IFILL: … I want to get — try to get you both to answer a question that neither of your principals quite answered when my colleague, Jim Lehrer, asked it last week, starting with you, Sen. Biden. What promises — given the events of the week, the bailout plan, all of this, what promises have you and your campaigns made to the American people that you’re not going to be able to keep?

BIDEN: Well, the one thing we might have to slow down is a commitment we made to double foreign assistance. We’ll probably have to slow that down. We also are going to make sure that we do not go forward with the tax cut proposals of the administration — of John McCain …

So “the one thing” that can be put on hold is Obama’s previous commitment to double foreign aid? 

It isn’t clear how this fits with Obama’s sponsorship of the Global Poverty Act, which would require the next President of the United States:

to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the U.S. foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

According to Obama’s website:

With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces,” said Senator Obama. “It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America’s standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere

The UK wants donor countries to provide full and detailed information of all the financial assistance provided to each country; details of individual projects and their aims; and reliable information on future aid flows so that developing countries can plan ahead.

This political pressure is a very welcome boost for our work on the need for greater transparency for aid, with strong civil society backing, and the UK Government deserves great credit for pushing it. It

The next stage for us is an intensive period of listening to people in developing countries - parliaments, finance ministries, civil society, the private sector - as well as in donor countries, to understand exactly what information should be published, and how.

And that’s what we’ll be doing for the next couple of years.

The lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age five at risk from malnutrition, OCHA said. …

The United Nations appealed in June for 325.2 million dollars mainly for drought victims . Only 52 percent of the appeal has been met.

I don’t understand how this can happen. We presumably knew - or could have known - in April that the short rains had failed, and that there would be hunger in southern Ethiopia. So how is it that we find ourselves in September - at least 4 full months later - and we’ve only raised half the money we need to prevent people from dying of hunger?

I am told that the food shortages were accurately predicted by the experts as early as May. But this predictions don’t translate into political pressure, and thus funding, until there are pictures on TV of children with distended bellies and flies on their face.

So the question for the future is: how can we translate warnings about food shortages into a flow of the necessary resources without having to wait for people to start to die?

The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

• Changing riders;
• Appointing a committee to study the horse;
• Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses;
• Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included;
• Reclassifying the dead horse as ‘living impaired’;
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse;
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed;
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance;
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance;
• Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the mission of the organization than do some other horses;
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses;
• Preparing a workshop with paid attendants on the subject of Experience gaining in riding dead horses in post war setting;
• Preparing a second workshop on environmental hazards caused by horse shit, and the advantage on using dead horses since they do not shit therefore are of no hazard to the environment.

This RSS feed gives you an update of what is changing on the site - add it to your favourite feedreader today.

• Untie all aid, including technical assistance, and publish information on which providers get contracts in practice.
• Tell recipients what donors are spending through a concrete set of standards for transparency.
• Make all evaluations public, regardless of their results, by entering them into a prospective registry.
• Pay for outcomes not inputs, by piloting a Cash on Delivery aid contract with interested recipients.
• Let recipients use technical assistance to buy what they need by piloting with interested recipient(s) an arrangement giving recipients full flexibility in what consulting and training to buy, and financing a platform for recipients to give and see each other’s feedback on the services offered by multiple providers.
• Give recipients ironclad predictability of the future aid flows to which they commit by allowing recipients to arrange with an intermediary to receive a guaranteed cash flow, and sign over the donor’s actual flows over some agreed period to the intermediary.

I like these suggestions partly because they are each sensible in themselves. But the main reason I like them is that too much of the discussion about Accra has focused on rather narrow and technocratic measures to address particular items in the Paris Declaration. These ideas from CGD are more far-reaching: proposals such as greater aid transparency (which is what I spend most of my time working on) or on paying for outcomes (instead of micromanaging how money is spent) are ways to change the whole nature of the relationship between donor and recipient in the way that Paris envisages.

My only complaint is that they should have called the paper “a little less conversation”. After all, as Elvis said:

A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me baby

under the pretext of making aid more effective the Paris Declaration project is a form of collective colonialism by Northern “donors” of those countries in the South that (because of their weakness and vulnerability and psychology of “dependency”) may allow themselves to be subjected to it at the Accra September Conference.

This is massively overstated, but there is a kernel of truth here. Donors have the money, the choice and the power, and however progressive individual officials want to be, that power relationship is translated into institutional mechanisms such as the Paris Declaration.

That said, the Paris Declaration is the best opportunity for a generation to change that power relationship, by committing the donors to improving their behaviour as donors, including several measures which could, over time, rebalance the power.

I will be at the Accra September Conference and will report on whether we make progress.

“That’s increasingly in the last few years what our foundation has been focused on - what is the most cost-effective way to mobilise a national health system,” Mr Clinton said.

“You can get the universal treatment - the money’s there now, if we spend it most effectively.”

“But we don’t have the health care systems to reach out to people, get them tested and diagnosed in a timely fashion, get them on treatment and do the regular follow-ups.”

Well good. This is what the aid experts have been saying for years. It is why many of us opposed the establishment of funds like the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria and PEPFAR in the first place. But politicians like to announce things that they think their public will understand, and big disease-specific initiatives are the kind of thing that seems to fit the bill.

Mr Brown’s four-point plan for the annual G8 gathering includes a $60bn boost for health care in developing nations, to recruit more health workers; extra money to meet shortfalls in a $1bn fund to stop 72 million children missing out on a primary education; and a food-crisis package. [Ed: I make that a 3-point plan?]

Say what you like about Mr Brown’s domestic political standing (I personally can’t see what he is supposed to have done wrong, apart perhaps from dismantling our civil liberties) but he continues to put real energy and passion into international development. Since I think that is two orders of magnitude more important and urgent than anything in British politics, that is enough for me.

A government source quoted in the same article gets it exactly right:

“It would be very stupid to give up on Africa because of the economic downturn – a big strategic error to save a relatively small amount of money. If we invest in agriculture in Africa, we could bring down the price of food. Half of the food produced rots before it gets to the market. It could become the breadbasket for the world.”

Leaders of the Group of Eight rich nations are set to backtrack on their landmark pledge at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 to increase development aid to Africa to $25bn a year. A draft communiqué obtained by the Financial Times, due to be issued at the group’s July summit in Hokkaido, Japan, shows leaders will commit to fulfilling “our commitments on [development aid] made at Gleneagles” – but fails to cite the target of $25bn annually by 2010.

To be fair, the only evidence for this given by the FT is that the draft G8 summit makes no reference to the figure. In some ways this may seem pedantic - failing to repeat the number is not the sane thing as renouncing it - but for those of us who watch summit language carefully, this is a significant ommission. If the countries meant to to keep their promises, they would make a virtue of it by restating the commitment. The only possible reason for dropping the language is that they no longer believe they will live up to it.

In some ways, however, this is more worrying:

In a further retreat, the G8 is set to abandon its Gleneagles promise to provide universal access to Aids treatment and prevention by 2010. The pledge has been a benchmark around which health campaigners and others have been organising their work, especially in Africa.

Universal access to AIDS treatment is a much better target than the aid target. In principle, we should be setting targets for what we plan to achieve, not targets for how much we plan to spend (which creates perverse incentives to spend more, rather than achieve more value for money).