I’ve posted about the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness on our aidinfo blog.
The ever-excellent Chris Dillow asks:
2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? [...]
A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following:
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 [...]
The World Bank published new estimates of the number of people in poverty yesterday. They are very important and they’ve been universally misreported.
The estimates show:
the developing world is poorer than we thought; there are 1.4 billion people living in poverty (about one quarter of the developing world), not 985 million as we previously thought
nonetheless, progress [...]
Paul Collier savages Prince Charles for advocating medieval peasant farming, and points out that it is not a solution for hunger in Africa.
The GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out of [...]
I’m very excited to have made an inaugural post on the new aidinfo blog. This is the website for the work we are doing to increase the transparency of foreign aid.
This RSS feed gives you an update of what is changing on the site - add it to your favourite feedreader today.
Nancy Birdsall and Kate Vyborny at the Center for Global Development suggest six concrete steps for the Accra meeting on aid effectiveness:
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 [...]
I’m impressed by the idea of the Welbodi Partnership, a charity supporting the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone:
The Welbodi Partnership was established to support the provision of paediatric care in Sierra Leone, where child health statistics are the worst in the world.
The cool thing - as Tristan points out - is that:
they [...]
Helmut Reisen points out that the global development finance system is dysfunctional:
A prerequisite for effective ownership and efficient aid delivery, at the core of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, is to map the rising complexity of multilateral development finance, to help identify areas for consolidation, address fragmentation and poor co-ordination at country level, and [...]
In a slightly whimsical account of Bill Clinton’s trip to Ethiopia in The Guardian, we find this:
Awke Tiruneh and his wife Emaye Beyene are not the only couple who are faintly bemused. They are pleased with their two lightbulbs, one in the main room and a second in the kitchen annexe of their pristine [...]