In a very thought-provoking post, Alanna Shaikh lists four ways that an NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it’s trying to serve.

1) You can waste the time and effort of a community by initiating projects which have little chance of success. It’s hard to identify a good project for a small community. Community buy-in is no guarantee of success; possessing deep local knowledge doesn’t make a person omniscient. Projects that have little chance of success include vocational training in sewing and handicrafts, beekeeping, and raising chickens. If you waste a year of the community’s time on a broiler chicken project that never makes a profit, that’s a year of time and effort which could have gone to real income generation or looking after children.

2) You can leave communities convinced that they need outsiders to solve their problems. If you raise $3000 for a backhoe to clear irrigation ditches, then what happens next time the ditches silt up? The farmers’ cooperative will never realize they could have cleared it with hand shovels, or raised the money by charging a membership fee.

3) You can damage beneficial community structures, or solidify harmful structures. Your choice of community intermediary elevates that person or group, by putting them in control (real or perceived control) of valuable assets. If you work with existing power structures, you can support and entrench inequalities, such as sexism or racism, which are already present. If you chose partners who are not part of the current elite, you can destabilize delicate community balances, and erode resilience.

4) You can construct a building and then not provide funds for maintenance or staffing. A school needs a teacher. A clinic needs a doctor or nurse. All buildings need upkeep – painting and repairs at the very least. A building with not funds for maintenance is a drain on community resources in perpetuity, or an eyesore.

Those are all serious risks.  I can think of two more:

5)  You hire good people to deliver the best service you can. But those people would otherwise have been working for government or another local organisation.  The good they could have done in government might far exceed the good they can do in your organisation.  There are donors here in Addis Ababa who pay their drivers more than twice what an experienced doctor will get paid in a government hospital. Where do you think the doctors want to work?  Reckless hiring by donors can create skills shortages in key institutions and drive up wages so that provision of services becomes less affordable.

6)  You establish yourself as an influential player in the sector you work in; you become friendly with Ministers and senior officials; you are invited to key meetings.  This is good: you can help to push things in the right direction. But the people you are influencing should be accountable to their own citizens, not to you.  And there are three more like you, all pushing in slightly different directions, making it very difficult for any government to maintain a common sense of purpose.  And who are you accountable to?  With the aim of doing the right thing, you are undermining the legitimate accountability of the system you are influencing.

These risks apply to official government donors and multilateral organistions as much as they do to NGOs.

An enquiry has been demanded into the way some UK aid is given directly to the governments of some countries.  According to the Daily Telegraph

Figures from the Department for International Development show that over the past five years the UK has handed £1.6 billion to 15 of the world’s poorest countries. But research from campaigning group Transparency International shows that many of these rank highly in its corruption index of 180 countries.

There are several points to make about this:

1. There is no evidence that aid has been subject to corruption
   Transparency International does not claim (pdf) to have found any evidence of corruption in the use of UK aid. The Daily Telegraph report says that that some countries to which the UK gives budget support score poorly on the TI corruption index. But it does not follow that any of that aid is being corrupted and there is no evidence in the TI report that it is.
2. Budget support is no more likely to be subject to corruption than other forms of aid
   A major, multi-donor review of budget support found

   “Corruption is a serious problem in all the study countries, but the country study teams found no clear evidence that budget support funds were, in practice, more affected by corruption than other forms of aid.

   Indeed, the Conservative Party policy review on Globalisation and Global Poverty notes:

   Many oppose Programme Support, and particularly General Budget Support, because of worries about corruption. However, other modes of delivering aid are also prone to corruption.

   The same TI report hightlights extensive corruption in conflict, reconstruction and post-conflict contexts (which are not typically the places to which the UK gives budget support). The report highlights the risk of corruption in tied aid and the risk of bidder collusion in aid tenders (both of which are reduced by budget support).  In other words, in countries in which corruption is high, all aid will be at risk of corruption.  Moving aid from budget support to other forms of aid does not reduce that risk.

3. Giving budget support enables donors to tackle corruption
   Corruption is very bad for a country, especially for the poor.  If donors are serious about corruption, they should be trying to reduce corruption as a whole, and not just protecting their own money. Experience suggests that when donors bypass a country’s budget, procument and auditing processes they are less likely to take an interest in tackling broader corruption. When they are interested, they have no basis on which to get involved, since none of their money is at stake.  If donors want to help to reduce corruption they have to engage with the country’s processes. Budget support not only forces donors to do so, it turns them into legitimate stakeholders in helping to improve those systems.  This engagement helps address corruption in the whole of the government budget, and not just that part financed by foreign aid.
4. Using other forms of aid is a less effective way to reduce corruption
   Again in the same report, Transparency International say that making aid more accountable to donors is less effective at reducing corruption than steps to increase domestic accountability:

   Upward accountability by recipient countries to donors has demonstrated its serious limitations in terms of relevance as well as in its ability to detect corruption. Rather strengthening the accountability of aid toward intended beneficiaries is the most effective way of limiting abuses.

   In other words, Transparency International itself does not believe that replacing aid that is locally accountable with aid that is accountable to donors is a good way to reduce corruption.

5. Budget support improves local accountability and so tackles the broader problem of corruption and financial management
   The Conservative Party policy review observes:

   “if aid is channelled through the government budget and is accompanied by steps to strengthen public financial management, the handling not only of donor funds but of tax revenues is improved. In addition, Budget and Programme Support make it easier for parliaments, the media and electorates to hold government accountable for how aid money alongside tax revenues are spent.”

   Because budget support provides donors with an opportunity to engage in reform of the public finances as a whole, and because it increases rather than reduces local accountability, it is likely that  budget support will result in less corruption in the long run than alternative forms of aid.

6. There is a cost to switching away from budget support
   Switching aid away from budget support to other forms of aid comes at a cost: on balance it reduces the effectiveness of that aid, so reducing the the overall impact on development; and it may reduce the ability of the country concerned to tackle the very problem of corruption that we profess to be concerned about.  The Conservative Party policy review said that:

When donors create parallel structures to deliver aid they can undermine both government ownership of policy and its ability to deliver (by recruiting scarce talent). So where aid can be effectively delivered through government or departmental budgets that is desirable.

In conclusion: donors are right to be concerned about corruption, but there is no reason to think that corruption is reduced, either in aid or in the country as a whole, if donors switch their aid from budget support to other forms of aid. On the other hand there are costs to doing so - in the form of reduced aid effectiveness, which means more people dying, as well as slower progress towards systems that are more accountable and less susceptible to corruption in the future.

So it does not follow that because some countries perform badly on the TI corruption perceptions index, that it is a bad idea to give those countries aid in the form of budget support.  Perhaps that is why the TI report itself explicitly counsels against that kind of reasoning:

Some governments have sought to use corruption scores to determine which countries receive aid and which do not. TI does not encourage the use of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in this way.

Alanna Shaikk writes about the good and bad of working in international development.  Here is a big part of the bad:

… You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.

This is a very acute observation, and it is confirmed by what I see here in Addis every day.

It seems to me that we must de-escalate the amount of paperwork involved in international development.

There has to be some record-keeping to enable us to account to the people whose money we are spending.  But the bureaucracy involved in designing and getting funding for projects, for hiring people, and for monitoring and reporting, has become an industry in itself. 

Akvo is promoting “Really Simple Reporting (RSR)” which is intended to simplify reporting.

The Skoll Foundation is also apparently working on a common reporting format to simplify the paperwork for grantees of US foundations. (I can’t find anything about this project online.)

I think the time has come for all donors - government agencies, international organisations, private foundations, and NGOs - to adopt a common reporting format for their grantees, so that each organisation can provide information about finances and performance in a single report - possibly provided online - on which all their funders can rely. 

The people whose money we are spending - taxpayers and individual givers - don’t want to pay people to fill in forms; and the people who work in development don’t want to do it either.  A common reporting format would also make the information more comparable and useful.

So help me I’ve read some rubbish in the Daily Mail over the years - and I know it to be a potent brew of prejudice and lies.  But this article must rank in the top-ten for stupidity.

The headline - “A heart rending dispatch from Ethiopia” - seemed promising.  Could it be that the Daily Mail is taking an interest in the challenges being faced by 80 million people here in Ethiopia?   Heaven knows, it would be about time.  About 5 million people here need emergency assistance, and about 75,000 children are suffering with severe acute malnutrition.  Approximately 73% of the female population undergoes female genital mutilation. Only 22% of the population has access to an improved water supply, and only 13% of the population has access to adequate sanitation services (less in rural areas).  Only 46% of girls in Ethiopia go to primary school, and fewer than 25% go to secondary school (these numbers are a huge improvement on the figures only a few years ago).

And the situation today is dire. Less than a year ago, a quintal of teff (a type of grain from which people make injera, a staple food) cost about 350 birr; today it has spiralled to to over 1,100 birr for the same amount, which is about what you need to feed a family for a month.

But none of that worries Liz Jones of the Daily Mail:

What I will remember most about my trip to Ethiopia is the sight of the grain market, held just outside the small town of Hossana - human population 70,000; equine population 91,040.  Mules - half donkey, half horse - are used for the terrible task of carrying grain because they are bigger and stronger than donkeys.

She is in a country in which children are dying of malnutrition and what she will remember most is the mules?

I’ve been vegetarian since I was a teenager,  so I count myself as someone who takes the rights of animals seriously, but I cannot begin to understand how Ms Jones can think that, of all the insults to dignity and humanity facing this country, the plight of donkeys could feature anywhere in the top ten.  But Ms Jones ranks donkeys right up there with Ethiopian children:

I tried to imagine how I would treat a donkey if I had seven mouths to feed, and I hope I would still have a vestige of compassion. But if my children were starving, I cannot be sure that that would be the case. No one can.

I don’t have children or a mule, but I am pretty sure that if I did, I’d put my children first. And I’d be keen to prosecute anyone who took a different view.

Almost every day here, I see women hauling huge loads of firewood on their backs from the outskirts of the city, to bring fuel for their family. A few are lucky enough to have a donkey to bear the load.  Ms Jones of the Daily Mail does not approve:

The owner explains that she has been walking with her donkey since 7am; it is nearly 5pm, and the sun is still beating down relentlessly. I ask why she has not taken the load from her donkey’s back, and she replies that she would not have the strength to lift the sacks back on to her donkey again.  Can she not let the donkey rest? The woman shakes her head. She has to hurry, to be home before 6.30pm, so that she can take part in a religious feast.

Ms Jones suggests you might want to give money to a charity to help the mules (and, almost unbelievably, to “educate owners in better animal care,
preventing problems from reoccurring”).

Alternatively, you might want to give money to a charity to help the people. You can donate to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) here, or Save the Children here.

Today is World Food Day. There are 967 million people living below the hunger line.

In one of DFID’s splendid new blogs, Howard Taylor, Head of DFID Ethiopia , emphasizes the need for greater agricultural production:

In the long-term, development assistance needs to prioritise agricultural growth and productivty, if we’re to make sure that in years to come everyone, no matter where they live, has enough to eat. In a nutshell, that’s what World Food Day is all about.

Today is a good day to remember Amartya Sen’s book Poverty and Famines, which was written partly about the the Ethiopian famine of 1972-74, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.  It begins with this profound observation:

Starvation is characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes.

This is a thought of enormous importance.  For most of the 967 million people who are hungry, the problem is NOT that there is not enough food, it is that they are too poor to buy it.

We should be cautious about pursuing a policy focused on increasing food production.  Our goal should be to increase the incomes and wealth of those who currently live in hunger and other forms of extreme poverty, so that they can exercise entitlement to the food and other things they need.  Increasing agricultural productivity is one way to improve the incomes of the rural poor, but it is not necessarily the best way, and so it may not be the way of reducing hunger.

Update: more here.

We ran ten miles this morning at the top of Entoto with a great group of runners.  The Entoto national park is a beautiful place to run, with views across Addis Ababa.

As the elevation chart below shows (full size), it is at over 10,000 feet, so you feel the lack of oxygen.

All the photos from this morning are here, or as a slideshow. If you have been running somewhere more beautiful this morning, I’d like to hear about it.

Here is the Marie Stopes team for the Olympic Day Ring Road Relay yesterday. Each team of 12 people ran a kilometre each on the newly built ring road, between Meganagna and Bole. It was an out-and-back route, so we got to see the elite athletes going past. Haile Gebrselassie presented the prizes at the finish.

I have to say it isn’t easy to run a kilometre anyway - it is a lung-busting, all out effort - but it is harder still with the heat and pollution of the Addis ring road.

And this is what power-athletes have for breakfast.

I would be trying to beg, steal or borrow tickets for the Ethiopiques concert at the Barbican Hall, London, on Friday June 27. Here is an extract from an article in the weekend FT: Raider of the lost archives:

The golden age of Ethiopian music ran from 1969 to 1978. In the last years of Haile Selassie’s reign, censorship relaxed sufficiently for an outpouring of musical creativity. Musicians thronged the nightclubs of Addis Ababa and about 500 singles and 30 albums were recorded in that period. …

Ethiopian musicians, who had remained aloof from musical developments in the rest of Africa, mixed these influences from American R&B with their own music into something distinctive and strange. At the time, it was denounced. “When you read the press of the time”, says Falceto, “there are polemics against abandoning the culture and so on.” …

Many of the musicians whose 1970s heydays are captured on the Ethiopiques series are still working, mostly playing for the vast Ethiopian diaspora, more than 1m-strong in the US alone. Ahmed and the influential arranger and keyboard player Mulatu Astatké both live there, working largely with American bands. At the Barbican, they will be joined by Alèmayèhu Eshèté, who channels the spirit of James Brown, and by the saxophonist Gétachèw Mèkurya. Instrumental support will come from the Either/Orchestra, a Boston-based group.

(Hat tip to my Mum for spotting the article and sending me the link.)

Every day, about a 120 children come to get lunch at Beza le Hiwot, a day-centre at near the Merkato in Addis Ababa.

Their food is provided by Our Father’s Kitchen, set up a year ago by Yasser and Manal Bagersh who own a couple of restaurants here in Addis. Their kitchens provide food every day for these children, most of whom are living with HIV.

It costs 217.20 birr (about $20) a month to feed a child every day. A decent meal is an essential part of staying healthy for a child living with AIDS - the drugs make you sick on an empty stomach - and the simple provision of this meal enables these children to go to school. With this simple investment, Yasser and Manal are transforming the lives of these children.

They want to expand the programme and they are launching a pledge campaign. Yasser is setting up a website for people to donate; until then you can pick up a sponsorship form at The Lime Tree Cafe or email ourfatherskitchen@yahoo.com.

I’ve been enjoying a new technique for losing weight.

First, eat or drink something that does not completely agree with you, in a tropical country like Ethiopia.

Then spend three days as fluids gush from every orifice, like a three-cornered fountain in a town square.  The fever flushes and shivers last only a day, and the headaches only for two.

(It seems to defy the laws of physics that you can lose more than your own body-weight in water, but I never understood the thing about which way water swirls down a plughole at the Equator either.)

By the third day, your throat may be sore from the acidic vomit, and you may not have regained your appetite, but you’ll be a lot lighter than you were on Thursday afternoon.

We are still in a hotel, so I don’t have bathroom scales to measure the effect. But I estimate that my weight must now be slightly less than zero.

I’ll keep taking sachets of oral dehydration salts in the hope that my equilibrium will be restored.