I am so grateful and humbled that my message on the accountability of aid has finally reached this extremely high profile — wait, I just realized, there is NO audience, it’s the holidays.
For those of you who didn’t have enough heavily spiked eggnog to listen to the whole 46 minute version, here is the New York Times’ 6-minute excerpt of the conversation, emphasizing microcredit, evaluation, overhead costs, and the limits of generic “answers.”
The audience gave us rave reviews (both of you) :
There is a superb Bloggingheads debate between Peter Singer (author of The Life You Can Save) and Bill Easterly (author of
I Hate Puppies and ChristmasThe White Man’s Burden). (Chris Blattman, what a card)Peter Singer and Bill Easterly on Bloggingheads.TV (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution, ”assorted link”. OK this is not really a review but at least we made it into one of the hundreds of links Tyler chooses.)
I sense a juggernaut slowly (VERY slowly) building up toward that day when we demand results of our NGOs, of our official aid agencies, of our favorite celebrities, until we will all be able to join hands and say “Accountable at Last! Accountable at Last! Accountable at Last!”
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I have a request for your consideration. In the name of understanding endogenous development solutions, would it be possible spend some e-ink covering the positive deviants of the developing world? In the recent past, what are some of the best examples of communities finding their own ways to increase their wage potential, improve their education, health, and general quality of life?
Martin Luther King said ‘free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty we are free at last!’ as the conclusion of his ‘I have a dream’ speech in Washington in 1963.
http://race.eserver.org/free-at-last.txt
William Easterly echoes Martin Luther King Jr with his call for accountability in efforts to address world poverty.
Good on you Bill!
I really enjoyed your discussion with Singer. A day later, I received the new decade’s first Foreign Affairs in the mail. The opening article, ‘A Few Dollars at a Time’ by former French Foreign Minister, is a disappointing piece that is highly relevant to the bloggerheads discussion. Former French FM brags about UNITAID – a new partnership that claims to revolutionize giving by tapping into mundane customer purchases, such as buying plane tickets. According to this genius (!) plan, people who buy plane tickets in participating countries will donate 2 dollars, euros, pounds toward the eradication of HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB in developing nations. However, because the US plane ticket wholesalers refused charge a mandatory fee, consumers here will have the option to opt out of donating a few bucks. At the end of the article, the author enumerates a few obligatory down-sides to an otherwise brilliant (!) plan: that voluntary contributions can crowd out government funding and that small scale nonprofits that rely on government financing may falter.
I see the most disappointing shortfall of the article (other than parading the consumer donation as a novel idea – hello, my local grocery store asks me to donate a dollar to various causes every time I shop there!) as the author’s lack of interest in who will manage the incoming funds to ensure their proper allocation. I have not yet done much research on UNITAID, but prematurely judging from the article, I am afraid that it is another half-baked development idea whose implications have not yet been fully worked out…
[I won't even mention the fact that throwing money at pharmaceutical companies to combat HIV/AIDS-TB-Malaria will make everything peachy given the cultural complexities that can exacerbate the perpetuation and spread of the triple-threat.]
I loved the discussion. I still think not enough was said about accountability. Who should keep NGO’s accountable? The people they help? or their donors? Its not as settled a question as people think?
Besides NGO’s are a product of a gap in accountability. I don’t know too many Free the Children like organizations building half baked schools for children in the Sweden. The UN does not hold whole symposiums on China’s economy. Government should do this stuff. We should never lose sight of that. Keeping govts accountable is secondary to keeping NGO’s accountable.
By the way, I have a huge problem with Singer’s thesis. This is my problem with Singer’s thesis. He claims if you see child drowning you would save it. Well I would, if I knew how to swim….
If I don’t I would drown the child and myself.
There is no more apt description for what is happening in Africa atm.
Half the money going to Africa does not know what it is doing there.
Effectiveness? You have to give top marks to a local administrator who is totally committed to the project and has the right skills for the job in hand.
I avoid the big bureaus and look to individual projects with good track records….
Gemma Sisia at School of St Jude, Arusha, Tanzania, and Catherine Hamlin of the Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa are two people who could put a few million dollars to good use.
Two Australian women… how novel.
Peter and Bill discussed the impetus to give and the need to ensure the gift is effective. With these two projects, the effectiveness is taken care of… so you only have to decide how much to give. And that is up to your own ethics, conscience and preferences.
Bill, your comment that microfinance leads to an increase in loan shark lending is supported by http://www.roubini.com/globalmacro-monitor/258164/half-truths__lies_and_poverty “the high repayment rate is facilitated by their increased borrowing from local money lenders at exorbitantly high interest rates.”
Improved access to credit for firms who have the cash flow to repay the debt is a much better way to promote growth and reduce poverty than microfinance. It is a shame the socialist planner bias of the aid community insists on promoting methods that are bound to fail, just because they create a warm inner glow for donors.
On a somewhat related matter, the latest New York Review of Books has a fantastic article on corruption in Kenya: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=23552
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