Owen abroad

Archive for December, 2006

Spare a thought for Treasury officials, who are today sending off a cheque for £45 million to the United States Treasury, in the last payment of British war debt to our American, ahem, allies.

I suppose very few British people know that we are still repaying the United States for their assistance in World War II.  At the end of the war, the US administration decided permanently to weaken Britain for strategic reasons, to ensure that the US emerged as a superpower.  The lend lease repayment terms were set at a level intended to weaken Britain financially, and to force it to give up its aspirations to be an international empire.

With friends like this ….

Hansard 3 May 2006 : Column 1726W

War Loan Repayments

Anne Moffat: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether the UK Government continue to pay interest and capital reduction to the US in connection with lend lease and war loans; and if he will make a statement. [67695]

Mr. Ivan Lewis: The Government intends to meet its obligations under the 1945 Agreement by repaying the United States Government in full the amounts lent in 1945. Repayment of the war loans to the United States Government are expected to be completed on 31 December 2006.

I said in June that the national identity register should be a federation of connected computer systems, not a single database.

Very sensibly, that is what the Home Office has now announced in the Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Register. 

So far so good.  There is one protection, however, that the government has not yet been persuaded to implement. Each citizen should be able to log in, see their own information, and see the names and job titles of every government official who has accessed that data. 

Ruth Levine, writing at CGD, is spot on (as ever):

That's why we have to do better this time, learning from history that to succeed will require big-time funding over the long haul, and a willingness to pay attention to emerging evidence about which combination of strategies is working or failing in different settings. In the past, the bugs have adapted faster than we have, costing untold lives. Much as we might see potential in the use of bednets, the application of pesticides, the scale-up of ACT use or other strategies, an over-reliance on one approach versus others combined with unrealistic promises about very rapid progress is likely to lead us down the road to nowhere that others have followed before.

Ruth's warning applies to much of the development business.  There are few quick wins; we need long term sustained commitment, not attractive initiatives; and we we need to act on evidence not on instinct.

Mohammaed Yunus, accepting his 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, said:

I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.

Poverty is created because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions which under-estimates human capacity, by designing concepts, which are too narrow (such as concept of business, credit- worthiness, entrepreneurship, employment) or developing institutions, which remain half-done (such as financial institutions, where poor are left out). Poverty is caused by the failure at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people….

A human being is born into this world fully equipped not only to take care of him or herself, but also to contribute to enlarging the well being of the world as a whole. Some get the chance to explore their potential to some degree, but many others never get any opportunity, during their lifetime, to unwrap the wonderful gift they were born with. They die unexplored and the world remains deprived of their creativity, and their contribution.

I thought this was a moving speech, and I'm glad that a fighter against poverty should be recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize.  And for what it is worth, while I'm a great believer in microfinance, I'm pretty sceptical about using aid or philanthropy to support it.

The World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group has launched its Annual Review of Development Effectiveness.  It is an honest, and somewhat depressing, account of what the Bank has achieved.  According to the Washington Post:

Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 experienced reductions in poverty from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, while 14 had the same or worsening rates over that term. The group said the sample was representative of the global picture.

"Achievement of sustained increases in per capita income, essential for poverty reduction, continues to elude a considerable number of countries," the report declared, singling out programs aimed at the rural poor as particularly ineffective. Roughly half of such efforts from 2001 to 2005 "did not lead to satisfactory results." During that period, new World Bank loans and credits aimed directly at rural development totaled $9.6 billion, or about one-tenth of total bank lending, according to the group.

Comment:  I suspect that many people will use this report to confirm their prejudices.  If you are an aid sceptic, and you do not read the report carefully, you might conclude that this shows that the money spent by the World Bank is wasted.  But this is not what the evaluation finds.  It finds that many reforms of development assistance that are being implemented around the world  are likely to be effective.  The evaluation finds:

• growth alone is not enough: growth delivers poverty reduction more effectively when it occurs in sectors and regions where most of the poor live and work;
• satisfactory project outcomes alone do not ensure country sector impact: what matters is the long term development of in-sector and cross-sector strategies that complement each other;
• pressure to show results quickly can divert attention from the quality of results;
• achieving and maintaining results requires public sector institutions that are accountable to domestic stakeholders, not donors;
• the long time required to achieve many of the intended results underlines the importance of continuity and predictability of donor engagement;
• results depend on the commitment and ownership of recipient governments.

These recommendations are consistent with the progressive aid agenda, increasingly being implemented by the World Bank, DFID and some other development agencies.  It is, however, an agenda that is sometimes under attack from sceptics of government aid, many of who minstead recommend a project-based approach, in pursuit of short-term, more measurable targets.  This so-called bottom-up approach is often at the expense of the long term, cross-sectoral institutional improvements that really drive sustained and systemic change.

Finally, kudos to the Bank for publishing a thorough warts-and-all analysis of its weaknesses as well as successes. 

More from Ezra Klein,  Washington Post.

There has been a lot going on.  We've moved back from California to London, and we have moved back to G's old flat in London.  This took some time, as we waited for the tenants to move out, and then had some repairs done.  We've been combining our luggage from Berkeley with our old stuff from storage – effectively combining three households into one.  Oxfam came to collect boxes of books, redundant hi-fi equipment, duplicate crockery and other treasured posessions.

I have started back at DFID, as Director of Global Development Effectiveness.  G has made an even tougher transition – from successful investment banker, via an MBA in the States, to starting work a couple of weeks ago at Marie Stopes International.

I've been doing a lot of traveling – getting to know my opposite numbers in Berlin and Tokyo (Germany and Japan hold the G8 Presidencies in 2007 and 2008 respectively), an aid effectiveness conference in Manila, and a meeting of the Donors Assistance Committee in Paris on improving the coordination of health programmes. I've spoken at conferences on the importance of good governance for development, on the need for better donor coordination as aid increases, on the need for global programmes to be more integrated into country systems, on the role of NGOs in the international process, and on the need for a stronger results culture in development.  I've been getting to know my colleagues in No.10, the FCO, Treasury, DTI and elsewhere in Whitehall.  And I'm involved in policy development from improving our efforts to tackle international corruption, planning the scale up of Government aid, raising the game of the international community in the fight against AIDS, resuscitating the trade talks, and understanding how DFID's "country-led approach" applies in countries with governments that are less than fully committed to improving the lives of their own citizens.

It is, frankly, a mixed blessing to be back in London and at DFID.  I miss the sunshine of California; the easy lifestyle of working from home; the intellectual freedom of working in a think tank; and good friends that we made on the West Coast.  But it is good to be back among friends and family in London, to be at home in one of the great cities of the world.  Despite the inevitable inconveniences of working in a bureaucracy, I am really enjoying being back in DFID.  I'm working with really great team of people. I really admire the way my colleagues combine professionalism with passion for our mission.

Blogging is still a bit unfamiliar to my fellow civil servants, and I still don't really know what I'm allowed to do. I think I'm going to re-enter the water, a bit cautiously, and see how it goes.

It is good to be back.