Aid Effectiveness

What We’re Reading: Polio, sanitation and a controversial constitution

Aug 2nd, 2010 10:43 AM UTC
By Robyn Mitchell

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Famine in Niger affects 12 million – Expensive imports and aid remain out of reach for 12 million people in Niger – 80 percent of the population – which is facing the worst food crisis in years. Aid organizations say that the immediate obstacle preventing them from meeting urgent food needs is a donor shortfall of more than $100 million. (Afua Hirsch, The Guardian)

Horn of Africa once again polio-free – The Horn of Africa is again polio-free, with Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda having reported no cases for more than a year, said UNICEF. The victory is attributed to a series of multi-country immunization campaigns, along with greater technical support and strong political engagement. (Peter Mutai, Xinhua News)

Make Maternal Health Priority, African Leaders Told – Speaking at last week’s African Union summit, the Deputy U.N. Secretary-General maintained that women and children are the “engines” driving future economic growth on the continent, and that leaders must making meeting the 2015 Millennium Development Goal deadline of improving child and maternal health a priority. (Abimbola Akosile, AllAfrica.com)

Kenyans to Vote on Controversial Constitution – Kenyans will vote on a controversial new constitution this week—the latest step by the nation’s leaders to bring political change to their country to quell tribal tensions. The U.S maintains a new constitution is central to this effort. (Sarah Childress, Wall Street Journal)

New focus on Sanitation in Burkina Faso – Burkina Faso has embarked on the construction of 55,000 latrines each year for the next five years to improve access to proper sanitation by more than 40 percent. The new initiative was spurred by findings that the current pace is insufficient to attain the Millennium Development Goal on sanitation in a context of rapid population growth. (Brahima Ouédraogo, IPS)

Dear US government, Let’s start practicing the transparency we preach

[Photo credit: Neil Brander/Oxfam America]

Meet Akyema Adausina: he’s 55 and lives in Ghana. In this photo, he’s discussing compensation for farmers to be displaced by a goldmine in Ghana. Citizens like Akyema have to demand transparency from their governments. But the US also has a role to play in letting Akayema and his government know how and where we are giving aid in their country.

In a report released this week, Oxfam America calls for the US to give countries transparent and predictable information about our aid. As part of Oxfam’s Ownership in Practice series, we went to 6 countries and interviewed 200 people from civil society, government, US aid agencies, and NGOs.

What they told us is that even the recipient governments don’t know what programs the US is funding, so it’s tough for any of them to plan for the future. In Ethiopia, for instance, USAID distributed 20 million malaria bednets that will need replacing in 3 years. The group that distributed the nets, and the families that received them, have no idea whether they can expect a new bednet when the old one no longer works.

Based on what people in the 6 countries told us they needed to know, we went back and investigated which parts were available to the public. We found out that information about who is implementing the program, what activities they’re conducting, and the province where they’re working is simply not available for most US foreign assistance.

The report concludes by calling for the US government to practice what it preaches, and share information about aid with recipients. Giving countries this information will help a minister of finance prepare for global economic swings, a parliament keep the president in check, and a citizen group hold its government accountable for building schools and keeping people healthy. And that’s information that everyone will want to shout from the rooftops.

Check out the full report: Information: Let countries know what donors are doing.

AidData goes live

Mar 24th, 2010 4:47 PM UTC
By Joe Powell

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The AidData website went live yesterday, opening up a huge new amount of information on aid flows, individual projects and multilateral spending. The project organisers estimate that they have published improved data on one third of aid money. The aim is to improve transparency and thus help in the fight against corruption and misuse of aid money.

Kawusu Kebbay from the Sierra Leone Government highlighted at the Oxford launch on Monday that: “Corruption is primarily driven by the lack of information on aid data and weak capacity”. By going into considerably more depth on how money is spent AidData looks to give local civil society the tools to hold officials to account.

Michael Tierney, director of the programme, told the UN’ s humanitarian news service how he thought the website would be used:

What we hope is that once the information is made public others will use it and develop applications for it that we haven’t thought of yet. We want a continual feedback loop: if the database says a donor funded a bridge in Nicaragua and someone sends in a picture of a half-built bridge in Nicaragua, we need to connect those dots.

Another area in which AidData helps to improve the overall picture is by providing substantial new information on the so-called ‘emerging donors’. These include countries in the Middle East and the BRICs.

The database comes from six years of hard work by teams based at the College of William and Mary, Brigham Young University and Development Gateway. Much of the data they have made available is a result of painstakingly trawling through donor documents and existing databases. They have also conducted hundreds of face-to-face meetings with aid agencies to try and extract as much new information as possible.

The next step for the AidData team is to convince donors to provide all their data in an easily accessible format to make transparency efforts easier and improve aid effectiveness as a result. ONE will be pushing for the implementation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative to achieve just that.

Obama Calls For White House Review of Global Development

President Obama signed a Presidential Study Directive (PSD) on Monday calling for a government-wide review of U.S. global development policy. According to White House staff, the president has asked National Security Adviser Jim Jones and National Economic Council Chairman Larry Summers to lead the review. The review will include all U.S. government agencies involved in global development as well as Congress and constituents. Findings and recommendations from the review will be provided to the president in January. All of this is welcome news to many in the development community who have been tracking the growing momentum in Congress and the executive branch to strengthen U.S. global development efforts. And the directive signals that the White House is seriously thinking about how the U.S. engages with poor countries and promotes global development, including but not limited to stronger and smarter foreign aid.

While we wait to read the full details of the latest Presidential Study Directive (PSD) on global development (it’s not yet publicly available), we know that PSDs initiate reviews of policy procedures generally pertaining to national security and President Obama’s first PSD, Organizing for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, might serve as a good guide for what we can hope to see in the global development PSD. I’d like to see the global development PSD keep similar language calling for:

1. A full, interagency review of how to reform the White House organization to create an integrated, effective and efficient approach, in this case to strengthen U.S. and global prosperity and security;
2. Full participation from all the U.S. government agencies involved in global development (from State, to USAID, MCC, Treasury, Defense, Centers for Disease Control, Department of Agriculture, and many more) and a commitment to consult important stakeholders in Congress and among outside experts during the course of the review; and
3. Consideration of the recommendations from numerous bipartisan and expert studies on the issues (from the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network’s New Day New Way; the Center for Global Development’s White House and the World: An Global Development Agenda for the Next President; the Brookings/CSIS’s Security by Other Means report; and many others).

Unlike the first PSD on counterterrorism, I hope that the global development PSD will include the USAID administrator among the addressees (even better if we soon have a new USAID administrator appointee—those growing impatient are casting their votes for the next administrator here!). I also hope to see some language encouraging the review to address the full range of U.S. policies—from foreign aid, to trade, climate change, migration and more—that affect how the U.S. engages the rest of the world, including developing countries. I’m also eager to learn how the White House will engage the multilateral development institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the review and potentially other development donors from the UK, Germany, France, Japan, and elsewhere.

The White House call for a presidential study directive on global development comes on the heels of announcements from both the executive and legislative branches aimed at strengthening U.S. global development efforts including:

1. The Department of State has said it will undertake a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR);
2. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) introduced the Initiating Foreign Assistance Reform Act (H.R.2139) that calls on the administration to develop a national strategy for global development and now has 100 Republican and Democratic co-sponsors;
3. Senate Relations Committee members Kerry (D-MA), Lugar (R-IN), Menendez (D-NJ), Corker (R-TN), Cardin (D-MD) and Risch (R-ID) introduced the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act of 2009 (S.1524) that calls for strengthening the U.S. Agency for International Development and monitoring and evaluation of aid programs; and
4. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Berman and his staff have begun the process of rewriting the outdated 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.

Together, these are welcome signals that the executive branch and Congress are committed to strengthening U.S. global development. The trick, as Sheila Herrling at the Center for Global Development points out, is going to be figuring out how to put them all together so that you end up with a smart, coordinated U.S. strategy for confronting poverty, inequality, conflict and disease that threaten prosperity and security globally and at home.

-Sarah Jane Staats

On Modernizing Development

“The issues that we face today- from chronic poverty and hunger to violent acts of terrorism- require that we work seamlessly toward identifiable goals.” Senator Richard Lugar opened with a strong statement on the importance of aid reform yesterday at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that I attended called The Case for Reform: Foreign Aid and Development in a New Era. Witnesses at the hearing included Peter McPherson, President of Public and Land Grant Universities and former administrator of USAID, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Rev. David Beckmann, President of ONE partner organization, Bread for the World and Co-Chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.

The hearing highlighted a bill written by Senators Kerry, Corker, Menendez and Lugar that seeks to strengthen USAID and thereby strengthen the effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance. The bill has three main facets:

• To strengthen the monitoring and evaluation program of USAID by creating an “internal evaluation and knowledge center” and reinforce the partnership between USAID and the State Department to make sound decisions relating to development.
• To coordinate all U.S. agencies that have a role in foreign assistance by promoting information sharing and appointing a Mission Director at USAID to coordinate all development and humanitarian assistance within all countries where the U.S. works.
• To create a high-level task force at USAID and increase training within USAID and other U.S. development programs to alleviate the disorganization that has arisen with increased funding and decreased staffing at USAID.

McPherson, Sachs and Beckmann spoke very highly of this bill and were in agreement with the idea that the U.S. must increase their capacity in foreign assistance through higher level leadership and monitoring and evaluation. If these steps are taken, USAID will become an effective long-term development agency rather than the short-term disaster relief organization, which it has evolved to in recent years according to Senator Kerry.

Jeffrey Sachs had many strong words of advice to the United States development community. He stated that the framework of development assistance should focus on agriculture, healthcare, education, infrastructure, small business development and climate change, emphasizing that progress on these issues will promote resources which would in turn reestablish law and order in countries like Kenya where it is lacking.

Rev. Beckmann mentioned that the American people value aid reform and increased resources to developing countries, even in hard economic times. He praised ONE along with other NGOs for reaching out to members to voice these opinions and encourage their representatives to support initiatives such as the Water for the World Act and the Global Food Security Act.

- Leah Moriarty

Aid Debate Recap

On Monday, we noted that the Munk debates program would feature a discussion about foreign aid and we encouraged those who watched to post their thoughts and reactions. ONE’s Policy Advisory Board member Paul Collier, along with Stephen Lewis, Dambisa Moyo, and Hernando de Soto talked for almost two hours about the opportunities and challenges of foreign aid. The purpose of the Munk debates is to “enliven and elevate public discussion of the political, social, and cultural issues shaping the course of the world’s events and Canada’s future.” This goal was certainly accomplished – the debate participants engaged in a lively discussion about their thoughts on how and why foreign aid has affected Africa and what are the best ways to reduce reliance on donors to finance programs. Exchanges like this are helpful to educate people about foreign aid and the array of perspectives about it.

While there was disagreement between the two ‘sides’, represented by Moyo and de Soto, arguing that aid does more harm than good, and Lewis and Collier, arguing the opposing view, there was common ground. The debate participants agreed that African countries cannot continue to rely on foreign aid to the extent they are now, that strong leadership and good governance are critical to transitioning from aid dependence, and that aid has had mixed results over the past 60 years. There was also agreement on the importance of the private sector in economic growth, through investment and job creation.

The audience voted before and after the debate on whether foreign aid does more harm than good. The outcome? The majority of people do not believe that aid does more harm than good. This means that both before and after the debate, the majority of the audience believes that aid does more good than harm. Before the debate, 61% of the audience voted ‘against’ the principle that aid does more harm than good, compared to 59% of the audience who voted after the debate. The opposing side, who believe aid does more harm than good, had 39% of the votes before the debate and 41% afterwards.

What do you think? Watch the webcast and let us know.

-Lisa Fleisher

Donors suspend funding to Zambia in response to corruption reports

The Swedish and Dutch governments announced today that they will suspend $33 million in aid to Zambia following reports about embezzlement in the Ministry of Health. Reports indicate the civil society was calling for the Ministry of Health to publish expenditures, but former President Mwanawasa cancelled the spending reports, which may have led some officials to siphon funds for their own use. In response to concerns that the lack of funding will affect the delivery of health services, the Minister of Finance Musokotwane stated that the Zambian government will develop a plan to fill the gap and investigate the corruption charges.

The transparent publication of spending by donors and governments is a critical component of ensuring money for development is used as effectively as possible. Like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, the Swedish and Dutch governments’ response to reports of embezzlement in the health sector suggests their support for the idea that well-governed programs are critical to successful development and that aid can help to encourage transparency and accountability.

-Lisa Fleisher