way to describe the state of this sub-population, rather than as a comprehensive indicator.

In contrast, the Human Development Index was intended to be used to make statements about the overall progress of a country’s development. While all of its components are aggregated from individual or household information, or from counting those in a certain condition (i.e. those that are literate, or who have died this year), they do not give the same type of insight. The education component is similar (we are just counting those who are in the state of literacy or who are enrolled in school), but with GNI and life expectancy, we aren’t really counting anything, we’re expressing moments and expectations from interesting country-wide distributions. We cannot say “X number of people have an HDI of Y.”

The HDI was initially introduced as an alternative to just relying on income as a measure of human welfare. This way of looking at the world, which became very popular following Sen’s work on the capabilities approach, also motivates the MPI as an alternative to only considering poverty in income. The weakness in both the indices is in their method with dealing with multidimensionality – by using ad hoc methods of averaging different dimensions together to come up with a single number.

So, when describing the MPI to someone new, one might refer to it as “an extension of traditional income-based poverty measures, taking into account the multidimensional nature of poverty, much as the Human Development Index considers the multidimensional nature of development. Both consider just measuring income, or consumption, to be insufficient,” rather than as a natural follow on from the HDI.

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