By William Easterly
During last Friday’s conference, participants and speakers leveled a variety of criticisms at aid agencies for lacking accountability and transparency, but also suggested new ideas and expressed hope for a new way forward. Here are some highlights; check back soon for more details and some video footage. Click here for the full conference agenda.
Yaw Nyarko (NYU):
“No nation has ever developed because of aid and outside advice.”
Esther Duflo (MIT):
“Field experiments have a subversive power.” Find her presentation here.
William Easterly (NYU):
The institutions of a free society make it possible to answer “what would the people say?” Can we imitate this in aid to know “What would the poor say?” Full presentation here.
Laura Freschi (DRI) on Aid Watch:
“We want to act as ONE OF MANY catalysts in the open marketplace of ideas about aid evaluation: inspiring connections, and helping to convert good ideas into opportunities.” Find the text of the Aid Watch launch announcement here.
Andrew Mwenda (the Independent):
“Aid money makes African governments accountable to the aid agencies rather than to their own people.”
The power of accountability for African governments is shown by some examples when political elites faced a threat to their very existence, like in Rwanda after the genocide or Uganda after Musevni’s takeover in 1986, when both governments instituted pro-development policies.
Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development):
Cash on delivery aid “traps the donors so they are forced to have poor country governments accountable to them and accountable to their own people.” Find her presentation here.
June Arunga (BSL Ghana Ltd.):
“Aid money is diverting African skilled professionals away from private enterprise to writing proposals for NGOs.”
When June pitched her idea of using cell phones to facilitate financial transactions to Western investors, one well-known philanthropist expressed disbelief that poor Africans (whom she had seen mainly in pictures begging and starving) had cell phones: “Who do they call?” she asked.
Dennis Whittle (GlobalGiving):
“Put up a billboard in each community saying what aid money is supposed to be going towards.” Click here for his presentation.
Lant Pritchett (Harvard University):
“Is this information you are gathering from us just to help you write your report or can you really be helpful to us?” – a woman in South Sudan.
Evaluation can help make politically successful development movements into effective ones. Find his presentation here.
Ross Levine (Brown University):
“Aid agencies are insufficiently evaluated on advice…financial survival depends on distributing money.” The right advice often violates the imperative: “Don’t interfere with lending!” Click here for more.
Leonard Wantchekon (NYU):
“We African professionals want to be the ones advising our own governments rather than foreign aid professionals!” Find his presentation here.
Karin Christiansen (Publish What You Fund):
“In Afghanistan, the government does not know how one-third of all aid since 2001 – some $5bn – has been spent…Liberian civil society organizations couldn’t get basic information [which foreigners could.]” Find her presentation here.
William Duggan (Columbia School of Business):
“I wasted 20 years of my life on aid efforts, but now I see some hope for change.” Click here for his short paper (co-authored with Lynn Ellsworth) on “Evaluation, the Poor, and Foriegn Aid.”
10 Comments
Thanks for posting the presentations – I found the event very worthwhile, and its useful to have these reminders to hand.
If anyone is interested, I have posted some reflections on your own talk – from a global administrative law perspective – at http://globaladminlaw.blogspot.com/2009/02/easterly-on-what-poor-would-say.html.
There was one thoughts I wanted to voice after William Easterly’s talk.
While Easterly was correct in identifying that most successful public and private systems have mechanisms for accountability, I think he was mistaken to focus only on the “Threat to Existence” mechanisms. While it is true this is common to all, they all share mechanisms to reward success.
One can argue that if you put institutions under “treats to existence” mechanisms of accountability, reward mechanisms will emerge endogenously, but in generally I think it is important to stress both sides of this equation when pushing for reform. I think if one only talks about punishing bad aid workers, you run the risk of making workers resentful. In the same way teacher union is most effective when on stresses rewarding good teachers as much as punishing bad ones, I think people in the industry will be more welcoming of reforms that offer both sticks and carrots.
I thought the conference was great, and that what Easterly and all these presenters, but especially Arunga, Mwenda, and Duflo, are doing is heroic. Organizations that provide ODA are, strictly speaking, neither public nor private organizations, and so lack the mechanisms that make such organizations successful. (In the public sphere this is democracy, in the private, feedback through consumer choice.)
Many thanks for putting this up, and looking forward to seeing more.
Thank you for posting the conference paper links! I was not able to attend. I was wondering if June Arunga had a paper or presentation that can be linked to?
Thanks
Hi Jess:
There is no paper or presentation for June’s speech, but we are planning to post some selected video of the conference, so please check back with us.
Laura Freschi
Development Research Institute
Article from World Magazine on the conference:
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15015
I was at the conference, and found it extremely informative and useful for understanding the state of the evaluation field. However, I left with one pressing question that I felt was not addressed. That is, what is the role of U.S. aid policy in responding to these criticisms? Do you feel that U.S. (specifically USAID) can become more responsive to the poor, by, for example, focusing more on private sector and small
enterprise development? Or, is the very presence of U.S. money counter to these principles? The Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) was established with the goal of focusing on evaluation of programs and country ownership of programs. These are good principles, but they have run into their own problems. Some of the panelists (specifically Andrew Mwenda) seemed to imply that foreign aid will never help developing countries. Can we imagine a US foreign aid policy that encourages governments to be accountable to their citizens, while helping to aid growth? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
I was at the conference, and found it extremely informative and useful for understanding the state of the evaluation field. However, I left with one pressing question that I felt was not addressed. That is, what is the role of U.S. aid policy in responding to these criticisms? Do you feel that U.S. (specifically USAID) can become more responsive to the poor, by, for example, focusing more on private sector and small
enterprise development? Or, is the very presence of U.S. money counter to these principles? The Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) was established with the goal of focusing on evaluation of programs and country ownership of programs. These are good principles, but they have run into their own problems. Some of the panelists (specifically Andrew Mwenda) seemed to imply that foreign aid will never help developing countries. Can we imagine a US foreign aid policy that encourages governments to be accountable to their citizens, while helping to aid growth? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
I would hate to appear to be against transparency and accountability, but I think the call for more of these misses the point. You can’t hold people accountable for using aid to help the poor if that is not the primary objective. (Bill, you used to claim it was to achieve economic growth. Glad to see you are evolving with the poor-focused times.) Most aid happens in the context of a culture of diplomacy. The ostensible objectives of such aid are numerous but the primordial ones are to make the host country happy and move the money. Diplomats are international PR agents. The desired spin is more important than the evidence of effectiveness. You want to see accountability? Try being a USAID contractor and publicly complain about how the host government is squandering the aid or misusing it. You will have your contract quickly cancelled and probably be declared persona non grata in short order.
Unfortunately, multilateral aid doesn’t offer a much better model. There aid is stuck in the model of government ownership. If the host gov’t wants to use its aid badly, that is their right and no one from the UN or WB will tell them they can’t.
NGO aid might offer another alternative but the principle objective with most of that aid is satisfying the donor’s need for compassion. Relieve basic human needs, feel better and don’t worry about the evidence of larger impact including prolonged dependence.
The other problem is that the culture of corruption and feeding at the aid trough has created a norm for many people (poor and otherwise) in heavily aided countries. Even when transparency or luck bring misuse of aid to light, there is more outrage from foreigners than from the local poor. The local poor have grown accustomed to misuse of aid and take it for granted. This is where the reverse causality caveat is appropriate. Some kind of education or reeducation around values is needed before transparency will lead to people holding their leaders accountable. Even where there has been major transition in government in Africa, the political discourse has not been around using aid more effectively. It has typically been around giving my party (or ethnic group) its turn to feed at the aid trough (Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria).
Like many other important things, transparency and accountability are not magic bullets. Necessary but not sufficient to make aid more effective.
Bill,
So many familiar faces in this report! And it’s a pleasure to re-engage with you, Bill, in this new, higher-tech format for education. Congratulations and thanks for managing this forum on development aid, which really does need to be “watched.” Since I left the World Bank in 1999, my company, WILMA Inc., has been hammering out a private sector approach to the task that Jim Wolfensohn called the Comprehensive Development Framework. Ours is a business model that avoids the pitfalls of foreign aid and that builds the autonomy of the beneficiaries, as you and David Ellerman among others have urged through your books. We call it the WILMA Business Ecosystem for Africa, which is described in a document linked to our website, http://www.wilma.us . I think that your blog would be a good channel for discussion of the ideas in this document, and I would welcome your advice on the best way to organize this discussion.
Paul