Monthly Archives: January 2011

Mainstreaming revisited

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Bottom Up Thinking blogs about a “development effectiveness officer“, a person who walks around to incite people to do what they should do if they would be doing their job.
It is a recurrent problem with all “mainstreaming” issues. It is “a job well done” to taken environment, women , equity, drr, into account every time when it is relevant. NOT doing so is bad work. Taking it into account when it is NOT relevant is lack of focus and bad work. If there would be some weeding out of bad programs based on the results they get, people would learn fast to integrate everything that is needed to have a successful outcome .

When mainstreaming an issue, the focus moves from the success for the main goal of the project, to success in mainstreaming. The selection of successful interventions is not made based on the expected results for the objectives, but on “making the right noises”. A mainstreaming agenda is developed, with mainstreaming experts. This has a tendency to lead to “best practices” based on confirmation bias, and one size fits all projects.

However, mainstreaming issues are often serious problems needing attention. Just stopping the current approach will not make them go away. I don’t really have an answer to how to approach it, but like Bottom Up Thinking, I don’t feel comfortable by the steamroller political correctness the current approach seems to imply.

The Armdroids are coming

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There is an interesting article at the Harvard Business review on ” The fall of Wintel and the rise of the Armdroids” .

It is interesting how history repeats itself. Only a few years ago, at the start of the PC-era, the Intel processor was not the only game in town, neither was the Microsoft Operating system. The Wintel combination won the PC wars, because they delivered a platform for innovation. They provided a reliable backdrop of operating system and processor, around which an evolving ecosystem of peripheral hardware and useful programs could be built.

Bad programs don’t get a chance, because someone else will come up with an alternative fast.

Now the same is happening in the Mobile and tablet world: the platform combining the ARM processor and the Android operating system poised to win the mobile platform war because it leaves most room for innovation on hardware and software. This is the strength of standards and platforms: the platform itself might be static, but only when there is a level playing field you can compete of quality and cost. Without a platform and standards, there is a confusopoly. In a confusopoly, innovation is not necessary, because products cannot be compared. The market is shared, not competed for.

In development and humanitarian assistance, the lack of a common platform for evaluating results and impact is notorious. This is why fragmentation doesn’t lead to evolution and  division of labour, because the competition for resources is not based on measurable indicators such as the quality and cost/benefit analysis, but instead on “other” criteria, such as the nationality of the NGO, the domestic sensitivities of the donor, etc.

The more the focus moves to common platforms and results measurement, the more results and learning can be expected.

Data warehouse for project proposals in humanitarian assistance

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I posted the following at Opendata, please, if you are a programmer, contribute:

Proof of concept: Data warehouse for project proposals in humanitarian assistance:

For the moment nearly every donor and every UN-agency requires project forms to be filled according to their own template. They are quite strict on this, and non-compliance leads to delays in approval or even refusal.

When analysing the requirements however, it is obvious that the content in most forms is for 90 % the same. It should be possible to use a common database, with 90 % common data, and the additional data depending on the needs of the donor.

The application would be a website, where the applicant chooses first the donor he wishes to apply for. The webpage will let him fill in the form for this donor, but save the data in a common database. In an official version, it would be possible to submit from the site electronically to the donor.

If the application is unsuccessful, the applicant would be able to choose in a new donor, and fill in only the missing fields, without the need to reformat everything.

When this application would be accepted by the donors and NGOs alike, the project data would authorize learning to a very high degree: most open data efforts only make metadata available, like budgets, and project title. With this data warehouse coördination and comparative evaluation would be much facilitated, as all data are in the same format.

The proof of concept would bring together the forms of the major humanitarian donors: ECHO (European Commission), USAID, DFID, Sida, Germany.

Cheers, Samwise.gardner@gmail.com

This effort could provide the ” hardware” (ok, technically software) of the “new accountability paradigm to reflect the reality of the Aid Industrial Complex“, and links up with the IATI effort for transparency.

A new year, a new donor budget and the fallacy of additional resources

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Donor budgets are annual and modular. The legislation ruling these budgets covers normally all expenditures in all departments. This means expectations on donor flexibility are often unrealistic. While the role of parliaments in poor countries might be taken into account, often the role of donor legislation, parliaments in the donor countries and the limited importance of development in donor country political priority setting are often forgotten.

A budget in most countries is annual. This means a budget starting in January is normally proposed by the desk officer in March, April, balanced for priorities within the hierarchy and government and finally discussed, amended and approved by the parliament around November. The actual calendar depends on the donor. From that moment on, the allocation for departments, programmes, budget lines and even individual allocations is fixed for the rest of the year. Changes are still possible. However, the procedures can be difficult. In most countries, the legislation supports limiting expenditure and makes additional expenditure difficult. At the higher levels, there is a need to go back to the parliament, at the intermediate level, it might be necessary to go to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. At the lower levels, changes might be allowed within the department or even at the level of the desk officer.

Lessons learned:

  1. On the cabinet level, a government decides on the broad strokes. So the only cabinet level decision might be on the total Official Development Assistance budget for the year (allocation is annual, spending might be multi-annual). Within this budget, it is mostly the preserve of the Minister for development coöperation to make allocations.
  2. As most governments don’t allow the printing of money, additional funding for a development issue normally means savings within the same department. “Additional funding” for development is only possible if there is a disaster or other major event that convinces the parliament and the public to change its priorities, by reallocating e.g. national health service budget to disaster relief. There might be a constituency of potential health service clients who would oppose this move. International conferences, resolutions or best practices normally don’t qualify for getting this treatment. Real additional funding would e.g. mean that a government moves its benchmark for development spending up (e.g. from 0.7 % to 0.75 %).
  3. For all practical purposes, “Additional funding” for one development item, like climate change adaptation means to diminish the funding for less sexy development priorities, like primary education, health systems or democratic governance between elections. The call for additional funding is a call to diminish the funding for other development issues. The choices for savings are seldom explicit. How many people should we stop feeding to increase the funding for coördination?
  4. Who pays the piper calls it tune: If it is not on the budget, it is not important. If an item is recognized as a budget line or a programme in the official budget, it is ingrained in the DNA of the donor. Continuity is near guaranteed, even over the years. If there is only an agreement signed to give the item top priority, but there is no dedicated budget, allocation of scarce funding will be difficult. It will depend on the priority the desk officer can impose on his minister for actually paying up. However, being buried in the budget on a lower level might be useful to stay under the radar, e.g. when supporting innovative interventions with low political backing and public appeal.