Comments

Thanks very much Elpidius for raising this important point. Hopefully the baseline data will confirm your point regarding low domestic animal productivity.

Indeed a well written piece of great perseverance and hard work. I enjoyed reading to the last bit. Lastly congratulations and best of luck in your future endeavours.

Thank you for sharing those good and bad times stories that makes you bring this far. This motivates some of us too

The account is relatable mandeship. Can't agree more everything that had said portrays our life back then. With the grace of God we came this far irrespective.

Dear Mr. Baumann, thank you for these insights. While you do not provide a direct answer to the question of the effectiveness of UN’s development support, one must conclude: Not very effective. Or not effective at all. Your focus on effectiveness is most welcome. While the UN agencies’ organizational performance did receive little attention in the 2018 UN reform wave, it had already been assessed, debated and ignored at the beginning of the millennium - for instance through the DfiD multilateral aid reviews. We seem to agree on ills such as UN projectitis, short-termism, lack of scalable interventions, lack of lessons learned or viable theories of change, focus on obtaining resources rather than delivering on results. And I may add: very little capacity for critical self-reflection. Your review is based on evaluations commissioned by the UN agencies themselves. Very few of these evaluations provide a remotely independent assessment of the effectiveness of the agencies’ work. The typical ‘country programme evaluation’ is designed as a formative evaluation to inform the design of the new country programme; evaluators traipsing around the ecosystem of UN officials and direct counterparts will hardly recommend to shut down the agency’s country office for the lack of results. Any study can point out some contributions made by a concerned UN agency; but this does answer neither to the question of effectiveness nor that of value for money. Your first recommendation is a statement, which I wish to paraphrase: the current UN reform dogma has turned UN agencies into service providers accountable to host governments, at the cost of focusing on their mandate and their raison d'etre. The effect of this should be contemplated while looking at the countries at the bottom quarter of the corruption perception index. I agree with you that performance, not the amount of funds raised, should be the measurement of success. It would be interesting to see a study assessing the development trajectory of a country, and the role played by the UN or other development agencies (if any) therein. I disagree with your critique of earmarking. It is only natural that a donor wants to earmark funds to a well performing agency instead of throwing money into a muddled pool of underperforming organizations; it is also understandable that a donor may wish to finance a specific concern instead of a hotchpotch of issues that reflect every UN mandate under the sun. Earmarking is the market mechanisms that separates the wheat from the chaff. The ‘likeminded’ donors better start coordinating and rethinking their own bilateral aid.

Thank you Toka.

You just said it. I agree as a citizen of Papua New Guinea.

Hi Neal, That's a fair comment. It's like the old joke "The food is terrible—and such small portions!" I suppose I have always believed in the mantra "more aid and better aid", and am not prepared to give up on that just yet!

Thanks Dev Policy for this interesting piece. Like Ed and Denis my immediate thoughts go to the integration of AusAID with DFAT, the corresponding decline in aid capability, and the increasing numbers of projects that would have commenced and completed since 2015. Further analysis around this would be very welcome. Meanwhile just a word of caution in terms of averaging these ratings – as this is ordinal data it is my understanding it shouldn’t be averaged (as there is not an equal gap between the ratings).

Right. But here we focus on the representation of small island countries in the Pacific.

Aren’t all Australians Pacific Islanders? Isn’t Australia an island in the Pacific Ocean?

It is perhaps not timid but very sensible that the Australian government is focused on the “long-term rebuild of Australia’s international development program” before any rapid increases in the aid budget. The DevPolicy article (5 May) "Why are two in five Australian aid investments rated unsatisfactory on completion?" raises concerning issues on the current quality of the aid program i.e. 40% of aid investments at completion independently assessed as "failures". This equates to annual aid spending of $1.9 billion (based on the current $4.7 aid budget).