Comments

Hi Matt, I agree - donors themselves may not be the best people to get info to aid recipients. That's why I suggest working with civil society and using the media. I also agree that - first things first - donors need to be more timely in reporting aid data. It drives me nuts that, here in 2011, the most recent aid data I can get is only provisional 2009 data. Having said that, I'm not sure that DFiD's monthly data releases (as opposed to timely annual or biannual releases) really adds anything. Actually, I'm inclined to think they may have gone over the apex of the 'aid transparency laffer curve'. And might be better investing resources currently devoted to monthly reporting in areas that means that aid recipients can access their data better. Hi Jennifer, Thanks for the link...

You may be interested to know about The Listening Project (http://www.cdainc.com/cdawww/project_profile.php?pid=LISTEN&pname=Listening%20Project). It's a systematic exploration of the ideas and insights of people who live in societies that have been on the recipient end of international assistance efforts. Since 2005, 130 international and local organizations have participated and contributed more than 400 staff members to the Listening Teams that held conversations with nearly 6,000 people. You can read a summary of their key findings here: http://www.how-matters.org/2010/09/02/initial-findings-listening-project/

@devpolicy hmm, yes. And if its not transparent aid, don't acknowledge it. An incentive for Aid transparency.

Terence, Thanks for a great post. You are right to highlight the importance of getting aid information to recipients, and elsewhere at Virtual Economics (<a href="http://virtualeconomics.com/the-future-of-aid-beckons/" rel="nofollow">here</a>, <a href="http://virtualeconomics.com/how-can-beneficiaries-monitor-aid-projects/" rel="nofollow">here</a> and <a href="http://virtualeconomics.com/how-can-donors-use-the-crowd-to-monitor-projects/" rel="nofollow">here</a>) there are illustrations of how better information could improve aid effectiveness. But we may also be getting ahead of ourselves on the aid transparency chain. You are right that more data is available, but it is often old data and for commitments rather than disbursements. So the first thing is to get aid agencies to share up to date information, based upon an international standard--for example DFID now publishes monthly data and many donors have signed up to IATI. In terms of getting this information to recipients, I agree that donors have a responsibility to be transparent. But it is not clear that aid agencies are always the best information intermediaries. This might be a function that civil society organizations play, by mashing (collating) data and using a variety of networks and forms of media. Another reason why it is important for civil society to play this role is because aid flows are only one funding source, for example governments' own spending is often much larger. If we are concerned about improving accountability more generally and putting service delivery on a sustainable footing, then perhaps public expenditure transparency this is the bigger prize. School funding in Uganda is the oft-cited example. Nigeria's OPEN initiative, which actively involved NGOs in monitoring the spending of debt relief gains is another. Donors can help by setting an example on aid transparency, encouraging governments to be more open and supporting (funding) civil society organizations as infomediaries. Matt

Hi again Robert, You write: “The potential to really damage the generosity of taxpayers and donors is not media negativity, but the incompetence and corruption of both ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’ in the wider aid industry.” I think this point illustrates the essence of that disagreement which lies between us. I agree that the best way to make aid popular is to make aid work. Yet, when it comes to aid failures, it is not just "incompetence and corruption of both ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’" that causes aid to fail. Part of the problem (quite possibly the major part) is that development happens to be very difficult. If it wasn't, the problems of the developing world would have been solved years ago. This means that even the best aid programmes are going to fail at times. Money will be lost to corruption, mistakes will be made, and unintended consequences will blight even well-designed projects. Some aid will still work, despite all this. And the difficulties of development can be overcome within aid agencies (up to a point) if they are open about failures and if they take the time to learn from them. The trouble is, as the latest 'scandal' in the Murdoch press illustrates nicely, that the current media environment creates strong incentives for aid agencies <i>not</i> to be open about failure. On top of this, an ongoing obsession with low overheads, which I blogged about a week or so ago, means that aid agency staffers are often too busy to learn from mistakes. What can be done: 1. Scandals still need to be reported on. But please, let's stick to the real scandals when doing this. 2. Development successes need to be promoted. And promoted via some sort of mechanism that's more effective than aid agency reports. 3. Aid agencies need to find a way of being open about failure that doesn't lead to media crucifixion. 4. Aid agencies need to devote time and staff to learning and doing things better. cheers Terence

This is music to my ears. This blog highlights papers which expose the folly of forcing western “best practise” models on systems that are barely operating, and could never hope to attain even “good enough” practise. How often have we borne witness to development consultants and agencies exhorting countries to adopt best practice organisational forms and applying pressure to encourage the hasty introduction of changes, overloading the fragile systems, and causing local structures to fail to cope? In my experience – slow and steady wins the race. There are no silver bullets. In our paper “Working together for a better future”, soon to be published in the PNG Medical Journal, Maxine Whittaker and I suggest that home grown solutions need to be given time to emerge and a stronger focus on getting the basics in place is a better bet than creating organisational forms that look good but don’t deliver.

There is a wider discussion here about how these complex issues of fraud and corruption get communicated to the Australian public, as it can lead to an impression that the entire enterprise is not valid. For what it is worth - here is a letter to the editor from ACFID that did not get a run in either the Herald Sun or Daily Telegraph, nor did our interview with Steve Lewis get quoted. LETTER TO THE EDITOR Friday 25 March, 2011 If you read Steve Lewis’ article ‘Millions lost in AusAID foreign aid scam’ (24/03) you would be forgiven for asking if any of the money the Australian Government gives to poor nations is actually reaching its intended destination. Contrary to the claim that Australia’s aid program is ‘plagued’ by ‘widespread’ fraud, over the past five years, cases of fraud represented less than two cents in every $100 of the AusAID program. Of course, no level of fraud is acceptable and AusAID has a zero tolerance of fraud. The fact that cases are being discovered and pursued shows there are safeguards in place and that these are working. But we should never be complacent. We need to always work hard to ensure that our aid, like all other government programs, is spent as effectively as possible. But to imply that aid isn’t making a difference to those in need ignores the facts such as UN research which has found that the incremental increases in aid over the past 20 years account for an extra 14,000 lives saved per day, or that polio has been eradicated in the Pacific. Australia’s investment in foreign aid, whether it be funded through the Australian Government’s aid program, or public donations, is vital. It saves lives and helps some of the poorest people in the world. Co-signed by: Marc Purcell Executive Director, ACFID Julia Newton-Howes CEO, CARE Australia Jack de Groot CEO, Caritas Australia Andrew Hewitt Executive Director, Oxfam Australia Ian Wishart CEO, Plan Australia Tim Costello CEO, World Vision Australia

Dear Laurence, Thanks for this post. Unfortunately I cannot attend today's lecture, which I am sure will be great. I support your call for stronger social safety nets. However, there is a methodological concern with your paper which is not addressed in the text. The paper presupposes that the International Poverty Line of USD 1.25 2005 PPP is a) morally plausible and b) current data collected to populate this poverty measure are reliable, comparable across context and over time, etc. But the Bank's methods are deeply suspect. First, the method of setting the IPL simply averages the national poverty lines of a 'representative' set of poor countries. There is no underlying conception of basic needs or human capabilities that justifies setting the poverty line at that level. It is therefore theortetically possible and in fact empirically quite likely that one can receive USD 1.25 2005 PPP and not be able to satisfy even her most basic food needs. This can be seen most clearly simply by thinking about what one could purchase with USD 1.25 in the United States--certainly not enough to meet basic needs. Even more problematically, the Bank's method requires calculation of purchasing power parity between currencies. This requires a PPP conversion between currencies, and CPI conversion within a currency to a given base year. Because both the CPI and the PPP calculations take account of all goods consumed in a society, rather than simply those goods that are most relevant to poor people, the Bank's figures do not represent the true purchasing power of poor people. If the price of big screen televisions goes down and the price of rice goes up, both affect the Bank's estimation of poverty levels, even though one piece of information is clearly irrelevant to the consumption of poor people. A useful recent volume, Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty, covers these issues in depth. See also www.socialanalysis.org. Your projections of rapid poverty reduction during the period 2005-2010 will thus inherit the flaws of the Bank's approach. One reason to be skeptical of your claims of rapid poverty reduction in the period 2005-2010 is the impact of the food crisis. The rapid rise in the price of cereals and other basic foodstuffs during 2007-2008 certainly weakened the purchasing power of poor people and increased hunger. The FAO estimates between 2005 and 2010 there was an increase in the number of undernourished people worldwide, with no significant change in the proportion of undernourished people. Conceptually, it just cannot be the case that poverty is rapidly reducing at historically unprecedented levels and hunger is unchanged, or even getting worse. Thanks.

Dear Skip, You make a good point--the SWF will only be as good as it's administration. Funds have been raided in the past and the risk of this happening again is high. That's why the NRI wants constitutional protection for the SWF. My view is that SWF is not panacea and will be vulnerable, and that the bigger question, that the SWF doesn't answer, is how will mineral revenues ultimately be spent? Here are a few ideas to think about. - If services aren't reaching rural areas, how about using mobile phones to make cash payments instead and/or crowdsource feedback on service delivery? - If government is unaccountable for how it collects and spends mineral revenues, how about direct distribution to PNGeans, along the lines that CGD's Todd Moss is proposing in Africa? What else can be done to improve accountability? - If discretionary funds are more vulnerable to being raided, how about locking in spending that will make a difference (l.t contracts for maintain roads, manage health facilities etc.)? SWF is a good idea, but it is not sufficient and has a high risk of failing to achieve its objectives. We need more discussion on what else is needed.

I'd underline a point implied. "PNG Government expects to ... deliver a balanced budget this year, excluding trust fund drawdowns... in 2010 much of the windfall revenues from high commodity prices were spent on discretionary capital spending" Yes, good to see PNG establish a sovereign wealth fund. But the effectiveness of such a measure lies in its administration. There is a real question whether the discipline will be there to avoid raiding the fund at inappropriate times.

Thanks Robert, That's a very interesting comment. I'm travelling at present and struggling to get on the internet. I'll aim to reply at length next week.

‘Missing the Big Picture on Corruption?’ is an excellent title for the really good analysis that Matt has written, above. I want to suggest, however, that we urgently need to ask questions in a rather different way to highlight the answers we need on aid policy, good practice in aid and aid effectiveness. A major obstacle to understanding aid effectiveness is that much of the discussion, analysis and reporting is, indeed, ‘big picture’. I suggest the picture is both too big and uses only one lens. We urgently need to narrow our focus and ask ‘smaller picture’ questions that look at specific sectors, in specific countries, and at a particular time and stage in their development. To put this proposition another way in the form of two questions: ‘1. Can we really generalise from the experience of (say, for example) agricultural development in Kenya, to security in Pakistan, to health in Laos, law reform or education in Indonesia? 2. Who is doing the generalising?’ In answer to 1, I think some ‘big picture’ approaches can be helpful in broad strategic issues, as some of the references cited above by Matt demonstrate. The important works by former World Bank economists Steve Berkman in ‘The World Bank and the Gods of Lending’ (Kumarian Press, 2008) and William Easterly in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (Penguin, 2006), clearly demonstrate this big picture approach as well. To answer 2, these big picture approaches are often, possibly usually, written by development professionals with a major background in economics. Because of this, they can miss the important conceptual and technical details that underpin aid outcomes in different disciplines and in different contexts. The debates around aid need more balance and more inputs from discipline-based professionals such as agriculturalists, security specialists, doctors, nurses and health professionals, and so on. What we hear, I believe, is ‘the sound of one hand clapping’. And that is the hand of the development specialists with expertise in economics. These specialists undeniably bring their own unique and important sets of skills and approaches. But we need more of ‘the other hand’, the discipline-based development specialists in agriculture, health and education, with specific country experience, if we are to hear a fuller message. I suggest that we also need to add the important contributions that anthropologists can bring. A significant contribution from this discipline in Indonesian education was a study by Christopher Bjork, ‘Indonesian Education: Teachers, Schools and Central Bureaucracy. New York: Routledge, 2005. What Bjork discovered was very significant for educational development, and it was this: Teachers' conception of their responsibility, at the time of the study in the late 1990’s was to the state: to the process of nation building and establishing government authority rather than to parents or to students for educational and learning outcomes. Duty as a civil servant to develop a culture of obedience was considered to be of far greater importance than responsibility as an educator. In other words, schools were seen by teachers mainly as institutions to develop patriotic citizens rather than educated citizens. The study also picks up an issue I identified above about particular times and stages in development. Since the late 1990’s, Indonesia has changed fundamentally from an authoritarian dictatorship to a robust democracy. Has this changed teachers’ conceptions? I do not believe we have clear empirical evidence to answer this question although field experience suggests that much has changed and especially among younger teachers. In a subsequent blog, I intend to address some of the educational development issues in Indonesian education. <em>Robert Cannon is an education development specialist who has worked in this field in universities and in the aid sector, particularly in Indonesia, since 1974.</em>