Yes, Cash is Best. Now when will USAID follow its own advice?

When? Never.

Because . . .

Farmers and shippers will never allow their lobbyists to let legislation untying aid pass through Congress

And because . . .

Senators and Representatives don’t care about good governance or effective public policy so much as they do about getting re-elected.

It’s human nature. There’s no incentive to change. And they justify themselves that they’re already giving something, which is true, and that there other problems here in the U.S. which are more of a concern to them and their constitutents, which is also true.

Finally, it seems the aid train never stops . . . how much money have we dumped into Africa, again? (Not picking on Africa, it’s just an easy example . . . could be a lot of other places).

I can see untying aid for disasters or emergencies to get supplies there quickly, but for long-term problems, like continuous food, health and other interventions that last years cases, I don’t see a huge issue with tying aid. Doing so might make aid more politically palatable and easier to keep aid flows going, whereas untying it might make people question more why we’re giving out so much aid and therefore seek to cut it off. I don’t know the answer. Has someone done a RCT or other evaluation on it?

I’m afraid I agree with RJS. USAID wont follow its own advice because Congress won’t let it. And the same misguided people who are sending their old shoes and sending missionaries to cut corners on adoptions are also voting for congresspeople who are equally misguided about “saving” poor people while simultaneously supporting US shippers and farmers.

So, is this all part of super subtle and crafty plan by USAID to change US public attitude and thus eventually provide enough public support to counteract vested interests and lobbyists and so enable the untying of US aid?

What you say in this post is true, of course, and I could regale you with horror stories of inappropriate aid which I have received over the years, and the subsequent waste of resources.

Used clothing is a good example – fur coats and ball gowns for Sudanese IDPs, and trousers designed for the average US citizen of, let’s delicately say, “fuller figure”, into which two southern Sudanese can fit comfortably, but which only come to their knees as they are 2 metres tall. Whenever we were given cash instead of secondhand clothing we used the money to finance local tailors, often IDP or refugee women, to make clothes which were the right size and type.

One of the worst donations I ever received was a shipping container full of used hotel soap – those small pieces that you find in your room. How can you give people used soap?

To add insult to injury these shipments often arrive with freight paid only up to the port, say Mombasa. We then have to find the funds from elsewhere to pay customs duty, demurrage, transport and storage as well as the actual distribution, often for commodities that we don’t really need, with the frustration that the money could have been much better spent.

We also receive donations of new stuff which in itself is OK, but which doesn’t fit the situation. For example, we received Italian generators and pumps, but in Sudan the older equipment is British while the newer stuff is from China, Japan and India. It’s fine until it breaks down, but then there are no spare parts for Italian stuff and no mechanics who know how to service and repair it. A number of Bristish NGOs were forced by their donors to use Land Rovers, but the Toyota Land Cruiser is the only car that survives in southern Sudan so everywhere you went there were new Land Rovers standing on wooden blocks waiting to be repaired.

Sometimes we’d get food aid of a type which people don’t know how to prepare or eat. I remember shipments of tinned fish where people scooped out the fish and threw it away but kept the tins, which were very useful.

Another problem which we found in northern Sudan during the 1984 famine was that donors would send us containers full of useful stuff but would try to be helpful by filling any remaining spaces with teddy bears or chocolate or whatever. Unfortunately these last-minute gifts did not appear on the shipping manifest so the whole container would be impounded by customs authorities pending a very slow and bureaucratic investigation into the discrepancies in the paperwork. By the time a shipping container has stood in the 50C temperature (well over 100 Fahrenheit, for your US readers) for a few weeks whatever is in it stands a good chance of being spoiled, especially if it is medicines or foodstuffs.

In discussing food aid, I think the blog post could make more of the fact that food aid does not come from a desire to help the poor. Food aid stems from the subsidised agriculture policies of Europe, the USA and a number of other rich countries. This produces a surplus which has to be disposed of. It can’t be sold openly, otherwise it would undercut the markets, cause a drop in prices and therefore defeat the object of the subsidies in the first place, namely to provide a stable income to farmers in the rich countries. Therefore it has to be given away.

During the 1998 famine in Sudan, in which I was directly involved in food aid, we could buy food in Uganda. It was cheap, transport to Sudan was cheap, it was fresh, it was the type of food which people were familiar with and knew how to prepare, it could be sourced and transported quickly, and it benefited the economy of another poor nation, Uganda. So many benefits. Yet so much food aid had to come all the way from north America. At one point I turned down USD 100,000 worth of food aid from Canada because of all these reasons. As the article mentions, Canada is more flexible and eventually I was able to get the cash from them instead. That cash bought far more food (including transport from Uganda to Sudan) than if I had received the original food shipment transported all the way from Canada. The article alludes to this when it says that only 40% of the money actually goes to buying food.