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I would like to support this Independent review of Australian aid programme. I worked for a UN Agency for many years in Asia and Pacific and the AusAID programmes were what made major differences in most countries I worked in.

This report today in The National - Bougainville mine ‘to reopen next year’ <blockquote>THE European shareholders of Bougainville Copper (ESBC) have welcomed the breakthrough achieved by the Panguna landowners’ conference in Buka regarding the re-opening of the Panguna mine. This historical decision was reached on Sunday when landowners agreed to re-open the mine towards the end of next year. ESBC president Axel Sturm said they were very satisfied with this outcome. “This gives Bougainville the chance to recover financially from all suffering in the last 20 years. “I am very grateful to the Minister of Bougainville Affairs Fidelis Semoso that he finally pushed things cogently forward by organising this conference. “We are also glad that the Autonomous Bougainville Government assisted in this important undertaking,” he said. Sturm said he appreciated Semoso’s courage to face this sensitive issue “without any fear or prejudice”. “Next year would bring giant investment to the island and many people who are jobless now would soon find work,” Sturm said. “This makes me very happy especially for the young generation on Bougainville who would benefit from the decisions on this historic weekend,” he said.</blockquote>

Hi Matt, Its great to have these debates on the table. Perhaps we can play the devil's advocate on this one. 1. Certainly multilaterals offer the capacity to channel large amounts of the Australian aid dollar - that is a benefit in a scaled up world. 2. Multilaterals are often favoured on basis that they reduce efficiency on recipient countries and thus more ore in line with principles of aid effectiveness, however, multilaterals no longer enjoy a major advantage in having low transaction costs. Their compliance procedures have become more cumbersome and costly. Is there evidence to support the claim of lower transaction costs? The jury may be out on that one. 3. Effectiveness of multilateral activities is difficult to establish (and contributions therein even moreso). Will this cause a problem for Australia's greater accountability focus? 4. The ability of multilaterals to mobilise sufficient funds for large-scale ‘development’ projects is often cited as one of their key advantages however in many countries where the technical expertise necessary to manage large-scale programs is absent, some of the aid money is channelled to companies, consultants and technical experts that oversee the projects anyway. Will this be a problem with the strong committment from Australia to reduce TA? Will Australia be able to understand and account for the proprotion of multilateral funds that are channeled to TA? 5. A long-standing issue surrounding aid from multilaterals is conditionality – does Australia have the opportunity to consider and form views on conditionalities in multilateral programs its funds? The issue of multilaterals will be considered in the current aid review - we will watch with interest their commentary on the issue. But as Peter McCawley aptly noted - it all depends on your objectives!

Very interesting and timely – we have known for a long time that the highlands fringe people and inland lowlands people are the most vulnerable, and probably least well served. In fact, when I first went to PNG in 1982 with the IMR, I worked among the people of the Torricelli Rages, who are exactly in this category. I have also been to all of the least developed districts myself over the years and have witnessed the lives of these communities. Yes - it is indeed tragic. The question is, what reasonably can be done? Many have grappled with this for decades. There was a least developed districts program in the 80’s and it is still the same districts in that category. With low population densities, poor access and lack of economic opportunity – it is a huge development challenge. The cost of getting needed services to those communities and economic development and feeder roads, may prohibit being able to achieve much. A well known PNG experienced epidemiologist has even posed the challenging question – should we even try and get immunisation coverage in those areas, where the cost is high and we will never get herd immunity high enough – or concentrate on population dense areas where we can get children fully immunised and get herd immunity to a level where it actually affords protection? Should people in these desperately poor areas be resettled, where they can be educated and given services and have access to employment? There will be lots of people against that idea... Tough questions – Questions of scarcity and choice, economists would saay. We know these people and poor and in need - but can anyone actually come up with a viable scheme for changing their circumstances – I have not heard of such a scheme yet.

Many thanks Julia for highlighting CARE's work on this. This is all very much in line with the work of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), a research partnership I've worked with over the past few years. The CPRC is an international partnership of universities, research institutes and NGOs which exists to focus attention on chronic poverty. It aims to stimulate national and international debate; deepen understanding of the causes of chronic poverty; and provide research, analysis and policy guidance that will contribute to its reduction. The CPRC has been in place for 10 years, and there is now a strong set of policy and programmatic messages on tackling chronic poverty, grounded in rich empirical evidence. See www.chronicpoverty.org for more. Best, Kate Higgins Research Fellow Overseas Development Institute (ODI)

Scott thanks for this, I agree with you. The Natsios article doesn't dwell on the failures of USAID's own target setting and measurement of results - one factor behind the rise of influence of the counter-bureaucracy. It does however reference the disconnect between the data that politicians need to sell the aid program and that which development professionals need to run it. This is clearly an area where more work needs to be done, particularly in relation to hard (but not impossible) projects to evaluate like institution building. Otherwise there is a risk that pressure will mount to shift aid towards projects with simple measurable outputs - such as those outlined in the article, or to impose artificial and inappropriate targets on institution building projects. Evaluations of such projects tell us that such targets are often met, but that this may come at the expense of the main objective of capacity building. Ultimately, I think it boils down to the fact that if we want effective aid, we need decisions about interventions to be driven by strategy rather than ease of measurement - and we need monitoring and evaluation methods that are appropriate to the objective of the intervention and meet the information requirements of both development professionals and politicians.

I agree with the analysis by Matthew Morris, especially the misuse of funds and the impact these monies would have in bridging the missing funding gaps. But I believe the biggest problem is the lack of basic financial service capacity in the rural areas to transfer public funds for procurement of public goods and services on a timely basis.The current procurement policy for service sectors like public hospitals in the provinces to rural health centres and the same for the education sector needs a complete overhaul.The key is to get the funding out to the rural areas quickly without delay so that we can purchase the much need medicine and school materials like text books on time. One of the solution I believe would be to look at outsourcing procurement of public and donor funded services to private service providers like NGOs, Churches and the private sector for a fee.These service providers can obtain competitive quotes from existing suppliers and submit to the approved financial delegates for approval. Once approval is granted,Purchase Orders can raised and goods can be ordered and delivered in a timely manner.This would avoid leakages and misuse of funds by the many layers of bureaucracy. Thanks, Paul K.Martin Port Moresby,NCD PNG

Another excellent thought provoking article. It touches upon something quite fundamental in development today - namely that Government Ministries are fed up with being poked around and micro examined like bacteria in a petri dish. It would be one thing if these donors subjected themselves to such scrutiny but the real insult comes when one tries to determine the "source" of such information. With a bit of research it quickly becomes evident that many of the key indicators used by the major donors are sourced from out-of-date surveys done by NGO's. As a result the movement of these indicators can be almost random, yet the impications in terms of funding and development support up-stream can be very serious. There is probably a good follow up article to be written about the "out-sourcing" of this data collection.

Great post Cate. And good comment Scott. I think that Natsios' suggestion to focus on and measure capacity (I would also add the word sustainability) is not so much pie-in-the-sky. The measures have to be program specific. To take the case of malaria programs (focused on prevention): currently PMI measures nets shipped, and nets handed out. Important program effectiveness measures capturing real results might be: the increase in demand for, or propensity to use, nets; parasitemia and anemia indicators (captured via household surveys); access to nets at community level (which campaign distributions often diminish); and measures of capability of malaria control program staff (numbers, qualifications; stability; adequacy of resources to analyze program data, and to manage the program). These things are measurable. Indeed, in many cases the data is already collected (the data from household surveys) but it is not used to assess program effectiveness.

One of the main factors in the failure of the Australian scheme is the continued use of illegal migrants to fill increased labour demand in the horticultural industries. Before the RSE, NZ increased crackdowns on undocumented labour and this helped create a spike in demand for new workers, which the RSE was positioned to fill. The SGWP seems fairly well designed, but needs greater government support to be successful. Australia should consider following a similar path to NZ in this respect. Pacific islanders currently working illegally needn't be persecuted by this process, and could be re-employed in some sort of amnesty period, but it seems unlikely employers will move over to the SGWP if they can continue to employ cheaper labour with no strings attached.

Cate's summary of Natsios is good and the paper itself is interesting, but let's not forget that there are also reasons why the push for better results measurement, tougher oversight, and centralized controls came about. Development administrators always argue that nobody is better positioned to regulate them than they themselves. Granted, this is now out of control (Natsios's main point) to the point where agencies like USAID are splendidly dysfunctional, but the track record of in-house oversight isn't all that great either. We can be sure that the dialectic between centralized control and decentralized initiative is going to be with us for some time to come. More interesting for me are Natsios's proposals to use different measurement systems for institutional capacity building. Unfortunately, he doesn't say what those might be. And yet while "capacity" seems to be one of those areas that every agency parks in the "sacred cow" category of agency purpose, it's one where we don't seem to be much nearer to true knowledge and understanding than we were thirty years ago. Just what is it that creates capacity? And for development, are there any lessons to learn about what "capacity development" means (beyond endless training courses and strategic planning workshops) in terms of what to do in fragile state environments, with decentralization, with institutionalizing bottom-up accountability, etc? USAID (and AusAID in the Pacific) probably suffer more from their constant list towards capacity displacement than they do from too much measurement and control, and some of the push for them to show results came from the fact that so many countries seemed locked into a low-level equilibrium that sustained a permanent stream of new projects and helpful consultants but never seemed to make any real progress towards building up significant national capacities.

Here are some sites/resources on improving downward accountability your readers may be interested in: http://www.listenfirst.org/ – practical ways of improving accountability for NGOs from Concern Worldwide http://www.whocounts.org/ – Mango UK’s guide on financial reporting to beneficiaires http://www.cdainc.com/cdawww/project_profile.php?pid=LISTEN&pname=Listening%20Project – A research project at Harvard exploring of the ideas and insights of people who live in societies that have been on the recipient side of international assistance