Comments

Two questions raised by Richard in his article leads to the core of the Aid dilemma. His deep understanding on the region and youth has placed him in a position to critically analyze the issue. The aid dependency and the inability to revive economies of the recipient countries is a common issue in the 'ever' developing world. The poor countries have failed miserably over generations. In my opinion two factors mainly lead to this situation. Firstly absence of a Vision for the country concerned. The leadership of the country has to formulate it and a proper SWOT analysis has to be done in designing one. Secondly not having a genuine desire among the leadership to achieve the vision. Why do donors provide aid? People believe that there are strings attached to them. Do donors have a genuine interest for the citizenry of another country [of which their own leaders have no regard for their own people]? Why some aid are given only to government institutes when donors very well know they are corrupt? Why don't they go through small NGOs [who are less corrupt] and the private sector? Is this because donors cannot benefit through them? If the donors really want and if their monitoring and evaluations are effective they can always see early warning signs before it's late. Donors should avoid the social elite and go to the beneficiary direct and gather unbiased information. And most importantly - they should respect local knowledge and expertise.

Foreign Aid – Why have it? Hi Terence, your post raises some interesting discussion points. As one who in my younger days spent some time at the grass roots (or kunai) level in PNG, my experiences of those times may well be dated. However for a number of years when I was younger, I mostly lived in a house built of local materials. I did have a stout pair of boots and a bike and I did eat canned bully beef and fish more often than those in neighbouring villages but not a lot else was different. Together we achieved a lot. Yet a basic human tenant of behaviour has not changed, so perhaps I could offer my twopenneth worth. Firstly, the question of whether there should be overseas aid is really axiomatic. Most people feel a genuine need to help those who are less fortunate than themselves. In Australia, many people recently gave generously of their time and resources after a number of natural disasters. This generosity was not meant to create any long term obligation or reciprocity but merely to genuinely help those who have suffered loss. That same inherent desire to help others translates into efforts to help those in other nations in circumstances clearly less fortunate than ourselves. Politicians in so called western countries try to capitalise on this basic human trait and promise large amounts of overseas aid funding to garner public support. A cynic might reflect however that it’s not their money after all and it doesn’t affect their salaries. How politicians in the so called developing world see the opportunities provided by foreign aid money from elsewhere is questionable in many cases. The experience in many ‘developing’ countries seems to be that if their nation is seen as poor then it will attract more overseas aid. If overseas aid is available to pay for services usually provided by the government, then those same politicians from developing countries can get on with acquiring their own fortunes at the expense of those in their country less fortunate than themselves. In these cases, overseas aid can be therefore seen as essential to try to provide the desperately needed services that in reality, should be provided by the country’s own resources. These resources are instead, reputedly being accumulated in foreign bank accounts and property. So maybe the real question that should be asked is not why have foreign aid but how should it be managed? Therein I suspect, lies the nub of the problem. There has been constant criticism about Australia’s so called ‘boomerang aid’ programs that never seem to achieve much except line the pockets of consultants and aid workers. The solution is unfortunately in the eye of the beholder. Everyone seems to have a different idea and this unfortunately clouds the real issue. I believe the benchmark for successful foreign aid programs aught to be a pre set achievement outcome for each program that must be transparently signed off and reported on and independently audited. Can everyone see why this isn’t acceptable to government?

What a fantastic, well-balanced post. It describes the uncomfortable feelings I've had about 'moving up' in salary and perks, and the one-upmanship of "which expat aid workers lives in the most badass rough conditions". >>>>And there is a risk that if they are paid a lot more, aid might end up distorting local job markets, meaning that the most talented local staff strive to be aid agency employees rather than working for their own governments or private sectors, which do desperately need their skills. I think that's already the situation in Zambia, and probably other countries too 🙂

Papua New Guineans like Andrew Mako and myself are a major part of the problem. At this point, the only group that our politicians could possibly become accountable to are honest, caring and determined Papua New Guinean urban activists who take to the streets in percentage numbers at least as high as what has occurred in Egypt, various European countries, including the UK over the past several years. Civil disobedience, always a powerful tool of the public, needs to become the rule, not the exception in PNG because the politicians themselves would be the last ones to pass laws that restrict their current limitless cowboy activities. Only a concerned, possbly dangerous public would scare the pollies enough to step down as necessary, and pass the necessasry reforms under the guidance of learned Papua New Guineans who absolutely refuse to work within the system but put pressure and ideas from outside. Sadly, none of this occurs and people like Andrew and myself will continue basking in the illusion that there is gain with no pain, that the tepid Transparency International marches achieve anything but displaying more evidence of public weakness, and that think tanks such as NRI are listened to by anyone other than head nodders. Andrew may not pray for it but I pray for a true leader who will be of honest soul and sound ethics, and will be a true muckraker and troublemaker. Nothing less will cause our current corrupt politicians to take pause. But in my praying for such a person I realise that I'm just like all the rest of us middle class or upper middle class urban Papua New Guineans - afraid to do anything activist myself. We reap what we sow.

Thanks a lot for the comment, Melanie. I’d say it’s the job of researchers to try to understand the world a little better, which is what we try to do. We don’t say that economic factors are all there is to consider.

Thanks Chris for your detailed comments. I agree that ODE forms only part of the evaluation team and indeed the article is directed to AusAID and not specifically ODE. I also agree that evaluation has to be tailored to methodologies that are suitable to those needs (and RCTs are not suitable in many cases). That said, where practical and cost-effective, an RCT is generally considered the most rigorous quantitative technique. The key way any other quantitative approach would be superior to an RCT is if available observable data is very highly correlated with unobservable characteristics (of units in the sample) or if unobservable characteristics are unlikely to influence outcomes or participation – both which don’t seem to happen widely in practice. Apart from the above point, the debate focuses largely on the disadvantages of RCTs (which certainly exist), and less on the disadvantages of RCTs relative to other quantitative techniques. In the large majority of cases where practical and where the benefits outweigh the costs, RCTs represent the most appropriate quantitative approach. Combine that with the most appropriate qualitative component, and it would provide a strong basis for causal inference – hence the term platinum standard. Unfortunately only a small percentage of projects will lend them to this type of scrutiny and hence other evaluation approaches to provide rigour, quality and validity are more practical. I am encouraged that AusAID are looking at an array of ex-ante evaluation approaches which can only improve on the good steps AusAID has taken to make performance standards stronger. As to your last point, I can only hope that development effectiveness is measuring value for money and feeding into new programs and projects.

I think this kind of research (produced by male economists, I notice) treads a potentially counter-productive path, it really worries me. I don’t think we should be trying to argue for women’s representation in economic terms. It paves the way for people to then produce research showing the opposite (of which there is some) and then argue over the numbers, losing the point that women are half the population therefore they ought to be half the decision-makers. It also essentialises and limits women who do gain positions of power. They end up being disproportionately punished for not living up to the superior standards expected of them.

Some of these issues were considered about 20 years ago, under the heading of the "peace dividend" after the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s, there seemed a strong movement to support the UN peacekeeping efforts through the "Blue Berets" - note "Berets", not "Helmets". If we are to spend money on the Australian Defence Forces, then their use in supporting the UN peacekeeping missions would be welcome. As we did after the first Gulf War in northern Iraq ("Operation Habitat"), in Cambodia, Somalia, partially in Rwanda and could do elsewhere. Still. Recognising that the ADF is on a war-footing at the moment, then there are military skills in medicine and building clean water wells that can still be utilised to protect civilians in times of civil unrest and armed conflicts. Especially, if you happen to believe in the following obligations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (signed by Australia) and CROC's Article 38(4): "4. In accordance with their obligations under international humanitarian law to protect the civilian population in armed conflicts, States Parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure protection and care of children who are affected by an armed conflict".

Thank you Jonathan. It's interesting: in terms of welfare implications Dinuk and Paul's post on the growth impacts of women in parliament is much more significant than this post here. And yet it's my post that has attracted more attention. The reason for this I think is probably, as you suggest, a mixture of guilt and the fact that the story is a personal one that most development folks can related to. While it is the big things and big trends that really matter for development, at the end of the day we are all individuals caught up for the most part in our own lives and dilemmas (or, at least, I know I am), and I guess that's why it has resonated.

A fantastic post Terence. It's interesting that the topic of aid worker entitlements consistently gets a unique level of development community engagement. Duncan Green's <a href="http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=8258" rel="nofollow">piece</a> on the Nairobi pool furore has certainly gotten it's fair share of comments. One of Chris Blattman's most commented on <a href="http://chrisblattman.com/2009/05/09/should-development-agencies-fly-business-class/" rel="nofollow">posts</a> was also of the same ilk, instead asking the question of whether development agencies should fly business class. I must say your post did provide a much more balanced critique than his! I wonder, is it an underlying sense of guilt (or entitlement) that people so willingly throw themselves into public discussion about this issue, or is it rather that it is one of the only topics in this sector that development workers (traditionally from the developed world) can most easily relate to?

Thanks for the reply and explanation. Indeed an interesting and important area for future research.

Dinuk, I am coming to this conversation late having just returned from the field, but you raise some important points that deserve exploration. First, I am not sure how helfpul it is to put 'platinum' or even 'gold' labels on approaches in evaluation. As a professional evaluator, I have always felt the best approach is to think carefully through what you are trying to achieve with your evaluation and then choose and explore the methodologies that are going to suit those needs. The whole issue of labels tends to open debates around standards rather than focusing on rigour, quality and validity. Some nice responses on this recently in the Journal of Economic Literature from Ravallion and Rosenzweig in their reviews of Banerjee and Duflo's book "Poor Economics". Second, the current performance and evaluation policy in AusAID allows programs significant freedom in choosing their own approaches to performance tracking. Ex-ante evaluation is encouraged and is increasingly being adopted by the more performance oriented parts of the agency (admittedly it is often the better funded country programs - Indonesia, PNG and Philippines). There are also evaluators working with a number of AusAID teams and they are regularly having conversations about pipeline evaluative activities. It is often overlooked that ODE only forms one part of the quality system in the agency and there is a whole team in the Program Effectiveness and Performance Division tasked with driving the evaluation policy. The real challenge for this section is driving policy change alongside adequate and supported cultural reform of an agency filled with Development Generalists. Which brings me to my third point. The main constraint in taking on this approach has always been expertise rather than cost or willingness. AusAID has few professional evaluators in its ranks and even fewer individuals capable of getting their heads around an RCT or quasi-experimental evaluation design. The field of evaluation in Australia is heavily qualitatively focused and the ability to draw on a pool of quantitative evaluation experts that understand the development context is not straight forward. As I understand it, AusAID is having conversations with J-PAL and others about running this type of evaluation, but there are all sorts of constraints and challenges that need thinking through before launching into the misguided policy (see recent USAID proclamations) of believing independent evaluations will be the answer. You suggest universities as a possible partner and there is value in better utilising these institutions. However, universtities have often had their own issues with being involved in these operational undertakings. Contrary to popular belief, my experience has been that AusAID is very open to starting a conversation with groups that could undertake this type of work and the political barriers are often overcooked. Thanks for raising the issue as I think it is an important component of the development effectiveness debate. What I think is even more important though is raising the whole issue of where the issue of effectiveness and value for money is going. There are some important aspects of the recent AusAID agency results framework that have huge ramifications for how the sector works and this deserves further discussion. <em>Christopher Nelson is a Monitoring and Evaluation specialist with the World Bank Group and a former M&E advisor at AusAID.</em>