Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘NGOs’ Category

If you read this blog, you might be interested in this job with the good people at Global Integrity. The post is based in Washington DC:

Project Manager – This position will play a key role in managing and supporting almost all of Global Integrity’s fieldwork in the coming years. Alongside other colleagues, this position will help to research and design new fieldwork methodologies and indicators; recruit and manage field teams of journalists and researchers to execute current and future fieldwork projects; perform analysis and quality control over the resultant data and reporting; and design and lead outreach and dissemination activities, including public workshops and capacity building activities. Like all colleagues at Global Integrity, this position will have the creative space to conceive of and lead new and innovative initiatives on a regular basis. We encourage good ideas and risk-taking.

Two interesting new articles start with the premise that the aid system needs to be overhauled, and then reach radically different conclusions about what this means in practice.

First up, Roger Riddell says we need a radical rethink of foreign aid:

The gap between what it does and what it could do is widening fast. … The central problem of the aid system is that there is no system.  … Almost since official aid was first given, politicians have both warned of aid’s systemic problems and proposed alternatives. These include raising aid funds through an automatic compulsory mechanism based on the ability to pay; pooling aid resources and allocating them on the basis of need; and, if there are grounds for believing that the recipient government is unable or unwilling to use the aid funds transparently, “ring-fencing” the aid in a fund to be administered independently.

Most of these good ideas have been eclipsed by the focus on increasing aid levels. A common response to anyone advocating these solutions to aid’s systemic problems is the counter-argument that they are part of the very nature of the aid system, and that it is naive to suggest that it can be changed. They warn that if governments are unable to decide for themselves how to give aid and then check on its use, then they simply won’t provide it.

There are two ways to respond to these arguments. One is to point out that that aid’s systemic problems are getting worse and fast and frustrating progress on the core objective of ending extreme poverty. Resolving key systemic problems would probably have a greater effect on extreme poverty than expanding the amount of aid given. The other is to draw attention to high-level discussions where the sorts of changes needed to fix aid are being presented as politically viable.

The authors of Philanthrocapitalism, Mike Green and Matt Bishop, also think that the aid system needs reform, but they have a very different view of the direction of travel:

Like it or not, we have to find new ways of making the aid money go further and find new ways of financing development that do not depend on the political will of a few rich countries. Philanthrocapitalism, by tapping the expertise, creativity, money and other resources of the private sector, has to be central to a new development strategy. First, to pilot and test ideas to make aid smarter and more effective. Second, to leverage more private capital – full for-profit, ethical investment and donations – to fill the gap.

As we have argued before, this means thinking about aid not as the exclusive preserve of government but as a partnership with philanthrocapitalists, rich and less rich alike. This challenge is urgent and the rich countries are being slow to take it up - Britain’s new government, in particular, seems set on business as usual (although there are plenty of disgruntled voices on the right who would like to see an axe taken to the aid budget).

Both arguments start from the view that the challenges to aid are the result of political pressures in donor countries.  Roger Riddell argues for a more centralised, technocratic aid system which can be isolated from undue political influences.  Mike and Matt want to see much greater involvement from a range of other actors, especially the big philanthropic foundations.

I think they are both partly right, and both partly wrong.

Roger Riddell is right to say that the systemic problems of aid are the result of politics; and he is right to disagree with the pessimistic idea that these problems are insurmountable.  But he wants to address these problems but putting the aid system at arm’s length.  I don’t think this is a viable solution: it wishes the problem away.  It is like saying that we can solve the global climate change problem by handing over control of energy policy to an international panel of wise people.  The politics matters, and we can’t make them go away by asking technicians to give us the answer; so we have to figure out how to change the politics.

The aid system today is characterised by aid institutions (official aid agencies, international organisations and charities) trying to mediate between the preferences of the people who give them money and their view of the interests of people in developing countries.  Aid agency staff typically want to do as much as they can for people in developing countries: if you ask most aid agency staff who their “client” is, they will tell you it is the world’s poor, not their own taxpayer. But they feel they can’t do many of the things they would like to do (such as improve the allocation of aid, reduce conditionality, make long-term commitments, scale back paperwork and process, focus more sharply, untie aid etc) because they have to take account of the preferences of the people whose money they are spending.  They see themselves as a firewall, serving the interests of the poor by protecting the aid programme as best they can from what they consider ill-informed or selfish wishes of their taxpayers. This behaviour is not confined to official donor agencies: many NGOs say one thing to their supporters, and do something quite different (think, for example, of the difference between what Kiva actually does and what most people think that it does).   In my view, trying to deliver effective aid despite public opinion  is fundamentally misconceived and unsustainable; this model is beginning to fray at the edges, and could well fall apart.

The alternative approach is for aid agencies to recognize that the public wants to see aid used as effectively as possible; and to build an informed conversation about how that can be achieved.  The stakeholders see the issues from different perspectives: for example, the public sees the benefits of spreading its aid across many countries and sectors, while aid agency staff see the ineffective duplication this creates.  The solution to this is to share information and build a common view, not to try to disempower the public.  If the aid bureaucracies believe that long-term commitments of aid to strengthen national systems is more effective in the long run than the series of smaller ad hoc projects that the public seems to prefer, then they should  produce the analysis and evidence and persuade their stakeholders.   Both Roger and I believe that more aid should be given to the poorest countries; he believes that this decision should be taken out of the political process, while I believe we have to win the public round by explaining why that would be better.

In the long run, public opinion will determine how much aid is given, to whom, and by what means: we cannot and should not try to sidestep the argument by putting the administration of aid beyond the reach of public opinion.  The only sustainable way to make aid more effective is to change the political pressures by producing persuasive evidence and analysis.   If Roger’s approach is to insulate aid from political pressure, my approach would be work to align those political pressures with more effective aid by making aid more transparent and accountable.

By contrast, Mike Green and Matt Bishop want to improve aid, and attract more resources, by making more use of the expertise and money of the private sector.  I agree with them that there is huge potential for the growing diversity in the aid system to improve the effectiveness of development system, if different organisations focus on the contributions that they can make.  Foundations could act like venture capitalists: taking bigger risks but leaving long-term financing of scaled up successes to official aid donors. Private aid could focus on achieving community and individual level results. Specialised global organizations could provide particular expertise not available through generalist support. The diversity of official donors could provide innovation rather than a monoculture of ideas. Official aid agencies could focus on long term funding and resource transfer, and support for institutional change.

Unfortunately it is not clear that all these different actors really are focusing on their strengths, and there is nothing in the aid system that pushes them to do so.  The foundations do not display the higher risk appetite that we would expect them to have (despite their rhetoric).  The approach of official aid agencies to the division of labour does not appear to be intended to drive specialisation (from which the benefit of division of labour derives) but simply to limit spread.   Diversity of approaches and innovation are essential, but this must be accompanied by mechanisms which kill off bad innovations and take good ideas to scale; otherwise the effect is simply to add to costs and fragment systems.

In their book, Philanthrocapitalism, Mike Green and Matt Bishop give several examples in which philanthropic foundations have made significant and worthwhile contributions. The role of the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting the Green Revolution is a compelling example.  But from these successes they extrapolate a wildly rose-tinted view of the work of foundations.  As with official aid, there are successes and failures; there are good practices and bad.

My impression is that, at their worst, foundations are much less effective, and behave even worse than official donors.  For example, I have seen:

• massive unpredictability and volatility of foundation grants; many foundations make grants worth 5% of their capital asset value each year, which is the minimum imposed on them by US tax authorities.   In years when asset prices are volatile, many foundations pass on this volatility to grantees – they do not (as they could, if they chose) use their capital to smooth out the grant-giving and make it more predictable and stable.  In 2009 I know of some foundations which imposed in-year cuts exceeding 25% on their grantees, leading to cuts in services and imposing huge costs in developing countries just at the time when the world economic crisis created needs for additional funding;
• reinventing the wheel and failure to learn – it is one of the advantages of foundations that they can be innovative and unconventional; unfortunately, both the benefactors and staff of many foundations suffer from an inflated sense of their own abilities, and foundations often repeat basic mistakes that have been made for many years, rather than building on the experience and wisdom of organisations that have made these mistakes before;
• capriciousness and personality-driven priorities – both the staff and benefactors of foundations get ideas into their heads from which they cannot be dissuaded.  There are many examples of ludicrous decisions and instructions from foundation staff to grantees based on nothing more than their prejudices or personal preferences.

Of course, official aid agencies also suffer from these problems to some extent.  But they also benefit from a degree of public accountability which puts them under pressure to be more effective.  I think Matt Bishop and Mike Green underestimate the problems that foundations suffer as a result of their lack of accountability.  In many cases benefactors became rich in markets; and they often trusted their instincts. But when they got a judgement wrong they were soon punished by the market, and they were able to change course.  Now that they are philanthropists, they do not have any such feedback.  When they make the wrong decision, everyone is too afraid to tell them, for fear of losing the opportunity to apply for the next grant.  There is no mechanism for identifying and rewarding their most effective staff; nothing that forces foundations to concentrate on what they are really good at.

In many ways we have the worst of all worlds: with some notable exceptions, foundations do not in practice take enough advantage of the opportunities that their lack of accountability give them (for example, taking bigger risks, or supporting unpopular causes) but they do suffer from the weaknesses that lack of accountability imposes on them.

So I think Mike and Matt are right to say that development relationships should not be the exclusive preserve of government, and that is should increasingly be an effective partnership with philanthrocapitalists, NGOs, private sector organisations and individuals.  But without some more effective governance arrangements in the aid system, we will not reap the potential benefits of this partnership.  We need stronger pressures for the different partners to make their specific contributions effectively, which in turn demands greater transparency and stronger accountability for all organisations.

Both articles start from the premise that the aid system needs to be improved; on this I think we all agree.  But Roger’s solution – putting aid beyond politics – is unlikely to be effective, and is undemocratic.  If we believe that politics constrains effective aid decisions, we should square up to trying to change the politics, not trying to insulate ourselves from it.  And Mike and Matt’s answer – passing the baton to very rich Americans – is no answer either.  These stakeholders certainly have a contribution to make, but to be effective their contribution must be part of a system that is likely to get the best from all partners working together, and holds everyone to account; otherwise we risk having all the disadvantages of the free market with none of the benefits of market discipline.

Disclosure: the organisation for which I work receives grants from the Gates Foundation and Hewlett Foundation.

A new Oxfam paper, written by the excellent Jasmine Burnley, looks at 21st Century aid. Here is a good summary paragraph:

“We are now at a crossroads. On the one side, is politically motivated or ineffective aid – much of which still exists today. On the other, and looking to the future, is aid fit for the 21st century. Twenty-first  century aid is liberated from rich countries’ political incentives and is targeted at delivering outcomes  n poverty reduction. Twenty-first century aid innovates and catalyses developing country economies, and is given in increasing amounts directly to government budgets to help them support small-holder  farmers, build vital infrastructure, and provide essential public services for all, such as health care and education. Twenty-first century aid is transparent and predictable. It empowers citizens to hold governments to account, and helps them take part in decisions that affect their lives. In recent years we have seen more of this good 21st century aid but we need to see a lot more still, and soon.”

There is a lot to like in this paper:

• the combination of making the case for more aid, and for making improvements in how it is delivered;
• the emphasis on making aid more predictable, transparent and accountable
• the focus on helping to support the evolution of effective institutions, particularly state institutions
• a whole chapter devoted to addressing the critics of aid
• the call for developing countries to do more to end corruption and increase transparency and freedom of expression
• a clear case for giving more aid to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

It is an interesting straw in the wind that the paper does not dwell on the Paris and Accra agendas for aid effectiveness. I see this as growing recognition that while the objectives of of those declarations are laudable, the top-heavy, committee-led process for achieving them is unworkable and ineffctive.  I wonder if transparency and accountabilty would have featured so much in a paper written even one or two years ago.

Yes, and …

Writing a paper about everything in development would have been an impossible task, even for someone as talented as Jasmine.  So when I say that there are points I would have liked to see made more prominently, or done differently, I do not mean this as a criticism of the paper, but rather some nuances and reflections that I would like to add.

First, there is only a brief acknowledgement (p15) of the importance for development of policies other than aid.  My view is increasingly that the most important levers for industrialised countries to help accelerate development are changes in policy (eg trade, climate change, migration, intellectual property, corruption); and that contribution of aid is likely to be modest.  Even so, I think aid makes a huge difference to improving people’s lives while development is happening, and that this is reason enough to increase and improve it.

Second, I would have been interested in some reflections on how the role of aid should change in the face of broader changes.  What are the implications for the way we use aid of of the rise of philanthropic foundations?  What difference is made by the emergence of new donors such as China?  What is the role of business, corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurs?  How does aid fit with other financial flows, including remittances and direct investment?  My own view is that we should focus aid more sharply on reaching the parts that other flows won’t reach: the poorest countries, the chronic poor and marginalised within those countries, and investments with no immediate financial return, but the paper could have put aid more clearly into this context.

Third, I think those of us who want to see more and better aid should recognise more explicitly the serious challenges that the aid system now faces.  As Duncan Green says “the pro-aid camp is fearful of giving fuel to the enemy if it acknowledges the failings of aid.”   The paper suffers from a certain amount of self-censorship of this kind.  There are scattered references to the problems,  such as this:

“Aid that does not work to alleviate poverty and inequality – aid that is driven by geopolitical interests,  which is too often squandered on expensive consultants or which spawns parallel government structures accountable to donors and not citizens – is unlikely to succeed.”

I would have liked a more thorough examination of these (and other) problems. We have to acknowledge that some of these problems are getting worse, not better. (In places it reminded me of the way that some politicians appear on TV when things are going badly wrong, with a talking point that says “things are pretty good, though of course we could do even better; but we really need to get our message across better”.)

On his blog, Duncan Green makes much of the point that this paper sets out the case both for increasing aid and for making it work better.  I don’t think this is as unusual as he suggests (“More and better aid” was one of the demands of Make Poverty History, for example).  But I do agree with him, and with Jasmine, that this is the right position.

Despite those quibbles, I thought this was a very good paper. It explains the debate about aid clearly, and it sets out very well coherent and plausible agenda for why aid should be increased, and how it should be improved.  But I’m not sure who Oxfam thinks will read it, and unfortunately I doubt if it will change anybody’s mind in either direction.

This post is a longer, more detailed companion to my article published today at the Atlantic Community.  You might want to read that first. Here I include a gratuitous but friendly swipe at a caricature of the views of Bill Easterly.

Almost every successful complex system became successful through a process of evolution.

Complex animals are the result of generations of evolution: of random mutation of genes (variation) and then survival of the fittest (selection).  That is how complex animals, superbly adapted to their environment, come into existence.   In market economies firms and products are launched  (variation). If customers like their products, and if the firms are efficient, they will grow; if not the firm will fail (selection). That is why well-functioning markets tend to have efficient firms which make products that customers  want.  Political movements spring up (variation) and do well if they are popular with the electorate (selection).

At the end of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins invented the notion of a meme, an idea which tends to reproduce itself in a community such as a fashion, culture, value, melody or belief.  He describes how societies with successful memes (“Don’t marry your cousin”) tend to do better than societies with memes that do them harm (“Humans make a tasty dinner”).

The development system is a complex system, but it would be excessively kind to claim that it is a successful one.  There are many initiatives to design a new “aid architecture”  which are unlikely to succeed; and even if they did, do we really want to wait another half a century until we can agree the next new design?  What we need instead is to instill into the development system mechanisms that force it to evolve as circumstances change.

In development, we have quite a lot of variation but not enough selection.

There are too many, rather than too few, organisations and projects in development.  Here in Ethiopia, nine sectors have 20 donors or more (including health, governance, education, water, agriculture, infrastructure), and according to the DAC database there were 1 840 projects by aid donors in Ethiopia in 2007.  Globally the UN has more agencies working in development than there are developing countries, and there are more than a hundred global funds working in the health sector alone.

It isn’t just DAC donors and multilaterals that are proliferating.  In Ethiopia there are more than 3 500 NGOs, almost entirely funded from overseas. As with official aid agencies, some of these NGOs are outstanding.  Some are well-meaning but ineffective.  Some are charlatans and rent-seekers.  Ethiopians are shrewd judges of which are which.  But the ineffective agencies and NGOs and the charlatans, and some very duff projects, still get funded year after year.

I recently met a European bureaucrat sent to “build capacity” at the Africa Union, whose headquarters are here in Addis Ababa.   As we ran together in the hills above Addis where Ethiopian athletes train, he told me frankly that his project was a complete waste of time. No surprise: we have known the shortcomings of the way donors give “technical assistance” for more than forty years.  But there is nothing in the aid system that forces organisations to stop wasting money on projects that everybody knows will never work.

A slight disagreement with Bill Easterly

This is where I partly disagree with my friend and fellow blogger, Bill Easterly (or to be more accurate, I disagree with the following caricature of his view).  Bill argues in The White Man’s Burden that there are too many “planners” and not enough “searchers” in development.  He is robustly critical of anyone with anything resembling a grand plan, and consistently sceptical of the aid industry’s habit of herding towards the next big thing (microfinance, agriculture, etc).  He calls for more experimentation, and more small scale programmes grounded in local realities.

I’m all for lots of experimentation: an evolutionary process needs variation. But the evolutionary force missing in the aid system is not variation but selection.    For the evolutionary process to work, there has to be some process by which more resources are channelled to effective aid, and resources are taken away from things that don’t work.  If not a planner, then there has to be some sort of decision maker to make this happen.  Bill seems to agree with this in principle -  the AidWatchers prize for Best In Aid went to the “smart giving” movement which encourages private donors to give more money to effective organisations.  But if ever someone suggests that a particular approach appears to be work and ought to be scaled up, Bill pops up and accuses them of being a planner, or of diverting scarce resources to their pet cause at the expense of the myriad of other grass roots programmes being promoted by searchers.

While I agree with Bill’s robust scepticism, and his demand for more rigorous evidence, I think he focuses too much on the need for more “searchers” and does not sufficiently focus on the need for stronger selective pressures. I agree that we don’t want a plan, but we do need some way of doing more of what works, and doing less of what does not, and that in turn requires some sort of institutions to channel aid to priorities.  But Bill is apparently allergic to any sort of institution playing this role.

What would better selection look like?

There is a  movement which advocates a suite of sensible measures, including:

• a stronger focus on results, and less focus on announcements of spending
• more rigorous and independent evaluation, using randomised controlled trials where possible
• a stronger link between funding and results (for example, Cash on Delivery aid, EU MDG Contracts and the selectivity of the Millennium Challenge Corporation)
• promoting better giving to charities by the public (through  organizations like GiveWell, Philanthropedia and Great Nonprofits)

I’m in favour of all these things, and I would like to see more of them.  But they are all essentially “top down” mechanisms for selection, in which the pressure comes from wise outsiders who decide what is working.

Other complex systems do not rely on top down intervention to force selection (unless perhaps you believe in theistic evolution, in which change occurs through the external intervention of a benign deity.)  Tesco is not the largest supermarket in the UK because the government has conducted thorough monitoring and evaluation of its outputs and outcomes.   We do not used randomised controlled trials to decide which coffee shops should stay open.   Political parties win elections by getting votes, not because they have convinced a higher authority of the quality of their log-frames.

We should not exaggerate the market metaphor: development work is not exactly like a market, and anyway few markets operate well without some kind of central regulation.  But it isn’t neoliberal faith in markets to say we should look for more bottom-up ways to enhance selective pressure in development, so that the decisions are not made by benign deities from outside (even ones who know who to do randomised trials) but by the people who are supposed to benefit from the aid.

In a recent TED talk David Cameron spoke of a post bureaucratic age in government, in which citizens are able to improve services through greater local accountability.   More use of top down evaluation, with consultants flying in to conduct rigorous baseline surveys and measure results of treatment and control groups, however rigorous and independent, does not feel very ‘post bureaucratic’ to me.

There are increasingly many examples of bottom-up mechanisms towards better accountability in development, many of which are enabled by growing access to communications and technology.  Ingredients of this revolution include:

• social accountability movements such as Twaweza (listen to Rakesh Rajani interviewed here)
• giving cash to people in developing countries, for example through cash transfer programmes
• giving people vouchers for services, and letting them choose where they get that service from
• Advance Market Commitments, which reward firms for producing goods and services of value

Oddly, many of these efforts to empower the poorest to direct resources themselves are opposed by some people working in development who regard themselves as progressive.  It is hard to escape the feeling that this opposition may owe more to concern for their own job satisfaction than for the interests of the poor.

It is not a straight choice between top down and bottom up accountability: there are hybrid models.  An important trend in development assistance over the last decade has  been efforts to encourage greater accountability of developing country governments to their own citizens, so that aid given to governments is better used in the service of the poor. This is a big part of the thinking behind the combination of budget support and Poverty Reduction Strategies.   Creative ideas are now emerging for strengthening the feedback loop from the intended beneficiaries of aid programmes to the overseas decision makers (such as ALINE and Guidestar), so combining top-down selection with bottom-up information about effectiveness.  These long chain accountability mechanisms are important, but they seem to me to be a second-best to giving poor people themselves direct influence over how resources are used.

Conclusion

Complex systems become and stay effective through a process of evolution: this requires variation and selection.  The development system contains quite a bit of variation, but not enough selective pressure.  Proposals for more effective top-down selective pressure should be supported, but the real prize is finding better ways to increase selective pressure from the people whom these programmes are intended to support.

Nick Kristof writes approvingly in the New York Times about faith based aid organisations:

Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensable networks on the ground….. A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.

I have two observations about this.

First, it is an indictment of the aid system that we have no way of knowing whether these organisations are more effective, less effective, or about the same, as their non-religious counterparts. Kristof’s claim that they are “indispensible” is completely without evidence either way.

Second, World Vision, which as Kristof says is the US’s largest development and organisation, has an explicit policy against hiring non-Christians:.

World Vision United States has diverse opportunities for qualified and committed Christian professionals who are willing to share the life, light, and hope of Christ.

All applicants for staff positions with World Vision United States will be screened for Christian commitment. The screening process will include:

- Discussion with the applicant of his/her spiritual journey and relationship with Jesus Christ;
- Understanding of Christian principles;
- Understanding and acceptance of World Vision’s Statement of Faith and/or The Apostles’ Creed

Either religion is irrelevant to the work these organisations do, in which case they should not discriminate on the basis of religion in their hiring; or religion is important in the work they do, in which case they should not be allowed to spend public money in its pursuit.

Even if you believe that these organisations should be allowed to discriminate against possible employees on the basis of religious belief, this surely means that they cannot be allowed to receive money from the taxpayer,  or be used as a contractor for government aid.

So those people (whom Kristof calls “liberals”) who want to stop channelling taxpayer money through organisations that discriminate on the basis of religion must surely be correct.

I am grateful to Oxfam’s Duncan Green for his fair and thoughtful review of my paper about improving aid, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid.

I’m glad that Duncan and Chris, his Oxfam colleague,  endorse a key argument of the paper, which is that the development industry will improve through evolutionary change rather than grand design; and that a driver of this change will be better mechanisms feedback from the citizens of developing countries about what is working. The paper points out that this kind of evolutionary change comes from variation and selection – and that the aid business does not have enough of either to ensure evolution towards more effective aid.

Duncan and Chris  have reservations about the word “beneficiary” to describe the people in developing countries whom aid is intended to support.  I think that is a good point, and I’d be happy to use a different word if we can find a suitable alternative (I don’t think that “primary stakeholder” or “rights holder” takes the trick, since neither is sufficiently specific about who we mean).

I don’t want to put words in Duncan’s mouth, but I detect from his review that he is more sceptical than me about the value of markets. He dismisses without much fanfare the  the idea of giving more choice to the, er, “intended beneficiaries” (aka primary stakeholders and rights-holders):

Where I think he is wrong is a largely market based philosophy for creating incentives based on New Public Management theories of expanding choice more than voice. … This in turn requires some quite fundamental organisational change with in aid agencies, as well as establishing more citizen to citizen links possibly using new social media.’

That is an unfair characterisation of my view: I am in favour of choice AND voice.  A large part of the paper, especially when talking about networks, is precisely about how citizens can have more voice, and I talk explicitly about citizens links through new social media.  But there are huge problems to overcome in achieving this, because the “intended beneficiaries” are geographically and politically remote from decision-makers in aid agencies, which means their voice is dimly heard, if at all.

While I agree with Duncan on the need to ensure that people have voice, I find it surprising that he (in common with many people who regard themselves as progressive) is so reluctant to give choice where possible as well.   Duncan’s (excellent) book is called From Poverty To Power – and I believe that giving people direct control of resources and allowing them to choose what services they want, and from whom, can be one of the most important ways of empowering people.  Duncan calls this a “technocratic/new labour enthusiasm for using market mechanisms” – but the idea of giving the poor more direct control of resources goes back long before New Labour:  Oxfam’s honorary President, Amartya Sen, got a Nobel prize for his 1982 book, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, which argued that it would be better to give people money than food in a famine.

I have not swallowed the New Public Management story hook, line and sinker, but I do believe that there have been positive experiences (for example, from the publication of league tables, and the distinction between purchaser and provider).  While I think we should learn from new public management, my paper describes in some detail the shortcomings of a market-only approach, especially as it relates to foreign assistance.  I hoped my paper would be an elegant synthesis of some of the best (and proven) tools of this school of thought with lessons from other approaches, especially the use of complementary mechanisms of networks, voice, regulation and planning.

The aid industry has almost entirely evaded the reform of public services over the last decade.   There is no measurement of results; no distinction between purchaser and provider; no customer choice.  Presumably the lack of reform is partly because the shortcomings of the industry are felt by people with no political power or voice in the political systems of donor countries. The incumbent service providers are politically powerful, well organised, and deeply conservative about any change that affects their interests.  The aid system has, over time, drawn to it people who are sceptical about the value of markets and choice, saddling developing countries instead with five year plans and long coordination meetings.  No politician in a donor country is enthusiastic to take on these vested interests, in order to improve services for people they will never meet and who have no vote in the election.

I love this black humour about useless NGOs:

It reminds me of a joke that we had in Malawi about the proliferation of useless (and often fraudulent) NGOs – we talked about the NGO TWACIB, which stood for “Two wankers and a computer in Blantyre.

On a recent trip to London I was taken aback by the widespread view that small NGOs are more effective than large NGOs and official aid agencies because they don’t have bloated bureaucracy and they are closer to the beneficiaries.  That is not the general perception here in Ethiopia, where people regularly bemoan the proliferation of small NGOs. These organisations tend to have high overhead costs in proportion to their programme (each needs a Director, an office, drivers, etc).  Many of them have to spend a disproportionate amount of time and effort raising money.  These costs are spread over small programmes with modest impact.  Of course, some are very innovative and successful, and they design programmes that should be taken to scale (but all too rarely are).

According to local newspapers, there are roughly 3,800 NGOs here in Addis Ababa, spending roughly $1.5 billion a year between them.  The Government’s annual health budget is roughly $300m a year, and it is impressively effective.  If there were 20% fewer NGOs, and the money went to the Government instead, health spending by Government could double and there would still be too many NGOs.

If the aid world were more business-like, there would be mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and bankruptcies, which would naturally cull the proliferation of small organisations.  The most successful organisations would grow, or become part of an established organisation, while unsuccessful and inefficient organisations would either be taken over or would be allowed to fail.  In the absence of any of effective evolutionary pressures, the NGO world remains a pool of tadpoles.

A friend of mine is the country director of a small NGO based here in Ethiopia. She thinks that what they do is worthwhile, but that they are far too small to be a cost-effective way to help people. Ideally she would like the work she does to be taken over and absorbed into a larger organisation; but there is no way in the aid industry for this to happen.

I’ve got nothing against NGOs, big or small.  But there is nothing in the system that pushes NGOs (or indeed official aid agencies) towards being the right size; and there is nothing that weeds out the ineffective organisations.  And so we should not be suprised that as well as many very effective organisations, there are a lot that are far too small and ineffective.

I know it is a cliché, but if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Oxfam’s new campaign urges us to believe that they have designed a package of measures that would give $280 billion to the world’s poor “without putting any extra burden on ordinary taxpayers.”

That would be terrific. But why stop there?  Why not make it twice as big and fix climate change while we are at it?  Now that we’ve invented a free money machine, the possibilities are limitless …

Oxfam’s three ideas are a Currency Transaction Tax, reallocation of Special Drawing Rights, and clamping down on tax havens.  These may all seem like painless taxes, but that ignores the reality that these additional costs will be passed through the system and the costs will, in the end, be an extra burden on ordinary taxpayers.

For example, I’m all in favour of international companies paying more tax in the countries where they create value or extract resources rather than in low-tax rich countries. I am in favour of changes to the tax rules, and increased information sharing, to make that happen.   But on the happy day that multinationals start paying more money in tax to developing countries, that money is going to come from someone – shareholders (that’s our pension funds and some rich individuals), customers (that’s us), the workers in that business (us again) or from less tax paid to our own government (that’s more tax for us to pay, or less money for public services).

Similarly, currency transaction taxes and giving away the seignorage from issuing SDRs will impose costs on businesses and government which will eventually be borne by “ordinary” people. (Actually hardly anybody is ordinary, but that is a point for a different day.)

Oxfam is making a classic mistake of confusing how a tax is levied with its eventual incidence.  When you put up a business tax, who pays?  Clearly not the business on which it is levied, because it isn’t a person.  The tax will be paid by some combination of the shareholders, customers and workers – the exact incidence depending on things like how competitive are the markets in which the businesses are operating.

Who exactly does Oxfam think is going to pay for the extra $280 billion of benefit to people in development countries?  If they want the cost to be borne by the rich, a far simpler and more reliable mechanism would be to introduce a higher rate of income tax on the rich.

To pretend that none of this will add to the burden on ordinary taxpayers makes Oxfam sound, at best, naiive; at worst they are setting out to deceive.

I am strongly in favour of spending more money on international development.  Peter Singer’s book, The Life You Can Save, sets out how much can be achieved with a modest contributon from each of us.  Let’s be honest about what is needed, and the very small sacrifice that is required, and not pretend that we have invented a perpetual energy machine or found ways to turn lead into gold.

Tim Harford has an interesting article in this weekend’s Financial Times about private health and education in developing countries:

Imagine that your daily earnings were less than the price of this newspaper. Would you consider buying private education and private healthcare?

Before you make up your mind, here are a few considerations: government healthcare and primary education are free; the private-sector doctors are ignorant quacks and the teachers are poorly qualified; the private schools are cramped and often illegal. It doesn’t sound like a tough decision. Yet millions of very poor people around the world are taking the private-sector option. And, when you look a little closer at the choice, it’s not so hard to see why.

Now there is a dilemma here.

On the one hand, we know that charging even a very small amount massively reduces the take-up and impact of services such as health and education. (This survey by Holla and Kremer summarises the evidence.)  So charges excludes many people from access, and it seems likely that the poorest and most vulnerable will be excluded most of all.

On the other hand, we know that public services in developing countries are often poorly managed and badly delivered. That’s why, as Tim points out in his FT article, many of the very poorest people choose to go private instead.

Apologies if this is anecdotal, but I see this dilemma in practice every day. My partner works for Marie Stopes International, which operates 21 clinics for women (providing contraception and abortion) here in Ethiopia.  They charge their clients for services – a small amount which is just enough to pay for the cost of running the clinics.   The result is that they are very focused on delivering services that will bring their clients into the clinics every day – that is, services that they actually need, at a price they can afford.  My feeling is that, as a result, they are more focused on their customers than most public services in developing countries, and indeed in some developed countries, whether financed by aid or by taxation.

So how can we disentagle ourselves from the horns of this dilemma?  Here are three thoughts:

• First, we should take seriously Tim’s observation that “a little accountability goes a long way” and think  much harder about how we can make public services more acountable.  You have probably heard about the way more funding reached Ugandan schools as a result of greater transparency (though the details have been disputed (pdf)). The work of my team on aid transparency is a modest contribution to this effort.
   
• Second, we should not be ideological about whether the public or private sector actually provides services, as long as the government takes steps to ensure that there is universal access. For example, governments (with the support of donors) might issue vouchers to the poorest, enabling them to choose for themselves whether to use public or private services.
   
• Third, in the long run this problem will be reduced if and when there is equitably shared economic growth which gives people sufficient incomes for these kinds of choices to be more reasonable.

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.

The Ethiopian Government passed a new law on Tuesday that limits the activities of foreign-funded organisations. The law prevents organizations that receive more than 10% of their funding from abroad from involvement in human rights, gender equality and conflict resolution.  It has been greeted with howls of protest by international organisations.

I’m going to make myself very unpopular with  lots of the ferenj here in Addis Ababa, many of whom make a good living working for NGOs with foreign funding and are up in arms about this. But I see where the Ethiopian Government is coming from, and I don’t think the law is completely unreasonable.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I would not have brought in this law. I think 15 years imprisonment (that was in the draft bill) for breaking this law is draconian. I do not think that government officials should have the right to attend internal meetings of civil society organisations.

But it is not unreasonable for the Ethiopian Government to say that foreign-funded organisations should not be able to use their funding to buy political influence and change in Ethiopia. Foreign donations to political parties are illegal in the UK – that is why there has been such a fuss about the allegations that George Osborne may have solicited donations from Russian oligarchs on a yacht. We are uncomfortable with the idea that very wealthy people should buy political power – that is why we have spending limits and caps on political donations – and in the UK we look rather pityingly at the United States, where funding by rich companies and individuals seems to dominate political life.  Think what this must feel like in a very poor country, where even quite modestly wealthy organisations and individuals overseas have undreamt of wealth by comparison with Ethiopians, and try to use that disparity of wealth to buy change.

So why shouldn’t a very poor country be concerned to avoid having its politics shaped by foreign funding?

There are about 3,800 NGOs here in Addis, with a total budget of $1.5 billion a year. (That is a lot of money in a country in which the annual government budget is about $4 billion a year. The government health budget is less than $300 million a year.) The money going to NGOs could make a huge difference if it were used to improve government services directly, rather that to fund a motley collection of advocacy organisations and fragmented small scale delivery organisations.

It is important to note that the new law does not forbid civil society organisations from being involved in advocacy for human rights. It forbids organisations from being involved in political advocacy if they get more than 10% of their funding from abroad.

So while this law isn’t one that I would have introduced myself, I see where the Government is coming from. It is not completely mad. The hysterical over-reaction from donors, often under political pressure from international NGOs at home, is out of all proportion.

Nicholas Kristof mused on Christmas Day in the New York Times on whether NGOs should pay high salaries.  He seems to come down – though equivocally – on the side of saying that sometimes they should:

In the war on poverty, there is room for all kinds of organizations. Mr. Pallotta may be right that by frowning on aid groups that pay high salaries, advertise extensively and even turn a profit, we end up hurting the world’s neediest.

“People continue to die as a result,” he says bluntly. “This we call morality.”

I think there is a dilemma here only if you retain the mindset that aid agencies and NGOs are providing charity to the world’s neediest.  If this is charity, then perhaps there is something incongruous about “profiting” from charity.  (One of the commenters on the New York Times forum calls it “a moral repugnance”.)  Today this is charity; and even so, the utilitarian in me thinks we should pay higher salaries whenever the return – in terms of higher output from securing better staff – exceed the costs.

But there is much less of a problem if we see development assistance as social justice.  In the 20th Century, most of Europe turned its backs in the  on Victorian concepts of charity and workhouses to deal with poverty in their midst in favour of building social institutions to protect all their citizens.  In the 21st Century, our view of foreign assistance will, I believe, undergo a similar change: we will see foreign assistance as an act of solidarity and social justice, as part of what it means to live together as part of the same society.  The world’s poor will have rights, not depend on charity, and there will be institutions whose job it is to protect those rights. When development assistance is not charity but justice, we will not think it strange to provide a decent income to those who deliver it, any more than we think it strange to pay our judges well.

Update: Wronging Rights has a discussion of this too.

If you read this blog you might have a passing interest in development and in technology. So you just might be interested (or know someone who would be interested) in joining our team.

We are hiring a Web 2.0 specialist to help us to make data about aid and poverty more accessible and useful in the fight against poverty. Here is the advert. More information about the team is here.

We can promise a great team, highly motivated, with lots of flexibility; and you’ll have a chance to do something really important. If you know anyone who might be interested, please pass this on.

Update: thanks to those who pointed out that they couldn’t access the file. I’ve uploaded it again – let me know in the comments if there is still a problem with it.

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.

Read this first (Allana Shaikh):

Don’t do it. You’re not going to think of a solution no one else has, your approach is not as innovative as you think it is, and raising money is going to be impossible. You will have no economy of scale, your overhead will be disproportionately high, and adding one more tiny NGO to the overburdened international system may well make things worse instead of better.

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.

I’ve posted about the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness on our aidinfo blog.