Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Archive for category Aid

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

Aug 30

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Aid, Development | 3 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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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.

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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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Best laid plans

Aug 3

Posted by Matt in Aid, Development, Political Economy | 15 Comments

No one else could possibly think of the same thing

There is a wonderful moment in the 1979 film “Life of Brian,” where the People’s Front of Judea, an anti-Roman revolutionary group, embarks on a mission to kidnap the wife of Pontius Pilate to force him to make political concessions. As they sneak through the palace, the group bumps into the Campaign for a Free Galilee, another separatist movement which is also planning to capture Pilate’s wife. The two groups argue over who gets to do this and end up killing each other before Pilate’s guards even get a chance to intervene. You can watch the scene here (fast-forward to 5:00).

Monty Python’s comical vision of a fracture resistance, comprising dozens of similarly-named groups with redundant objectives, is strikingly familiar in the world of aid. While the NGO community suffers from these problems the most, it is official donor fragmentation and duplication which is particularly disheartening as its relative size (a few dozen approaching 100 donors versus hundreds of international NGOs) means coordination and communication ought to be easier.

It is in this muddled context that USAID, has just announced its own “plan” for achieving the 2015 targets for the Millennium Development Goals, soon to be followed by USAID’s overall strategy for development assistance, all ahead of next month’s UN summit on the MDGs.

Let’s simplify things for a minute: Imagine a world where the US was the only donor. In this context, an individual strategy seems quite sensible – the solo donor just needs to decide on what its objective function is (i.e poverty reduction, growth, reaching the MDGs) and allocate aid flows accordingly to best achieve those objectives.

Now let’s move to a world where there are two donors and make the rather strict assumption that they have the same objective (perhaps achieving the MDGs). If each of those donors continues to operate as if they are in a vacuum, without knowledge of or concern over each other’s movements, they will both tend to spend money on the same programmes in the same places. This results in “donor darlings,” countries and programmes that have too many donors and probably receive too much aid money.

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Counting desires

Jul 27

Posted by Matt in Aid, Economics, Governance, Research | 4 Comments

Preference aggregation can be tricky business

A key assumption behind the Global Burden of Disease project is that it is possible to come up with a “Disability Weight” for each health state.  Diseases conditions that are considered worse than other carry higher disability weights than others.  A very important issue in the development of such weights is the question of who should define these conditions?  Should those who have the conditions be the best judge or are they biased?  Should healthy people who have never experienced these conditions be the judge?  Should doctors decide?  Should policy makers?  Should health economists (gasp!!)?

In the past, the GBD has relied upon “expert opinion” to make such decisions.  Well, it seems for the next update of the GBD, which is currently underway, you can also be an expert.  I came across a link to the following survey earlier today that allows you to have some input in these weights.

That’s Karen Grepin discussing an attempt to aggregate beliefs over disease burdens to better define the weights given to different ailments. This is a very similar exercise to preference aggregation, where we attempt to construct a unified set of beliefs that will govern public policy. The result is something approaching a social welfare function, which allows us to make statements like “Society strictly prefers A to B.” One way of doing this is to get a sample of individuals to compare different states and to try and tease out an overall ordinal ranking of these states. Using Grepin’s example, each person has to make a pairwise comparison:

The first person has swelling and tenderness in the testicles and pain during urination.

The second person has lost part of both legs, leaving pain, tingling, and frequent sores in the stumps. The person has great difficulty moving around and has episodes of depression, anxiety and flashbacks to the injury.

By asking enough people to compare different states with different combinations of symptoms, we can tease out their overall ranking of those symptoms – how this is done can sometimes be contentious and quite technical. That ranking then represents the best approximation of everyone’s relative rankings of disease burden.

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Who wants to get pumped up?

Jul 24

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Worst practices | No Comments

So I watched Conan the Barbarian tonight, and I was particularly struck by the scene where the young Conan is forced into slave labour, condemned to push a wheel round and round for years. You can watch the scene here (embedding is disabled so you’ll have to click through to youtube:

As I watched it I suddenly had a really familiar feeling. Why was that? Oh, that’s right: Playpumps!

You can read about the Playpump controversy along with some pointed criticism over at Barefoot Economics and Aid Watch. I am also deeply disappointed the pumps didn’t succeed in churning out out a few million Arnold-sized children.

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The burden of proof

Jul 24

Posted by Matt in Aid, Development, Research | 1 Comment

Honestly, folks, we don't know what the impact will be.

Over at Aidwatch, Alanna Shaikh, citing a few others, considers the limits of impact analysis. At one point she cites a post by Steven Lawry:

“Many real-world problems are not easily described with the kind of precision that professional mathematicians insist upon. This is due to the limitations of data, the costs of collecting and analyzing data, and the inherent difficulties of giving mathematical expression to the complexity of human behavior.” This strikes me as very true. At what point are we expecting too much from our impact assessments?

While the more rigorous impact assessments certainly require some statistical knowhow and reliable data, they don’t necessarily require giving “mathematical expression” to human behaviour. Even though the resulting academic publications might have some calculus window-dressing, an impact measurement is generally about as atheoretical as they come: what was the impact of X on Y? When academics move on and start asking why X impacts Y, they then often retreat to the black box of mathematical modeling (usually in a desperate attempt to avoid qualitative methods, which Chris Blattman writes an excellent post about here).

Alanna also discusses a point made by Andrew Natsios:

Natsios points out that USAID has begun to favor health programs over democracy strengthening or governance programs because health programs can be more easily measured for impact. Rule of law efforts, on the other hand, are vital to development but hard to measure and therefore get less funding.

I think this is the most important criticism of over-reliance on empirical assessment – donors will prefer to fund causes that can easily signal an impact that can be touted back home. A reasonable counter is that those that swim in murkier waters just have to work harder to show their impacts, but in reality they are more likely to either let effort collapse, or just migrate over to programs that do get the funding.

While I’m partially sympathetic to doubts about impact-analysis, I think that much of (but not Alanna’s) the criticism is self-serving: let us continue using the same methods we’ve always used, which happen to always show an impact despite the never-ending micro-macro paradox.

That’s fine if you choose to reject statistical rigour, but please don’t pop up five years later and claim that your project/aid flow is responsible for all sorts of wonderful things you can’t really prove. Some may be content with photos, anecdotes and correlations, but don’t be surprised if the rest of us aren’t.

This doesn’t mean that everything should (or could) be judged by a hardcore RCT starting tomorrow, but when the evidence is less direct, the onus is on the presenter to be more modest and careful with their assertions.

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Kicking habits

Jul 14

Posted by Matt in Aid, Development | 1 Comment

Responding to Easterly’s post on development systems, Meredith Startz  at IPA posits that perhaps aid’s main role is to help developing countries tread water while we wait to find real solutions:

On a deep level, Easterly is right, and not just because identifying the right solutions requires local knowledge. It’s also about sustainability, in a literal sense. In order for actual development to occur, solutions have to be imbedded in a local system that drives and sustains them without constant flows of money from NGOs or donor governments. Otherwise, it’s not development, but rather a permanent system of redistribution from wealthy countries to poor ones. It’s like claiming to cure an ill person by keeping her on life support. A person who is on dialysis and pain medication is alive and comfortable – and that is almost certainly better than the alternative. But, real healing would imply that we have figured out what’s wrong with the liver and fixed it, so that the body’s system is doing its own miraculous thing without mechanical intervention. Forcibly simulating the outcomes of good system can temporarily get you better health and education and housing, but it only goes so far.

I think most of us agree that a permanent system of wealth-redistribution is undesirable – what some of us might disagree on is whether or not aid-as-relief is beneficial, neutral, or detrimental to development in the long run.

First and foremost: The way to build a better problem-solving system is NOT to simply take the body off life support. Now, that may sound obvious, and we won’t accuse Easterly of suggesting that all aid flows be brought to a screeching halt just because they’re not imbedded in good local systems. However, it does suggest two types of action that ought to be taken. First, use the time you are buying with life support to diagnose the problem. Second, look for solutions that provide the spark needed to jump-start the system.

To challenge a medical analogy with another: what if aid isn’t just a life-saving intervention, but one that temporarily mitigates suffering – like morphine. If handled carefully, one can be weaned off slowly as they pick themselves up again. If given carelessly in large doses it can be highly addictive and distortive, hampering or even impeding one’s recovery.

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Profiting off the poor

Jul 10

Posted by Matt in Aid | 3 Comments

Writing on Change.org, Josh Berkman finds it unacceptable that ‘social entrepreneurs’ are making a profit off of an extremely poor consumer base:

In many cases, it’s fine to profit from good ideas that can help people, but I’d say there’s something wrong when your target consumer is living on less than two dollars a day and is spending well over half her income to feed her family. It’s not cool to set up shop in a slum or a village without running water in the homes and charge the very poorest residents for products and services they need. The driving ethos behind these so-called new do-gooders appears to be that nothing is free, even if your target consumer makes less in a year than what you paid for your laptop.

Berkman goes on to to suggest an alternative approach: helping local communities and businesses create beneficial projects which tackle the same problems. I disagree with Berkman’s assessment of social entrepreneurs, for several reasons:

The first is a reality check – while social entrepreneurs obviously have an altruistic objective, the sine qua non of their work is profit. However morally objectionable you might  find the idea of poor people purchasing goods and services, without the expected profit, many of those goods and services would no longer be available. Entrepreneurs aren’t sitting on huge piles of cash, just looking for ways to spend it: they have investors who will only commit when they smell a future return (even if they might accept a lower-than-average return for socially-beneficial enterprises). I’m friends with a social entrepreneur who runs a low-cost private school franchise in urban Kenya, where many extremely poor households send their children, glad to pay a low price to ensure a better education. Sans profit, his schools wouldn’t exist, and those families would have to make do with Kenya’s lacklustre public schools.

I sense that Berkman wishes that social entrepreneurship would look a little more like traditional aid and be driven solely by need and pure altruism. Unfortunately, most of aid never reaches those lofty expectations, and even if it did, the above argument still stands: this chunk of money follows profits, not need.

The neccessary synthesis is that profit and need are not mutually exclusive and may be more closely aligned than aid and need. The aid-giver’s dilemma is huge: identifying and meeting true need through a haze of mixed signals, political problems and changing priorities, then attempting to identify the impact of that aid by leaping back over the same hurdles.

The entrepreneur’s problem is much simpler: design and offer a product. If it is valuable to the poor then there will be demand and hopefully profits will ensue. If not, the product fails. Either way, all the risk (and the cash!) is borne by the entrepreneur, which creates enormous incentives to get things right.

One of the most persistent and important criticisms of the aid industry is that the beneficiaries are voiceless – there is no way for the poor to vote on moving money from one project (or donor!) to another. Donors and charities are often ignorant of this, because no one really complains about getting free stuff, whether or not it is the most appropriate assistance. In contrast, the poor vote for goods and services every day with cash from their meager budgets. This is an extremely strong case of revealed preferences: we don’t need to ponder whether or not wildly successful ventures like mobile phones or M-PESA are useful to the poor – their enthusiastic uptake says it all.

Some of Berkman’s concerns are well-founded – the private system is not comprehensive – especially for those most concerned with social protection:

What good is nutritionally enhanced food if the people who need it most can’t afford it when global commodities prices spike or a bad weather year in a far away country creates perilously low crop yields?

But this is where government and/or aid should certainly play a role. It’s perfectly possible for one to complement the other, such as through subsidies , public-private partnerships, and regulation. Social enterprises are never going to be great at providing certain public goods or dealing with externalities, but in the absense of functioning public alternatives there isn’t much room for criticism.

Entrepreneurship is not the ultimate solution to all our woes, but it plays an intriguing and perhaps crucial role in the big picture. I find it much more disconcerting knowing there are people out there wasting millions of dollars of aid money on bad projects than knowing that a few people make an honest buck on products that the poor value.

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Up close and personal

Jun 30

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid | 4 Comments

Is it appropriate to single out individuals for help?

Slate recently ran a piece by Emily Meehan, an aid worker who weighs the pros and cons of giving a young Congolese boy money for school:

It was a long time before anyone explicitly told me that they didn’t like what I was doing with Aimé. I knew that I was breaking an aid-worker code, one that says it’s unprofessional for an individual aid worker to single out an individual “beneficiary” and help them with their own money.

No one would actually talk about this code, just as they didn’t talk about the code against discussing why you left home and came to work in a warzone. In fact, people didn’t talk about a lot of things, and I sometimes think that’s why we had become expatriates—to avoid talking about our lives and to avoid our lives.

Still, I had heard a number of vague reasons why I shouldn’t help Aimé. One was that if you help an individual, they will become dependent on your help, and when you stop helping them, which is inevitable, they will be crushed. Aid agencies do that all the time, though. They help a group of people here one day and then stop another day. Besides, almost everyone broke the code.

The dependency argument is a compelling one, but, as Meehan points out, one that applies to all aid. Aside from official aid and charitable interventions like the one in the story, many local staff becomes dependent on expatriate aid workers for their livelihood.

Meehan’s piece is insightful, but a little naive at times. It perfectly captures the ambivalence and uncertainty aid workers feel about giving to specific people – such concerns boil over at the end of the piece when Meehan temporarily suspects her beneficiary, Aimé, of lying to get more money out of her:

“And they stole my money,” said Aimé quietly, smiling and looking at the ground.

“What money?” I asked.

“All the money you gave me,” he said, still looking at the ground and smiling. My little brother used to smile when he lied.

“Who’s they?” I asked, in shock.

“I don’t know,” Aimé replied.

After thinking for a minute, I told him I didn’t believe him.

“You think I would trick you?” said Aimé.

…..I was confused and upset. I realized that I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know whether Aimé was tricking me. I didn’t know why he would trick me. I didn’t know if anything I have told you about his life was true, and I didn’t know if foreign aid works.

I think part of the frustration over helping individuals is driven by the contradictions that arise: aid workers work on programmes that are meant to, directly or indirectly, help people in recipient countries. If we were driven purely by altruism, we should be working in the programmes that offer the greatest chance of improving people’s lives. The desire to spend time outside the programme helping people might be driven by a desire to maximise time spent doing good, but more likely it is a silent acknowledgement that we don’t know whether or not our aid work is doing any good. Otherwise, if we wanted to help more people, we could just put in a few more hours of work per day, or return a hunk of your pay check.

Perhaps there are less rational reasons that most of us have been in Meehan’s shoes before: we have an innate desire to see our charity up close. We have to question who’s needs we are really satisfying when we single out people to ‘save.’

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