This will interest you if you have an unusually geeky interest in the institutional arrangements for the UK’s development assistance programme. (It might also help with severe cases of insomnia.)
Over at the Center for Global Development, I’ve published a new Working Paper, entitled “Reforming Development Assistance: Lessons from the UK Experience”.
It is actually more interesting than it sounds. Here is the abstract:
The establishment of the UK Department for International Development in 1997, and the evolution of the UK’s foreign aid policies, has provoked international interest as a possible model for other countries to follow.
The UK now combines in a single government department not only the delivery of all overseas aid, but also responsibility for analyzing the impact on developing countries of other government policies, such as trade, environment and prevention of conflict. The department is led by a Cabinet-level minister. It has a remit to articulate the UK’s longterm security, economic and political interests in helping to build a more stable and prosperous world, and to ensure that this long-term goal is considered alongside the more immediately pressing concerns of political, security and commercial interests. It has benefited from a sharp focus on its long-term mission to reduce poverty overseas.
Within a few years, the new Department has established a reputation for itself, and for the UK Government, as a leader in development thinking and practice.
This paper describes the institutional changes in more detail, and considers how they came about. It also considers the steps that will be needed to consolidate its early success.
John Densmore, the drummer for The Doors, has turned down $15 million offered by Cadillac last year for the right to use “Break On Through” to promote its luxury SUVs:
People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music. I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn’t commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.
Apparently Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger and not too pleased with John Densmore’s principled stance.
What would Jim Morrison think?
Here are the lyrics from Black Polished Chrome, which apparently Cadillac didn’t want to use:
Someone knew the tv showman
He came to our homeroom party
And played records
And when he left in the hot noon sun
And walked to his car
We saw the chooks had written
F-u-c-k on his windshield
He wiped it off with a rag
And smiling cooly drove away
He’s rich. got a big car.
… the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
John Maynard Keynes, 1935, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 24.
In my recent paper looking at progress so far on the development agenda in 2005, I promised to come back to the question of how much additional aid has been pledged during the "year of development".
The UN Millennium Project Report (Investing in Development) estimates in Table 8 that an additional $50 billion a year will be needed by 2010 to reach the Millennium Development Goals.
The UK government has claimed that:
The agreement at Gleneagles went a very long way to achieving what the Commission [for Africa] recommends. Extra money from the United States and Japan will be added to Europe’s commitment to reach the UN’s target of providing 0.7% of national income for development by 2015. This will release an extra $50 billion a year to poor countries by 2010, $25 billion of which will go to Africa, more than doubling aid to Africa compared to 2004.
By contrast, Oxfam has said that commitments made by the G8 during 2005 may add only about $16 billion to the global aid budget by 2010 over and above existing trends.
So who is right? I don’t agree with either, but Oxfam was pretty close. According to my detailed estimates, the increase in aid promised for 2010 is less than $14 billion a year compared to what was already pledged.
My calculation uses figures from the OECD/DAC, by comparing projections made after Gleneagles with the projections based on pledges that had been made up to 2004. I tried to be generous, by making relatively pessimistic assumptions about what would have happened in 2010 without the additional pledges made in 2005 (which were mainly the commitments by EU Governments at their meeting on 24 May 2005). You can see the calculation here.
Who wouldn’t want a $100 laptop? Most of the world’s poor, at least for now.
As usual, Russell Southwood at Balancing Act gets it right:
Try going to the informal settlements of most major African cities and explain to potential customers why they might want a cheap PDA or indeed a cheap laptop. Negroponte is giving them away because he knows what an unbearably difficult task it would be to have to actually sell the things to people who might actually want them and have the money to buy them.
Somehow I don’t think Negroponte’s plan is going to work any better than Simputer.
But take a look at Ndiyo. (The BBC reported it in April.) That looks to me as if it might be a real success.
More from World Changing and Ethan Zuckerman.
I’m sitting in a coffee bar in Berkeley, which is about my favourite state of being.
There’s been some good music playing … Beatles (White Album), David Bowie (Let’s Dance), Pink Floyd (Murmur).
And I’ve just realised that all the bands they’ve played are British. And that we are disproportionately well-represented in the annals of great pop music.
Ah: now it’s Simon and Garfunkel. A reminder that there are some great American singers and songwriters too.
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