Tag Archives: development

Development: The dictator’s handmaiden; Is bad aid almost always good politics?

Posted on by
Reply

I have just finished reading the Dictator’s Handbook, by Bruce Bueno de Mequita and Alastair Smith. I immediately reread some chapters. The book gives you an insight you feel you have known all along, but you just could not act upon it because you don’t want to be seen as a spoil sport, cynic and nutcase.

From reading the book, I think adding a power impact assessment (PIA) before committing to development interventions is necessary.

The book makes a very convincing case that political economy, driven by personal interest, is the major motivation for leaders and potential leaders (surprise). The main objective of a leader is to get and keep power. Good public policy is not more than a distraction in this pursuit.  Leaders ignoring their main objective, will have only a short stint at the top.  So the leader will try to get as much loot from the state and its subjects as possible, and pay just enough to his essential backers for them to stay loyal to him. The rest is preferably stashed away for bad times. She must try to rely on as few possible backers as possible, who should each always need to scramble to keep her favor. The formula is really quite simple, but please, just read the book, I will limit myself to ponder some consequences of this reality of power ( “the world like it is, and not how we would like it to be”) on development assistance.

Easterly is an optimist
The Handbook gives a very black view of the world. We all know a politician or leader who would never act this way. The book however comes close to predict the real choices made by most of the world leaders who manage to stay in power (unlike the gullible friends of ours).

This means that development money that is embezzled by the leader and its cronies is not a bug, it is the main feature of cunning leadership. The whole government ownership agenda is very misguided in this light. It is probably true that the local government knows best what can work and what not. However this is not very relevant if the interest of the local leader in development funding is limited to the use of these funds to help her to stay in power.
Indeed: if the objective of the able leader is to keep the money and distribute it only to his essential backers,  anybody who is not an essential backer will not get anything.

It is also a positive message: understanding this mechanism makes it possible to use strategies to change the incentive structure and change the system.

Forget Paris.

Some types  of development assistance will be very much in demand by autocratic leaders.

  • Infrastructure leads to  excellent corruption and patronage possibilities. Moreover, in the form of big dams, it gives the dictator absolute power on who gets power and who does not.
  • Military support is even better. You can pay your essential generals and distribute bribes. Paying the rank and file is optional: they can “harvest” their own salary from the population.
  • Basic services are necessary to keep the population just intelligent enough to work hard. This is only important in countries without natural resources or without big aid flows. Anything beyond primary education will only lead to emancipation and other trouble. The leaders love basic services provided by NGOs: it authorizes the leader to spend less on the poor and more on themselves. Moreover, it transforms education from a right that the government is accountable for, to a gift from a foreign benefactor.
  • Disaster relief provided through the government services. It authorizes the dictator to embezzle most of it, while giving the rest only to the essential coalition.
  • Dept cancellation will only lead to the dictator strengthening her hold. Dept cancellation should be more conditional to democratic reform, or even better, used after democratic reform happened.  Apparently dept cancellation only works in democracies anyway.

The writers seem to have written the Handbook from a very serious concern to improve the effects of development assistance for the real world, not for the world we would all love to live in.

Their main piece of advice on development is to go for “cash on delivery”. Pay a non-inclusive government only for goods and services it has delivered, not for the process. Indeed even simple processes as capturing a terrorist bring in more loot for the cronies if they are dragged on eternally.

From poverty to power

The main lesson  I take from the book is the need to expand the coalition in power. If the leader has to rely on a wider coalition to stay in power, the kleptocracy deludes into a state delivering public services for most of the people. Indeed by growing the coalition needed to reign, there is a tipping point when it is cheaper for the leader to provide public services than to pay a bribe to the ever-growing number of essential backers.

The book goes in detail on the issue of inclusive governance structures, and ways that are used to limit the power of the public to hold leaders accountable. It proves that the nuts and bolts of the democratic system we use matters, and this as well for governing a country as for a public company or even a club.
While in a democracy a Government theoretically needs the backing of more than half of the voters, in reality this is often much less. The writer explores how the leader can find innovative ways to limit the number of people with actual power in different systems. In a multiparty first past the post-system a group can grab power with as little as 10 % of the total population backing them, just by gaming the system.

All this means that we need a radical emancipation strategy to deliver on development, where expanding the essential coalition in a country is seen as the main goal of interventions. Delivering services in non-democratic countries will not lead to a long-term development agenda; widening the coalition to include the middle class and the poor does. If some services must be delivered, theoretically the cash on delivery system should work.

To take home
Power and incentives matter. In the real world, they might matter more than the moral high ground. However, just like the rational choice is too simple to explain all economics, rational dictators are probably too simple to explain power. It is a start, and it would help us to be less gullible.
This is why I propose to add to each intervention a Power Impact Assessment (PIA), just like an environmental impact assessment.

Planning for collapse: making development interventions too big to fail and vulnerable to systemic risk.

Posted on by
Reply

The financial collapse in 2008 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers was enthusiastically prepared by the political and economical decision makers. In the 70s and 80s, in the name of more efficiency and free marked, regulations were more and more seen as a restraint on the development of companies. With less regulation, the market would be more efficient with less transaction costs. The firewalls between savings and investment were torn down, as the memories of the thirties were deemed irrelevant and “this time it is different”. Indeed economic growth followed. Financial markets seemed more efficient. The business cycle seemed to have disappeared.

Companies became more and more interlinked and financial products became more sophisticated. Risk was shared among more actors, all of them with a AAA rating. The risk vaporised in the system. Until it suddenly was there again. The dew point was reached. And the lack of firewalls took down the system, including some governments who believed the hype, like in Iceland and Ireland. As I am not an economist, I would like to refer to Tim for a better explanation of the crisis. His explanation in his book “Adapt” is enlightening and suits my point well.

So the financial system became so integrated that risk became systemic. All actors were linked up so much that the failure of one hurt all of them. The financial innovation went so fast and the system became so complex that nobody could assess the overall risk anymore.

Development is a risky complex system.
Development is a risky business. Success is elusive and failure frequent. Moreover the “transaction costs”, the difference between what the donor wants to give, and what the ultimate recipient gets, is high. There are important inefficiencies: unaccountable partners, overlaps, gaps, lack of results, lack of knowledge what works and what not, not forgetting stubbornness in repeating things that failed over and over again like swedow.

The way to make changes in a complex system is best described by “do no harm”: a prudent and evolutionary approach. Make small changes, and with a short feedback-loop check on the effects on the system as a whole. Make another change. Innovations should be never too big too fail. Innovation should be tested before bringing it to scale. Indeed, this is our world, our ecosystem. We should not take systemic risks with the lives of poor. As it is impossible to predict what will work or not, it is better to have a lot of initiatives and not to pre-empt the outcome.

A development system based on these principles should be expected to be very conscious of the risks that go with large-scale intervention, and focus on the value chain from innovation to bringing to scale.

The development system that exists however has the Paris agenda and the humanitarian cluster approach. The 3D approach (development, diplomacy and development), linking relief to development and integrated missions. The items on the international agenda are aiming to link the different systems to each other. Does this lead to more efficiency or to unacceptable systemic risk?

Some examples where this clustering of agendas seems to have led to collapse due to systemic risk: :

  • In Afghanistan the West has tried the 3d approach, it did not seem succesful.
  • In Uganda, donors have linked themselves into a budget aid logic, meaning that to punish the parliament for a gay law, children will probably not get their vaccine anymore.
  • Madagascar textile lost their jobs, because the duty free regime for their country was withdrawn after the politicians squabbled too much.
  • In DRC and Sudan, the UN integrated missions make the UN-humanitarian agencies de facto not neutral, affecting their efficiency in a serious way.
  • In Somalia the mixing up of the humanitarian and anti-terrorism agenda was an element in the current crisis.

From these examples I would like to conclude that systemic risk for the whole aid effort in a country can exist if agendas are lumped together. If an approach does not work, the most logical explanation could be that the approach is not a good one, and different options must be explored. The alternative narrative, that it did not work because we did not try rigorously enough, seems dangerous.

An alternative: nimble aid (agile aid, mindful aid)
Nimble aid would consist of independent interventions, each very limited in its objectives and conscious about the unpredictability of externalities. Like a bird in a flock, each programme would be able to steer itself in full consciousness of the effects it has on its environment. It is the evolutionary approach to development. If every objective is diluted in a wider technocratic programme, nothing is really happening. Trying to be responsive in a wider programme just leads to more meetings and more lemming thinking on development.

Vaccination programmes in humanitarian settings do just that: saving the life of thousands of children, leading to healthier and more productive lives for the beneficiaries. An effect that can be traced over up to 100 years.
New agricultural practices are tried one by one on a small scale, until there is one that works well, and everybody adopts it. Like the use of maize in Africa, long before colonisation, and varieties resistant to plagues now.

It is a development agenda which is less ambitious in the short term, but revolutionary in the long term.

A prerequisite for this approach to work is information sharing. Not information about what happened, but information on what is happening. So all actors know what others do by reading this information and can adapt their interventions to what is already happening around them. The actors can only correct their actions if they know what is happening around them. This is very much like obliging public companies to publish essential information , development actors should to post essential information on their activities. Information sharing should not be confused with going to meetings nor coordination.

Keeping the firewalls
In the consensus thinking, a compounded indicator will tell you about success of failure (like the human development index). This means that each value, each objective is not important enough to fight for on its own. You want to raise the overall index. In a nimble approach there is a tension between overall goals and each objective. There is a specific programme assuring that child mortality is down. Even if the government does not have the institutions or intentions to do it themselves yet. Good child mortality work will always strengthen the local institutions when the objectives are both long-term and short-term.

This is why I would like to argue to keep the firewalls between the values that are important. This does not mean to work in an ivory tower, It means that there are some objectives you just don’t negotiate away.

Moreover: fund what works
There is a lot of evidence on interventions that do work, even on a large scale. Getting rid of funds is not a problem for the agencies even if they would limit themselves only to evidence based interventions. Just a few examples that work in some circumstances if done well:

  • Basic economical infrastructure
  • Basic health services
  • Cash support for the poorest
  • Water and sanitation
  • Most humanitarian interventions if done according to the Sphere Standards.

And so much more. In the cases of decent accountable local institutions, even some forms of budget aid seem to work.

In conclusion

Of course, coördination and coherence are important. But they are only means for reaching results. Sometimes other means, like innovation or competition, might work better. When coherence becomes an objective of the aid, however, the level of systemic risk for the development system might just be too high.

Finally, transparency will always be beneficial for planning interventions, as well in a coherent as in a competitive environment.

 

Admitting Failure: Join the Posse (Only for real Men)

Posted on by
Reply

I am all in favour of evolution in development practice and thinking, where normally, it is more important to cull downright dismal failures than to select only the best, as evolution needs variability to work its magic.

Admitting mistakes or difficulties is also part of every professional relationship between partners. Part of the reputation of ICRC is generated by its tendency to speak rather bluntly about its own capacities in private, while the toeing of the party line by the staff of other organisations (say UNICEF) lessens the confidence in the organisation. However, when looking at the public image, it might be the other way round. It might seem that, when you need direct funding from the broader public, admitting failure is not the best practice.

I have some serious questions on the trend to focus on admitting failure. I will focus on elements:

  1. Who can admit failure?
  2. What does this failure say about the respect organisations have for beneficiaries?
  3. The posse rides again, where do we ride it to?

Who can admit failure?
When I look at who is leading the charge in “admitting failure”, it seems to me that big failures can be admitted by organisations who interact mostly with a more sophisticated donor public: governments (World bank) or better informed people (who supports engineers without borders?). For these organisations it seems to me to be fully in line with the analysis of Marc: it is just something to run with the posse, without a real cost. It is signaling credibility. However, if they need a separate thematic line to treat with failure, what have their (transparent) evaluation and monitoring departments been doing until now? An aspect that cannot be addressed with the failure approach is the recognition that systems are inherently complex.

When other organisations publish failures, it is closer to a “lessons learned” story: we know this works, we applied it there, we overlooked this element, it did not work). What is being talked about by these organisation is not failure, but evaluation and short feedback loops, in order to be able to correct early in the project. Small NGOs don’t have official evaluation strategies, they just learn their lessons the hard way, and take them on board.

Admitting failure looks very much like extremely badly conceived monitoring and evaluation when described this way. Indeed I fear this failure posse might interfere with the other posse towards professional and transparent evaluation and results measurement. The World Bank should know better.

Please some respect
The stories about failure often describe projects that were implemented and afterwards it seemed not to work, because of a simple aspect not taken on board. The Merry-go-round water pump is the case in point. I notice that the evidence base of this project was weak, and implementation at a large scale happened before a decent assessment was made.

This echoes the discussion on the Millenium Villages in the Guardian where do-gooders rush into implementation of everything they think will help the villagers, claiming it would be immoral to let them wait until an evidence base is established. I sympathise with them, but a minimum of monitoring must be possible between a pilot or startup phase and full-blown execution. Of course, the victims of all this activism are poor, and poor are by definition powerless. The organisation can just move on, looking for fresh victims. There are enough of them : “the poor will always be with you”. With enough failure, we can assure they stay that way.

The posse rides again: where to ?
Failure looks to me like the spin off from a good tendency. The tendency to professionalism, to stop looking at the world as it should be, but as it is. The need for evaluations and feedback loops. The need for research and evidence base. The need to document what works and what not. Part of this professional approach is that failure is just another piece of transparent information from every actor.

However, like we saw the “program approach” coming instead of making good projects, it might be that the Posse on Failure attracts more riders than the one of professional information and risk management.

Markets in everything: 2021: the secondary market for development products.

Posted on by
Reply

Francis Watanabe is project portfolio manager for the government. He acquires development interventions on the secondary market, to add to his portfolio on early child development. Innovators, like the Gates Foundation or Oxfam, or even local governments, start up their interventions, and after the first rated evaluation sell them off to the highest bidder on the secondary market. Interventions from a reliable provider, with a good results projection and long life span are in high demand. Buyers normally will pay for all the investments and overhead, and are prepared to pay the innovator for the further project management. The management fee for high yielding projects can be set quite high. Private sector innovators with a good success rate can earn a good living, and in some sectors, like micro-finance, most innovators are from the private sector. In early child development however, most innovators are former NGOs or foundations.

Watanabe is expected to reach a very good results/cost ratio for his portfolio, better than the average from the donor group, so he cannot just rely on market data. He also has to research on the latest scientific findings and try to identify upcoming new techniques or new innovators. He can also improve his ratings by identifying local champions in difficult environments. Real bargains can be concluded when other countries decide to switch to other priorities, and they offload their old portfolio.

Thanks to the secondary market approach, most donors have managed to improve the development results of their work with a factor two or even three, all on a stable budget.

It seems like this market approach just had to happen when the different building blocks for the system were available:

  • In order to have a functional market, knowledge asymmetry should be solved as much as possible. The transparency drive in development funding provided the information needed. The International Aid Transparency Initiative lead to the availability of data on every intervention by every actor in a comparable way. IATI started just did this.
  • The results based approach lead to a system where interventions should deliver on the promised results.
  • Standards in results reporting and impact evaluations led to the rating of projects for a specific development outcome. Independent rating agencies emerged from evaluation and audit consultancies.

The acceptance of the Sphere standard as the absolute poverty line set a baseline and brought it all together.

The real breakthrough came with the sphere standards, setting concrete lines for absolute poverty. Donors wanted to spend the bulk of their money on palpable morality & evidence based interventions for the poor, instead of for vague institutional goals or long term elusive economical growth.

Inevitably once the results based approach was accepted, coördination and partnership moved from the agenda. Indeed, as ownership and the “do no harm principle”were part of the basic set of principles, debating coördination and partnership was not necessary any more. Any intervention bypassing ownership issues would get a bad rating for sustainability. Partnerships and coördination became more organic: it had to serve the development goals. Pragmatically the operators moved from partnership to competition and back again, according to the needs of the beneficiaries.

However, still a hefty 30 % of the interventions happen outside of the system. This is normal, as most of the interventions that don’t cover basic services are more difficult to assess on their results potential and their value would be too difficult to estimate. Indeed: important work still happens in the rule of law, security, democracy, governance and economic development. However, a secondary market for this type of projects still seems a few decades away.

The Sphere Project: Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response and the Poverty Line.

Posted on by
Reply

The Sphere standards and humanitarian efficiency.

The latest edition of the Sphere Handbook was presented on the 23rd of June, and the more I read it and think about it, the more relevant I find this standard.

“The Sphere Handbook is a voluntary code and self-regulatory tool for quality and accountability[…] The Handbook does not offer practical guidance on how to provide certain services […] it explains what needs to be in place in order to ensure a life with dignity for the affected population.”

The standard is based on the experiences in the field of some of the main actors in Humanitarian assistance, and prefers localization above rigid compliance. It sets practical service levels on everything from protection, coördination, water, sanitation and hygiene, food security and nutrition to shelter and health services, but it leaves it open to the actors to decide how to reach these service levels, leaving room for innovation and improvisation. The “do no harm”principle refers explicitly to the strengthening of local institutions.

Although it is a voluntary code, a generally accepted standard is a god-send for evaluators. Suddenly interventions of different organisation can be compared against the same standard. While in the past evaluations were rarely comparing the efficiency and effectivity of different actors, this becomes feasible. Although the Sphere standards are voluntary, they will become the yardstick against which to measure outcomes.

It is difficult to underestimate the potential effect of having a common standard for evaluating outcomes in driving the quality and efficiency of humanitarian interventions. NGOs will be able to prove how much better their cost/benefit ratio is when compared to multilateral agencies. iNGOs will be able to prove the need for international staff to reach the required quality. Where efficiency and quality gains are possible, the policy for outsourcing and in-sourcing will be scrutinized.

The Sphere standard will be a “living” standard, but it should be rigid enough to drive the accountability an innovation processes.

Looking at the past months, I am surprised to find only limited enthusiasm with the results-based crowd for the Sphere standards.

The Sphere standards and the development paradigm

The sphere standards belong squarely in the humanitarian paradigm. Humanitarian assistance is a moral imperative. The aid is aimed at saving lives, alleviate suffering and preserve human dignity. The support should be given in a neutral and impartial way.

Mentioning the Sphere standards in relation to the development paradigm is not considered appropriate. Indeed: development is seldom framed as only a moral imperative. It rests on the crossroads of different values. The definition of development aid is vague and mixes values (gender equality, human rights,…) with economical development (poverty reduction, infrastructure,…) and governance. Often, in the presentation of development cooperation, poverty alleviation is linked to economic results and even to direct interests for the population in the North, such as getting rich by having more markets or the need to limit immigration. By definition, the actual development interventions are not the result of a single moral imperative, but the result of a political compromise between the needs of the population, the needs of the different local institutions and political powers, and the needs of the international actors.

Within the development paradigm, as there is always an interplay of factors, it is difficult to focus the intervention every actor on its comparative advantage. Institution building is particularly difficult, and national governments are supposed to deliver sophisticated services before they even can deliver the basic functions of the state, like security and the rule of law. Foreign donors try their hand at poverty alleviation, institution building, governance and economic growth, sometimes with little to show for.

In some failed states, this means that the only basic services available are those provided by the humanitarian actors, while development assistance focuses on elusive institution building goals. The poorest of the poor, living with less than Sphere standard level services, are out in the cold. However, the moral imperative to help these poor still stands. The moral imperative ruling humanitarian assistance, should protect everybody in a situation that normally leads to humanitarian interventions, even if the state would like to build institutions one day.

The necessity to assure that the poor receive this basic level of services is recognised by Paul Collier in the Bottom Billion, where he advocates for alternative service delivery mechanisms, and the added value for focusing aid on the poor is highlighted by Owen Barder in his presentation to the British House of Lords.

With the Sphere standards, there exists a framework to prioritize assistance according to the needs to the poorest, based on a moral imperative. Once the conditions improve, the more complex development priority setting could take over.

The Sphere standard as an absolute poverty line

The current international poverty line (was it US$1.25 or 2?) is only used as an indicator for poverty. If you are below this line, it doesn’t really help you. Being poor is not leading to any specific action of the international community. On the other hand, there are also the Millennium Development Goals that set benchmarks for overall government action, but little that tells a poor what he could expect as services.

Moving to the Sphere standard for service delivery to the poor, would create instantly a well defined program. It would also solve the moral issue concerning the pockets of poverty in middle income.

Is it necessary to put the Sphere standard on the agenda in Busan? I think so.

Not longer, but deeper commitments for more aid predictability

Posted on by
Reply
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that one of the major problems in development is the unpredictability of aid. It is taken on face value that this can be reached by introducing long-term commitments, 3-4 years, and preferably beyond. It seems to me this is the wrong approach. Deepening commitments would lead to more predictability. If badly done, long-term commitments could lead to even less predictability.

Lessons from Egypt
William Easterly wrote a nice summary on why autocrats eventually fail to adapt to changing circumstances. They can deliver immobility which is often misread for stability. It is not: with the end of the reign comes inevitably the disruption and chaos: the necessary changes are too important to implement through mere evolution. Dinosaurs don’t evolve into mammals, they are too far gone on a path that was right under different conditions in another era. Long term immobility is not always good for development. Long term predictability should rather be an engagement than a cast in stone approach.

Lessons from the UK budget discussions.
The UK-civil servants don’t get nervous because the government’s budget is annual. This is strange: their salaries are approved annually by something unpredictable as a MP. Their whole livelihood depends on it, they have no plan B, and they don’t panic.

This is because most of the budget (perhaps something like 85 %, I made the numbers up, don’t quote me on them, you get the picture) is based on a sturdy consensus in the society, beyond parties. Another 10 % is deeply entrenched with the current majority. This leaves only 5 % discretionary spending. Those are the nervous people, mostly on a short term contract.

Typically, in the donor development budget, over a legislature, apart from the “assessed” or negotiated contributions to the World Bank, the EU and the UN, nearly everything is discretionary. Longer-term programmes are as discretionary as the short-term ones. Only a wide consensus on the development budget would move it away from this haphazard spending.

The European Commission creates their policy in such a participatory way. They bring on board input from assessments and evaluations, the 27 governments, the civil society and parliament, before proposing a way forward. And after only two years there is a mid-term review. A programme based on such a wide consensus has more chance to be predictable and long-term than a programme built on the wish of a single politician. Such a broad based program can be predictable, even if all the engagements coming from it are short term.

Stop-start development
With a longer term commitment to a country, near the end of the commitment period, a thorough assessment will take place.
Firstly the donor will asses whether they want to stay engaged in the country. The results of the current programme will inform this donor decision, together with factors beyond the country (herd thinking among donors, new themes coming up, other countries become a donor darling, etc. ).
Secondly there must be decided whether the sectors and regions of engagement will stay the same, and thirdly whether they will do the same things in the same way within the sectors.
The result is, from the viewpoint of the recipient in a specific intervention, mostly a lottery. The success or failure of the programme itself will play only a limited role in the decision whether to drop it.
The process can be compared to the end of a regime. It is often preferred to start from a blank slate than to build on what was done earlier.

The cost of continuity and the cost of disruption
For the poor in the third world, continuity is central to development results. Startup costs are notoriously high, there is a learning curve, and development results must not only be obtained, but also made permanent and institutionalised.
The political economy on the donor side is not in line with the needs of the poor. The political benefit of development results is notoriously low for the donor, while the political benefit from aid announcements is high.
As donors are spread thinly over a multitude of sectors, political visibility is obtained by announcing reforms and new programmes, not by pledging continuity of engagement, nor by highlighting results.

Unacceptable reporting requirements
Long-term commitments span 3 to 4 years. This means they sit astride on 2 donor legislatures, and 2 postings of donor officials. Donor reporting “should be” limited, as this leads to “too much transaction costs” (how much does it really cost to forward an internal report? Or even, to publish it on the Internet?). This means that in a 3 year program, the first report that arrives at the donors’ desk arrives after 15 months, and is not acted upon before the project is half way. As international agreements go, they are executed without too much questioning: the cost of concluding them was too high. Abandoning an agreement is not good. As development is innovative, this means that normally the project will not be reassessed and rewired for success after 6 months of failure. The project will only be reported on after 1.5 years, and will probably continue for the last 1.5 years after the first annual report was received as it is too late to save the project anyway. Depth of commitment means close monitoring, in order to understand and allow change as it is necessary.

The evolving consensus: don’t become a dinosaur.
A short feedback loop for the donor would help him to steer its commitments towards his “comfort zone”. The areas of division of labour where the donor finds an internal consensus that they are committed. Annually, the choices in who does what, where, could be reviewed and fine tuned. Evaluations should inform this process at every turn, but also the opinions of the opposition. Rolling programmes become the norm.

After some evolution, the programmes should stabilize around some areas of commitment, where this donor can act predictably. Other areas, where this donor cannot reach this consensus, should probably be left to other actors who can. Like in Humanitarian Assistance, where the Central Emergency Response Fund has the role of rapid response and gap-filling where there are unaddressed needs, the World Bank and other development partners could play this role in development.

In search of a deeper commitment: identities count.
Long term predictability can only exist if the donor country builds a deep internal consensus on what, where and how needs to be done by whom. This commitment must go beyond principles, as it is possible to do wildly different things from year to year within the same principles. It probably must be hands on. The example of the Dutch in a former era comes to mind. They used to be the one stop shop for engagement, expertise and funding on everything water.
Depth of engagement is not synonymous for micro-management. As donors stop spreading themselves thinly, they will understand better the need for local ownership for getting results. Donor support should evolve from the evil stepmother, nagging the partner at every step, to the fairy godmother, empowering the partner to accomplish what they long for, and live happily ever after.

Energy efficiency is the way to go.

Posted on by
Reply

A new article in the New Scientist claims that efficiency gains alone could cut world energy demands by three-quarters.

This is, of course extremely relevant for everybody in the development sector, as we tend to be cought in the maelstrom of environmental innovation, while savings are probably the more efficient way forward. Especially for the poor we like to use as guinea pigs for technology that fails in the rich world.

It seems to me that the sectors with strong commercial interests, such as wind energy, or construction, do get a lot of airtime, while other techniques don’t get any airtime at all.

Bringing down the energy bill with about 20 % of an old house in an area with harsh winters can be done by any of the following investments:

  • New triple glazing and suppression of draughts
  • Roof or ceiling insulation
  • Wearing warm underwear (lowering the room temperature with 3 degrees)
  • Wall insulation
  • Heating only the rooms where you need higher temperature.
  • Getting rid of the draughts

I did not hear about a subsidy for underwear yet. However, this intervention is by large the most economical one.

We will not run out of oil, it will get more expensive as it runs scarce. Progressively more alternatives will become economical, but to overall the price of using energy will become higher. This upward trend will be slower than wat could be expected with only oil as a source, as new energy sources become available.

As the prices go up, we will not only have to consider using better technology, we will also have to consider to just stop doing the activity we were going to do, when other pathways are open to us.

Like putting on underwear when the temperature drops or not installing a heated jacuzzi in the bathroom.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Sunday Paper – New Years’ edition

Posted on by
Reply
  • “Sunshine: at the IMF, of all Places” – Economist’s View; A new paper argues that the best solution to a financial crisis like the one we just experienced is to increase the share of income going to labor: Sunshine: at the IMF, of all places, by Alex…
  • Where Does Hate Come From? – Economist’s View; Daniel Little has a question: Hate as a social demographic : Every democracy I can think of has a meaningful (though usually small) proportion of citizens who fall on the extreme right by any standard: racist, White supremacist, hateful, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, nativist, nationalist, or violently anti-government individuals and groups. In the United States we have many, man…
  • Palestinians Must Be Free – By Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat – Foreign Policy; Ignore the smoke screen thrown up by Israel and its apologists. The real reason for the lack of an enduring Mideast peace deal is the Israeli occupation.
  • The march of freedom – Aid Watch; All men are created equal. Except blacks. Except women. Except gays. American history shows the erosion of the Excepts, although never complete. Yesterday’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was another small victory for freedom. Let’s celebrate, while never losing resolve to keep moving towards complete equality and liberty for All. Why even homophobes should celebrate gay rights victories – Aid Watch; One of my favorite Abraham Lincoln quotes: As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.If I claim the right to deny you rights, that sets the precedent…
  • Freedom from fear: Protecting people from one of the world’s most brutal rebel groups – From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green; Maya Mailer, Humanitarian and Conflict Policy Advisor Across central Africa, men, women and children live in fear of the Lord’s Resistance Army. This predatory group attacks women as they perform their daily tasks – fetching water or tending to their fields – and children returning from school. It abducts, mutilates, rapes and kills, using extreme violence against the most vulnerable. Surviv…
  • Assessing Humanitarian Aid – Global Development: Views from the Center; A lot can be said against the methodology DARA uses, and even against the results they publish (honestly, New Zealand doing better than the Netherlands?). However, the index is necessary and useful. Subscribing to principles, without creating a cost to the non-compliance is moot. DARA makes it worthwhile for a donor to comply, as non-compliance leads to dismal scores. Countries should get more detailed feedback, as they need to be able to explain the problems caused by the methodological issues, and address those that are caused by the lack of motivation to comply with the undersigned principles.
  • Local politics a tough nut to crack – Chris Blattman; Donors push “community driven development” programs largely to strengthen local institutional capacity, democracy, and inclusiveness. (Sometimes overlooking the fact that these three goals are not…
  • Development Policy Review, Theme Issue: Aid, Institutions and Governance – What Have We Learned – Resources – Overseas Development Institute (ODI) – www.odi.org.uk; As part of ODI’s 50th anniversary celebrations, DPR has republished nine key articles in the field of aid, institutions and governance, with an introductory essay by former Editor David Booth.

Results in HIV/AIDS interventions: Considerations on the need for a vertical approach in an horizontal world, and vice versa

Posted on by
Reply
Aids day
During Aids-day, the blogs proved that the debate between the believers in a vertical approach and the believers in a geographical approach rages on. I did not write on it before, because it is an issue with ramifications in all directions, and wonderful opportunities for tangents and meandering digressions. Most thinking is black and white: HIV/AIDS needs advocacy and a vertical approach otherwise it does not get the priority it deserves, or all development must be locally generated, and advocates should stay out.
I will try to be brief and as provocative as I can to highlight the need for a more instinctive and competitive approach on this divisive issue.
Conferences
I was working in the HIV/AIDS sector in South Africa, before Mbeki got internet-shavvy, and before the Global Fund For AIDS, TB and Malaria existed. It was a very frustrating experience. The South African government was hailed as one of the few Sub-Saharan governments with a decent policy, but rates of HIV-positive cases kept going up. Donors and the government were subsidizing mostly advocacy and awareness programs, and the responsible officials were often found in international conferences. In short, everything was politically correct, and nothing worked. Until GFATM was created. They had exotic ideas such as “evidence based” interventions. Things were falling into place when the price for drugs dropped too. Alternative reading: until Brazil and MSF got their way and cheap drugs.

Lesson 1: If there is an internationally recognized crisis, focused forceful global action can be useful.
Lesson 2: “Evidence based” interventions might have a bigger chance for success than doing whatever seems right when you are at it.
Lesson 3: Advocates can make a difference. Sometimes for the better.

Reform
Since the UN was created, there have been calls for reform, but here I am talking about 2004, with a donor drive for more streamlining amongst agencies. Smaller agencies should be integrated in the bigger ones. This would lead to more efficiency, as we all know that big bureaucracies, thanks to economies of scale, are more efficient than nimble organisations fighting for their survival. One of the agencies under fire was UNIFEM, The organisation that “provides financial and technical assistance to innovative programmes and strategies that promote women’s human rights, political participation and economic security.” It should have been merged with UNDP. One of the delegates of the G77 berated: all UN-agencies have been created because there was a good reason. So good a reason, that all MS in unanimity decided to create this organisation. Are you really sure that the situation of women has changed to such a degree that we don need this organisation any more?

Indeed only 6 years later, the same donors managed to create a bigger UN-women organisation, that should strengthen the original mandate of UNIFEM, and bring it to a larger scale.

Lesson 4: never thrust a donor (or anyone) that is sure about the next silver bullet
Lesson 5: Sometimes, if something is very important, you need to create a special tasks force to make it happen.
Lesson 6: Development fads come in tides, tides rolling in and out, a new tide rolling in…

Localizing
In the early years when I was working on HIV/AIDS in South Africa, it was amazing how many of the “good practices” were just copy paste from the interventions that were used in the HIV/AIDS communities on the West Coast. A group threatened by exclusion dominated by homosexuality and intravenous drug use, while in Africa victims were often heterosexual middle class. It was only when results were required that the programs got adapted.

Lesson 7: local actors seeking locally adapted solutions based on global knowledge works better than local solutions transplanted to a different ecosystem. Without good knowledge to start with, chances are good nothing will happen at all.
Lesson 8: never thrust donors or iNGOs that they are open for local input. If they think they have a silver bullet, they will push it, claiming it is localised.

Conclusions:

Lesson 9: global institutions should offer global knowledge and try to adapt catalytic operations to local circumstances. Acceptance and rolling out should be up to the local owners of the problem (if they find it is a problem).
Lesson 10: vertical and localized horizontal programs must coexist, and fight for attention. Having a dynamic of competition, where global, vertical programs must prove their mettle, and local horizontal programs are constantly challenged is a good thing.

Lesson 11: as a donor, you invest your money best where it delivers the most. Depending of the situation and the “maturity” of the issue, this can be a global vertical program, or a local operation, or anything in between. You should have thematic and geographical programmes with different goals competing for resources and attention.