Tag Archives: transparency

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

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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.

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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)

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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.

Humanitarian needs and the way we fund the Horn of Africa

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Some important annual milestones for needs based humanitarian donor budgeting just passed: the publication of the 2011 Global Humanitarian Assistance Report and the Mid Year review of the OCHA Consolidated Appeals.

The GHA report analyses the available data on humanitarian funding. It informs you on the reality of funding, in contrast with the fluidity of donor declarations and promises. Donors with a high media visibility might turn out to have low commitments . As an operator in the field, it tells you who funds what where. Compared to other sectors, funding seems to move in a direction where, according to the GHD consensus, more efficient humanitarian assistance is possible. The mid year review gives a snapshot of the needs and funding shortfalls in the different crises, as it is reported through the UN-system.
One of the aims of both documents is to get a better allocation of resources, to have more predictability and better match the donor budgets with the needs.

Indeed, the unspoken consensus on humanitarian assistance is that humanitarian assistance is a moral imperative, a human right, stronger than the “human rights”. When the shit really hits the fan, we will come and help you out. You can count on it. Everywhere. Anywhere. You will get at least what is promised in the Sphere standards. We will not let you sink lower. Your life and dignity will be protected.

Therefore, humanitarian assistance should be organised more like an insurance than like a charity. What is the current mechanics of humanitarian funding, and how is the political economy now, and what should change to become more like an insurance?

The mechanics: The budget cycle
The donor budget cycle starts for most government donors in march of the year before. The first draft of annual (or rolling multi annual) budget is prepared before the mid-year review is received. The only data on needs available are those from the year before. The budget is approved around November in countries with a working government, meaning before Common Appeal is even shared. The input for the budget cycle comes from the common appeal for the year before the budget. Even the review comes too late. The budget cycle is conducive for stable, long term investment in an insurance like scheme, with stable funding.

The mechanics: sudden disasters: the additional funds delusion
When a sudden overwhelming disaster strikes funding of the humanitarian budget is redirected to this new need. Most donors provide with a reserve of 20 % of their budget for sudden onset disasters.
Calls will be placed to liberate “additional funds”. These funds will come in the first place of course from the budgets within the same programme: the allocations for flexible funding or for complex crisis response that was not yet paid in the same year.These other crises will be “forgotten”: all attention goes to the media hog.
If the situation is politically overwhelming, the head of the humanitarian department will have a good hand to fight for additional budgets from other programmes. These will normally be development budgets. Unspent development funds will be transferred to humanitarian assistance. It is extremely rare budgets from outside the development sphere (e.g. unemployment benefits) get transferred to the humanitarian budget for a crisis.

Political economy for budgeting based on sudden disaster spending
This approach leads to an incentive structure for the level of the humanitarian budget that runs against the consensus on humanitarian assistance as a right:
The visibility of complex crisis and predictable funding is limited
The politically experienced needs are mostly in sudden onset disasters.
When it comes to “important crises” the voted humanitarian budget is irrelevant. You could as well accept the need for flexibility, and scrape the money together when disaster strikes. It will make you look good.

The political economy of spending in sudden onset disasters pushes against the principles of Good Humanitarian Donorship and pushes the long term budget provisions down.
Why would you have a high humanitarian budget if you can have a cabinet meeting with media coverage and add from other budgets when there is a political need? In this reasoning, the humanitarian needs are secondary.
It is indeed remarkable that countries with a “presidential” approach to humanitarian spending have lower annual budgets, but also have troops on standby when CNN is filming.

It is normal that the public and even most politicians think humanitarian assistance happens meanly in natural disasters, while in reality 80 % of the funds is spent in complex crises, mostly in civil war zones.

However, something more is at work. I like to call it the incredible moral fibre of the humanitarian donor and agency administration. In some countries, the flexible funding of needs based allocation mechanisms is and stays well funded. Moreover, disaster preparedness and prevention get a good funding, inspite of the political economy.

An alternative approach? Funding instruments
The humanitarian operations by the main actors have moved fast towards an accountable system trying to deliver services according to standards.

Donors should fund instruments that build up reserves and allocate towards the most important needs today in the shifting humanitarian crises. These instruments should be accountable and look for efficiently delivered effectiveness.

There is already an interlocking system with enough redundancy that does just this:
The CERF, DREF and ICRC core funding act as a global system of insurance for humanitarian needs. They can act in sudden disasters and fund forgotten long-term crises.
Most humanitarian agencies have a flexible fund for allocation according to needs. The UNICEF thematic fund for humanitarian assistance, IRA at WFP, SFERA at the FAO, etc.
ECHO acts like one giant needs based fund, with good management practices, oversight and quality control.
There are country level pooled funds and Emergency Response funds.

Apart from funding “needs based”instruments a donor will have to keep some hands on presence in crises that are perceived as important: human solidarity must be done and must be seen to be done. This should not obscure that working through insurance-like mechanisms is far superior when talking about efficiency and effectiveness.

However, there is little political gain in funding these instruments: when the list comes out of donor support for disaster relief, the budget will be spent, and there are no more funds available for bringing your country in the spotlight. Responsible donors and agencies manage however to keep up this kind of funding.

One fund or interlocking systems ?
Politically, the creation of one big fund seems interesting. . It would simplify the message and management for the donors. One check every year. However, in order to have an innovative, learning system, with enough redundancy to pick up the slag when one actor fails, a further development based on interlocking and sometimes competing mechanisms seems indicated.

Insurances need assurances: blank checks or value for money?
However, there is one issue with these instruments: most of them start from the hypothesis that all actors in humanitarian assistance deliver quality and value for money. Comparative evaluations and competitive bidding on value for money are rare. Most attention goes to effectiveness, not to efficiency within a certain quality standard for effectiveness. The instruments for creating instruments for assurance on value for money exist however: there are standards for service delivery and accountability, that could be used for diving prices down and quality delivery up.

These assurances will be the cornerstone towards an insurance-like system

Including preparedness and prevention
Like every insurance, there should be in-build incentives for preparedness and prevention spending, as one of the most efficient humanitarian approaches.

Pushing Good Humanitarian Donorship
The gatekeepers for information should brainwash the politicians and the general public by highlighting the positive contribution of flexible accountable and needs based instruments. The current practices by the main humanitarian actors are more geared towards monetising sudden onset crises, hoping it sticks into the general budget. This should be an active approach, worth a significant portion of the budget.

Some possibilities are obvious:
Ocha should, for every crisis, mention first the contributors to CERF; the same could be requested from ICRC for core and IFRC for DREF. There should be an effort also by teh EU to highlight the importance of flexible funding above ad hoc funding.
Pressure should be as little as possible on “additional funding” the pressure should be to increase the budget for needs based funds. Even pressure for flexible funding to agencies does not have the necessary flexibility to respond exactly to the needs.
The overall budget should be used in rankings. This is why GHA is so important. Rankings per crisis are important, but should be presented always with overall rankings.
To move to an insurance thinking, contributions could be presented preferably as a part of the GNP or per capita, instead of on an absolute basis.

What matters for increasing the humanitarian budget?
An increase in the humanitarian donor budget will not be directly caused by an increase in humanitarian needs. It will depend in the first place on the importance a donor country gives to humanitarian assistance in general. It will be based on the conviction that Humanitarian assistance is a right. It will depend on conviction of the politicians and the general public that assistance should be given more, and that the money is well spend.

This means that the moral case for assistance must be promoted until it becomes a consensus, first in each country, second globally.

It also means that vetting humanitarian partners is necessary. An insurance type of coverage is only possible with decent standards. Standards for service delivery, accountability and evaluation make it possible to compare the operations of the different actors, Multilaterals and INGOs. It does not mean that data or evaluations will convince anybody, it means that those advocating the moral case can do so from the high ground, knowing the tax payers’ money will be well spent.

The biggest enemy for this approach could be the NGO, or multilateral that can make a killing with ad hoc funding.

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

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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.

The Fragmentation of Humanitarian Aid: Market failure leads to planning and broken networks.

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Is Fragmentation a solution or a problem?
One of the main reasons the donor community pushes for reform in the humanitarian aid sector is the fragmentation of the services. As an antidote for fragmentation, coordination is proposed. The conventional narrative says that small interventions and fragmented approaches are inefficient. If this is the case, a market approach to the allocation of funds, where efficiency is rewarded, would create incentives to consolidate, as it would be more efficient to have less actors. Currently the system seems to fragment even further, even while high level declarations are signed to vowing to stop the fragmented service delivery.Making the system work as a market, with incentives to make it more responsive to efficiency gains would improving the results of the system as a whole. Self regulating systems of incentives normally work better for complex systems than crude top down regulation by decree.

In this blog I will try to determine whether the current humanitarian system can be defined as a market geared towards better results, and identify possible incentives to make it respond better.

Competitive markets and market concentration

A normal market has a few market leaders and a long tail. The redundancy of the market (more providers providing the same service) is not seen as a problem, but as an assurance for getting best value for money. The long tail is for practical purposes irrelevant, but it guarantees that special niches can be covered, and the big actors are kept on their toes, because the small firms could always challenge them if they manage to innovate or produce better.

An example of such a market is the one for PCs: The top 4 manufacturers produce 60 % of the PCs, the 6th a meagre 5.3 %, and all the thousands of others combined master 1/3rd of the market.

Computers are of a decent quality, and there is innovation leading to better, and cheaper computers.

Table 1
Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q10 (Units)

Company 3Q10 Shipments 3Q10 Market Share (%) 3Q09 Shipments 3Q09 Market Share (%) 3Q09-3Q10 Growth (%)
HP 15,431,749 17.5 15,513,420 18.9 -0.5
Acer 11,527,716 13.1 11,726,586 14.3 -1.7
Dell 10,816,474 12.2 9,908,099 12.1 9.2
Lenovo 9,140,778 10.4 6,871,379 8.4 33.0
Asus 4,793,186 5.4 3,911,263 4.8 22.5
Toshiba 4,695,600 5.3 4,014,945 4.9 17.0
Others 31,896,091 36.1 30,106,333 36.7 5.9
Total 88,301,595 100.0 82,052,026 100.0 7.6

Note: Data includes desk-based PCs and mobile PCs.
Source: Gartner (October 2010)

However, fragmentation in the development world seems not to deliver this kind of expected results. Why?

The humanitarian market: perceptions of fragmentation and of competition
Looking at Humanitarian Assistance funding , which is (imperfectly) documented through the FTS system managed by OCHA, we find for 2010 a total funding of USD 7 billion.

Appealing Organisation Funding 2010 (million USD) % of total funding
All others (636 organisations) 1.507 22 %
WHO 127 2 %
UNRWA 163 2 %
IOM 219 3 %
FAO 229 3 %
UNHCR 574 8 %
UNICEF 740 11 %
WFP 3.403 49 %
Total 6,963

 100 %

Data: FTS, Summary of requirements and contributions – per Appealing Organisation in 2010, dd. 9/02/2011. Note: the data don’t show all the contributions to MSF nor ICRC, 2 important actors in the field. It is possible that some NGO-funding is not reported through FTS, however, at least donor government contributions are well reported, as donors want all their contributions to show for international forums.

On first sight, this distribution looks wrongly like a normal market, with some market leaders and a long tail. There would be some risks for monopoly abuse by WF. The top 7 organisations deliver 78 % of the assistance. The Herfindahl-Index (HHI) is 26.2, which hints to an extremely concentrated market. The PC-market has only a HHI of about 8.

  • A HHI index below 10 % indicates a highly competitive index.
  • A HHI index between 10 to 18 % (or 1,000 to 1,800) indicates moderate concentration.
  • A HHI index above 18 % indicates high concentration

On closer inspection however, the humanitarian system is not one market at all.

Indeed, WFP is dealing only with food security and logistics. UNICEF with water and Children, UNHCR with refugee camps. The next organisation dealing with food security (as only one of its activities) would be Oxfam UK recieving only 0.8 % of the total contributions. Less than 1/50th of WFP. The top 7 organisations are all UN-entities focusing on a UN-given mandate, in theory not competing with each other. For execution those UN-entities rely partly on the other actors at the bottom of the pile.

Fragmentation within the sector: on what basis are NGOs selected by donors?
Humanitarian aid is organised per sector, with a UN-agency (sometimes assisted by an NGO) as “cluster lead”. The cluster lead has “only” the power of its mandate, its financial means and capacity.

Within the main sectors dominated by the UN-agencies, there is little fragmentation. There is domination by the big players and not enough competition to have a real market. The humanitarian field the cluster leads, such as UNICEF, WFP and UNHCR, receive five to ten times the amount of funding of the main NGOs competing in the same field. In the food sector this phenomenon is the most striking, with 3/4 of the funding through WFP, and an extremely concentrated market with an HHI of 70. In the Water and Sanitation sector were actors in essence do the same job, there were 162 actors in 2010 (data of 09/02/2011), the cluster lead, UNICEF, gets 39% of the resources, followed on a distance by Oxfam GB (6.7%), Solidarités (2.9 %). This leads to a HHI of 16.4, still highly concentrated.

However, the cluster cannot be seen as one market: The UN-agencies get often their funding through core resources or separate funds. This means we should split the data in 2: The UN-agencies are a separate market from “the others”.
When excluding UNICEF from this health sector analysis, the HHI drops to an unheard of 2.98. This means the market is splintered. This is a sign of little return to size. The market does not reward any possible economies of scale. For the other sectors (health, protection, shelter, coordination) the relative weight of the UN-cluster lead is lower, but the NGO-field is as fragmented.

More analysis is needed to explain this phenomenon, as it is evident that there are economies of scale in the sector, but apparently they are not rewarded by the market.

Looking at the water-data per donor, the level where the market operates seems to be the donor level. For most donors, 4 sets of partners can be identified:

  1. the UN-agencies and the Red cross
  2. Some international NGOs probably with a local presence in the donor country.
  3. Donor country specific NGOs
  4. Possibly, some crisis specific NGOs.

Each donor has its own specific funding pattern. Sometimes there is a high weight of UN-agencies and i-NGOs, sometimes the sectors with most needs prevail, more often than not, at least part of the money is spread over donor country NGOs.

The water market for NGOs apparently is not a single market, but a set of unrelated markets per donor and per set of partners.

This means that the market push towards more quality and efficiency work only within the small donor specific markets. However, at this level, the “partnership” approach could lead to an approach where the allocation is rather spread on basis of negotiation than on selection. The market model would be a cartel.

The role of the UN-cluster leads
From the data, it seems that the NGO-funding and the UN must be considered as separate markets, even with different funding sources. Indeed, there is little evidence that the donors in general (except perhaps for some exceptions, like the CRF, or ECHO) have the wherewithal to allocate funds on basis of quality and results alone.

One hypothesis that the donor governments de facto consider the services delivered by the main UN-entities as a “utility”, a service that is part of “global governance”, a near natural monopoly. The reasons why they continue to fund the small fry are unclear from the data. It could be that they need the visibility possibly through national NGOs for internal reasons, or they might want to keep the UN-entities on their toes by providing some competition and variety of actors. If they want to deliver competition for results, the system does not seem to reward the better organisations by letting them grow. If they want to keep variety of actors, they would strengthen the hand of the NGOs better if they did not fragment them so much.
With the overwhelming part of the funding for the crucial sectors going to the UN-cluster leads, it is notable that coördination, the elimination of overlaps and filling of gaps, is still perceived as a major problem. The impact of other players in areas dominated by the big entities should be limited at best. Especially in the “life saving”sectors.

However, it is possible that the small outfits are many times as efficient as the UN-entities, showing an impact that is way more important than their share of the funding. It might also be possible that there is a perceived lack of coördination, as the visibility of the small NGOs tends to be bigger than the visibility per unit of funding of the juggernauts.

The selection of NGOs by the donors
A visit to the website of ECHO (the Humanitarian Office of the European Commission) on their partnerships is revealing. On the 8th of February 2011, ECHO worked with 191 partners. On first sight, this looks like a crowded field. However, looking per member state, there are only on average 7 partners per member state. The UK alone fields some 40 NGOs, but most member states have only a few ECHO-accredited NGOs.
Within the NGO-group a hopeful tendency shows up: Most national NGOs are local branches of international outfits, with a good reputation and internal quality control systems. This means that the perceived field fragmentation might be partly a ploy from the NGOs to deliver their quality work as one, while authorizing the individual donors to shine. They “game” the system by obtaining funds thanks to their national identity and results through their global organisation.

We conclude from the FTS data that the donors don’t base their selection procedures for NGOs only on the GHD indicators (needs based, capacity of executing agency, effectiveness), but add to it, sometimes even as a prerequisite, the nationality of the provider. Different choices of partners could be acceptable if each donor would focus on a different market: a sub-sector where it takes on its responsibility in the framework of division of labour. This seems not to be the case: donor nationality is not a result area in humanitarian assistance.

The fragmentation per nationality is a concern for the quality of the humanitarian assistance. Donors don’t play their role in the oversight of the funding, as they observe only a narrow slice of the market. If the prerequisite for the allocation of resources is the geographic location of the branch in the north, the importance of other parameters, such as services to the beneficiaries, quality, transparency and efficiency goes down.

The pressure for consolidation in order to get to optimum scale is stopped in favour of the pressure to stay fragmented to maximize national donor resources. Maintaining the status quo on the division of funding is an act of survival for the individual splinters: people can lose their job. In this environment a small NGO will rather seek rents and single sourced funding rather than risk its own survival by moving to a more competitive global environment. Results focus is not in the interest of most of the NGO-players in the sector.

When donors reserve 20 % to the NGO-sector, but every donor finances a different set of NGOs, while they finance the same group of UN-entities, Red cross and MSF, the NGO-sector will be too fragmented to play a relevant political role as it is difficult to project power as a splintered group.

The way forward
To improve the humanitarian results for the beneficiaries, the problem area is the NGO-sector.
The selection of NGOs should be aimed at the general principles for government spending: best value for money and transparency through competition. Selection should be rigorous on basis of criteria that are relevant for the beneficiaries. The market for NGOs must be widened, preferably to the global level, to make it possible for NGOs to reap economies of scale. The needs for national “visibility” could be addressed through the active promotion of national chapters of international NGOs. Such a system would not eliminate small, effective or specialized NGOs, but would lead to more consolidation where this would lead to more efficiency.

Some possible action points:

  • Assure that the funding to NGOs is based on criteria of efficiency, quality and value for money.
    1. Make projects, reports, data, evaluations comparable across donors by using standard forms and data.
    2. Consider support to national NGOs without competition from iNGOs as tied aid for OCDE/DAC
    3. Fund only interventions  you can actually monitor as a donor. with a minimal size, and leave it to flexible funds, or strong actors to fill the gaps. (Correction: some small interventions by niche specialists are crucial. I would not want to cause them to lose funding).
  • Abandon direct funding to NGOs by donor governments, and fund them only through needs based allocation systems, such as thematic funds, CERF or ERF.

In the short term, dealing with the UN-system seems to need rather an evolutionary approach than a revolutionary approach. In the long run, if NGOs become more competitive, the system will have to be reformed completely.

Possible ways forward for UN-funding :

  1. Accept the role of the UN-entities as humanitarian utilities and regulate them as such. Allocate them the near monopoly they already enjoy now, but assure the drive for more efficiency by e.g. a outcome and impact evaluation, outsourcing functions for more results at a lower cost.
  2. Separate the UN-monopoly from their operations outside of their UN-monopoly; fund the monopoly as an utility, and open the rest to global competition with the NGOs.
  3. Introduce competition on basis of quality and efficiency of the organisations. This should lead to a more diverse market, with less monopoly power of the UN-entities. Levers for maintaining coördination should be build in this system.
  4. Continue the same system, with a near monopoly of the cluster lead and limited direct funding to NGOs, but assure that the choice of the NGOs is based on criteria of efficiency and quality. This would lead to more innovation while keeping a good overall coördination through the UN.

In general, when funding a specific crisis, the best results for the beneficiaries should be obtained by considering the 4 sets of partners as one market. In the light of the limited donor capacity in most countries, it can be argued that the direct funding of local partners is not feasible for each donor.

Conclusion : the collapse of complex systems
The organisation of humanitarian assistance is for the moment not based on a global market. the market is fragmented on the donor level and per set of partners: UN-system, national NGOs, International NGOs, crisis specific partners.

Within sectors calls for better regulation and a recognition of the role of the UN-entity as a “utility”delivering humanitarian assistance.

The funding of NGOs is problematic. There is a place for a competent NGO-sector, but the donor incentives create a lot of dead wood in this sector. The current system stands in the way of an evolution towards better learning, quality and efficiency. It is the funding by the donors, that leads to the current fragmentation in NGO-resources. The donors will have to reassess their funding model completely to work towards more efficiency and better results instead of against it. Otherwise the fragmentation of the NGO-sector can only increase, while the efficiency of the NGO-sector will diminish. The legitimacy of humanitarian aid itself will be under fire. Funding outside the UN-coordinated system, for ICRC and MSF as a more accountable option, could counterbalance this trend.

In order to move away from the current equilibrium, Donors should select their partners on basis of their results and not on basis of their nationality. They should be able to compare different actors with the same yardstick. A first step would be to introduce a level playing field for accepting, assessing, monitoring and evaluating interventions.

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.