Like most behaviour sets it can be changed with systemic shifts and feedbacks mechanisms. Not saying it is easy, but definitely part of the answer. I still wish projects could compete on audited ends basis vs means. ROI of some sort tied into human development index etc. which is of course tough to do.

A lot of the aid business is a market not for the poor but for the donors. Thinking one is doing good allows a person to feel good, that is a service business for the donor which delivers a hedonic lift. The recipients end of the deal if unmeasured is unknown, but the donor is winning as they keep coming back and feeling great.

How does this square with this blogs suggestion last week “that governments should be accountable to their people not to Aid agencies?”

I think Andrew Mwenda’s point is that once a government becomes dependent on aid (rather than taxation or domestic production) for a large percentage of their revenue, this creates an environment in which countries can only be held accountable to aid agencies: there is no longer any direct mechanism that holds them accountable to their own people. In the case of Takjikistan, it seems reasonable that aid agencies should expect the government to spend aid money as it agreed to when the money was granted or loaned. Further, I would argue that aid agencies have the responsibility to enforce these agreements once they are entered into, rather than allowing the money to be wasted or stolen when there is strong evidence that this might be happening.

Best,

Laura

the monitoring and audit systems in World Bank-funded projects are carefully designed to ensure that the funds reach those whom they were intended for.

And Santa is a real person.

Hellloooooo? Some days it is hard to cope with the make-believe going around in the mega-aid world.

p.

I hear what you’re saying, and I do agree that aid project efforts can leave governments free to use their money on unsavory, corrupt, or just dumb, things. However, I would posit that a government that will do that with its funds will do so regardless of whether aid projects are taking place in country. The recent introduction of pizza to North Korea would be an example.

My original point, which we agree on, was that projectized aid generally does reach its intended recipients.

Thanks for pulling me up on this one. Can I ask what you would say the differences are between the two, and the different effects that they have?

As I understand it, aid agencies run projects rather than giving budget support either when there is a particular expertise that they have that they want to share, or because they don’t trust the government to use budget support properly. This really amounts to the same thing: they both pay for something that the government would otherwise not have been able to do, though I concede that money is less likely to go missing in a donor project.

I think a more useful distinction lies between aid that goes through governments and aid that doesn’t. Aid projects run at the behest of a government have the same result as with budget support, ie, they only work where there is a real demand for the money and / or expertise.

I didn’t mean to say that aid projects don’t ever work, because they sometimes do. The issue I was trying to address was what are the conditions under which they do or don’t work.

I think it’s useful here to remember the distinction between budget support and projectized aid.

Alanna

(full disclosure: I live in Tajikistan and I am consulting for a donor-funded project)

Where corruption is present as reported above, it suggests that (1) the government of Tajikistan has no real demand for aid projetcs paid for by donors and, (2) the donors have decided to run projects despite knowing that there is no real demand.

In this case surely the best way to safe-guard aid funds is to redirect them to a country or government that actually wants them?

So does anyone know who else accounts for the rest of that $300M in 2006?

How about other examples out there? Tajikistan can’t be the only case.