Comments

Rick, thanks for the links to your M and E site. The trial of <a href="http://www.sensemaker-suite.com/" rel="nofollow">Sensemaker</a> is referred to in AusAID's <a href="http://www.ausaid.gov.au/publications/pubout.cfm?ID=1041_6232_3442_846_8357&Type=" rel="nofollow">2010 update on scholarships</a>. Unfortunately they don't provide further details.

Can you point me to sources of more information about the following? "AusAID is also trialling a new tool – Sensemaker – to assess scholarships impact. Results of the trial will be available in March 2011." I have written on its use elsewhere, not as an advocate or user but as an independent and interested observer. See http://mande.co.uk/2011/uncategorized/using-stories-to-increase-sales-at-pfizer/ and to a lesser extent at http://mande.co.uk/special-issues/participatory-aggregation-of-qualitative-information-paqi/#self-categorised

An interesting post, Matthew. I've already had my say in The Canberra Times, but I must address some of the points you've raised, because I believe you're being very generous to AusAID. For example, I'm surprised you praise the agency's transparency on this matter. Did you know the documents about the scholarships that are now on AusAID's website are only there because I requested them under freedom of information law? They are not new documents, as you point out. Perhaps you believe that AusAID was on the verge of publishing them, but that, for whatever reason, it never quite got around to it. I don't. Indeed, I pointed out in last month's Public Sector Informant that AusAID breached the FoI Act by delaying - for months - the release of these papers. Based on this conduct, and on the many years that passed without any serious attempt to evaluate the scholarships scheme, I feel confident in saying that AusAID (or perhaps, more correctly, the government) was not willing to discuss publicly the merits of this program. I am also willing to share with you some of the exchanges between myself and AusAID about the evaluation papers. Some of the responses were unequivocally disingenuous. Yes, AusAID has published a 2010 update on the scheme (what of the many other years?). I remain unimpressed. Look at those parts of the pamphlet that you have quoted in this blog. It is very basic information; the bare minimum one would expect of any government agency reporting on its expenditure. It is certainly not setting new heights in transparency, and I am surprised you are excited by it. Nonetheless, I believe it's likely AusAID has improved administration of its scholarships since it received Margaret Gosling's evaluations. I hope so. However, there is not yet evidence of such improvements (e.g. where are the tracer studies? It costs nothing to publish them online). And the agency's past failures, documented in the newspaper, to respond to glaring concerns (come on - an interior design scholarship?) show it needed a prod. Or, to be less "sensationalist", take this broader example, from part 3 of the Gosling evaluation: "Unfortunately, the major findings of this review are that the selection, reintegration and [monitoring and evaluation] processes of most AusAID scholarships programs are not in good shape ... These problems have, for a very prolonged period, consistently defeated all attempts to demonstrate any level of effectiveness." How was this allowed to happen? I have several roles as a journalist. The more altruistic of them is to expose potential maladministration and encourage public debate about important issues. Scholarship aid clearly needs this debate. Not because I say it does, but because organisations such as the OECD, ACFID and CIDA have expressed concerns in the past about its effectiveness, yet the Australian government has taken little notice. Indeed, it's rapidly expanded its development scholarships scheme, without any evidence to back the soundness of doing so. Another of my roles as a journalist is more commercial: it's to take a complex issue and simplify it, that so it captures the interest of more people than it otherwise would have. Occasionally, that means using plain English like "doling out" and "lucrative" (and the scholarships are lucrative, by any measure). I also used the accurate terms "confidential" and "internal", because that's exactly what the papers were, and because I always, on principle, call secrecy by its name. I've learnt, both as a public servant and a journalist, that governments sometimes only take notice of important issues when they are exposed publicly. (I wish this wasn't the case, because governments today are far too media-centric.) I realise that aid practitioners are often uncomfortable when their sector is criticised, because it feeds the agenda of the Centre for Independent Studies and suchlike. But aid practitioners should, more than most, know the importance of transparency in discouraging waste and graft, and encouraging efficiency. Exposing poor practices helps eliminate them. I, too, hope the Auditor-General's report, and the aid review, give this issue another much-needed kick along. But I don't regard for a minute that my work was a "beat-up", nor am I sorry to have written a word of it.

Great post Matt. That (and the additional evidence contained within) has shifted my perspective on the matter. One question I've always had is that if we really give untied aid these days, why are scholarships so often still tied to donor country universities?

Jonathan, I note that you cite a particular New York Times article about skeptics of the campaign to eradicate polio, which include Dr. Donald A. Henderson, the former WHO officer who began the drive to wipe out smallpox, amongst its ranks.. You should amend your blog to say that Dr Henderson 'used' to be a skeptic. Check out this later NYT article by the same reporter who wrote the one you cited above: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/health/15polio.html?ref=donaldgjrmcneil It appears Dr. Henderson has changed his mind: “I see as much greatly augmented the probability that we can stop wild polio virus,” he said Wednesday in a follow-up interview — the opposite conclusion to the one he had given to the same reporter on Jan. 26. “I apologize,” he added. “It’s not my wont to turn on a dime like this. I don’t think I’ve done anything like this before.” Also, the point of extended immunisation is about more than reducing case load this year. It reduces life-long case load, and prevents breakouts. Note the measles break out in Australia right now - you may go years without a disease, decide not to immunise, and then there's a single importation that can cause an epidemic. Keeping cases below 2000 a year is a massive achievement, and slowly, it enables you to close the net. I think the better thing to look at is the case load in endemic countries - as they're the source of all imported cases, and if we can reduce endemic countries, then breaks out are less likely. And there, there's huge and exciting news with potential announcements around Nigeria and India. The recent article in the New Scientist is a good insight into this - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928050.100-dont-let-polio-eradication-slip-away-again.html

Dear Bill, thank you for another terrific blog post and getting a discussion going on partnerships--these are a critically important part of aid and development policy. Definitions are always difficult, but can help focus the discussion. According to Wikipedia, 'A partnership is an arrangement where entities and/or individuals agree to cooperate to advance their interests.' If we take this definition as a starting point, then Paris, MDG8, the Cairns Compact, and Pacific Partnerships for Development can be viewed as formal agreements on how various entities can cooperate to achieve better development outcomes. Of course partnerships can be defined more broadly than this, but the blog post highlights these and this could be a starting point for discussion. Evaluations should then be able to tell us whether such partnerships work and why. Some questions that come to mind: <li>How durable are such agreements (across countries and over time)? What impact do they have on the behaviour of entities? Do they lead to better development outcomes? What happens when interests deviate? Are there other ways to organise entities to achieve better development outcomes?</li>

Michael thanks for the correction. It seems the UAE contribution resulted in an adjustment of the funding gap since the start of the week. Progress is being made as we speak!

The eradication of polio is necessary for other communicable diseases to be tackled in such a way as to provide any real long term benefit- these countries need to strengthen their economies in order to provide sanitation and healthcare- they cannot do this with rampaging infectious disease. Due to the prevalence of other diseases in polio stricken areas I don't know how it is possible to predict such economic benefits directly from the eradication of polio, as these individuals are at high risk of other more common infections. However it seems shortsighted to argue to shift funding elsewhere as Henderson does, because these epidemics are huge and $1 billion annually would easily be swallowed. In my opinion tackling one thing at a time and unlocking international funding is the only way to begin to solve such problems- ruthless though it may seem when so many are dying of other ailments, it is how the world, and politics, work.

Thanks for this well argued and well written blog Jonathan. Just want to point out that the funding gap is now actually $665M -- see http://www.polioeradication.org/Financing.aspx. There are a couple of further points I'll post about later on. In the meantime, your readers might want to check out the campaign the Global Poverty Project are currently running on polio eradication. We recently met with the Prime Minister to discuss the oppourtunity we have to eradicate polio forever. See how the meeting went at: http://globalpovertyproject.org/blogs/view/355

Thanks to Russell Hangatt and Clara Momoi for their helpful introduction to the PNGDSP (‘the Plan’). My interest is in the prominence the document gives to the ‘informal sector’ as a source of livelihood in PNG. The informal economy is a much misunderstood component of the PNG economic system and I applaud its explicit inclusion in the Plan. It’s good also to see the informal ‘sector’ acknowledged as a functional element of the private sector, and to have planners accepting that informal enterprises are different and quite distinct from SMEs (instead of treating them as inconvenient and embarrassing appendages of the SME sector). The Plan implies, correctly, that the policy framework for informal enterprises should differ from that applied for SMEs. I have some difficulty with the Plan’s demarcation of the border line between the two categories, but we’ll get to that later. Other positive aspects of the treatment of informal enterprises in the Plan include its recognition of their role in lowering the cost base for the formal economy, its recommendations for the provision of public goods and services of particular value to informal economic activities, and its emphasis on microeconomic reforms likely to be at least as helpful to the informal as to the formal economy. The Plan gives welcome emphasis to the need for operators in the informal economy to have access to financial services and points to the particular inadequacy of such access in rural areas. It does well to suggest that financial regulators should pay attention to the unmet financial service needs of the poor and the isolated, and to remind us of the need for financial institutions to diversify their products to meet their needs. Having said that, I need also to point to some difficulties in the Plan’s treatment of the informal economy, which it classifies as a ‘sector’, alongside agriculture and manufacturing, and other sectors as conventionally understood. But the informal sector is not a ‘sector’ in that sense. The informal ‘sector’ is actually ‘cross-sectoral’. Almost every structural sector of the PNG economy has an informal component, in which informal labour and enterprise are engaged in the production of goods and/or services of economic value. This informal contribution occurs, to varying degrees, in agriculture, fisheries, mining, forestry, manufacturing, construction, financial services, retailing, and tourism. Telecommunications, thanks to the rapid spread of mobile phone technology, is the sector most recently opened up for informal economic activity. Since the ‘informal sector’ is not a sector in the conventional sense, why don’t we just agree to call it the ‘informal economy’? This usage has been adopted in the international literature for some time now, and has a number of additional advantages. Among these is that it focuses attention on the positive economic contribution of informal economic activities rather than on stigmatizing the people in it as a social problem. This is one reason why the policy brought to the NEC by Dame Carol Kidu last year, and approved by it, was titled ‘A National Policy for the Informal Economy’. It is perhaps unfortunate that this occurred too late to influence the language and content of the Plan, but if the Department of Community Development can drop the term, ‘informal sector’, why can’t National Planning and Monitoring do the same? The old name carries a lot of bad-news baggage and we’d be better off without it. My principal problem with the Plan concerns its treatment of financial services. In considering the financial service needs of people in the informal economy, it has failed to adopt a ‘financial inclusion’ approach, which would emphasize the need to bring the ‘unbanked’ under the umbrella of financial services in general. Emphasis in modern microfinance has switched to the need to provide a portfolio of services for the poor, principally deposit accounts, but also remittance and payments services, aside from credit. Instead the Plan proposes ‘a specific credit line with the National Development Bank to enable growth and development of indigenous micro-enterprises’. This would tie the fortunes of the informal economy to an institution not even licensed to accept deposits. The Plan appears almost to equate ‘finance’ with credit; this at a time when the beneficial impact of micro-credit on the well-being of the poor is under empirical challenge. Further, although it has correctly identified a financial services gap, the Plan appears to place too much reliance on ‘informal’ microfinance institutions to bridge that gap. It gives insufficient attention to the capacity of regulated financial institutions (including new small regulated banks with authority to mobilize deposits) and new technologies to do the job. For example, despite giving much attention to ICT issues, it fails to mention the potential of mobile phone banking to serve isolated and poor clients. As mentioned above, informal microenterprises and SMEs are discussed separately and different policy recommendations are presented for each. A clear statement of how planners understand the differences between the two categories is lacking, and it would be helpful if the Plan could spell this out. (Example: genuine SMEs need access to credit, but for microenterprises credit is a secondary consideration). The SME ‘sector’ in PNG is said to be small, weak and undiversified by international standards. Even so, the Plan appears to exaggerate SME numbers. ‘Tucker shops’, most of which are surely informal entities in terms of culture and capitalization, are said to comprise almost half of all SMEs. This characterization seems to reflect bureaucratic claims on turf, more than any concrete reality. A related disconnect between aspiration and reality is seen in the ‘rags-to-riches’ scenario depicted in a chart (5H: ‘the entrepreneurial career: from unemployment to a formal business’). Alas, while some fortunate and gifted individuals may make the transition described, better policy would focus realistically on facilitating the participation of larger numbers of households in a thriving informal economy. There are many more opportunities for informal income generation than appear in the Plan. For example, ambitious targets are proposed for home building without any role envisaged for informal and self-help contractors, while the possibilities for provision of a wide range of services, both urban and rural, are not explored. In fact, the Plan’s ambitions for informal economy job creation are rather modest, especially when compared with the numbers of formal jobs expected to flow from the PNGDSP, as modeled. Chart 1H and the accompanying table suggest that only some 49,000 new informal sector jobs will be created by 2030, compared with more than a million formal, non-agricultural, jobs. But perhaps this number is an artifact of the modeling process. If informal ‘sector’ employment is regarded as a residual, unemployment is held at 5%, and some 1.7 million ‘formal’ jobs are created, there aren’t really many able-bodied people left to work in the informal economy. <em>John Conroy, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School</em>

Thanks Chris - great post, and I definitely agree that we need to move beyond making the case in these areas and starting to actually examine why the changes we'd like to see aren't taking place. Your point that - 'The first, and perhaps most obvious, reason is that staff in aid agencies – and senior staff in particular – listen to powerful stakeholders who can strongly sanction their behavior i.e. Ministers, the media, Treasury offices, National Audit Offices, etc.' - is a good one. To that I'd add that in many way's this is understandable. Despite the power of the chequebook, aid agencies aren't omnipotent (in fact they are often surprisingly impotent when push comes to shove in recipient countries) and they do need local interlocutors, so in a sense it makes sense to work with powerful ones. This is, of course, problematic though. And I don't think it fully excuses things such as agencies' failure to divulge information on what they've donated to the citizens of aid recipient countries. I also think that another reason why too little real transparency work happens is simply that most donor agency staff are flat-out busy most of the time, and don't have enough time to consider new initiatives or undertake activities that might be quite time consuming at least in their set up. This is another example of the negative impacts of what I call the 'fallacy of low overheads' (i.e. the mistaken idea that having overheads which are as low as possible is actually a good thing). cheers Terence

I think it's important to be wary of processes that result in the more wealthy amongst "developing" countries having the most say. We will have to be very careful that these reach everyone, especially those suffering the most, to an equal extent, and that won't be simple.