Australia’s peak council for non-government international aid and development organisations has released its policy proposals for the Australian aid program ahead of the September 7 election.
ACFID puts forward some 20 policies across a range of areas, but its press release focuses on support for increasing total aid to 0.5% of GNI, and providing more aid for Australian NGOs. ACFID calls for funding for the AusAID-NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP) to increase from two per cent of ODA to eight per cent. If you are unfamiliar with the ANCP and how it works, my colleagues Jonathan Pryke and Robin Davies recently wrote on it.
Such an increase would continue the rapid growth ANCP has experienced since the scale-up of Australian aid started in 2005-06. Then ANCP totalled $26 million. Today it is $141 million. Further increasing the ANCP to 8% of a growing aid budget would imply a program of support for Australian development NGOs in excess of $600 million.
The proposal also calls for increases in a number of other areas:
- Doubling the number of volunteer placements to 2,000 a year. Problems with the existing volunteer program have been highlighted recently by Stephen Howes and myself, and an Office of Development Effectiveness evaluation into the volunteer program is currently underway.
- A doubling of support for food security.
- Scaling-up of funding for disability prevention, treatment and inclusion in Australia’s aid program.
- Increasing links between Australian medical and health research organisations and institutions in neighbouring countries.
- More funding for humanitarian response, and more of that (at least 25%) to go directly to NGOs.
ACFID also advocates for a Cabinet Minister for aid, less red tape for NGOs, and benchmarks for the aid program. It wants the Office of Development Effectiveness to report directly to the Minister – on the grounds that that will make it independent, though arguably it is independence from the Minister that is required if we want “a real watchdog for Australian aid.”
NGOs often get a hard-time on the accountability front. I’ve done it myself. But to add some balance to the above comments, while I’d certainly like to see greater accountability from NGOs, I’d also like to see a great deal more accountability from private contracting firms who win aid-contracts, and any other entity that receives aid. Why pick on NGOs?
Apparently ‘aid for trade’ takes-up about 17 per cent of the current aid budget. (See Robin Davies’ post ‘Separated at birth’ for this statistic.) In this context, I’m not sure what is wrong with Australian NGOs asking for an increase in funding from two per cent to eight per cent. They provide important contributions to development, across a wide-range of sectors and often get help to people others don’t reach. This may be imperfect and there is plenty of room for improvement. But if you scratch beneath the surface of any entity involved in the ‘aid industry’, you’ll find the same.
The cash benchmark is an interesting idea, and Blattman’s blog certainly points out the potential and pitfalls of this. But how to benchmark every single aid-funded activity against simply giving cash, in the absence of the cash-giving counterfactual? We’d be spending more money on RCTs than programmes if we had to prove the counterfactual for every single intervention. For sure, over time the evidence-base will build-up but for now, perhaps it is more realistic to ask the question than be expected to prove it.
On ‘adding balance to the above (below) comments’: all my remarks on accountability, evaluation and transparency are sector-neutral and apply equally to all players, particularly to the public sector which we expect to practice what it preaches and lead by example. Same goes for private contractors, both of which have more resource capability for it.
On the cash benchmark, I agree with the views in this post (particularly last few paras), so I won’t repeat them.
On ‘we’d be spending more money on RCTs than programmes’: this warrants a reply, as I think it is not the right way to frame this important issue:
– Firstly, evaluation will only ever be a subset of program funding. Now, it is barely is a subset, but rather absorbed in a lot of cases, when not ex-ante earmarked or paid for after. There is little threat of evaluation becoming a major component of, let alone overtaking, program funding anytime soon.
– Secondly, not all sound impact evaluations are RCTs*, nor should they be. RCTs or other quasi and non-randomised evaluations also need not be expensive as those ideologically against them like to make them out to be in their attacks – good, scaled research is often not cheap, true, but there are countless grad students are running innovative experiments and mechanism studies partnering with small scale NGOs, and may of these make it in to top journals without the dollar tag attached, with immensely useful lessons for practitioners and policy makers. A more productive approach is problem solving these costs and feasibility constraints down, rather than repeating the barriers that have already been knocked down in debates.
Combining these two points and given the starting point of impact evaluations here in Australia and in our organisations and programs, there is no doubt we can do with more: asking the questions as well as trying to answer them, ideally with some kind of proof rather than rhetoric. On RCTs, I do however welcome AusAIDs funding of J-PAL to open a new office in Indonesia, and hope this catalyses more randomised evaluation in our region, particularly the Pacific.
Great and punchy post, Ashlee. This is exactly what I thought after scanning the document from my twitter feed.
Interesting how the first big point was all about accountability (holding the Government to account to taxpayers), but then increased flexibility, funding and cutting ‘red-tape’ for the NGO sector, under the axiom that the accreditation and code of conduct is enough accountability and checks and balances to ensure that effective aid is delivered. By definition, holding the Government to account also means the Government holding every organisation it provides public funding to also to account, and while flexibility, innovation, and dynamism with less bureaucracy is great in theory, there is an absolute dearth across the board of sound, public and transparent impact evaluation evidence which would need to accompany it in practice.
Slight tangent, but definitely a useful way to view this ‘what organisations and programs should aid money fund?’ question, is this ongoing discussion that poverty reduction programs, whether delivered by private contractors, NGO contractors, the public service itself or others, should be bench-marked against just giving cash instead. It’s hard to conceptualise in case of emergency assistance, humanitarian, rights-based and human security related aid (which I’d personally contrast to human development aid, the former being a precondition for the dynamic process of the latter) which most NGOs focus on, but still a useful framing for thinking about this, I think. These are a few juicy articles which I really enjoyed on this:
http://chrisblattman.com/2013/08/19/is-it-nuts-to-give-money-to-the-poor/
http://international.cgdev.org/blog/new-documents-reveal-cost-%E2%80%9Cending-poverty%E2%80%9D-millennium-village-least-12000-household
http://www.millenniumvillages.org/field-notes/the-costs-and-benefits-of-the-millennium-villages-correcting-the-center-for-global-development
That Chris Blattman blog post is excellent (as is the segment on This American Life discussing cash transfers). His emphasis of impact assessments is spot on, hopefully bringing more accountability from traditional aid sector partners, such as the NGOs affiliated under ACFID.