Comments

Great observation Melissa and Gordon. Being also guilty of taking up large amounts of community members time in unpaid "participatory" initiatives I wrestle with the same dilemma. Volunteering your time for these sort of things is great but people have other tasks needing attention. If you were to pay a fee however you might get people turning up for the fee and not really interested in what is being discussed (although sometimes a free lunch and a t-shirt might generate the same in a poor community). Not sure how you resolve this. Related issue is payment or not for actual project activities. I once managed a program in East Timor that spent a lot of time working with communities on sustainable agriculture. It was slow work but eventually enough people started to adopt sustainable practices (such as afro-forestry and no burning) that we could see real progress and a commitment to change with people seeing the benefits themselves and initiating changes without payment. A bigger agency came in and started doing similar work but with more rigid project timelines and targets. Things were not going well so they started paying people to plant trees in agroforestry plots so they could meet their targets and satisfy their donors. A community member came to me and explained that they could see our approach would work in the long run but the money from the other agency was needed too much and they had to take up the paid work on the other project and go slow on the other work. I said it was perfectly understandable. In the long run the bigger project failed and the smaller project eventually generated lasting improvements in sustainable land management and food security. That said, I still feel it is big ask as a well paid western development worker to take up large amount of peoples time, without payment, in seemingly endless consultations for "participatory" scoping studies, reviews, evaluations etc. Agree that the problem merits further focussed (and paid) research.

The volunteer spirit has been vanished by the aid industry in the last one and a half decades through so many programs initiated and funded by international agencies including malae and local NGOs. Let's say a 3 dollars cash program as one of the example pushed by the World Bank, it is a good idea in terms of cash circulation in the community but it creates a bad mentality for the future. The limitation of cash transfer in the remote area has encourage communities to attended the meetings. And sometimes they laugh and say it is a win-win solution which we get the numbers of participants as much as we want and plus the photographs, on the other hand they get the incentive of 5-10 dollars a day. Even if there are no outcomes and no follow-ups after the meeting. The Opinion above based on 15 years experienced as civil society and still as member of civil society in Timor Leste.

Thanks Matt for this - it provides a really important insight into the very real challenges faced by small operators, some of whom are established as in this case and others who are new entrants. Here in Vanuatu the province that 'surrounds' Port Vila (SHEFA) has its own tourism promotion office. It has pretty much no budget and what it has sometimes finds itself 'diverted' to other things. But they have done some really good work with the help of a VSA volunteer in helping small operators such as this one set up their own websites and in promoting attractions, tours and services via <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ShefaTourism" rel="nofollow">their Facebook page</a>. They use this to provide information (including directions!) to both overseas visitors and the (small but not insignificant) domestic tourism market.

Puts Australia to shame, this does!

Thanks Melissa and Gordon, great post. I witnessed some programs in Timor that build community volunteering into their models. I was somewhat torn on it-- while on the one hand, some of them seemed to really give the community a chance to take some charge on their own development (and of course communities should be consulted on and engaged in development projects affecting their communities), on the other hand, I couldn't help but think that some of the people heading up these groups or volunteering to take on what are paid professions in other countries should actually be paid a wage for what they were doing (I'm thinking of volunteer community preschool teachers or those heading local water management committees-- these were some of the examples I saw in person). One particularly inspiring community preschool volunteer teacher that I met would walk for miles to voluntarily teach at a second preschool, outside of his community, and outside the program area of the particular NGO supporting the program. He was really passionate about it, and it was definitely a happy development moment to see someone so dedicated to helping children access basic early childhood education. But chatting to the teacher, he expressed how he really hoped he could become a primary school teacher some day, so he could be paid. It was a shame that teaching preschool wasn't considered a real profession--this teacher was gifted at it, you could see he had done a fantastic job in getting the kids out of their shells and teaching them some basic literacy and numeracy, so important for giving kids a headstart when they get to primary school. No doubt he will be a great schoolteacher if he achieves that goal, and I really admired his ambition as well as his dedication. I also thought the NGO program had done a great job establishing early childhood education in quite remote communities and mobilising community support for it--a task that would no doubt be more complicated if it involved exchanges of cash or salaries. But I couldn't help but think that being a preschool teacher should be a legitimate, paid profession. It's tricky to know whether starting with volunteers could help that happen one day, or whether it was actually undermining that and letting the state off the hook.

Hi Henry, Thanks for your comments, you raise some excellent points – chiefly that it’s a two-way street, and if aid organisations want fair treatment in the media then it’s very reasonable to expect them to be more open and forthcoming. However, I don’t think that the fact that there needs to be more transparency from aid automatically lets journalists off the hook. With respect to the ‘partisan nature of the report’, yes I refer to the sample size and composition. Granted, the report is not intended to be a formal one (i.e. not a ‘scientific’ study), but I think it is a reach to suggest that this gives us a comprehensive picture. It’s also worth stating the obvious: both media and aid are huge fields and the levels of transparency and quality of reporting (from both parties) varies enormously. So some journalists are sufficiently informed and well placed to call out aid organisations, others less so; some aid org's are very restrictive, others are not. Thanks again for your comment, Camilla

Would this sort of thing happen if people really had power to shape their own development? Perhaps this is one more reason to provide the bulk of aid in the form of cash transfers so that people on the ground decide how it is spent.

Can you expand more on the "partisan nature of the report"? Is this due to the list of people who were interviewed? I think in any field (certainly in my area of migration), there will be calls for more transparency and openness. I don't see an issue with that. You only need to read a few blog posts on devpolicy to see in Australia, steps in this direction would be quite welcome. The lack of public oversight and evaluation, even if it's trending in the right direction, isn't good enough and journalists are well placed to call this out. I wish there were more of it in relation to Australian aid. It's certainly the case in some Australian contexts as well - such as the volunteer programs and project managers on the ground - that there are very tight restrictions on media access. Volunteers are basically forbidden to talk to the media or even write blogs about what they are doing in a personal capacity. Funnelling all communication through HQ back in Australia is hardly an effective way to open up reporting about how aid works. I think this meets the burden of being overly territorial and policing access. Personally, I think this is being done almost exclusively for PR reasons to suit both the bureaucracy and the service delivery organisations.

Thanks for this post and these inputs which are very valuable. The superannuation issue is an interesting one. I agree that paying superannuation in Australia is bizarre and should be discontinued. But there is a related issue which is that people working overseas are not paying into national provident funds in their home countries and there would be good reasons to facilitate that. In Vanuatu people can access their VNPF accrued funds on reaching the age of 55 and, possibly more significantly, they can access one-third of accrued amounts prior to that for home improvements or to secure a business investment loan. Whether those who are taking part in seasonal work overseas are doing so as their first experience of formal employment or having left a job they already have (not uncommon) there is benefit in starting/maintaining the contributions.

Hi Vern, Thanks for your comment. A good question. With regards to government aid, the aid world is quite transparent about overheads, although its efforts at transparency are hampered by poor website design and maintenance. The OECD DAC's website provides detailed data on government donor expenditure and if you go to <a href="http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=TABLE1" rel="nofollow">this link</a> and then reconfigure the table (click on customise) and move country to the filter and aid type to the row field, and then filter for Australia you can find out how much money has been spent on staff and TA. In the case of New Zealand (which I know best, being a New Zealander) we are also provided with very clear information on overheads in the government aid programme by our Treasury. I imagine this may well be the case in Australia too. (We make use of the NZ data in <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Data_Integrity_Notice.cfm?abid=2292300" rel="nofollow">this paper</a>, and report on NZ govt aid programme overheads, which average at around 10% of total spend; I suspect Australia is similar). In the case of NGOs data can often be gathered from their annual reports (and if they don't offer it, there's no need to donate to them.) Just as a more general point, while I agree that transparency on overheads is important, as I've written <a href="https://devpolicy.org/aid-mythbusters-low-overheads20110311/ " rel="nofollow">here</a>, focusing on lowering them will often lead to worse aid, not better. Thanks again. Terence

Thanks Garth. And I agree with some of what you say. In terms of your proposed alternative, I your approach is definitely preferable if it is possible. However, I don't think it is. I think that the amount of information on activity efficacy available to DFAT staff is less than you make it out to be. All the more so because of the AusAID re-integration. That said, I could be wrong and maybe a better guide to cuts is possible. My fear though is that the cuts may possibly be guided by worse heuristics (i.e. geostrategic ones) and so part of the reason I have proposed my approach is that if the cuts land in significantly different places, we are then in a position to ask why. Perhaps we will be provided with good answers, in which case I will have no objection. Also, WRT need. This needs to be thought of in terms of immediate need (depth of current poverty) and ongoing need (the odds of development progress that is not driven by Australian aid in the medium term). In terms of of immediate need countries such as Indonesia would obviously score highly, but in terms of ongoing need I would say Pacific countries such as PNG and Solomons are much more worth focus countries. Thanks again.

Here's wishing her every success. She will certainly need it. If the Secretariat is to deliver on her / the leaders vision - it will need to be completely rethought and rebuilt.