Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Transparency’ Category

When Google decided to set up a censored version of its search engine in China in 2006, I was among those who criticised the company for its decision (here and here).

As well thiking it was the wrong decision in principle, I worried that a company that says one thing (“Don’t Be Evil”) and does another will eventually suffer from the contradiction between their values and their actions.

So I applaud their announcement today that they are taking a new approach in China and their threat to pull out of the market.

(Ironically, Google’s own blog is censored here in Ethiopia. You cannot access blogspot blogs.)

Google is standing up to dictatorship and speaking out for free speech, and putting this ahead of their immediate commercial interests.

It is hard to imagine other companies standing up for their – and our – values in this way. (Can you imagine Microsoft withdrawing their Bing search engine instead of producing sanitized results?)

Bloggers are quick to criticise when companies do the wrong thing.  So let’s be equally unstinting in our praise when they do things right.

Good on yer, Google.

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.

This post is cross-posted on the aidinfo blog.

My colleague Judith Randel has made a very interesting point about aid transparency.

It was not long ago that donors conducted Consultative Group meetings in Paris about their planned aid to each developing country. Representatives of the recipients were not invited (they were subsequently given observer status to some of the meeting). That seems very strange today, as we know that development must be a country-led process. Donors aim to support the plans of developing country governments.

Yet today donors give aid to developing countries without publishing detailed information about what aid they are giving, to whom, for what, and with what effect. You can find out some general information a few years after the event, but the aid relationship is essentially a black box between donors and recipient countries. In a few years time, this will seem just as bizarre as donor-only Consultative Group meetings.

The people of a developing country – citizens, parliamentarians and civil society – have a right to know what is being spent in their country and how resources are being used. That is essential to making sure those resources are properly used, and to building the accountability of governments to their own people. Aid agencies are increasingly coming under pressure from taxpayers to publish details of how aid is spent, and there are some tentative steps towards greater transparency.

Aidinfo is working to ensure that the information is provided in a way that is accessible by, and useful to, the people of developing countries, and not just to donors.

The aidinfo team which I lead at Development Initiatives is hiring.  Click here for our job advertisement (pdf).   Closing date: 22 January.  Feel free to ask me if you want more information. (Job descriptions now online here.)

Job advert

My new working paper, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid is on the Center for Global Development website in the innovations in aid series.

In the paper I argue that more planning and coordiation among donors will not overcome the political constraints that prevent better aid.  The aid system is in a political equilibrium which we need to try to change; we won’t solve aid’s problems by trying to move away from the equilibrium.  This means making more use of market and network mechanisms to change incentives within the aid system. We need to stop thinking of grand new designs of the aid system and start putting in place mechanisms that force evolution in the right direction.

I’ve listed a set of measures, from the commonplace (untying aid, for example) to the unusual (tradable missions permits, or a tax on proliferation pollution) to illustrate the ideas.

I’ll be discussing the paper at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) on Friday, and on a forthcoming episode of Development Drums.

I’m looking forward to comments and feedback.

Have a look at this video produced by the International Budget Partnership.

The video is about the way that a civil society organisation in Kenya, MUHURI, has enabled a local community in Mombassa to hold their government to account.

(Disclosure: I work on aidinfo – a small research team which promotes the adoption of open standards for the publication of detailed information about foreign aid, to enable people in developing countries to hold governments and donors to account.)

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

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

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

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

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

Also you can subscribe to our RSS feed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So asks Chris Blattman:

I seldom fly business myself, even on Bank and UN consultancies, mostly to conserve my project funds for research assistants and survey expenses. My incentives are just right: money I spend on me comes out of money I’d spend making my research projects just a little better. Not so the rest of the agency?

I also hold back from business for another reason: $6000 for a single ticket? When the purpose of your trip is to contribute (however little) to ending poverty, something about that price tag just doesn’t seem right.

The Bankers and UNers have a good response: I’m only there for a week, and I’m much more productive if I can sleep on the plane.

To which I reply: your productivity for a 0.5% of your time is worth 4% of your annual salary?

In some cases, I might add: what development assistance exactly is achieved in a week?

In an age of diminishing aid and global belt-tightening, now seems an opportune time to change this little practice. Mr. Zoellick? Mr. Ki-Moon?

The answer is obvious:  of course not. The staff of aid agencies should fly economy class.

Business class flights are not the only expensive perks.  Why do World Bank and IMF staff  visiting Addis Ababa stay in the Sheraton, which is one of the most luxurious and vulgar hotels in the world, when there are very good hotels down the road for one fifth of the price?  Why do international aid agency staff living overseas have such luxurious houses, with allowances for gardeners and domestic staff?  Why do some aid agencies pay to fly their belongings to Addis Ababa air freight, when it could come by sea for a fraction of the price? Should staff be allowed to ship cars from home, at public expense, duty free, and then sell them locally at a profit?

A good start would be to make all this transparent. As we are seeing with the row over MPs’ expenses in the UK, sunlight is a good disinfectant.  If all these expenses were individually and separately itemised and published, I suspect many aid agencies would soon decide that they are difficult to defend.

The senior staff of the Canadian aid agency, CIDA, are required by Canadian policy to publish their travel and hospitality expenses.   Here are the returns for the first quarter of this year.  That’s a good start. But I’d like to even more detailed figures published for all staff of aid agencies.  I suspect quite a lot of this stuff would stop quite quickly.

My colleague Simon nails the link between the Obama team’s idea of openness and what we are trying to do with aid data:

The pitch for the idea states:

“We can unleash a wave of civic innovation if we open up government data to programmers. The government has a treasure trove of information: legislation, budgets, voter files, campaign finance data, census data, etc. Let’s STANDARDIZE, STRUCTURE, and OPEN up this data.”

Quite. This is exactly what we want to do with aid data!

I am in favour of more openness in government, and against leaking by civil servants.

Almost everyone recognises the need for secrecy in some discrete areas of government, such as security and defence, and for information about individuals to be protected. But there is debate about whether information about other areas of government policy should be protected.

There are some – including my father, Brian Barder – who argue that governments are entitled to retain some information privately to permit effective decision-making.  On this view, Ministers are entitled to advice and analysis before a choice is made, and if that advice is likely to be published then it is less likely to be sought, or it will be provided in phone calls, text messages or in un-minuted meetings to avoid the need for disclosure. This will result in less comprehensive and frank advice, and less well-informed decisions.  That is a serious concern.

The alternative view is that if officials know that advice will be published, they will do a better job in providing evidence-based, impartial and comprehensive advice; and Ministers will do a better job of making decisions consistent with what the evidence and analysis is telling them.  Transparency makes it harder for Governments to do irrational things.  It reduces the power of insider lobby groups and creates political pressure for better government.   It makes it more likely that governments will take a longer-term view rather than seek short-term political advantage.  Furthermore, controlled release of information is sometimes used by government to “spin” the message and to create an unhealthy dependency between the media and government spin doctors.

A lot of government information is classified to avoid embarassment rather than to avoid harm to the interests of the nation.  (The use of the classification “sensitive but unclassified” is a case in point.)

But although I am in favour of greater transparency in government, I am not in favour of leaking of government information by civil servants.

The media and MPs seem to have sided with Damian Green MP on the basis that democracy requires a flow of information from government to, err, the media and MPs, and that this information would not be available within the current law.

Parliament should debate and decide the amount of transparency it wants of the executive part of government, and ministers and officials should then comply with that law.  Parliament has done this by way of the Official Secrets Act (1989).   Having passed the law, there is no excuse for those same Parliamentarians to collaborate with civil servants who break the law by receiving or using that information, still less by encouraging them.   If MPs believe that the good functioning of democracy depends on more information being made available than is currently required and allowed by law, then they should change the law, not break it.

For the police to enforce the law, as passed by Parliament, is not an intrusion of police power into democracy.  Enforcing the law is the job of the police; and if Parliament doesn’t like the law then they are in a peculiarly strong position to do something about it.

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.

The UK Department for International Development has started a group blog.  This is great news for those of us who believe that it has a good story to tell.

DfID has a very good reputation abroad, but hardly anybody in the UK knows anything about it, or appreciates how much DfID contributes to positive perceptions of Britain.  I hope this blog will help tell the story in a very direct and personal way.

I used to blog when I worked at DFID, but that was before the government had guidelines about blogging. Let’s hope that the Government will be willing to accept that there will be some uncomfortable moments but that the benefits hugely outweigh the risks.

The Guardian reports that the UK is pushing for greater transparency of aid in an initiative to be launched tomorrow:

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.

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

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.

Yash Tandon, writing in Business Daily Africa says that that the Paris Declaration on aid is a form of collective colonialism by donors:

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.