“The defining division these days is increasingly: open or closed? Are we open to the changing world? Or do we see its menace, but not its possibilities?”

—Tony Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values, September 2006

It is easy to be cynical about international summits and their carefully drafted communiqués. But they sometimes matter more than people expect. (If they didn’t, why would government officials put so much time and effort into negotiating the text?) Even if the text is often a bland compromise, these meetings can help to move an issue forward, by locking in a new consensus which forms the platform for further progress.

We saw how this works at this week’s High Level Forum on development effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. In a speech notable for a thinly veiled warning about aid from China, Secretary Clinton made the welcome announcement that the US would join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which entails the publication of the details of all US aid projects.  This decision has given a major impetus to the international movement for aid transparency, which has been one of the important outcomes of the Busan meeting. According to US administration insiders, this decision was in part a consequence of an earlier international  initiative, which has not had as much attention as it deserves: the Open Government Partnership (OGP).

The OGP is an effort to create a club of nations committed to good governance and transparency. It was launched a few months ago in New York, at a side-event of the UN meetings, by 26 heads of state, the culmination of months of work by the White House and eight partner governments.

David Eaves (an open government enthusiast from Canada) sees the Open Government Partnership as more than just another meeting.  The OGP, he says:

…is much more than a simple pact designed to make heads of state look good. I believe it has real geopolitical aims and may be the first overt, ideological salvo in the what I believe will be the geopolitical axis of Open versus Closed. This is about finding ways to compete for the hearts and minds of the world in a way that China, Russia, Iran and others simpley cannot.

The Economist blog is less convinced: in their view “this is really nothing new or major” especially because the partnership includes “such beacons of openness as Russia and Pakistan.”

We’ve warmed to the Open Government Partnership after some initial skepticism.  The architects never had the grandiose ambitions that David Eaves suggests: rather they wanted to do something which might encourage small, tangible improvements in the way governments promote transparency and good governance. The idea is to provide a network of support to reformers across the world pushing for open government, to enable them to share ideas and lessons, and to strengthen their hand by demonstrating to sceptics that they are part of a broader international movement.  It brings government’s domestic achievements to the international spotlight to encourage reforms and reformers.  By that modest yardstick, the initiative is a step in the right direction.

Why were we skeptical at first?  Partly for the reasons set out by the Economist: the standards for joining the OGP (and the implicit endorsement that it confers) are not very exacting. What kind of transparency club has Russia and Azerbaijan as members? More importantly, we felt that an international initiative would have most value if it focused on transparency of cross border flows such as payments by companies for minerals, cross-border transactions between multinational companies and their subsidiaries, aid transparency, and cooperation between tax authorities. It is in tackling transnational problems that an international coalition makes most sense. But there was little political appetite for starting with these difficult international problems, and the OGP has focused mainly on encouraging its members to implement policies which promote transparency domestically.

But although the OGP has not focused on improving the transparency of international flows, there are already signs of how it can work to put pressure on its members to be more open.  It has apparently contributed to the announcement this week that the US would join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, bringing the US into line with other OGP members. Furthermore  there is now a debate bubbling up in the UK about the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative which requires governments publicly to disclose their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to disclose the payments they make. President Obama announced at the launch of the OGP that the US would itself become a member of the EITI.  As a result, the UK is now under pressure to follow suit. Although the UK was a supporter of EITI from its inception, it has never joined itself (partly because of opposition from the Business Department): a position which will be more difficult to sustain if and when the US fulfills President Obama’s commitment to join. That is exactly the kind of international peer pressure which OGP is designed to generate.

So the OGP is, to misquote Churchill, a modest initiative with much to be modest about. It was not conceived as the opening salvo of a new battle, but as a small step to encourage and support those countries round the world who want to move towards greater openness and transparency. There are some welcome signs that it is already making a difference. It may eventually lose momentum, especially as the politicians who put it together move on, and it may become too diluted by the undemanding criteria for membership. We hope not.

More than two thousand delegates have gathered today in Busan, South Korea, for the fourth installment of a succession of meetings aimed at making aid more effective.

There has been significant progress since the meeting in Accra in 2008 towards improving transparency of aid. This is important because it’s a pre-requisite for achieving all the aid effectiveness principles. Jamie Drummond from the ONE campaign explains this very well in the Huffington Post.

The challenge is to provide information to people at country level. Our existing aid information systems are mainly designed to enable donors to share information with each other, not to meet the needs of people in developing countries.

But the information needs at country level are hugely diverse, both between and within developing countries. Within governments, the information needs of the finance ministry are different from the needs of line ministries. The needs of parliamentarians, civil society, media and citizens are all different again. It is impractical for donors to try to meet the needs of every niche interest with their own subset of the data in a particular format.

뜻이 있는 곳에 길이 있다  (where there’s a will there’s a way)

Here’s the technical bit: the way to serve all these different needs for information without massive duplication and bureaucracy is to separate the data from the interface. An open, standardised, detailed, shared data layer can support a whole range of different applications, tailored to specific users.

That is why it is so exciting that the open data revolution is coming to aid. In 2008, in a side-meeting in Accra, a coalition of willing donors, developing countries, foundations and NGOs made a declaration which launched the International Aid Transparency Initiative. A lot of that data is now being published – countries accounting for nearly half of global aid are now publishing through IATI, and that proportion will grow in the coming months.

If you are in Busan this week, and you want to know how IATI works, the IATI secretariat will be doing a briefing at 5pm on Wednesday, in room KW202 (I’m making a guest appearance to show off some beta software, so do come along and laugh at me when it doesn’t work).

천릿길은 한 걸음부터 (A 1000-li journey starts with one step)

Transparency by itself does not lead to more accountability, less waste, or better coordination. That happens when people are able to use the information. The extent to which they are able to do so depends on their context, including the political and administrative climate. Open data won’t automatically make organisations responsive, but will greatly reduce the difficulty and cost for citizens of taking the data and turning it into something meaningful and useful.

With an open aid data platform now in place, huge opportunities are being opened. We can use the standard to introduce traceability of aid as it passes from organisation to organisation. We can improve the quality and detail of the data that is collected and publish it through these systems.

Reporting of aid data should be not just by donors but by NGOs, private sector implementing agencies and foundations. The mechanisms for sharing information can be extended beyond aid to other kinds of resources for poverty reduction.  We can add detailed geo-coding, to enable aid projects and programmes to be mapped, and better coordinated.  We can begin to compare across aid programmes and across countries. We can mix aid information with other data from other sources.

The twenty four donors who have signed IATI should be congratulated for their efforts to make data available. The payoff from that effort will come when we all start to use the data to understand aid better: to see what is working and what is not, and to hold the aid system to account, so leading to improvements in the effectiveness of aid. IATI removes the most significant barriers to entry for a wide range of diverse applications.

The next step is to nurture and encourage an ecosystem of civil society groups, parliamentarians, researchers, think tanks, academics, governments, private sector organisation, media and hackers, all accessing and using the information in different ways, and using this as a platform to push for improvements in how resources for poverty reduction are used. The new Open Aid Partnership is an example of an initiative of this kind: the door is now open for many more.

We can now look forward to the day when we take for granted the ubiquitous availability of aid data. We will soon forget that it was ever a struggle to find out about aid projects in a developing country, or to follow the money through NGOs and implementing partners. Having laid these important foundations, we will be able to move on to much more important and exciting innovations which support people in developing countries to use and repurpose this information and use it to change their world.

Much of the development policy world converges on Busan this week for the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. This is the fourth in the series after Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008).  The Guardian has a good ‘explainer’ about the issues being discussed.

Behind the scenes here in Busan, the trade-off is between getting everybody on board, including new providers of south-south cooperation such as China, India and Brazil, and pushing the boundaries towards more effective aid from existing donors.

Liberian children hold Chinese flags before the arrival of China's President Hu Jintao

Busan offers the possibility of a globally inclusive agreement, especially bringing in the important providers of south-south cooperation such as China and India, and non-traditional donors such as foundations and the private sector.  But a broad consensus may only be possible if the text is sufficiently watered down. New donors are unlikely to sign up to an agreement which seeks faster improvements in development assistance by setting more explicit and demanding targets than were agreed in Paris and Accra. Most would not be willing to sign up even to long-established effectiveness principles such as untying aid, more predictability, and greater transparency and accountability.  Nor are they likely to agree to be bound by any kind of monitoring or enforcement regime.

Many of the organisations involved in Busan have a strong institutional interest in emphasizing the benefits of a ‘big tent’ agreement:

• Individual DAC donors will be glad to talk up the importance of drawing new players into the process. They can trumpet this as a big step forward, especially to domestic audiences which feel threatened by China’s growing global role. They can pretend to be disappointed that it has required them to accept a rather bland communique which steps back from their existing commitments, while being privately relieved to have been let them off the hook for the improvements in aid to which they have agreed in the past and which they have shown themselves unwilling to make.
• A dialogue with new donors could give a new raison d’être to the DAC, an OECD body which is otherwise staring into the abyss of obsolescence. The DAC is a club of traditional government donors which constitute a dwindling proportion of global aid; nobody any more believes that an exclusive group of donors should set the rules of the aid system; and anyway DAC members themselves have failed to implement the principles they have agreed.  It is not lost on the 150 staff of the DAC that hosting a dialogue between traditional and emerging donors could give the DAC a new lease of life.
• The Korean hosts will be looking ahead to how the Busan conference will be remembered. Building the bridge to new Asian donors would be a natural legacy. Korea has itself only recently joined the DAC and they would be very glad to shift the discussion away from compliance with a (largely European inspired) aid effectiveness agenda towards the value of a broader dialogue with emerging donors and the private sector.
• China would be happy to have a declaration which validates their approach to development cooperation, but they do not regard this as important. They are apparently sending a small, low-key, delegation of about six people to Busan, and it is rumoured that they will either not sign the outcome document at all, or that they will sign as a developing country but not as a donor. China believes that different rules should apply to ‘south south cooperation’, so in principle they do not regard any of this discussion as applicable to the aid they give. In any case, China gives very little actual aid (as defined by the DAC) – probably less in total than Switzerland. The vast majority of China’s involvement in developing countries takes the form of quasi-commercial trade credits which are not included within the scope of these aid effectiveness discussions.

Given these strong institutional interests which favour getting China on board, it is no surprise that the latest (5th) draft of the Busan Outcome Document is a largely anodyne document with few additional commitments by donors. The UK Aid Network has a concise update about this here. Unless this changes in the next few days, Busan will be remembered as the conference at which traditional donors retreated from the explicit, time-bound commitments and monitoring arrangements which they agreed in Paris in 2005.

There is one group of stakeholders with something to lose from this: the people of developing countries who are the intended beneficiaries of aid, whose voice is not strongly heard in the discussions. They are the people who lose out when aid is wasted because it is unpredictable, untransparent and unaccountable.  It is their services, not the aid bureaucracies, which suffer when there is duplication and burgeoning bureaucracy.  It is their businesses which are damaged by tied aid.  It is their governments which become answerable not to their citizens but to an unaccountable group of donors.  A decision to accept a weaker, more universal agreement in Busan will satisfy the donors, but the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world will pay the price.

As Gideon Rabinowitz of the UK Aid Network pointed out last week, the Accra communique was similarly disappointing at a similar stage before the 2008 conference.  That time round, a group of European development ministers arrived in Accra and insisted on significant improvements, causing outrage among other participants, not least the bureaucrats who had sat through endless drafting meetings over the preceding months only to find their work had been nugatory.  But this year, those donors seem to be much less inclined to use any of their economic or political capital pushing for improvements in aid.    So it will suit them to emphasize the importance of a new agreement which includes China, and hide behind this as an excuse for their own inability to summon the political will to make aid more effective.

There is, however, another approach which could both and secure broad international agreement and still lead to substantive improvements in aid effectiveness. We should learn from what has happened since the Accra High Level Forum in 2008, in particular on transparency which is the issue on which there has been most progress. Donors accounting for half of global aid are now publishing their aid data through the new International Aid Transparency Initiative, IATI. But this has not been achieved by the official DAC processes which are limited to moving at the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy. Instead, a coalition of willing donors has worked alongside the official process to agree and implement an international aid transparency standard.

There is a lesson here as we consider how to move forward from Busan. A possible approach is to accept an outcome document setting out principles which represent the ‘highest common factor’ among all the participants, which is buttressed by (and which could endorse and launch) various coalitions which are willing to move forward more quickly on particular issues (e.g. predictability, using country systems, and so on).  These coalitions can then be pathfinders, leading by example and exerting peer pressure on other donors.  Taxpayers in donor countries can put pressure on their governments to join these coalitions, so that their aid also benefits from the improvements which the coalitions are bringing about (in the way, for example, that the Canadian NGO Engineers Without Borders has put pressure on the Canadian government to join IATI.)  There is more hope of achieving real progress through a series of path-finding coalitions than by investing all our energy in a universal agreement which is acceptable to everyone and satisfies nobody.

Two key pieces of background evidence have just been published which provide the backdrop to the discussions in Busan.  First, the Broookings Institution and my colleagues at the Center for Global Development have published an updated Quality of Official Development Assistance index (QuODA), which scores donors on the effectiveness of their aid.  Second, Publish What You Fund has published an Aid Transparency Index ranking donors according to how much information they make available about the aid they give.

CGD and Brookings Quality of Aid Index  (QuODA)

QuODA is an assessment of the quality of aid provided by 23 donor countries and more than 100 aid agencies. It uses 31 indicators grouped in four dimensions that reflect the international consensus of what constitutes high-quality aid:

• Maximizing Efficiency
• Fostering Institutions
• Reducing Burden
• Transparency and Learning

QuODA itself does not provide an overall ranking of donors.  The reason is that your view about the overall effectiveness of a donor will depend on how much weight you place on each indicator.  But for what it is worth, here is how the ranking of donors looks if you give equal weight to each of the four QuODA dimensions:

Donors may quibble about which of the indicators are important, though all the indicators reflect solid academic research and experience about what makes aid effective, embedded in the international consensus about aid effectiveness to which they have signed up.  For anyone wanting to focus on particular indicator and dimensions of effectiveness, the data are published online in an interactive web tool.

My two observations about this are:

• almost every donor has something to be proud of (nearly every donor is in the top half in at least one dimension) but all donors have considerable room for improvement;
• the multilateral agencies do better, on the whole, than the bilateral agencies; this may be because they are less susceptible to pressures from national donor politics;  the World Bank, in particular, scores extremely well across the board

The Publish What You Fund Pilot Aid Transparency Index

The PWYF Aid Transparency Index, published today, dives deeper into whether donors publish adequate information about the aid they give.  They analyze 58 organisations on 37 dimensions of transparency, mainly relating to whether information is available about particular projects and activities.

The World Bank tops the transparency index too. Indeed, there appears to be a strong correlation between aid transparency and aid effectiveness more generally.  The chart below plots the PWYF transparency scores against the average of the three dimensions of QuODA which do not relate to transparency.

This correlation between aid effectiveness and transparency could come about for three reasons:

a. common causes: well-governed and well-managed aid agencies are likely to be both more effective and more transparent;

b. effectiveness causes transparency: aid agencies that are ineffective and know it are likely to want to be secretive; agencies that are effective are likely to want to tell the world more about what they do;

c. transparency causes effectiveness: agencies that are open and transparent are less likely to make decisions to use aid ineffectively because they will be held to account by politicians and the public.

Conclusions

The good news from both the QuODA index of aid quality and the PWYF Aid Transparency index is that it is possible for donors to live up to the goals they have set themselves to make aid more effective and more transparent.  Most donors do well on some indicators, and yet are a long way behind the best on others.  The bad news is that there is a long way to go before donors overall live up to the pledges they have given.

Time will tell whether yet another conference, and yet another communique, will make any more difference to donor behaviour than have the last three. However, there does now seem to be welcome momentum towards putting more information about aid into the public domain, and we may hope that this will, over time, provide both the information and political pressure needed to make aid more effective. If Busan succeeds in giving a big push to aid transparency, that may be the biggest contribution it can make towards the ambitious goal of ‘transforming’ aid.

Information, not coordination, is the key to aid effectiveness.  Some donors such as USAID are becoming interested in a more decentralized ‘Google Maps’ approach to aid coordination, to facilitate well-informed decisions by people on the ground. For this to work, donors need to do two things: publish more detailed project level information, and do so in an open, reusable, internationally consistent data format. Transparency aimed at a domestic audience is not sufficient.

We now know that the development system has met just one of the 13 targets it set in 2005 for making aid more effective. That is not surprising: the problems diagnosed in the Paris Declaration are real and important, but the solutions that have been pursued in its name have not been practical. There are better ways to achieve the aid effectiveness which the Paris Declaration envisages.

Here is an example of the problem, from Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami:

“Last February in Riga [close to Calang in Indonesia], we had a case of measles. The epidemiologists from Banda Aceh gathered, fearing that the measles would spread among displaced people, but the girl was cured in two days. Eventually we discovered that this child had been vaccinated three times by different organizations, each without a vaccination card or any type of control. The symptoms were the result of these measles vaccines”.

Informal translation of an article in El Pais (April 13, 2005)

This is a graphic example of a widespread problem in development and humanitarian aid: a coordination failure leading to a substantial waste of money.

Following Paris, a conventional wisdom has grown up on how this kind of problem should be tackled. The regional health department should call a big meeting of all the donors and NGOs who might be interesting in running an immunization programme. They should share information with each other about their plans: which vaccines they intended to administer, and where. Under the leadership of the ministry, the donors should agree a division of labour to eliminate overlaps and ensure that aid is used efficiently.

Similar committees would have met to plan and coordinate every other kind of intervention to avoid overlap and make the best use of limited resources.

You don’t have to have a degree in Political Science to be able to see why this committee approach does not work. A country director for a large government aid agency recently told me that he spent more than half his time in donor coordination meetings. Most of each meeting is taken up by donors listing what they are doing. (Not surprisingly, he has now quit.)

So what is the alternative?

Once an aid agency has been licensed by the health ministry to provide vaccinations, it could simply publish online, in an accessible format, details of its plans and activities. Another organization planning its own programme could then easily check how they can best fit with what other agencies are doing. With open information sharing, no child would be vaccinated against the same disease twice; and under-reached populations could be easily identified and served.

This is an example of an important general point about improving aid effectiveness. Aid staff on the ground should not be stuck in endless coordination meetings: they should have the information they need to make good decisions about how to have the biggest impact, within a regulatory framework established by government, without being constrained by inappropriate rules and incentives imposed on them from far away.

A Google Maps approach to development?

There is growing interest in a ‘Google Maps’ approach to development coordination. We have seen welcome moves towards mapping of aid projects, for example by the World Bank, USAID, and Canadian CIDA. But as the example of vaccination in Banda Aceh illustrates, the key to making this information useful is that sufficiently detailed data from many different organisations is available in one place.

Some of the momentum towards greater aid transparency is driven by the need for increased accountability to taxpayers in donor countries. This is a laudable goal, but if data publication is targeted on this purpose alone it misses even bigger potential benefits from transparency. The US Government is making gradual progress on its Foreign Assistance Dashboard and a geographical coding system: but on current plans the data will not contain enough substantive detail. It will record information which is good enough to get a broad sense of where aid is being spent (‘top level administrative region’) but will not record specific locations (‘street corner’). This approach may be enough to meet the needs of a US accountability agenda, but it will miss the opportunity to use robust project level data and geo-coding to track and coordinate aid, to close down the space for corruption and waste, and to link feedback from project beneficiaries to specific aid funders.

It is also important that aid information is published in a reusable open data format, which has been agreed by a large group of donors in the IATI standard. Several donors – including the World Bank, the European Union, DFID, Australia and the Netherlands – are now publishing their data this way. Other donors have plans to do so. While it is welcome that Canada is publishing more detail about its aid projects, as the website makes clear the target audience for this information is “all Canadians”. The information published by CIDA is of almost no use to people in developing countries because it is not published in a form which is compatible with data from other all the other donors. Open data – in the sense of being genuinely accessible and comparable – enables civil society, parliamentarians and citizens of developing countries to be part of the coordination and accountability from which they are presently excluded.

In contrast to Canada, the United States has said it will ‘cross-walk’ its aid data to the IATI standard, which is extremely welcome. But so far they have not done so. While the implementation of a Foreign Assistance Dashboard is an important step towards domestic US accountability, all this data will only be of use internationally to make aid more effective and accountable when it is also published according to the international data standard.

Of course, USAID and State Department have limited resources and should be spending their money as much as possible on aid rather than administration. But as the World Bank has found out with its Mapping for Results project, it is not tremendously complicated or expensive to geo-code aid projects – and it will be even easier if that is done at the outset by front line staff who have detailed knowledge of the projects, rather than retrofitted afterwards in Washington. Nor has it proved difficult or expensive to organize data into the IATI format: I am told it took UNOPS just four weeks to implement IATI, from start to finish. There are many other donors, and organisations such as the Development Gateway, AidData and aidinfo, who have experience in geo-coding projects and publishing information in IATI format, who would be glad to help to design procedures, set up systems, and even to share their computer code. Furthermore, the administrative savings from reducing duplication by publishing open data are estimated rapidly to outpace these modest implementation costs. This is not primarily a question of money, but of leadership, recognition of the value of transparency which serves international as well as domestic audiences, and a willingness to reach out to work with others.

We can – and must – make aid more effective. This means making sure that decisions on the ground are likely to yield the biggest possible impact, and for that we need not more coordination meetings but better information, greater decentralization, simplified systems, fewer perverse incentives and more accountability.

If you have comments please put them on the CGD website.

In his blog post explaining the new policy, David Roodman explains why this is important.  It is intended to increase both the quality and credibility of our research, and to enable other researchers to use the data and the code.

Of course this is a little daunting for us too. As David says:

Fundamentally, then, the new data and code transparency policy is about putting the pursuit of truth first. We believe that this step is both right in itself and strategically smart. In statistical analysis, as in software, bugs are the norm. So placing more of CGD’s work in the public domain will inevitably expose mistakes. That can be a daunting prospect for an organization that prizes its reputation for high-quality analysis. But transparency serves the public good. And serving the public good is what CGD, as a charity, should do.

Our full policy is here (pdf).

First, a word about the report.  This is not a study by the World Bank, or a group of donors.   It is a study by Uwezo, an East African initiative hosted by three NGO networks: TEN/MET in Tanzania, WERK in Kenya and UNNGOF in Uganda, with overall quality assurance and management support from Twaweza.  They conducted their own survey (standardized across the countries) to test the literacy and numeracy of more than 100,000 children, the largest ever survey of its kind in the region.  When citizens themselves are telling us about whether their public services work, we should be paying attention.

There has been a remarkable increase in the number of children in school in East Africa since Uganda reintroduced free primary education in 1997 (followed a few years later by Tanzania and Kenya).   Over the ten years from 1999 to 2009 net primary school enrolment has risen in Kenya from 62% to 83%, and in Tanzania from 49% to 96%.

But the Uwezo report finds that the quality of education that those children receive is ‘very poor’.  According to the Uwezo tests, most of the children in Standard 3 had not reached the Standard 2 levels of literacy and numeracy.  Only by the time they reach Standard 7 are most children able to read and write at the levels expected in Standard 2.

Kenya’s pupils did best, followed by Tanzania and then Uganda, and there are large variations within as well as between countries.  The report has interesting things to say about the apparent reasons for the differences:

an important finding given the enormous resources invested in recent years in improving school infrastructure, was that school quality was weakly associated with literacy and numeracy levels. Children in areas with better school infrastructure did not perform better than in lower quality schools or more crowded classrooms.

The report finds grounds for optimism in the variations within countries;  the fact that some places do better than others suggests that improvements are possible within those contexts. The report speculates that quality is driven by non-observed factors such as the quality of teaching, practical accountability and teacher motivation.

The poor quality of education, despite considerable investment in school infrastructure, may perhaps be the result of what Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock and Matt Andrews call “isomporphic mimicry”.  The idea is borrowed from sociologists of organisations, and it describes the way in which organisations can sustain their legitimacy by the adoption of the forms of effective organisations in a way which camouflages a persistent lack of functionality.   This behavour may be partly a consequence of the way that donors work to increase service delivery in developing countries.  Pritchett et al observe:

Development agencies, both multi-lateral and bi-lateral, have very strong tendencies towards promoting isomorphic mimicry— encouraging governments to adopt the right policies and organization charts and to pursue best practice reforms—without actually creating the conditions in which true novelty can emerge, be evaluated, and scaled.

What can be done to improve education in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda? The Uwezo report says:

Differences in performance among districts within each of the three countries, and between public and private schools, suggest that certain schools have ‘figured out’ how to achieve better results within existing constraints. Investigating why certain districts, and within districts certain schools, do so much better than others could provide important clues about what matters most for improved learning.

The report also suggests that Cash on Delivery aid may be a good way to create the incentives to improve quality:

One such approach, which is still untested but whose design has been informed by careful review of the evidence of what works, is called Cash on Delivery. The core idea here is that instead of funding inputs, a mechanism is created by which payments are made against the achievement of a specified and independently verified outcome, such as $50 per student who completes Standard 2 with 80% literacy and numeracy competencies. This approach has been original designed for improving the effectiveness of aid given to national governments, but the approach may be even more useful for how national governments create incentives to improve performance at district and school levels.

(By the way, I’m on the board of Twaweza, though I can claim no credit for this report.)

We may, however, soon find ourselves looking for a new Managing Director of the IMF, either because DSK is involved in a legal case or because he has declared himself a candidate to be President of the French Republic.

The speculation has already begun (see Alan Beattie in the Financial Times) with Christine Lagarde being touted in some quarters as a likely successor.

Under an unwritten agreement, the IMF’s managing director has always been European and the president of the World Bank has always been from the United States. (Jim Wolfensohn had to take out American citizenship to get himself nominated.)

This seems a good time to recall the Leaders’ Statement at the G-20 summit in London on 2 April 2009:

we agree that  the heads and senior  leadership  of the  international financial institutions should be appointed through an open, transparent, and merit-based selection process;

This is important for four reasons.  First, we want good people in these jobs. This is more likely if we thrown the field open to good people like Kemal Derviş and Trevor Manuel as well as Americans and Europeans, and make a choice based on merit not nationality. Second, people in these roles should owe their allegiance to the institution not to their own government.  Third, it is important for the legitimacy and effectiveness of these institutions that they do not appear to the rest of the world be the fiefdoms of rich and powerful nations, to be used as sinecures for supernumerary or inconveniently-placed politicians. Fourth, it brings the G-8 and G-20 into disrepute to say these things in communiques if we have no intention of implementing them.

The traditional next step is for the Europeans to do a deal behind closed doors, get American agreement, and then to accompany the announcement of a fait accompli with a lot of public hand-wringing about how the process will be better next time.

The Europeans want a fair and open process for the appointment of the next President of the World Bank  rather than having to accept another imposition from the Americans. The only way to achieve that is to relinquish our hold on top job at the IMF.  It looks as if we may shortly have the opportunity to do it.

My article begins with a quote from Brian Eno:

We expect that the next big thing will be a bigger version of the last big thing. What we don’t expect, yet what is most likely, is that the next big thing won’t look important to us at all – until it’s so important that we can’t ignore it.”
Brian Eno, Prospect, 26th November 2010

There are some interesting articles elsewhere in the same edition looking at the role of the private sector in development, and a rather eclectic mix of other articles.

There is a lot of detail below, so for busy readers here is a summary of the proposed ten steps for aid transparency.

1. Donors cannot achieve meaningful user-centred transparency just by putting project data on their websites.  Users need information which comes from many different organisations simultaneously.  Yet it is not realistic to try to maintain lots of different manually-updated databases which collate information for users. The answer is for organisations to publish online all the information they have about aid projects and programmes, in a common, reusable format, which can then be used as the basis for user-centric databases and applications. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is the best chance for a generation of creating such a public infrastructure for information about aid. All donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and aid contractors should implement the IATI standard as the key first step to meaningful, user-centred aid transparency.

2. Any organisations which do not implement IATI voluntarily should be pushed to do so by the organisations and people who fund them. For example, official aid agencies should require every organisation to whom they give a grant or contract to implement IATI as a condition of handling public money.  Citizens should refuse to put money into a collecting tin if the charity is not implementing IATI.  Governments should consider making IATI compliance a precondition for charitable status and tax relief.  Developing country governments should make IATI compliance a precondition of local registration by international NGOs.

Google has a policy that it should eat its own dogfood

3. Donors, foundations and NGOs should ‘eat their own dogfood’ – that is, any information on their website and any analysis and data that they publish about aid should use be based on the publicly available data infrastructure.  This will give the organisations an incentive to ensure that the information they make available through IATI is up-to-date, comprehensive and accurate and that the system is fit for purpose.

4. Once donors and foundations are (a) publishing their data through IATI and (b) using IATI for their own websites and analysis, they should consider (c) helping other users, especially in developing countries, to make the best use of this information. But donors’ priority should be getting their own house in order by publishing their information in a reusable format, since this is something only they can do, and using that public data infrastructure themselves, before they help others to do so.

5. One of the highest priorities for new information about aid is that all aid spending should be classified in future according to the recipient country budget classifications as well as agreed international classifications.  The Technical Advisory Group for IATI should agree the mechanism for this as soon as possible.

6.  It seems so obvious that it shouldn’t need saying, but aid would clearly be more effective if we had more information about the future plans of donors, foundations and NGOs. Homi Kharas, in Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, estimates that the cost to aid recipients of historic unpredictability of committed aid flows is at least 15 percent. It could be much higher. Finance ministries, line ministries, the IMF, other donors, NGOs and the private sector would all do a better job with their money if they knew what was planned by others.  Organisations should publish whatever they know about their future aid plans, generally (with some possible exceptions such as for procurement) at the level of detail they know it.   This is likely to be the hardest part of IATI for many organisations, as few have mechanisms to keep systematic track of their forward spending plans.

7. A global system of traceability in aid, enabling money to be tracked from taxpayer to services delivered, via multiple layers of multi-donor funds, international and local NGOs and private sector contractors, is less difficult and expensive to implement than you might think.  Traceability of aid would bring about a huge step forward in efforts to make aid more effective and less prone to corruption and waste, and for building public support for aid.  Done right, it could also substantially alleviate the reporting burdens of aid recipients, NGOs and implementing agencies, and reduce donors’ costs of monitoring compliance.  Priority should be given to implementing this part of the IATI standard.

8. Donors, foundations, NGOs and implementing organisations should start recording and publishing detailed geographical information about aid projects and programmes using the newly-agreed IATI standard format for geocoding of aid, and they should require their implementing partners to do the same.

9. Some donors and agencies have defined, or are in the process of defining, their own internal standardised output indicators. Organisations should now make a big effort to reach an international agreement on a common set of standardised ouput indicators to facilitate international comparability across organisations.  This information can be reported through IATI.

10.  When we connect feedback from citizens in developing countries to a rich public data infrastructure about aid, we will have a much more realistic inderstanding of the impact and effectiveness of aid. That day  is coming sooner than most of us realise.

You will doubtless think me guilty of hyperbole when I say that the emergence of an open, international infrastructure for development information has the potential to transform the development business, much as the internet has transformed so much of our society, and for similar reason.  I’m sorry that this is an absurdly long blog post, but I hope it will convince you of the amazing opportunities which are there if we seize them.

Recap: two key themes

Two themes from my previous post are directly relevant to the next steps for aid transparency.

First, transparency needs to be centred on users, not organisations.  Only a few people are interested in the details of specific institutions. Most users want to know about all the resources and activities in their country, their sector or their community. They are mainly not very interested in the distinction between aid and other sources of finance. They want comprehensive information about resources from all organisations, whether or not it is classified as aid, so that they can monitor and influence how that money is allocated and used.  This means that it is not sufficient for each aid organisation to be individually transparent: the information has to be accessible in a form which enables users easily to see in one place comparable, consistent information from dozens of different organisations which they can add up and use.

Second, transparency should focus more on execution and not just allocation. Many parliamentarians, NGOs and academics in donor countries are primarily interested in how aid has been allocated across countries, sectors and activities. They often want to ensure that donors are living up to their promises. But in our analysis of stakeholder needs, people in developing countries repeatedly told us that they want to be able to see how money is actually being used. They want to know how much money is really arriving in their country or town; how much is taken in overheads and by whom; which organisations are contracted to provide particular services and on what terms; what outputs are produced; and what difference all this makes to people’s lives.

Organisation-centred transparency

Meaningful aid transparency cannot be achieved in the way that many aid agencies previously assumed.  While it is a welcome step forward that some aid organisations are now publishing online databases of all their aid projects and programmes, this does not meet either of the two key needs described above.  Agencies’ online project databases are an example of organisation-centred rather than user-centered transparency. As anyone knows who has tried to analyse aid spending in a particular place or sector, it is not feasible for a user to trawl through the websites of dozens of bilateral aid agencies, hundreds of multilateral agencies and thousands of NGOs, to identify the relevant activities.  Even if you could assemble all the details published by different donors, you could not create any kind of meaningful overview. Every project is described in different terms by different donors, in different currencies, languages and time-frames.  Often you can’t even tell whether donors are reporting contributions to the same project or describing different projects.  There is no way to remove double counting when money flows from one organisation to another. Nor do these project databases give us enough information about execution: they do not tell us how much money has arrived in the country, how much has been given to each subcontractor or implementing agency, or what outputs and outcomes have been achieved; and they don’t tell us anything about the agencies’ plans for future projects and programmes.

The magic database?

So user-centred transparency cannot be achieved by individual organisations putting their own project databases online, because that information cannot be aggregated across donors.  An obvious alternative is to build a database, or perhaps a few databases, to bring together comparable information from a variety of sources.

I’m writing this blog post in a café in Addis Ababa which is much frequented by ferenjis.  At the next table is Gary, a Canadian consultant who has been paid by CIDA and the World Bank on behalf of the donors to build a bespoke database of donor projects in the rural livelihoods sector in Ethiopia.  Gary has done magnificent work over the last year, visiting donor offices to collect information from each of them about what they are doing, and entering it manually into his database.  It has been an expensive exercise for donors but they already think it is has been well worth the investment to be able to have an overview of all aid-financed activities in the sector.

There are at least three other aid databases which already collect information about livelihood projects in Ethiopia. Yet Gary’s database does not draw information from any of them: he has had to construct it from scratch.  Why can’t he use the existing databases?  Because one of them is not publicly available, one publishes information with a 2 year lag, and the third was built three years ago and has not subsequently been maintained.   None of them meets exactly the needs for which Gary’s database has been designed.

Gary’s story is not unusual. There are probably other consultants like him in Ethiopia working in other development sectors, and there are hundreds more like him all across the developing world.  Donors are spending a lot of taxpayers’ money on consultants to do this kind of work again and again; and donor staff are also having to supply the same information repeatedly, in slightly different form each time, to each of these databases which one of them has commissioned.

It would be nice to think we could replace all this effort by building a small number of comprehensive and authoritative databases to meet all these different needs.  That would save everyone a lot of time and money.  But sadly it is not practical to build a one-size-fits-all database that does anything.  Any database primarily serves the perceived needs of the institution that built it, at the time it was built.

The OECD-DAC maintains the two aid databases which provide the most authoritative source of aid information.  (The DAC CRS database used to be the most comprehensive too, but in this respect it has been overtaken by AidData which contains everything in the CRS database and more).   The DAC databases were built for a particular purpose: for donors to share information with each other so that they can be held to account for meeting their promises. The DAC has never asked governments or citizens in developing countries what information they need about aid, because it is not part of their mandate to meet these needs. As a result, the DAC databases are not designed to provide even very basic information needed by developing country governments and stakeholders, such as the amount of aid which is actually spent in the recipient country, or donors’ plans for the coming year.

The introduction of country level aid management system in around fifty countries has been a welcome advance in recent years; but these too have only limited use.  They are generally designed to facilitate relationships between governments and donors, and they oftern serve this purpose perfectly well.  But there are many other important information needs which they do not serve. For example, they are not usually designed to be consistent with local budget classifications, so they cannot be used by finance ministries to support domestic budget planning.   Still less do they contain the level of detail needed by line ministries, for example to enable them to plan their activites to complement the investments made by donors.  Furthermore, the majority of country level aid management systems are not accessible by the public, so they do not meet any of the needs of parliaments, civil society, the media or individual citizens to enable them to hold governments and donors to account.

The education ministry in Cambodia told us that when they asked donors for detailed information about aid projects in the education sector many donors refused to supply the data on the grounds that they had already given a lot of aid information to the Cambodia Development Council database and they did not have sufficient resources to respond to multiple information requests. But the CDC database, which is among the best in the world for what it does, does not contain the level of detail needed by the education ministry, such as where donors planned to build schools or the type of text-books they proposed to supply.  These details were not needed by the Cambodia Development Council, and so are not included in the database, but are essential for the education ministry to manage their programmes well.

This is no criticism of the DAC database, or the aid management systems in developing countries. It just isn’t possible for a single database, either globally or for each recipient country, to meet the needs of every different stakeholder. That is why we end up with many ad-hoc databases built by consultants like Gary.   But if all those databases have to be built and maintained manually, the cost is prohibitive.

In the face of a growing proliferation of requests for data for different purposes many donors have, not unreasonably, decided they have to focus on priorities. They supply data to the DAC databases, because this is the donor club of which they are members.  They also generally supply data to the aid management systems, because these databases are clearly a priority for their partners in developing country governments.  For many donors, anything else they provide is on a ‘best endeavours’ basis – some donors do what they can to provide information in response to reasonable requests, but this manual exchange of information by fax and email, or by sneaker-net (i.e. a consultant going by taxi from one office to another) is slow, patchy and expensive.

This partial access to informatioin tends to reinforce existing power imbalances.  In 2008 civil society organisations from both donor countries and developing countries met in Accra and compared notes.  Representatives from northern NGOs reported that they generally could, with some effort and sufficient time, get information they needed from donor agencies in response to specific requests. By contrast the southern NGOs reported that when they asked donors for the same kind of information they often did not even enjoy the courtesy of a reply.

Meaningful aid transparency will occur when information is available in many different forms, in the detail and form required for particuar users, often combined with data from other sources. We can’t achieve this with a single international aid database, or a single database for each recipient country.  But if we build many separate bespoke, manually-populated databases to meet the needs of different users, we are left with a nightmare of duplicate reporting and inconsistent, incomplete and out of date databases which are too expensive and difficult to maintain.

A public data infrastructure

Fortunately there is a solution which – in common with many of the best solutions in life – lies somewhere in between.

If donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and implementing agencies publish all the up-to-date information they have about their aid projects, online in a common, machine-readable format, then it is possible for everyone to access that information easily, and to collate information from many sources, and to add up and compare across donors.  The reusable data format makes it possible to turn donor-centred information into user-centred information.

Once we have this information in a reusable format, any number of databases  and websites can be built quickly, and can be easily maintained.  Instead of spending a year building a database of livelihoods projects in Ethiopia, Gary could have done it in an afternoon; and the information would stay current automatically.

That is why the International Aid Transparency Initiatve is so important.  It solves the problem of turning donor-centred transparency into user-centred information. It is neither a new database, nor merely an encouragement to publish project details online.  It is an international public infrastructure for reusable data.  Donors accounting for for two thirds of global aid have now said that they will, during 2011, publish their data online in this common, reusable format.  (My former colleagues at aidinfo have done a very good short video explaining how IATI works.)

This will bring about a revolution in aid transparency.  If a country chooses not to open its aid management system to the public, that won’t be a problem any longer for citizens who want to know what is happening in their country, because it will be easy for anyone to build a copy of the database and populate it with exactly the same information from the same source.

More importantly, the creation of an international public data infrastructure for development unleashes possibilities which we could not even contemplate today. It will become easy to connect aid information to other kinds of data, such as government budgets, the distribution of poverty, or feedback from citizens.  It will unlock new analysis and insights, and allow different, less controlled, more user-centred ways of increasing accountability.

That’s why the most important step organisations can take towards meaningful aid transparency is to sign up to and implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative.  The UK has already started to publish its data in the IATI format, other donors are expected to do so in the near future.   Donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and private contractors should all follow suit voluntarily, or be required to do so by the people who fund them.  Government donors should make it condition of eceiving a grant or a contract that the organisation must itself implement IATI.  Bilateral agencies should not put money into an international organisation or multi-donor trust fund that does not comply with IATI.  Citizens should refuse to put money into a collecting tin unless that charity implements IATI.  And charities should not expect to continue to benefit from tax relief if they are not prepared to adhere to this international transparency standard.

Dogfooding

The raw information is not, by itself, very useful.  As well as pumping out data in a reusable format, it is right and understandable that many donors will want summarise and synthesize, to highlight key trends, draw out key lesssons, and tell their story.

As Ranil said on AidThoughts:

By all means, publish the data to allow people to interrogate it themselves. But also provide high-quality, penetrative analysis in a simple, easily understood form to support their understanding. They can always go beyond that if they wish.

I largely agree with this (notwithstanding Ranil’s suggestion to the contrary).   But I would add an important qualification: the principle of ‘dog-fooding’.

Donors should be mindful that the public increasingly expects the authorities to show rather than tell. Though most members of the public will never look at the information which underpins the summaries and narratives, they will trust the summaries more if they know that the underlying information is available for anyone who wants to check it and perhaps to construct an alternative interpretation.  So while donors should be encouraged to provide easy-to-understand analysis, they should also publish the raw data which supports it.

Furthermore, in the must-read paper Government Data and the Invisible Hand, Robinson et al from Yale proposed the following principle:

The new administration should specify that the federal government’s primary objective as an online publisher is to provide data that is easy for others to reuse, rather than to help citizens use the data in one particular way or another.  The policy route to realizing this principle is to require that federal government Web sites retrieve their published data using the same infrastructure that they have made available to the public. Such a rule incentivizes government bodies to keep this infrastructure in good working order, and ensures that private parties will have no less an opportunity to use public data than the government itself does. The rule prevents the situation, sadly typical of government Web sites today, in which governmental interest in presenting data in a particular fashion distracts from, and thereby impedes, the provision of data to users for their own purposes. [My emphasis]

This is a principle which can and should be applied to aid information.  If donor agencies were to agree that the information and analysis that they publish on their websites and elsewhere would be retrieved entirely through the publicly available IATI infrastructure, this would incentivise them to maintain their IATI data up to date and in good order; it would ensure that their analysis can be reproduced (and challenged) by others; it would increase public trust in the analysis; and it would reduce the risk of inconsistency between the summaries produced by donors and the analysis done by others.

Donors who resist the principle that they should ‘eat their own dogfood’ by using the publicly available data infrastructure for their own website and analysis have to explain why they think that the information they use is sufficiently important to be included in their analysis but should nonetheless not be publicly available for others to use.

The dogfood principle is famously practised at Google, which uses its own products internally, both before and after public release, to eliminate bugs and to make sure the organisation is always aware of the limitations of its products so that they remain focused on priorities for new features and improvements.

Helping citizens to use data

The Robinson et al paper quoted above argues that priority for government should be to publish reusable data, rather than to help citizens to use data in a particular way.

Perhaps it is reasonable to expect that the wealthy, educated citizens of America, supported by the technology of Silicon Valley, will be able to interpret and government data.  But is it sensible to expect that citizens, civil society organisations and parliamentarians in developing countries will be able to do the same?

Here’s Ranil again:

In recipient countries, both civil society and the Government needs to be helped to use the data available to work out how far the aid received in total and from each country deviates from their needs, and this again needs to be backed by a real form of accountability – and this is the hardest part of all.

I agree with this, of course.  The publication of raw data is no use unless citizens and their representatives are able to use it and to exercise real accountability over their governments, donors and service providers.  This will require investment in tools and technology and in capacity and skills, and we should expect a period of only partial success while we learn what works.

Perhaps I am more optimistic than other people because I believe that, once there is an infrastructure of publicly available reusable data, people will work out to use it.  I have a great deal of confidence in the energy and capacity of people in developing countries to sieze the opportunities of freedom when they can.

Perhaps I am too cynical in observing that many of the people – and Ranil is an exception to this generalisation – who argue most passionately for donor funding of capacity building and pilot projects and the like are also people who might expect to secure lucrative contracts from such efforts.

My anxiety about putting donors under too much pressure to focus on this is that it may reduce the priority that donors give to what only they can do, namely making available up-to-date, disaggregated, comparable, information about their aid projects.   If a donor doesn’t fund work supporting civil society groups to use aid information, then someone else can fill that gap.  But if a donor doesn’t make their information publicly available in a reusable format, nobody else can do it for them.

Furthermore, the most valuable contribution that donors can make to making it possible for citizens to use aid information is to reduce the costs of accessing and using it, by making the reusable data easily and cheaply accessible.   A modest investment which sharply brings down the costs for everyone of accessing data will have a much higher return than spending the same money enabling one particular group to assemble and use information for a particular purpose.

This means that I am in favour of encouraging donors to do what they can, with funding and expertise, to enable people to use aid information to increase accountability and so improve services; but I think it is a lower priority for donors than getting a comprehensive public data infrastructure working properly.

This means that donors should:

a. First, implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative so that there is as much information as possible freely available and meaningfully accessible to everyone;

b. Then use exclusively that public data infrastructure for their own websites, analysis and publications (the dogfood principle); this will create incentives for donors to ensure that the public information is up-to-date, comprehensive and accurate;

c. Then – and only then – invest in helping citizens to use the information in different ways.

This is a lexicographic ordering of obligations, meaning that no item on the list should be considered until the obligations above it have been discharged in full.

I do not mean to claim that helping citizens to use the data is objectively less important than getting the data out there; but I am saying that it is less important for donors to address this, since other entites can help citizens but only donors get the data published.

Budget classifications

By putting in place a public data infrastructure for development (namely IATI) we have opened up almost limitless opportunities to make more information more accessible at little cost to donor organisations and data users.  So now let’s ask how we should use these opportunities.

A key priority must be to make sure that aid information is categorised according to local budget classifications.  This has been agreed in principle in the IATI data standard, and the IATI Technical Advisory Group has identified several possible options for how it might be implemented.   The TAG should be asked to come to an agreement quickly on this so that donors can make it happen.  (The reasons why it is essential to be able to read aid information alongside national budget information were were set out in my earlier post so I won’t repeat them here.)

Information about planned future aid

The DAC databases are designed to keep track of what donors have spent, rather than future plans, reflecting their primary role of allowing donors to hold each other to account for keeping their promises.  Country aid management systems usually have more forward-looking information, reflecting their function as supporting the dialogue between government and donors.  But the forward looking information they contain is frequently patchy and incomplete.

Homi Kharas, in Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, estimates that the cost to aid recipients of historic unpredictability of committed aid flows is 15 percent.  Finance ministries, line ministries, the IMF, other donors, NGOs and the private sector would all do a better job with their money if they knew what was planned by others.   It seems so obvious that it is scarcely worth saying, but it is preposterous that a government cannot make an informed decision about where to supply new water points because they don’t know where donors and NGOs are already planning to provide services.  Lack of information about current and future aid spending leads to duplication and overlap in some places, and woefully under-served communities elsewhere.  We miss the synergy of complementary investments (investment in agriculture together with rural feeder roads, for example), and we create uncertainty for the private sector.

Furthermore, for people in developing countries, know what donors are doing and planning to do is a critical first step in injecting some local accountability.  The people we spoke to were not mainly interested in the past: they wanted to be able to find out what is planned and how they can become involved.

This is a challenge for many donors, for two main reasons.  First, aid projects often don’t get into their systems until they are into the implementation stage and beginning to disburse.  Before that, plans are often held as less structured information – such as in planning documents or email exchanges, and these plans are rarely collected into a central repository.  Finding a way to get this information systematically into IATI is therefore a non trivial task.

Second, some donors are worried about saying too much about their plans until they have considered their options in some detail, secured high-level or political approval within the agency, obtained approval from legislators who must appropriate the funds, and reached an agreement with the host country.  Donors do not want to announce the budget for a project before they put it out to tender,  as they don’t want the bids to congregate around the budget ceiling.

Neither of these problems is insurmountable, and given the importance of forward looking information we should aim to make it a priority to address them.  Concerns about pre-empting the decisions of the legislature seems to be a case of inventing obstacles (it is easy to include disclaimers, and governments talk about future spending plans all the time).  The genuinely hard problem is logistical: most donors don’t have much of this information is a reusable form.

The IATI mechanism is designed to enable users to collate information from many different sources.  This may be the solution for some organisations who do not keep forward looking information in their management information system.  These organisations may find it most practical to publish information about actual spending from their central finance system, while decentraliszing publication of planned spending to country offices or embassies.

The people and organisations who want information about future aid plans – such as developing country partners, NGOs and civil society organisations in developing countries – are not the most powerful stakeholders, and so it is no surprise that our existing systems are not designed to meet these needs.   Our systems are mainly designed to record and report past spending, because that is what donor countries have decided to monitor, and that is what they need to report to parliaments and auditors.

Organisations should adopt the principle (proposed to us by a statistician from a donor aid agency) that ‘if anyone knows it, everyone should know it’.  Though this is the part of the agenda that may require the most administrative change,  the benefits of sharing forward looking information are potentially huge.

Traceability

This is a simplified diagram by Homi Kharas of how aid flows. There are many more layers than depicted here.

When courier companies introduced barcode systems to track envelopes and parcels, they faced non-trivial implementation costs, but the savings have been enormous.   Barcode scanning has replaced a lot of manual recording, so streamlining administration, and has enabled companies to trace missing items easily.  It has provided management information to identify bottlenecks and so drive performance improvements. It has hugely reduced the companies’ customer support costs, since customers can see for themselves where packages have reached through self-service websites.  Perhaps more importantly, the fact that customers can track packages themselves has increased customer trust in courier companies, and some larger customers have integrated the tracking information from their courier company into their own management information systems.

A system of aid traceability is technically feasible, and while the implementation costs would not be negligible, the savings would be huge.  There is a placeholder for such a mechanism in the IATI standard waiting to be fleshed out.  My view is that this should be a very high priority.

How would it work? The underlying design principle is that each organisation disbursing money would report the details of its spending and that this would include the transaction identifier (or identifiers) corresponding to the source of funds for that spending.  For example, a multi-donor trust fund would publish each item of spending and include an attribution of that particular expenditure to the fund’s various income from donors.  Some spending would be linked to particular grant (e.g. where a donor had made a grant to the trust fund for a particular purpose), and other spending would be attributed pro-rata to various general sources of funding.

Once implemented, a system of traceability would not be a significant burden on aid recipients and implementing agencies. Each organisation and agency would be asked to publish information it already has: the source of the money it spends. If this is done consistently and the data published through IATI, it would enable any stakeholder to cumulate the information across the aid system and so obtain an overall picture of where aid is actually going.  It would be possible for the first time to trace money from taxpayer, through donor agencies, trusts funds, NGOs, governments and private contractors to implementation on the ground.  It will become possible to compare overhead costs and margins, to see whether supply chains are unnecessarily long, and to establish how much money actually reaches the intended destination.

The same traceability standard would also solve completely the problem of checking whether donors are living up to their multiple spending pledges on aid – for example to create new sources of finance for climate change.  (I’m largely hostile to these spending pledges, but that is a different matter.)  All a donor would need to do is designate each spending pledge as a different “source” of their money, and it would then be possible for anyone easily to trace whether each donor had in fact spent the money they promised and to see what had eventually happened to it.  This is a much simpler and more effective solution to ensuring that spending pledges are kept than the leading alternative, which is to set up brand new global funds for the sole purpose of enabling the money to be accounted for separately.  Traceability is a much cheaper, more efficient way to track spending pledges and prevent double counting.

Indeed, a standard for traceability could greatly simplify aid management and reduce the bureaucratic burdens of the aid system.  Intermediary organisations already have to provide information in considerable detail to their donors, to enable the funders to see how the money has been used and whether it has been spent in accordance with various constraints.  An NGO might have to comply with a rule from one funder its money is not used to finance capital equipment, and a different rule from a different funder that the grant is not used to finance travel to and from the United States.  (This is a real life example.)  So all organisations in receipt of grants or contracts are already having to apportion their spending across various sources of income so that they can show they have complied with the different obligations imposed upon them in grant agreements and conracts.  Traceability would greatly simplify reporting by NGOs and implementing organisations. Instead of manually completing forms and spreadsheets for each funder, they would simply publish the details of their spending electronicallly, with all their spending attributed to particular sources of income.  Donors would be able to access the information electronically through the IATI data infrastructure to confirm that their particular grants or payments were being used by grantees and contractors in the agreed way.  This would both simplify and streamline reporting by NGOs, contractors and other implementing agents, and streamline compliance monitoring by donors.

A system of tracability would also eliminate double counting by implementing agents.  I know a former MP from Mozambique who was asked to officiate at three separate opening ceremonies for the same school in his constituency, each with a different donor as the guest of honour to view the school for which – according to the invitation – they  had paid. Each donor was able to report to its headquarters that the money had been properly used for the purpose intended, and the result was this new school.

This scam is widespread in the aid industry and without traceability there is nothing in the system which prevents it.   Traceability would make transparent where administration overheads are too high.  It would show which organisations are not disbursing money, whether through incompetence or graft, and it would narrow the scope for corruption and waste.

The system of traceability proposed here would not require a central database or a complicated new set of reporting requirements.  All that is needed is that  implementing agents should have to identify the source of each transaction in a consistent way.  Donors could simply require this in their contracts and grant agreements.  Far from adding to the workload of NGOs and contractors, such a system could greatly reduce reporting and bureaucracy. And the IATI information infrastructure is ideallly suited to enabling these fragments of information reported by many different decentralised organisations, each individually meaningless, to be added up into a overall picture which is not only useful but potentially game-changing.

Geographical coding

The Ethiopian Government – one of the poorest countries in the world – has a GIS database of all the public health facilities in the country.  But there is no equivalent information about the location of health facilities provided by donors and NGOs.

World Bank health projects in Kenya overlaid on a map of poverty levels

The technology for geographical coding has changed out of all recognition in the last few years.  Everyone with a smartphone has the technology in their pocket to record the location of a piece of a school, a well or a clinic and to add it automatically to a database.

When aid projects in Nepal were geocoded, and then compared with a map of where poverty is most acute, the donors and government found there was no correlation. The aid projects were all concentrated around the offices of the NGOs and along the tarmac roads, far away from the people living remotely in mountains whose need is greatest.

AidData has a very useful summary of the benefits of geocoding and mapping.  More and more donors are seeing its value. I’m told that when the US Embassy in Yemen geocoded its projects it rapidly found that this was the framework they used most often for planning and mointoring their aid.  The Gates Foundation has similarly found it useful to geocode all its agricultural projects.  Yet neither organisation has chosen to publish this geographical information for others to use. The World Bank, working with AidData, has geocoded all of its active projects and made this information publicly available (see http://geo.worldbank.org/).   Their Mapping for Results programme is at the forefront in the development industry.  (I thought I saw a recent announcment by the US Government that it was moving to geocoding in ten pilot countries, but I can’t find any trace of that now.)

This is an example of increasingn returns to information.  The addition of geographical information to aid data enormously increases the value of the information that is already being collected.  Geographical information offers one of the most useful and intuitive way of organising information, and opens the way to new platforms for information sharing and gathering.

It is important that as more and more donors move to geocoding information, they do so in a consistent way.  That will increase the value of the information, and reduce the burdens on implementing organisations who will otherwise find themselves having to report the same information in multiple formats.  The IATI standard does not yet include a requirement to geocode data, but it does set out a common format for voluntarily doing so.

An important step towards meaningful aid transparency would be an agreement among all donors, NGOs, and implementing agencies to geocode all their activities from now on, and to publish that information through the IATI infrastructure.

Outputs and outcomes

The discussion so far has been mainly about spending, and the need to keep track of how money is spent.  But none of us thinks that is what is ultimately important. What we all really care about is what outputs are produced as a result of all this and what difference they make to people’s lives.

Some donor agencies have realised that it is very helpful to have standardised measures of outputs within their organisation. This enables them to compare performance across projects and programmes, and so learn what works best.  It enables them to identify wasteful or expensive programmes and put more aid into the most effective programmes.  It enables agencies to estimate totals of the outputs which their work is supporting across the world, which is useful as part of their accountability to taxpayers.

When the World Bank looked at the different ways it was measuring its textbook programmes, it found a vast range of different output measures (including, in one case, a text project whose outputs was specified in metric tonnes).   When one bilateral agency put together comparable measures of textbooks purchased by different programmes in different countries, it found that the difference in unit costs between the cheapest and the most expensive programmes was substantial – a discrepency of two orders of magnitude which could not be explained by differences of circumstance between the countries.  (Sadly this analysis was never published.)   We can only make these comparisons when we standardise measures of outputs.  In practice the process of arriving at standardised indicators has been fairly boring, but they have not been particularly difficult to implement.

Common output measures would be even more useful if they were standardised internationally across aid agencies. Then we could compare the cost effectiveness of different international organisations, including comparing bilateral donors, development banks and NGOs.   We could learn not only within aid agencies, but between them.

Internationally comparable output measures is, in my view, the most important step on the road to a sensible division of labour in the aid industry.   Specialisation will only increase the productivity of the system if organisations specialise in what they are good at, and we can’t know that until we have comparable measures of their cost-effectiveness.  When it is apparent to everyone how much it costs for different organisations to provide the same outputs, there will be public pressure on the worst-performing organisations either to raise their game or to focus instead on the things which they can do better.

There are inevitably squeals of protest from the aid industry about all this.  In part this is the modern equivalent of political pressure which led to the Calico Acts: vested interests resisting any kind of competition which might undermine their privileged position. Competition reduces the producer surplus, so you should expect incumbent producers to resist it.

But there are more creditable worries about introducing standardised output measures: that they may push donors to funding what can be measured rather than what is important, or that they will undermine the principle of country ownership by defining a rigid, global idea of what is ‘good’ in development.

I don’t find either objection persuasive.

I have no difficulty accepting that there many activities in development which have rather diffuse, difficult to measure and unpredictable benefits which are nonetheless worth doing because the potential benefits are large – I have, after all, spent the last three years of my life promoting aid transparency, which is an example of just such an activity.  But I don’t think the advocates of spending part of the aid budget in these ways should expect to be funded without having to make a robust case.  If we have good measures of the benefits of alternative uses of aid – such as vaccinating children – then someone who thinks that aid should be spent on capacity building or public sector reform should produce the evidence and analysis which justifies their view.   We should not be subject to levelling down, in which we refuse to do the best we can to quantify outputs whenever possible on the grounds that it might make other kinds of investment look relatively less attractive.

Nor do I believe that standardised output measures will undermine country ownership.  Aid donors already require recipients to provide a raft of information which they say they need for their domestic accountability.  Recipient governments, NGOs and implementing agencies would be overjoyed if donors could get their act together and ask for reports on the same, rather than slightly different, measures of output.

Some donors have shown that they understand this by moving to internal standardised output indicators. Before they become too attached to these, they should make a big effort to get international agreement to a common set of indicators which they are all willing to use. This would be a big step forward towards meaningful aid transparency, especially for those people whose primary interest is in understanding what aid achieves, and not simply in tracking how it is spent.

Citizen feedback

The aid industry has relied for too long on monitoring and evaluation by so-called experts, brought in from donor countries to conduct stakeholder interviews and review logframes.  The real experts on whether an aid programme is working are the people who are supposed to be benefiting from it.

Can we link information about public services to the aid programmes which funded them?

As we implement a public data infrastructure for aid, one of the most exciting new possiblities is that this will help us to find out, for the first time, information from citizens about their experiences of how aid is used and their priorities for the future.

The Maji Matone (‘Raising the Water Pressure’) programme in Tanzania  enables  citizens to use their mobile phones to give feedback on the state of rural water supply. The information is then forwarded to the relevant government authorities – thus enabling them to respond quickly – as well as to the media.  This kind of feedback is a great way to improve public services in developing countries.  But it will do nothing to improve the quality of aid unless this feedback about services can also be linked back to the specific aid programmes that supported those services.  If the information coming from Maji Matone about which water points are working can be mashed up with information coming from donors about which of those water points they paid for, then we can find out which donors’ provide the most useful and functioning water points.  It is ironic that the part of this jigsaw that is missing is not real-time  feedback from rural water point users in Tanzania, but the necessary information from donors to connect that feedback to their aid programmes, despite the money and technology at their disposal.  When donors move ahead with detailed geocoding, and publishiing that information through IATI, a big part of this problem will be solved.

The examples so far – from crowdsourcing in disaster relief to citizen report cards in health clinics – suggest that when citizens are able to get engaged, the benefits can be enormous.

A public data infrastructure for aid creates a platform which makes this possible on a large scale. Together with with growing access to mobile phones and the internet, it will change the power dynamics in the aid industry forever.  For the first time, it will be possible on a large scale for citizens to set priorities and give feedback about what is working in development.

Conclusions

The emergence of an open data infrastructure for development has huge potential to enable us to use aid much better.  I’ve proposed ten steps to improve that infrastructure, and to begin to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.   Here they are again, in short form:

1.  Putting a database of aid projects online does not result in user-centered, meaningful aid transparency unless the information is online in a common, machine-readable, reusable format.  Donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and aid contractors should implement the IATI standard.

2. Donors should require NGOs and and implementing agencies to implement the IATI standard as a condition of grants and contracts.  Citizens should demand it of charities.

3. Organisations should use the publicly available data infrastructure of IATI to power their websites and for other publications (the ‘dogfood principle’).

4. Helping citizen country citizens to use this data is important, but donors’ top priority should be getting their own data into the IATI system and using that public data infrastructure themselves.

5. Aid spending should be published categorized according to recipient country budget classifications (as well as the agreed international classifications).

6. Forward looking information about aid is administratively challenging for some donors, but hugely important.  If the donors have forward looking information then (apart from a few exceptions) they should publish it.

7. Donors should implement a global system of traceability in aid.

8. All organisations should start to record geographical information, in the agreed common format.

9. We need an international agreement on a common set of standardised ouput indicators.

10.  We need to connect feedback from citizens in developing countries to this public data infrastructure about aid.

This is a self-indulgently long essay about the importance of aid transparency, and the priorities for how it should be achieved. Busy readers may want to read the 8-point summary below.  And for a very clear and concise introduction to the importance of aid transparency, take a look at  this video by my (former) colleagues at aidinfo.

The 8-point summary

Here are what I think are the eight most important things I’ve learned in the last three years about transparency in general, and aid transparency in particular:

1. To make a difference, transparency has to be citizen-centred not donor-centred.
   Citizen-centred transparency would allow citizens of developing countries to combine and use information from many different donor agencies; and provide aid information compatible with the classifications of their own country budget.
2. Today’s ways of publishing information serve the needs of the powerful, not citizens
   Existing mechanisms for publishing aid information were designed by the powerful for the powerful. Until the aidinfo team started 3 years ago, nobody had ever done a systematic study of the information needs of all stakeholders, including citizens, parliamentarians and civil society, let alone thought about how those needs could be met.
3. People in developing countries want transparency of execution not just allocation
   There are important differences between the information requirements of people in donor countries and people in developing countries.  Current systems for aid transparency focus mainly on transparency of aid allocation, because that is what donor country stakeholders are largely interested in, and not enough on transparency of spending execution, which is of primary interest to people in developing countries.
4. Show, don’t tell
   Citizens in donor nations are increasingly sceptical of annual reports and press releases. In aid as in other public services they want to be able to see for themselves the detail of how their money is being used and what difference it is making. They increasingly expect to engaged, and are less willing to be passive funders leaving  the decisions entirely to ‘experts’. Donor agencies – whether government agencies, international organisations or NGOs – will have to adapt rapidly to become platforms for citizen engagement.
5. Transparency of aid execution will drive out waste, bureaucracy and corruption
   There is, unfortunately, quite a bit of waste, bureaucracy and corruption in the aid system.  There is good evidence that this kind of waste is rapidly reduced when the flow of money is made transparent. Corruption and waste prosper in dark places.
6. Social accountability could be Development 3.0
   The results agenda in aid agencies is currently too top down and pays too little attention to the power of bottom up information from the intended beneficiaries of aid.  Increased accountability to citizens may be the key to unlocking better service delivery, improved governance and faster development.
7. The burden of proof should be on those who advocate secrecy
   We have published a compelling business case for greater transparency, with all the uncertainties this kind of analysis entails. So where is the business case for secrecy, which would be far harder to quantify or defend?  Why does nobody even ask for it?  Why is the (inevitable) uncertainty in this kind of analysis allowed to count against the case for transparency, when the same uncertainty would deal a much greater blow against the case for secrecy?
8. Give citizens of developing countries the benefit of the doubt
   Transparency is necessary but not sufficient for more effective aid. But the fact that transparency alone will not solve every problem should not be an excuse for aid agencies to shirk their responsibilities to be transparent. Nor should we be too attentive to vested interests in the aid industry telling us that transparency is not enough. Citizens of developing countries will be more innovative and effective than some people give them credit for when we give the information they need to hold the powerful to account.

That’s the summary.  If any of that whets your appetite and you want the long version, read on.  In my next post, I’ll look at the ten steps that development organisations should take towards aid transparency.

Aid transparency: worthy but dull?

Some of my family and friends have wondered why I have devoted three years to a topic which is so utterly dull as aid transparency.  (Most of them are too polite to ask.)  The answer is that I think this matters, very profoundly, for development and for aid.

In my heart I’m a budget wonk.  I’ve worked on budgeting in the UK Treasury and in the South African Treasury. My opinions on the importance of budget systems and how they can be improved can clear a room in seconds.

King Charles I was executed because he refused to accept Parliament's right to control tax and spending

Budget accountability is not just a technical question. England fought a civil war on the issue of Parliament’s ability to control tax and spending. It is the defining characteristic of legitimate government: if the British government cannot carry its budget in Parliament, it falls.  The power of the US Congress to control spending is at the heart of the relationship between the legislature and the executive in the US balance of power. In Australia, Gough Whitlam was sacked as Prime Minister on the pretext of his failure to carry supply in the Senate.

My obsession with the technical and political importance of the budget is why I first became interested in aid transparency.

Here in Ethiopia, donors and NGOs spend more than the government raises in domestic revenues.  Yet there is no way for a member of parliament, a journalist, a civil society organization or – heaven forbid! – actual citizens to find out what foreign powers are doing in this country.

Donor behaviour makes a mockery of the idea that the heart of government is the allocation and execution of the budget.

It isn’t only a question of legitimacy and sovereignty: for anyone who has worked on public budgeting it is also a practical question of getting the maximum value for money.

For example: a friend was working for the Health Ministry in Malawi. They were trying to work out where to invest in building new community clinics. They know where their own clinics are, of course: but have no way to find out where donors and NGOs have built, or will be building, new clinics.  So there is no way for them to assess which communities do not have a clinic nearby.  In the end they had to guess.

Parliamentarians, the media and civil society need to know how much money donors are paying to governments, and on what terms, so that they hold the government to account for how that money is used. They need to know how much money is being spent by donors outside the budget process, how can they have an informed discussion about the government’s budget allocations.

My interest in aid transparency came about initially from anger at the way donors undermine budget systems in developing countries, and I am no less angry about that today. How dare we urge countries to improve their budget systems and lecture them about the efficient allocation and execution of their budget while refusing to provide them with the information they need to do so?  How dare we demand more productive public spending, while providing none of the certainty and stability they need to get the maximum value? How dare we lecture developing countries on the need to be accountable while denying citizens and Parliaments the information they need to make an informed judgment about budget allocations?

The right to information for taxpayers in donor countries

Intellectually, I understand also the idea that citizens in donor countries should have access to information about how their money is being spent.

But to be honest, until recently I found it difficult to be motivated by this. It just never grabbed me emotionally. Foreign aid is such a pitifully small amount of money – about half of one percent of national income in most donor countries – that it didn’t seem to me a great priority for the citizens of those countries to be given a lot of information about it. And I certainly did not want to use up a big chunk of a small amount of money to answer questions from freedom of information advocates, if the consequence was that we reduced the amount of money going to people who really need it in developing countries, for example to give them access to food, water, health or education.

I’ve changed my mind about the importance of this, for three reasons.

First, I am increasingly convinced that citizens of donor countries are, in the end, the only people who can insist on aid working better.  Many of us would like aid to be accountable and responsive to the needs and interests of poor people.  But that isn’t how the power relationship works, at least not directly.  Whether we like it or not, aid will always be responsive to the people who pay for it – and that means the taxpayers of donor countries, as intermediated by their political representatives.  Fortunately, these people do genuinely want their aid to be helpful to people in poor countries, though they presently have little idea what that means in practice.  If we want aid to be more effective, we have to get information from the people in poor countries who are supposed to benefiting from aid into the hands of the citizens of donor countries showing them what is working and what is not.

Expedia gives customers comparable information compiled from many different sources.

Second, the zeitgeist in industrialised countries is changing.  Twenty years ago, citizens were happy to delegate to aid agencies and NGOs the responsibility of spending aid well, and to be told from time to time what had happened to their money.  That’s no longer true: people increasingly expect to be shown, not told, what has happened to their money, and they expect to be more involved in making choices. Information that was impossibly expensive to collect and access even a decade ago can now be published online as a matter of course, and that is what people expect from their public services.  Technology enables people to be involved in the management of their services day to day, and not just every five years.

Aid agencies in the 21^st century cannot continue to act like old-fashioned travel agents – respositories of expertise and information about options, to whom the money was given and decisions delegated. If aid agencies want to retain public trust, mandate and funding, they will have to become like Expedia – a platform on which citizens can see meaningful, comparable and reliable information and then exercise choices themselves. Unless aid agencies respond to these changing expectations, support for their work is likely to continue to decline, perhaps disastrously.

Third, the access to information movement is powerful, effective and smart. We in development have much to learn from the work they have done about the most useful ways for information to be made public, for rights to information to be asserted, and for the balance between freedom of information and privacy to be respected.  Their ideas about the need for open, reusable, mashable government data is hugely more advanced than any thinking on these issues in development circles.  (I found this paper on Government Data and the Invisible Hand especially interesting and helpful.)

Different information needs in North and South

The first thing the aidinfo team did was to pull together a comprehensive analysis of who needs aid information and what information they need.  We were surprised – indeed, a little shocked – to find that nobody had ever asked this question.

The OECD Development Assistance Committee has been collecting aid statistics for five decades, and it is the global centre of excellence on aid information. But they have a specific mandate: to share information among donors about donor efforts.  They have a database designed for this purpose.  But they have no mandate, capacity or resources to provide information about aid to people in developing countries. (This is not a criticism of the staff of the DAC, who carry out their task with great professionalism; it is a reflection on the nature of the way that powerful interests are able to define the priorities for transparency.)

We worked with actual and potential users of aid information in developing countries and in industrialised countries to find out, for the first time, what information they need.  We found a hugely rich and diverse set of people wanting information about aid.  You can find our case studies here.

For me, the most interesting lesson was the contrast between what we heard from people in developing countries and people in donor countries.

In donor countries, we heard much the same from everyone: they want detailed information about where aid is going.  International NGOs wanted to check whether donors had kept their promises, whether to increase aid overall or to fund particular programmes.  They wanted to highlight cases where aid had been allocated badly – for example, redirected from poor countries to more politically and commercially salient middle-income countries. Researchers and academics wanted information about allocation, mainly try to estimate the impact of that aid, or to provide evidence about the motives which drive aid allocations.   Ministers, parliamentarians and their researchers spoke despairingly of their inability to give a coherent account of where their country’s aid is going, or to show whether aid is being used for their citizens’ priorities.  All this is extremely important.

Yet none of the people we spoke to in developing countries mentioned any of this.  For people in developing countries the questions revolve around execution, not allocation, of aid programmes.  When a donor announces that they are giving aid to – say – a housing project in their country, what actually happens to the money? How is the contract tendered? How much money gets skimmed off by consultants and in donor overheads? How much money arrives in the country, and how much stays behind in the donor country?  Does any end up in the pockets of ministers and officials? Who decides what is built and where?  How much money actually gets spent on construction, how many houses get built, and where are they?

Key lesson: people from donor countries are mainly interested in aid allocation, people in developing countries are mainly interested in execution.

This difference in outlook partly reflects different experiences and expectations: people in industrialised countries tend to assume that a spending decision, once made, will actually be executed with a reasonable degree of efficiency.  That is not the assumption made by people in developing countries.  The difference in outlook also reflects different accountabilities: people in developing countries cannot hold industrialised countries to account for the choices they make about their aid priorities, but they can hold local players to account for how the money, once allocated, is used and what is delivered with it.  So that is what they want information about.

“We may be illiterate but we are not stupid”

We would like to tell you the story of $150m going up in smoke,” said the young villager. “We heard on the radio that there was going to be a reconstruction programme in our region to help us rebuild our houses after coming back from exile, and we were very pleased.”  This was the summer of 2002. The village was in a remote part of Bamiyan province, in Afghanistan’s central highlands, and several hours’ drive from the provincial capital—utterly cut off from the world. UN agencies and NGOs were rushing to provide “quick impact” projects to help Afghan citizens in the aftermath of war. $150m could have transformed the lives of the inhabitants of villages like this one.  But it was not to be, as the young man explained. “After many months, very little had happened. We may be illiterate, but we are not stupid. So we went to find out what was going on. And this is what we discovered: the money was received by an agency in Geneva, who took 20 per cent and subcontracted the job to another agency in Washington DC, who also took 20 per cent. Again it was subcontracted and another 20 per cent was taken; and this happened again when the money arrived in Kabul. By this time there was very little money left; but enough for someone to buy wood in western Iran and have it shipped by a shipping cartel owned by a provincial governor at five times the cost of regular transportation. Eventually some wooden beams reached our villages. But the beams were too large and heavy for the mud walls that we can build. So all we could do was chop them up and use them for firewood.”

Claire Lockhart, “The Failed State We’re In”, Prospect Magazine, June 2008

In donor countries we heard quite a lot about the need to hold aid organisations to account.  On this view, aid agencies and NGOs should be able to show exactly how their money is used, and for what.  Many organisations already put quite a lot of information on their websites so that their stakeholders can look at their activities in detail.

Yet from developing countries, we heard nothing at all about the need to hold individual aid agencies to account. Few people in developing countries are concerned with the performance of the World Bank, or of DFID.  They usually want to know, from all that money from whatever source, how much is likely to arrive in their community, or into their sector, and how they can influence how that money will be spent.

Many developing countries have their own aid databases. These are often developed by the planning ministry or Prime Minister’s offices. I was very surprised to learn that they are almost never designed to provide information compatible with the country’s budget system; and that most of them are not available to the public.  So while these databases are very important and useful for the purpose for which they are designed, to enable developing countries to manage their relationships with donors, they usually do not meet the information needs of important stakeholders such as finance ministries, line ministries, parliamentarians and citizens.

The aid information systems we have today reflect the interests and needs of powerful and vocal stakeholders: donors and planning ministries. They do not reflect the diverse needs of parliamentarians, civil society groups, the media and citizens.  They are donor-centred, not citizen-centred.  They do not enable users to add up information from many different donors.  They are focused on aid allocation, not the details of execution.

But we should not allow ourselves to be daunted by this diversity of needs for aid information. These are are all different perspectives on the same underlying information: namely how aid money is spent by different organisations and what it pays for.  And although this information has not been organized in a way which makes it easy to access or use, it is information that every organization has, somewhere in their systems.  After all, every aid agency and every implementing organisation knows who they have written each cheque to, and for what purpose.

Donors must resist the temptation to try to predict and prioritise these different needs. If donors try to meet all the diverse needs of all potential users of aid information, they will inevitably devote their finite resources to meeting the demands of larger and more vocal interests.  (That’s why we currently have data systems designed for sharing information between donors, and with planning ministries, but nothing to give information to parliamentarians, civil society or citizens.)

Instead of trying to serve the needs of particular users, donors should publish the underlying data in an accessible format so that everyone can access it easily and analyse it from their particular perspective.  (David Eaves has written a good article about this, set in the broader context of public information.)  Only donors can publish the information they hold: so that is what they should concentrate their scarce resources on. Once they have made the information available in an easily accessible form, many other organisations and individuals will be able to use that information to serve a variety of specific users. I’ll talk in a subsequent blog post about what this means in practice for aid transparency, and the (very welcome) progress that is being made.

Corruption, bureaucracy and waste

Lai Yahaya reckons donors agreeing to aid transparency is like turkeys voting for Christmas

At the ONE Africa Symposium on technology and transparency the other day, Lai Yahaya, one of the founders of TransparentAid, said that donors and NGOs would resist aid transparency because greater openness in aid was like turkeys voting for Christmas.

When I began working on aid transparency I thought the opposite.  I’ve seen aid making a huge difference in many developing countries, and I believed then (and believe now) that if more people could see the difference aid makes, they would be more supportive of it. I thought public support for aid would continue to atrophy, and perhaps start to hemorrhage, as long as aid agencies are not able to show the public how aid is being used.  Better communication in the form of more press releases and glossier annual reports would not be sufficient: people need to be shown, not told, what difference aid is making.  So I thought radical transparency was needed to convince a skeptical public that aid is not all lost in corruption, bureaucracy and waste.  On this view, resisting pressure for transparency would be suicide.

Living in Ethiopia over the last three years has changed my view a bit on this.  A lot of aid is hugely effective and it transforms people’s lives.  The aid-funded Protection of Basic Services scheme has enabled the government massively to scale up health and education services.  The aid-funded Productive Safety Net Programme has not ended bad harvests, but it has made the population more resilient, preventing the large-scale famines we watched on TV in the 1980s. As well as these hugely successful government-to-government aid programmes there is amazing work done by a wide range of NGOs, funded both by individual donations and from government aid budgets.

But there is a lot of garbage in the aid system too.  Donors are held up with red-tape and bureaucracy. They dump money into multi-donor trust funds which the World Bank charges a hefty fee to administer, from which money is never disbursed.  Money moves from donor to international organization to trust fund to international NGO to local NGO, minus a haircut at every stage, so funding which starts as a river becomes a stream and then just a trickle. There are appalling examples of waste.  Many of the people working for aid agencies in developing countries are hard-working and committed, but they face a constant struggle to do the right thing in the face of ludicrous demands and ineffective systems imposed on them from headquarters.

Aid is precious, and waste is egregious. In Vietnam, it took 18 months and the involvement of 150 government workers to purchase five vehicles for a donor-funded project, because of differences in procurement policies among aid agencies.

If donors and NGOs were businesses in a competitive market they would have solved these problems by now, or they would have gone bust.  International NGOs (such as Save the Children and Oxfam) would not have half a dozen different national programmes operating independently here in Ethiopia: they would have consolidated them into one local office.  Donors are trying to harmonise and improve the the division of labour between them.  Some NGOs are outstanding, some are daft and some are downright harmful.  But change is slow for donors and NGOs because, in the absence of transparency, political constraints in aid are more powerful than business imperatives.

Transparency would change the imperatives and so help drive out waste and corruption. A 1996 study of school funding in Uganda showed that only 13 percent of the school grant from central government actually reached the schools; the other 87 percent was diverted either for private gain or by district officials for intermediate layers of bureaucracy. So the Ugandan government started to announce monthly transfers of funds in national newspapers and on the radio, and required primary schools to post information on in-flows of funds. When this information was made available to parents and teachers, the flow of funds improved dramatically, from 13 percent reaching schools in 1991–95, to over 80 percent of the money reaching schools in 1999 and 2000.

I was talking to the head of a small NGO here in Addis Ababa, whose funding comes mainly from the US Government.  I explained that under the transparency we were advocating, it would be possible to see in one place all the different things that different donors are funding in Ethiopia.  She was alarmed: “But that means we won’t be able to charge different donors for the same project”, she said. I said that seemed to me an advantage rather than a shortcoming of greater aid transparency.

An MP from Mozambique told me recently that he had presided over three separate opening ceremonies of the same school in his constituency, each with a different donor as guest of honour to be shown what they had funded. If there was more public information about what aid was funding, this kind of scam would be impossible.

The aid industry is far from perfect, and for as long as there are dark corners there will be corruption, bureaucracy and waste.  Overall I believe that aid works, but we can and must do much better.  When we see the true costs of the bureaucracy of aid, the costs of duplication and proliferation, and the shocking discrepancies between good organisations and bad ones, we’ll begin to see the most wasteful practices eliminated, and do a better job of funding the successful programmes. (Incidentally, in Ethiopia I think that is likely to mean putting more money through government and rather less through NGOs).

I am an enthusiastic supporter of aid. But I no longer think that aid transparency will prove to everyone that nearly aid is all efficient.  I now accept that there is more waste, bureaucracy and corruption than I wanted to believe, and this has strengthened my view that aid transparency is absolutely necessary to help to drive that out of the system.  But, unlike Lai, I continue to believe that unless donors become more transparent, and so do a better job of driving out the bad and making more space for the good, public trust in aid will continue to decline.  It is not transparency that will bring Christmas early, but secrecy.

Knowing what works: citizen accountability

John Githongo is a member of DFID's Independent Commission for Aid Impact

There’s a fashion among aid agencies for saying that we have to do a better job of finding out what works.  This manifests itself in greater emphasis on evaluation, especially on making more use of rigorous impact evaluation such as randomized control trials.  It manifests itself as linking funding more directly to results.  The UK has introduced the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, a step which I strongly support.

I think all this is essential to making the aid system work better.  I certainly don’t agree with the whining from aid industry insiders that measurement of results is burdensome or that it distorts decision-making in an unhelpful way. (I’ll write about that separately).

But I now believe that this approach, as it is being implemented, is too top down.  We can learn a lot from rigorous impact evaluations, and we need to do many more of them.  We need independent evaluation of aid agencies.  But there is something we need just as much, if not more: to know from the users of services themselves whether those services are effective and meet their needs.  Successful companies don’t decide their strategy according to impact evaluations, they respond to their customers.

I’ve become less sceptical over time of the idea of making aid and public services more accountable to the poor. A few years ago I was concerned that this might be a combination of political correctness and wishful thinking. It is hard to do, and it doesn’t reflect the realpolitik, which is that aid is always going to be accountable to the people who pay for it.

But we have growing evidence that greater accountability can make a huge difference to the quality of public services. In a randomized controlled trial in Uganda citizens gave feedback about health clinics through report cards and civil society meetings.  In the clinics where this happened, waiting time decreased; doctor and nurse absenteeism plummeted; clinics got cleaner; and fewer drugs were stolen. Most importantly, 33% fewer children under the age of five died. Improving accountability was much more effective than more expensive alternatives, such as paying for buildings, staff and medicines.

I’m on the board of Twaweza, an initiative based in East Africa which seeks to expand opportunities through which millions of people can get information and make change happen in their own communities directly and by holding government to account. One of their partners, Uwezo, aims to improve competencies in literacy and numeracy among children aged 5-16 years old in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda by enabling parents to assess the progress of their children and increasing public accountability of education services.  Daraja is a Tanzanian NGO that aims to develop tools and encourage citizens to report waterpoint functionality in their areas. Twaweza supports Daraja to enable citizens to report which water points are working in real time, through text messaging; to share information about water point functionality to the public in accessible formats, primarily through the media; and to analyze and publicize responsiveness of the government to citizen notification.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I now believe (along with the World Bank Chief Economist for Africa) that social accountability can make services work better, and contribute to development.  The powerful combination of a growing civil society voice and changes in technology make it possible, perhaps for the first time, for poor people themselves to monitor service providers and government services.

This is a new field and the evidence base is not yet in place. The most recent and comprehensive review of the literature by Rosemary McGee and John Gaventa at IDS finds this:

…there are a number of micro level studies, especially in the service delivery and budget transparency fields. These begin to suggest that in some conditions, the initiatives can contribute to a range of positive outcomes including, for instance,

• increased state or institutional responsiveness
• lowering of corruption
• building new democratic spaces for citizen engagement
• empowering local voices

Reading this survey, my conclusions were that the evidence so far is largely circumstantial though quite persuasive, but that we know rather more about the impact of greater accountability than we know about what we can do to bring that accountability about.

Transparency and accountability

We have a lot to learn about the relationship between transparency and accountability. They are not the same thing. For one thing, transparency is not zero sum: if I make information available to one person, that does not reduce the information available to someone else. (The technical economic term for this is “non rival”.)  By contrast, accountability can be zero sum, or at least subject to trade-offs: if an organisation or service becomes more accountable to the citizens it serves, it may as a result become less accountable to other stakeholders such as the government, donors or the employees.  Till Bruckner made a similar point in a thoughtful post on the Devex blog.

We have many examples of how transparency can change power relationships and accountability. An obvious example is the publication of UK Parliamentary Expenses.  In this case, as in many others, vested interests attempted to limit the information that was published and to control the narrative. For example, MPs did not want to publish the details of the houses in respect of which they were claiming accommodation costs: they wanted to publish only the summaries of claims under each category. But it was the publication of precisely these details which led to the biggest public debate and, eventually, to criminal charges against some MPs, because it was the details which showed that some MPs were abusing the system.

If our aim is to increase the accountability of public services to the intended beneficiaries, and to drive out corruption and waste, we must be vigilant to ensure that the transparency we advocate challenges, and does not entrench, existing power relationships.  We should be sceptical when we hear that publishing the details would be ‘too much information’ to be useful, or that it would be ‘disproportionately expensive’.    These are precisely the arguments that vested interests use to try to limit transparency, to try to control the narrative, and to slow down the shift in power and accountability which greater transparency brings about.  If donor organisations claim that publishing this information is ‘too expensive’ the burden of proof should be on them to demonstrate that this is true.

I am all in favour of donor agencies summarising information to tell an accessible, compelling story about what they are achieving.  But they are not entitled to maintain monopoly control of the information. The same information should be available to everyone, to enable others to examine the evidence and to construct a competing narrative if they wish.

Our existing arrangements for publishing aid information risk reinforcing, rather than challenging, existing power relationships.  Donors provide information through the DAC databases, which are designed for donors to share information with each other about their efforts.  Less reliably, they also provide information to country-level aid management systems, which are designed to enable developing country governments to manage their relationships with donors and which are, for the most part, unpublished.  Aid transparency in the future must be designed to allows citizens and civil society groups from both donor countries and developing countries to access this information in a meaningful way, to enable them to hold both governments and donors to account.

The aid industry is falling over itself to point out that transparency by itself is not enough. For example, Duncan Green says:

Don’t just throw money at transparency and accountability initiatives and expect a revolution. Unless the domestic politics is right, especially linking state and civil society actors into accountability coalitions, it may not make that much difference.

In a technical sense, it must be true that greater transparency is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for greater accountability.  But while I do not claim that transparency alone will bring about an accountability revolution, I have a lot more confidence in the ability of people of developing countries to use information to change their own lives.

I dislike and distrust the argument we hear from the aid industry that it is not enough simply to give people access to information, for five reasons:

1. first, it is clearly the responsibility of donors to be transparent about what they do, and nobody else can publish this information for them. Donors should focus first on the parts of the problem that are their problems to solve.
2. second, the possible need for complementary interventions is used as an excuse to move slowly on transparency (on the grounds that transparency will not make a difference unless those other institutions are in place). This is a classic case of the best becoming the enemy of the good.
3. third, the burden of proof should be on those who advocate secrecy.  We have a compelling business case for transparency, despite the uncertainties.  But there is no business case for secrecy and nobody has ever asked for one.  The uncertainties would be just as great in either case, so why is the uncertainty allowed to count against transparency but not against secrecy?
4. fourth, the evidence suggests that transparency does work surprisingly well. We should give the resourceful people of developing countries the benefit of the doubt. Consider the example of transparency of school budgets in Uganda – there was no civil society capacity building programme, or any of the other stuff that NGOs say might be required, yet the amount of money reaching schools went from 13% to over 80% in a few years.  There is not yet a rich enough evidence base, but there do seem to be quite a few cases in which, once people have access to information they are able to use it to improve the services they receive without (shock! horror!) a logframe, an end-to-end theory of change or capacity building support from international NGOs.
5. fifth, this concern seems nakedly self-serving.  Much of the aid industry’s core business is “capacity building”, “linking state and civil society actors into accountability coalitions”, “stakeholder analysis”, “empowering marginalised communities”, “civil society support programmes” and so on. Just as journalists don’t like the idea of people using the internet to share information without it being intermediated by media organisations, because it undermines their sense of identity and self-worth and jeopardises their livelihoods, the aid industry doesn’t like the idea that simply giving people access to information might be enough to enable them to change their world.

I’m enthusiastic about organistions working to help communities in developing countries to access and use information as it becomes available, and especially to help them to add value to it by mixing it with information from other sources, and using it to demand better service and advocate change.  I’m proud to be on the board of Twaweza, and I think donors should allocate a modest budget to supporting this kind of work.  But I remain more optimistic than many of the vested interests in the aid business that, even if this kind of international support is not as forthcoming as they would like, transparency by itself will still make a big difference. My belief, which is supported by the (admittedly rather sketchy) evidence so far, is that once you liberate the information people will find ways to use it.

Conclusions

I’ve spent the last three years working on how greater transparency and accountability can improve the way aid works, and my thinking about these issues has changed.  In this blog post I’ve tried to explain why. We have, for the very first time, found out what information people want and what they would do with it.  We have thought about how they could get access to it. We have more and more evidence about the impact of transparency and accountability.  And more people have begun to think about this and work on it than ever before. We have, collectively, come a long way.

In a later post I’ll reflect on the (very impressive) progress that has been made on this agenda, and on the next steps.

To conclude, here is a recap of the 8 most important things I have learned:

1. To make a difference, transparency has to be citizen-centred not donor-centred.
2. Today’s ways of publishing information serve the needs of the powerful, not citizens
3. People in developing countries want transparency of execution not just allocation
4. Show, don’t tell
5. Transparency of aid execution will drive out waste, bureaucracy and corruption
6. Social accountability could be Development 3.0
7. The burden of proof should be on those who advocate secrecy
8. Give citizens of developing countries the benefit of the doubt

Go to the website of any aid agency and you’ll find a cornucopia of information about the good work that it is doing. The problem is that it doesn’t publish this information in a usable form. Visibility is not the same as transparency.

Members of the US Congress rightly complain that they cannot get a complete picture of US foreign assistance, which is delivered by 26 government agencies. As Congress has discovered, to get a complete picture of what the US is doing you need up-to-date, comprehensive data from each aid agency in a common format that enables it all to be added up, reconciled and compared. It is very welcome that the US government is putting a system in place to do this.

Now put yourself in the shoes of ministers or parliamentarians in a developing country. They face the same problem as members of Congress, writ large. Aid to their country is channelled through bilateral aid agencies, multilateral organisations and thousands of NGOs. Aid goes from one organisation to another – minus a “haircut” at each stage – before any services are provided to anyone. How can officials or MPs get useful, up-to-date, comprehensive information about all this spending and all these activities? Certainly not by trawling through thousands of separate donor websites.

Read the whole thing here.

Shanta Devarajan asks if we have found Development 3.0

Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank Chief Economist for Africa, describes in an important new blog post the evolution of development policy in terms of changing ideas about market failures and government failures.   In the 1950s and 1960s, he says, development was about addressing market failures by providing public goods, addressing externalities, and redistributing income to poor people. Starting in the 1970s, attention shifted to government failures such as weak capacity, rent-seeking, political patronage and corruption.    Today, he says, many of the most egregious failures have been addressed, but the remaining failures directly hurt poor people.

On Shanta’s view, these failures arise from two kinds of imperfection in the public sector: that governments have difficulty monitoring and enforcing performance (leading to absentee teachers, clinics without drugs, etc) and imperfections in the political system which prevent it from serving the poor.

Shanta says that changes in technology and the rise of civil society can change all this:

Our understanding of government failure has coincided with two other developments.  One is the rise of civil society’s voice in public discourse.  The second is the technology revolution in poor countries.  There’s a message here.  Can we use technology and the voice of civil society to address these government failures?  Rather than imposing conditions, we can empower poor people to monitor service providers.  With some 80 percent of Africans having access to a cell phone, it is not difficult to have parents (or the students themselves) send an SMS message if the teacher is not in school, or there are no drugs in the clinic or the purported road maintenance program is not happening.  This could do more for helping governments and donors get value for money than all the fiduciary controls we put in place.  While we are at it, why don’t donors (including the World Bank) use technology to have the beneficiaries monitor and supervise development projects?

Can this work? Is social accountability a new model for development?

There is increasingly good evidence that transparency and accountability make a significant difference, in some cases surprisingly transformational.  There is an increasingly impressive collection of individual case studies, rigorously evaluated, which demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.  For example, Jacob Svensson and Martina Björkman conducted a randomized field experiment in Uganda to test the effect of increasing community-based monitoring. They found that when communities more extensively monitored providers, both the quality and quantity of health services improved, including reducing infant mortality by a third.

There have, however, been no significant comparative studies bringing this evidence together.  Until now.  Rosemary McGee and John Gaventa have just published an extensive review of literature and experience across the field.  There is a lot of material to digest, but here is the core of what they find:

…there are a number of micro level studies, especially in the service delivery and budget transparency fields. These begin to suggest that in some conditions, the initiatives can contribute to a range of positive outcomes including, for instance,

• increased state or institutional responsiveness
• lowering of corruption
• building new democratic spaces for citizen engagement
• empowering local voices
• better budget utilization and better delivery of services.

Reading the study, my conclusion is that we know rather more about the impact of greater accountability than we know about what we can do to bring that accountability about.

I currently work on transparency, because I think makes an important contribution to the ability of citizens to hold governments and donors to account and so improve service delivery and accelerate poverty reduction. There have been some good examples of how this can work in practice, which are summarised in Appendix 1 of this cost benefit analysis for the International Aid Transparency Initiative (page 23 of this pdf; disclosure: I’m a co-author).  The most famous example is this study of the impact of information on funds flowing to schools in Uganda which found a strong relationship between transparency and funds flowing to schools, though the evidence was subsequently challenged.   So while there is increasingly good evidence to confirm the intuition that transparency plays an important role, we need to understand a lot better how, and in what circumstances, transparency works, and particularly to understand better what else needs to be in place.

One issue on which Shanta is clearly right is that role that technology can play in supporting greater accountability. We know that technology does not end poverty, but we are seeing more and more examples of how technology – especially mobile telephony and text – has enabled and supported changes from mobile banking to wholesale agriculture markets. Just as technology underpins changes in markets (think of newspapers, or bookselling), so it can underpin changes in political economy and social accountability.

So is this, as Shanta says, Development 3.0?

Development is a long, slow, uncertain process and the road is bumpy and winding.  Transparency and accountability are not a one bound and we are free solution, any more than the ‘big push’ or the Washington consensus which Shanta labels Development 1.0 and 2.0 respectively.  But this time there is an important difference.  The ‘big push’ and the Washington consensus were blueprints for a better world. Social accountability, by contrast, does not start with a preconceived idea of how resources should be used or services should be delivered: it seeks to change the dynamics of the system to make it more responsive and more likely to converge by itself on solutions which better serve poor people in developing countries.

A big challenge will be whether development agencies themselves are able to adapt.  Their models for project cycle management are based on a top-down view: you specify the world you are trying to create (the “goal”) and then you articulate a series of outputs and activities which you expect will bring this about.  It will be a big change – intellectually, organisationally and culturally – to modify their systems, incentives and procedures to a world in which donors work instead to help the citizens of developing countries to determine their goals and priorities and build their own systems to achieve them.

If what Shanta is calling Development 3.0 means that instead of offering a one-size fits all solution we should work to close the broken feedback loop so that communities themselves can find the answer, then I think this may indeed be a change of perspective on development worthy of a major version number.

The main conclusion is that as would-be change-makers, we should not try to design a better world: we should concentrate on building better feedback loops.

You can view and listen to the presentation by clicking the image below. This narrated presentation lasts 18 minutes (beware: as soon as you click you’ll hear my voice, so don’t do this if you are in a meeting!).

Alternatively, you can download the presentation as a pdf file here.  But this won’t make as much sense, as there are a couple of videos in the presentation.

If you like this presentation, you may also like my previous narrated presentation about aid effectiveness after Paris.

Please let me know what you think in the comments below.  Am I right that we should focus more on feedback loops?

Narrative 1: Glass half full: we need a big heave

The dominant story from the summit was that development can be achieved if the world would only come together with a big heave. On this view, the glass is half full. We have made good progress towards the MDGs (supported by the new MDG report card by ODI; and their excellent new Development Progress Stories website); and with more money, we can do more.  Jeff Sachs, whose Millennium Villages Project exemplifies the idea of a big, coordinated push, called in the FT for aid to be scaled up through pooled donor funding, “to scale up what has been proven to work”. (Oddly, he chose the Global Fund rather than the World Bank as his example of effective multilateral institution.)

The new report of the Commission for Africa advocates a further big heave

A new Commission for Africa report, Still Our Common Interest, agrees. The original 2005 report was probably the most authoritative (certainly the most weighty) argument for a big heave; and it concluded (among other things) that donors should treble their aid to Africa.  The updated 2010 report reiterates that view, celebrates the progress that has been made, and calls for donors to increase their aid, including – very oddly – a proposal for a new Global Fund for Education.

Probably the biggest announcement this week, which sits squarely in the big heave narrative, was for a new UN Global Strategy for Women and Children’s Health.  As I argued here the other day, the focus on women and children’s health is welcome, but this is no strategy: it is another list of spending commitments, which the UN press release says is worth $40 billion. The only interesting feature of it is that it lists commitments by private companies and NGOs as well as official donors.  All very big heave; all very retro.

Narrative 2: More accountability leads to better institutions

While the UN institutions and the NGOs promote the big heave, donor governments, particularly the US and UK, are beginning to tell a different story which focuses on the need for more transparent and accountable institutions, both in developing countries and in the international development system.  This was most evident in President Obama’s speech which announced a new US development strategy.   President Obama explicitly distanced himself from the big heave:

“This is the reality we must face — that if the international community just keeps doing the same things the same way, we may make some modest progress here and there, but we will miss many development goals.”

Both the US and the UK government argue that the efforts of donors should be measured not by what is spent, but by what is achieved, both by aid and by other policies.  Cynics might think this is preparing the ground for aid cuts in the face of tight government budgets, though this does not appear to be the motive of the UK government which has committed to increasing aid to 0.7% of GDP by 2013.

The emphasis in the new US policy on growth as the permanent path out of poverty is not as new as the President’s speech implies; but the renewed emphasis will be welcome to those who think that the importance of growth is sometimes forgotten. As Lant Pritchett writes:

The “development is about more than growth” backlash, which had important elements of truth, easily got carried away into “development isn’t at all about growth” and it is good to see economic growth back front and center of development objectives.

A more novel feature of the new US policy is the emphasis on investing in systems and institutions, for service delivery, public administration, and other government functions, and the importance of country ownership.  This is new for the US.  For many European donors it is this reasoning that brought them to give more of their aid through governments as budget support, so this new US approach will be seen as a welcome conversion.

What is striking about this narrative is the emphasis it puts on transparency and accountability as ways to make institutions work better.  President Obama set out the argument in his General Assembly speech the following day:

The arc of human progress has been shaped by individuals with the freedom to assemble and by organizations outside of government that insisted upon democratic change and by free media that held the powerful accountable.   … In all parts of the world, we see the promise of innovation to make government more open and accountable. Now, we must build on that progress. And when we gather back here next year, we should bring specific commitments to promote transparency; to fight corruption; to energize civic engagement; and to leverage new technologies so that we strengthen the foundation of freedom in our own countries, while living up to ideals that can light the world.

This emphasis on accountability seems to resonate closely with the approach of the UK Government.  The UK International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, set out a similar argument in his first major speech, in which he emphasized outputs and outcomes rather than inputs, and launched the new UK Aid Transparency Guarantee.   Paul Collier and Jamie Drummond, writing in the Guardian, make a similar point about the need for transparency and accountability in the use of natural resources.

The 32 page outcome document, Keeping the Promise, sets out the usual long list of activities which “with increased political commitment .. could be replicated and scaled up for accelerating progress”.  But experienced communiqué watchers (like Lawrence Haddad) also detect a new theme: the need for more citizen-led monitoring of delivery.  For example, the outcome document calls on donors to:

[Work] towards greater transparency and accountability in international development cooperation, in both donor and developing countries, focusing on adequate and predictable financial resources as well as their improved quality and targeting; …. To build on progress achieved in ensuring that ODA is used effectively, we stress the importance of democratic governance, improved transparency and accountability, and managing for results.

Until now, I think many people working in the development community have seen transparency as an add-on, at best a way of retaining public support for aid while they get on with figuring out how to use the aid money wisely (and at worst an annoying additional bureaucratic burden).  Perhaps I am tempted to read too much into these speeches, because my day job is working towards more transparent and accountable institutions, but it was striking to see Raj Shah, Administrator of USAID, talking about the use of new media to build an online platform to help the government to reach its development goals.  I think it is now clear that, for the US and UK at least, transparency and accountability will play a more central role in their development strategies, both as drivers of change in developing countries, and forces for improvements in the effectiveness of development agencies and institutions.

A sign that this narrative is beginning to take shape is that it is already under attack.  In an interesting article in The New Republic, David Rieff is sceptical of the idea that donor nations can offer a path out of poverty:

The problem is not with the analysis but rather with the president’s implicit claim that we know how to offer peoples and nations such a path. … The stark fact is that only if one fetishizes the idea of civil society as a kind of universal ideological solvent, and believes that, in tandem with scientific innovation, the road to our collective salvation is now open to us, can such optimism be justified.

An interesting feature of this narrative is that it emphasizes the need for a wider range of instruments (known either as beyond aid or – ghastly term – policy coherence).  For example, in his speech, President Obama said:

Development is helping nations to actually develop — moving from poverty to prosperity.  And we need more than just aid to unleash that change.  We need to harness all the tools at our disposal — from our diplomacy to our trade policies to our investment policies.

Andrew Mitchell’s speech in June said something similar:

21st century development is a complex tapestry of trade, investment and enterprise, climate change, economic growth, debt relief, financial services, intellectual property and advancing new technologies.

Bill Easterly argued in the pages of the FT that trade, not aid, is needed to promote development. I’ve argued elsewhere that we don’t know very much about whether and how aid promotes economic and development, but we do know that it enables people to live better lives while that transformation is taking place.  So it may be that these beyond aid policies are the best hope for promoting development, while aid should focus primarily on improving lives in the meantime.

Narrative 3: The challenge is increasingly inequality, not absolute poverty

In my view, by far the most interesting and important paper to be published around the summit was The World’s Poor Aren’t Where We Think They Are, by Andy Sumner from IDS. Here’s the key conclusion:

In 1990, we estimate that 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in low income countries. In contrast, in 2007 we estimate that three-quarters of the world’s approximately 1.3bn poor people now live in middle-income countries (MICs) and only about a quarter of the world’s poor – about 370 million people live in the remaining 39 low-income countries, which are largely in sub-Saharan Africa.

The paper also shows that just 12 percent of the world’s poor live in fragile low-income countries.  Take a look at this Guardian data visualisation tool.

Data visualisation by the Guardian

This change in the reality on the ground has profound implications for development policy, and my sense is that the discussion in New York is not yet grappling with these issues.  Readers of Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion will recall his analysis that the world’s poorest people lived in about 50 very poor countries which he said were stuck in a series of poverty traps.  Policy should be focused on helping those countries to escape that trap. But if three quarters of the world’s poor live in middle income countries, the challenge is to reduce inequality in these countries.  The figures suggest that the biggest causes of poverty are not lack of development in the country as a whole, but political, economic and social marginalisation of particular groups in countries that are otherwise doing quite well.

It is not clear that additional resources from abroad are an important part of the answer to this. At The Guardian, Jonathan Glennie says:

The world needs to find new ways to help other countries respond to persistant poverty and increasing inequality. The era of aid as we know it is ending. Let’s hope that a new era of development cooperation takes its place.

For some people this suggests that we should reconceptualise development as the ability of all the world’s citizens to live decent lives, rather a problem of economic industrialisation of poor countries. This view has the advantage of focusing on people and communities, rather than countries.  A recurring theme of the Chronic Poverty conference, which took place just before the MDG Summit, was the right of all citizens to a basic standard of living, and there is growing interest in the possible role of various kinds of social protection (social safety-nets, conditional and unconditional cash transfers, family grants and so on).

Similarly, a new report from Phil Vernon and Deborrah Barksh at International Alert asks us to get “beyond the MDGs”.  They call for a

… a new narrative, based on a vision of a world in which people can resolve their differences without violence, while continuing to make equitable social and economic progress, and without lessening the opportunities for their neighbours or future generations to do the same. This vision would be both enabled and recognisable by five core factors: equal access to justice, political voice, security, economic opportunity and well-being. These would in their turn be underpinned by a self-reinforcing set of values and institutions.

On this view, poverty is a problem of political and economic marginalisation which can affect communities within industrialised, industrialising and low income countries.  It calls for a different kind of policy agenda, which is as much to do with empowerment and political voice as the transfer of resources and investment in public services.

Conclusion

These seem to be three quite different views of development.  There is a substantial gap between advocating a big heave of more aid to ignite a cycle of industrialisation in the poorest countries, a focus on more transparent and accountable institutions in developing countries and in the development system, and political change that protects the rights of society’s most marginalised groups in whatever country they happen to live.

But while there are tensions and trade-offs, these views are not intrinsically contradictory, and in a subsequent post I’ll look at how these three narratives can be stitched together into a coherent whole.

This video by AidData explains brilliantly what geocoding means, and why its important. Take a look:

Serious kudos to the World Bank, Development Gateway and AidData for doing this work. Geocoding is going to have a huge impact on improving the accountability and effectiveness of aid.  By geocoding these World Bank projects manually, the team has demonstrated that geocoding aid is feasible. As Development Gateway’s Steve Davenport says in the video: “This is not that difficult”.

If the new standards for publishing aid information that are being designed by donors under the International Aid Transparency Initiative include appropriate standards for geo-coding of all aid activities, then it won’t be necessary for these projects to be coded by hand in future.  The people funding the projects would geocode their projects from the outset, and this information would be included in the data feeds, so everyone will have more comprehensive, more accurate and more precise about who is doing what, and where.

If you want more background, aidinfo’s paper Show Me The Money explains how geo-coding, traceability and transaction level details make a powerful combination for improving the effectiveness and accountability of aid.

H/T: my colleagues at aidinfo

More details are on the aidinfo.org blog.  In short, the donors agreed

• Data will be published more quickly, with an agreement that information will be published as soon as possible, and at a minimum, quarterly. More timely information is a top ask of stakeholders in developing countries.
• Data will be published in a common, open format, so that it is readily accessible, comparable and easy to find.
• More detailed aid data will be published, increasing its relevance to users.

None of this is going to be easy for donors. It will require some investment in collecting better information and quality assurance, and it will require a significant change of culture as they move to the assumption that the details of all aid projects will be publicly available automatically.  But we know that the benefits hugely exceed these costs.  So kudos to the donors for taking this important first step on the road to comprehensive aid transparency.

Two particular highlights of the meetings from my point of view were:

• The five country pilots demonstrated the feasibility of automatic electronic data exchange between donors and developing country governments, and for the creation of data in standard IATI format; and
• The developing country representatives at the meeting were clear and vocal in their insistence that donors should publish details of how they are spending aid.

There is a long way to go, and there is a comprehensive work programme for phases 2 and 3 of IATI.  But last week donors took an extremely important first step for which they deserve credit.

Read more on the aidinfo blog.

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.

If resources are limited, focus your efforts on making your data open rather than in producing generic “lessons learned” documents (or other knowledge management products) that have little contextual value for practitioners on the ground. In a world where SMS makes it possible to connect with affected communities even in rural areas, those products will sound increasingly hollow.

In our work on aid transparency, we’ve heard a lot of staff of aid agencies insist that aid agencies have to package the data, otherwise it will be no use to anyone.  The charitable interpretation is that they want to make sure that information is useful; less positively, this impulse may come from the desire to avoid difficult questions that may arise from the raw data.

There is an excellent slide show by Chris Taggart at countculture on this latter point: the risk that open data will lead to the exposure of problems and to difficult questions being asked.

I do not have a problem with public authorities using data to present information and analysis that they think is useful and which will help build their reputation.  But they should publish the raw, underlying data as well.  Any services which they provide to information consumers – such as websites – should use the same data, and the same public access interface, as is available to everyone else.  So if someone else wants to set up a different website, telling the story in a different way or mixing it up with data from another source, they can do so.  There is no reason why the authorities should have privileged access to the data: it should be a common, universally accessible layer on which anyone can build their service or tell their story.

There is a particular challenge in publishing foreign assistance: the consumers of information want information from many different donor agencies and international organisations.  In most cases, citizens in developing countries don’t want to know what a particular organisation is up to everywhere; they want to know what all organisations are up to in a particular place or on a particular topic.  So information intermediaries serving these users need some way to pull together data from many different sources, and turn it into a single stream of comparable, consistent and coherent data.  To a large extent information intermediaries could  do this automatically, if the organisations publish enough detail about their activities to enable the data to be compared; but to some extent it requires that data is deliberately classified and structured to enable this kind of mash up.   A good example is the ability to trace aid from one organisation to another: a lot of aid passes through many organisations before it arrives at its intended beneficiary, and even if every organisation is transparent about all its spending, there is no direct way to track the aid through this chain.  That would need an agreed way of tagging the data so that we can all see how money flows through the system.

So for me, the key messages are:

a. publish the raw data, either instead of or alongside the information and analysis (and sometimes spin)

b. to the extent necessary, agree a minimal set of standards for the way the data are structured and the detail it contains to enable users easily to mix and mash the data so that they can use it. The International Aid Transparency Initiative has the potential to do this.

c.  Aid agencies should not feel that they themselves have to meet the needs of information consumers; they should provide financial support to information intermediaries who will access this data, mix it with other data, and provide locally useful and relevant information which meet a wide range of needs.   The more the donors make detailed, raw data easily available in a consistent format, the less financial support they will need to provide to information intermediaries enable them to use it.

Not only has the World Bank made this data available, it has created interfaces that enable programmers to access the data automatically (in technical language, they are providing an API).  That in turn means that individuals and organisations can create programmes, websites or visualizations that use the data and enable them to mash it up with other information.

This data does not yet included detailed World Bank project data.  But the World Bank is part of the International Aid Transparency Initiative, IATI, through which 18 donors are working together to put detailed aid data online.  When that is up and running, it will be possible to access aid data in the same way as the development information being put online by the World Bank today.

This is a huge step forward for open access to development data.  Well done the World Bank.

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.

We got the text of the budget documents as ASCII files on 3.5″ disks from the typesetters, and I worked through the night, using a basic text editor to put the HTML codes into the files manually. I finished marking up the pages about an hour before the Budget Speech began; and we went live as the Chancellor of the Exchequer sat down at the end of his speech.

Not only was the Treasury the first UK government department to have a website, the UK was the first country anywhere in the world to put its budget documents online.  Today, of course, it is inconceivable that this information would not be available online. We could see then that the World Wide Web, invented three years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee, would change the way people access information, and we were proud to be part of that change.

In 2009, Tim Berners Lee (now Sir Tim) described in a TED talk his vision of a new internet, that will do for numbers what the web has done for words, pictures and video. He called for data to be unlocked. A year later, in a short 5 minute talk, he shows what can happen when the data are liberated.  It is well worth watching:

Once again I find myself persuaded by Tim Berners-Lee’s vision.  With an ace team at aidinfo,  we are working to see it applied to information about foreign aid.  We are working with donors to help them to work out the best way to put their aid data online in a common format (vision paper here – pdf) so that anyone with access to the internet can take that information from many donors, mix it together, and use it to help change their world.

If you want to hear more about why aid transparency is important, listen to this Center for Global Development “wonkcast” – a 20 minute interview with me.  And if you want to hear more about how citizens in East Africa are using information to increase “social accountability”, listen to the subsequent wonkcast with Rakesh Rajani.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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

Also you can subscribe to our RSS feed.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.