Owen abroad

If you are a geek who is into development, and you are somewhere near Washington DC, you are going to want to come to the International Development Data Barcamp.  In fact, even if you are not near DC you may want to come - I’m flying all the way from Ethiopia for it. Here’s the blurb:

There are a number of emerging activities focusing on improving the transparency of aid and allowing organizations, projects, researchers, practitioners, and clients in developing countries to have improved access to aid information, data on outcomes, knowledge, and tools. We are getting closer to the day when anyone can easily determine who is doing what, where they are doing it, what they have learned, and who is funding them. Come join a group of interested organizations to brainstorm about how to advance the conversation about making aid more transparent, improving access to data, and making knowledge and tools related to development easier to find on the internet.

Sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/366214357

Peter Singer has been described by the New Yorker magazine as the world’s most famous living philosopher. In his new book, The Life You Can Save, he argues that people in rich countries have a moral duty to give money to help people in extreme poverty in developing countries.

His argument is compelling.  As summarised on the accompanying website, it is this:

If we could easily save the life of a child, we would. For example, if we saw a child in danger of drowning in a shallow pond, and all we had to do to save the child was wade into the pond, and pull him out, we would do so. The fact that we would get wet, or ruin a good pair of shoes, doesn’t really count when it comes to saving a child’s life.

UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, estimates that about 27,000 children die every day from preventable, poverty-related causes. Yet at the same time almost a billion people live very comfortable lives, with money to spare for many things that are not at all necessary.  (You are not sure if you are in that category? When did you last spend money on something to drink, when drinkable water was available for nothing? If the answer is “within the past week” then you are spending money on luxuries while children die from malnutrition or diseases that we know how to prevent or cure.)

I find this argument compelling, though it leads to the unsettling conclusion that almost all of us should be doing more than we are already to give up part of our income to help people in developing countries.  (Basically: if you are buying mineral water in a country where it is safe to drink water out of the tap, you should give that money to a charity that will use it to reduce poverty instead.)

I spoke to Peter Singer about his book on Development Drums.  His message is important, and I hope you’ll listen.

For two years I worked at the Center for Global Development on Michael Kremer’s idea that donor nations should create stronger commercial incentives for drug companies to develop and manufacture drugs and vaccines needed for developing countries by guaranteeing to pay for them if they are produced.

On 12th June, a group of donors signed the first Advance Market Commitment.  Here is the Wall Street Journal

The $1.5 billion program marks a departure from previous charitable efforts to increase poor countries’ access to vaccines. Instead of buying existing drugs and giving them away, the donors will guarantee pharmaceutical companies a future market big enough to justify developing and manufacturing new vaccines needed in nations too impoverished to afford them on their own.

The donors — Italy, the U.K., Canada, Russia, Norway and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — plan to announce the initiative Friday on the sidelines of a meeting of top finance officials from the Group of Eight major industrial powers, according to Italian officials.

The first target will be a vaccine to prevent pneumococcal disease, which kills 1.6 million people in the world a year, the majority of them young children in the developing world.

The scheme is projected to prevent between five million and eight million child deaths by 2030.

The Center for Global Development has played a remarkable role shepherding the idea from concept to practical scheme to launch.  For me it has been a great privilege to be involved. As well as the possible direct benefits of this particular commitment - perhaps saving millions of lives - we have helped to think about new ways in which the rich can support people in developing countries, in this case using financial incentives to help stimulate the private sector to meet the needs of people in poor countries.
 

The UK Department for International Development is to be commended for encouraging some of its staff to maintain a blog to explain to the public what they do.

In Bangladesh, Adam Jackson has posted some interesting reflections on his visit to a health programme (in which DFID supports the government) and a Chars Livelihood Progamme.

Our health review team visited a District hospital where mothers who would never normally have access to safe delivery facilities had very recently given birth thanks to a voucher scheme funded by DFID and a number of other donors. Fifty miles away in the Chars I and the other workshop participants visited a village and met a number of women - some of the most vulnerable people on the planet - who had been given assets of their choice (typically a pair of cows) and had their homes raised on clay plinths above the seasonal flood level, as well as a range of other support to enable them to become self-sufficient. … Both of these programmes contribute to the Millennium Development Goals, and produce results that few people interested in the welfare of the poorest would argue with.

Adam makes the excellent point that both programmes work, albeit to achieve different kinds of objectives.  Working through Government may be slower and more uncertain, but in the long run it is an investment in Government systems which, in the end, Bangladesh will need as it becomes more prosperous and no long relies on foreign aid.  The Chars programme reaches people more quickly, but does not contribute to building lasting institutions.  Clearly, both programmes have an important place, and donors need to be better at understanding that we are working towards multiple objectives and need many different types of instrument.

We need to understand better than we do: (a) how much immediate development benefit do we give up, if any, and how much institutional improvement do we gain, by working through governments? and (b) can providing services through parallel channels such as NGOs actually do harm to the long-run evolution of national institutions, for example by hiring away skilled staff, or by reducing the focus on and accountability of government institutions which should, in the long run, be playing those roles?

Adam’s call for rigorous, transparent evaluation is welcome. I would add that it should be independent and more focused on impact and less on process than current evaluation.

My father was a diplomat.  When he left his last post in Africa (as High Commissioner to Nigeria) to become High Commissioner to Australia, he sent a message to the then Foreign Secretary reflecting on a career spent mainly in Africa. (These messages from Ambassadors are known in Foreign-Office-speak as a despatch).

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, he has been able to obtain a copy of this despatch, and he has published it online. At the time, it was regarded as controversial and radical.  Circulation within the Foreign Office was limited.

Perhaps my judgement is clouded by filial loyalty, but today it strikes me as forward-looking and far sighted.  He wrote:

Such grotesque disparities in the human condition are an inevitable source of conflict and instability. It is a century since British people ceased to be willing to tolerate massive inequality of wealth and income within their own society.  The time has surely come when we should tackle an even more offensive situation in the global village.

My father made a compelling case in 1991 for doing more to ensure that Africa shares in the benefits of globalisation and rising prosperity. As he predicted, the need has become greater the longer we have neglected the challenge.

I’m proud to follow in his footsteps in demanding change; but dismayed that I have to do so. If only they had listened then we might not have to be making the same case today.

Forgive the puff for my day job - aidinfo works to make aid more transparent and accountable.

Our web guy has done a great job on our website: http://www.aidinfo.org.

Also you can subscribe to our RSS feed.

The New York Times describes what happens if women do not have access to safe abortions:

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. …

Here in Ethiopia around a third of maternal deaths are the result of unsafe abortions.

Well done to the New York Times for addressing this. Too often this problem is swept under the carpet.

In the FT debate on aid, Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, seems to be adjusting her position:

To focus on the five-year aid-reduction example that my book offered as an illustration of an exit strategy deliberately misses the point, which is that Africa desperately needs to wean off aid. Obviously, a blanket five-year plan imposed on countries with different challenges and different circumstances would be ridiculous!

One can only interpret the fact that my detractors took the five-year example at face value as wilful blindness or a complete unwillingness to see Africa in any other light than a basket case. An aid exit might take 10 years, it might take 15, but after 60 years of the aid-regime (with no concomitant job creation) surely it is better to start the conversation (and the strategy) of aid exits than not.

Indeed, cutting off aid in five years would be ridiculous.  On that we are agreed.  I don’t know anybody involved in aid who does not fervently wish for the day when countries are rich enough to do without aid, and who wants to give aid in ways that bring that day forward.  If Dambisa Moyo is simply saying that we should all work towards removing the need for aid, then I am not sure why there is such a fuss.

So what made us think that Dr Moyo was advocating a five year plan to reduce aid? Perhaps it was remarks like these in just about every known newspaper:

In the book I actually prescribe that they should, with immediate effect or in the very near foreseeable future, implement a five-year plan where they systematically reduce aid to these countries.

Or perhaps it is because she says this in Dead Aid (p144):

What if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call (agreed upon by all their major aid donors - the World Bank, Western countries etc), telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off, permanently? Although exceptions would be made for isolated emergency relief such as famine and natural disasters, aid would no longer attempt to address Africa’s generic economic plight.

You can see why some people got the impression that Dr Moyo was proposing that aid should be shut off after 5 years.  But it is reassuring to know that this was not her position, or at any rate it is no longer her position.

Even with her new cuddlier policy of turning off the taps more gently, there is still a lot of wild and unsubstantiated garbage in her book - for example, this:

The problem is that aid is not benign - it’s malignant. No longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem - in fact, aid is the problem.

Here is my review of Dead Aid. Here are some other reviews.  Andrew Pickering at Global Dashboard has a good summary of the debate so far.

Cashewman quotes a friend:

“You can give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. You can teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. But did you ever ask him if he wanted a fucking fish in the first place? And it’s not as simple as a fish anyway.”

My day job is leading the aidinfo team working to improve the transparency of international aid. Why? Because we think that when aid is more transparent it will be more effectively used and it will help people in developing countries to hold their governments to account. We also believe that if taxpayers can see where aid is really going, and see what a difference it makes, they will support more of it.

So I was dead pleased to see this by David Cameron in today’s Guardian

Transparency tears down the hiding places for sleaze, overspending and corruption. Soon enough all MPs’ expenses are going to be published online for ­everyone to see: I and the rest of the shadow cabinet are already doing it. And if we win the next election, we’re going to do the same for all other public servants earning over £150,000. Just imagine the effect that an army of armchair auditors is going to have on those expense claims.

Indeed, the promise of public scrutiny is going to have a powerful effect on over-spending of any variety. A Conservative government will put all national spending over £25,000 online for everyone to see, so citizens can hold the government to account for how their tax money is being spent. And we will extend this principle of transparency to every nook and cranny of politics and public life, because it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to transfer power to the powerless and prevent waste, exploitation and abuse.

Yes, yes, and thrice yes, as Mark Kermode would say.

What’s more, with current technologies, we can do this quite easily, and unleash the creative power not only of armchair auditors, but of millions of people who are not in armchairs but are directly experiencing the effects of that spending and who can help us to understand what is working and how it can be made to work better.