Forgive the puff for my day job - aidinfo works to make aid more transparent and accountable.
Our web guy has done a great job on our website: http://www.aidinfo.org.
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My day job is leading the aidinfo team working to improve the transparency of international aid. Why? Because we think that when aid is more transparent it will be more effectively used and it will help people in developing countries to hold their governments to account. We also believe that if taxpayers can see where aid is really going, and see what a difference it makes, they will support more of it.
So I was dead pleased to see this by David Cameron in today’s Guardian
Transparency tears down the hiding places for sleaze, overspending and corruption. Soon enough all MPs’ expenses are going to be published online for everyone to see: I and the rest of the shadow cabinet are already doing it. And if we win the next election, we’re going to do the same for all other public servants earning over £150,000. Just imagine the effect that an army of armchair auditors is going to have on those expense claims.
Indeed, the promise of public scrutiny is going to have a powerful effect on over-spending of any variety. A Conservative government will put all national spending over £25,000 online for everyone to see, so citizens can hold the government to account for how their tax money is being spent. And we will extend this principle of transparency to every nook and cranny of politics and public life, because it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to transfer power to the powerless and prevent waste, exploitation and abuse.
Yes, yes, and thrice yes, as Mark Kermode would say.
What’s more, with current technologies, we can do this quite easily, and unleash the creative power not only of armchair auditors, but of millions of people who are not in armchairs but are directly experiencing the effects of that spending and who can help us to understand what is working and how it can be made to work better.
So asks Chris Blattman:
I seldom fly business myself, even on Bank and UN consultancies, mostly to conserve my project funds for research assistants and survey expenses. My incentives are just right: money I spend on me comes out of money I’d spend making my research projects just a little better. Not so the rest of the agency?
I also hold back from business for another reason: $6000 for a single ticket? When the purpose of your trip is to contribute (however little) to ending poverty, something about that price tag just doesn’t seem right.
The Bankers and UNers have a good response: I’m only there for a week, and I’m much more productive if I can sleep on the plane.
To which I reply: your productivity for a 0.5% of your time is worth 4% of your annual salary?
In some cases, I might add: what development assistance exactly is achieved in a week?
In an age of diminishing aid and global belt-tightening, now seems an opportune time to change this little practice. Mr. Zoellick? Mr. Ki-Moon?
The answer is obvious: of course not. The staff of aid agencies should fly economy class.
Business class flights are not the only expensive perks. Why do World Bank and IMF staff visiting Addis Ababa stay in the Sheraton, which is one of the most luxurious and vulgar hotels in the world, when there are very good hotels down the road for one fifth of the price? Why do international aid agency staff living overseas have such luxurious houses, with allowances for gardeners and domestic staff? Why do some aid agencies pay to fly their belongings to Addis Ababa air freight, when it could come by sea for a fraction of the price? Should staff be allowed to ship cars from home, at public expense, duty free, and then sell them locally at a profit?
A good start would be to make all this transparent. As we are seeing with the row over MPs’ expenses in the UK, sunlight is a good disinfectant. If all these expenses were individually and separately itemised and published, I suspect many aid agencies would soon decide that they are difficult to defend.
The senior staff of the Canadian aid agency, CIDA, are required by Canadian policy to publish their travel and hospitality expenses. Here are the returns for the first quarter of this year. That’s a good start. But I’d like to even more detailed figures published for all staff of aid agencies. I suspect quite a lot of this stuff would stop quite quickly.
My colleague Simon nails the link between the Obama team’s idea of openness and what we are trying to do with aid data:
The pitch for the idea states:“We can unleash a wave of civic innovation if we open up government data to programmers. The government has a treasure trove of information: legislation, budgets, voter files, campaign finance data, census data, etc. Let’s STANDARDIZE, STRUCTURE, and OPEN up this data.”
Quite. This is exactly what we want to do with aid data!
I am in favour of more openness in government, and against leaking by civil servants.
Almost everyone recognises the need for secrecy in some discrete areas of government, such as security and defence, and for information about individuals to be protected. But there is debate about whether information about other areas of government policy should be protected.
There are some - including my father, Brian Barder - who argue that governments are entitled to retain some information privately to permit effective decision-making. On this view, Ministers are entitled to advice and analysis before a choice is made, and if that advice is likely to be published then it is less likely to be sought, or it will be provided in phone calls, text messages or in un-minuted meetings to avoid the need for disclosure. This will result in less comprehensive and frank advice, and less well-informed decisions. That is a serious concern.
The alternative view is that if officials know that advice will be published, they will do a better job in providing evidence-based, impartial and comprehensive advice; and Ministers will do a better job of making decisions consistent with what the evidence and analysis is telling them. Transparency makes it harder for Governments to do irrational things. It reduces the power of insider lobby groups and creates political pressure for better government. It makes it more likely that governments will take a longer-term view rather than seek short-term political advantage. Furthermore, controlled release of information is sometimes used by government to “spin” the message and to create an unhealthy dependency between the media and government spin doctors.
A lot of government information is classified to avoid embarassment rather than to avoid harm to the interests of the nation. (The use of the classification “sensitive but unclassified” is a case in point.)
But although I am in favour of greater transparency in government, I am not in favour of leaking of government information by civil servants.
The media and MPs seem to have sided with Damian Green MP on the basis that democracy requires a flow of information from government to, err, the media and MPs, and that this information would not be available within the current law.
Parliament should debate and decide the amount of transparency it wants of the executive part of government, and ministers and officials should then comply with that law. Parliament has done this by way of the Official Secrets Act (1989). Having passed the law, there is no excuse for those same Parliamentarians to collaborate with civil servants who break the law by receiving or using that information, still less by encouraging them. If MPs believe that the good functioning of democracy depends on more information being made available than is currently required and allowed by law, then they should change the law, not break it.
For the police to enforce the law, as passed by Parliament, is not an intrusion of police power into democracy. Enforcing the law is the job of the police; and if Parliament doesn’t like the law then they are in a peculiarly strong position to do something about it.
An enquiry has been demanded into the way some UK aid is given directly to the governments of some countries. According to the Daily Telegraph
Figures from the Department for International Development show that over the past five years the UK has handed £1.6 billion to 15 of the world’s poorest countries. But research from campaigning group Transparency International shows that many of these rank highly in its corruption index of 180 countries.
There are several points to make about this:
“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.
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.
“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.
When donors create parallel structures to deliver aid they can undermine both government ownership of policy and its ability to deliver (by recruiting scarce talent). So where aid can be effectively delivered through government or departmental budgets that is desirable.
In conclusion: donors are right to be concerned about corruption, but there is no reason to think that corruption is reduced, either in aid or in the country as a whole, if donors switch their aid from budget support to other forms of aid. On the other hand there are costs to doing so - in the form of reduced aid effectiveness, which means more people dying, as well as slower progress towards systems that are more accountable and less susceptible to corruption in the future.
So it does not follow that because some countries perform badly on the TI corruption perceptions index, that it is a bad idea to give those countries aid in the form of budget support. Perhaps that is why the TI report itself explicitly counsels against that kind of reasoning:
Some governments have sought to use corruption scores to determine which countries receive aid and which do not. TI does not encourage the use of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in this way.
Alanna Shaikk writes about the good and bad of working in international development. Here is a big part of the bad:
… You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.
This is a very acute observation, and it is confirmed by what I see here in Addis every day.
It seems to me that we must de-escalate the amount of paperwork involved in international development.
There has to be some record-keeping to enable us to account to the people whose money we are spending. But the bureaucracy involved in designing and getting funding for projects, for hiring people, and for monitoring and reporting, has become an industry in itself.
Akvo is promoting “Really Simple Reporting (RSR)” which is intended to simplify reporting.
The Skoll Foundation is also apparently working on a common reporting format to simplify the paperwork for grantees of US foundations. (I can’t find anything about this project online.)
I think the time has come for all donors - government agencies, international organisations, private foundations, and NGOs - to adopt a common reporting format for their grantees, so that each organisation can provide information about finances and performance in a single report - possibly provided online - on which all their funders can rely.
The people whose money we are spending - taxpayers and individual givers - don’t want to pay people to fill in forms; and the people who work in development don’t want to do it either. A common reporting format would also make the information more comparable and useful.
So help me I’ve read some rubbish in the Daily Mail over the years - and I know it to be a potent brew of prejudice and lies. But this article must rank in the top-ten for stupidity.
The headline - “A heart rending dispatch from Ethiopia” - seemed promising. Could it be that the Daily Mail is taking an interest in the challenges being faced by 80 million people here in Ethiopia? Heaven knows, it would be about time. About 5 million people here need emergency assistance, and about 75,000 children are suffering with severe acute malnutrition. Approximately 73% of the female population undergoes female genital mutilation. Only 22% of the population has access to an improved water supply, and only 13% of the population has access to adequate sanitation services (less in rural areas). Only 46% of girls in Ethiopia go to primary school, and fewer than 25% go to secondary school (these numbers are a huge improvement on the figures only a few years ago).
And the situation today is dire. Less than a year ago, a quintal of teff (a type of grain from which people make injera, a staple food) cost about 350 birr; today it has spiralled to to over 1,100 birr for the same amount, which is about what you need to feed a family for a month.
But none of that worries Liz Jones of the Daily Mail:
What I will remember most about my trip to Ethiopia is the sight of the grain market, held just outside the small town of Hossana - human population 70,000; equine population 91,040. Mules - half donkey, half horse - are used for the terrible task of carrying grain because they are bigger and stronger than donkeys.
She is in a country in which children are dying of malnutrition and what she will remember most is the mules?
I’ve been vegetarian since I was a teenager, so I count myself as someone who takes the rights of animals seriously, but I cannot begin to understand how Ms Jones can think that, of all the insults to dignity and humanity facing this country, the plight of donkeys could feature anywhere in the top ten. But Ms Jones ranks donkeys right up there with Ethiopian children:
I tried to imagine how I would treat a donkey if I had seven mouths to feed, and I hope I would still have a vestige of compassion. But if my children were starving, I cannot be sure that that would be the case. No one can.
I don’t have children or a mule, but I am pretty sure that if I did, I’d put my children first. And I’d be keen to prosecute anyone who took a different view.
Almost every day here, I see women hauling huge loads of firewood on their backs from the outskirts of the city, to bring fuel for their family. A few are lucky enough to have a donkey to bear the load. Ms Jones of the Daily Mail does not approve:
The owner explains that she has been walking with her donkey since 7am; it is nearly 5pm, and the sun is still beating down relentlessly. I ask why she has not taken the load from her donkey’s back, and she replies that she would not have the strength to lift the sacks back on to her donkey again. Can she not let the donkey rest? The woman shakes her head. She has to hurry, to be home before 6.30pm, so that she can take part in a religious feast.
Ms Jones suggests you might want to give money to a charity to help the mules (and, almost unbelievably, to “educate owners in better animal care,
preventing problems from reoccurring”).
Alternatively, you might want to give money to a charity to help the people. You can donate to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) here, or Save the Children here.
The UK Department for International Development has started a group blog. This is great news for those of us who believe that it has a good story to tell.
DfID has a very good reputation abroad, but hardly anybody in the UK knows anything about it, or appreciates how much DfID contributes to positive perceptions of Britain. I hope this blog will help tell the story in a very direct and personal way.
I used to blog when I worked at DFID, but that was before the government had guidelines about blogging. Let’s hope that the Government will be willing to accept that there will be some uncomfortable moments but that the benefits hugely outweigh the risks.
The Guardian reports that the UK is pushing for greater transparency of aid in an initiative to be launched tomorrow:
The UK wants donor countries to provide full and detailed information of all the financial assistance provided to each country; details of individual projects and their aims; and reliable information on future aid flows so that developing countries can plan ahead.
This political pressure is a very welcome boost for our work on the need for greater transparency for aid, with strong civil society backing, and the UK Government deserves great credit for pushing it. It
The next stage for us is an intensive period of listening to people in developing countries - parliaments, finance ministries, civil society, the private sector - as well as in donor countries, to understand exactly what information should be published, and how.
And that’s what we’ll be doing for the next couple of years.
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