Rhetoric on “aid effectiveness” keeps escalating, is there anything to show for it?

The past (almost) two years, Bill and I have been collecting data, combing through that data, and refining the numbers to ‘grade’ aid agencies and assess overall trends in aid practices. We waited until our paper passed peer review to release our findings. Rhetoric versus Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practices has now been accepted for publication in a special issue of World Development. [1]

Our work updated Easterly and Pfutze’s 2008 study, Where Does the Money Go: Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid, on five dimensions of agency ‘best practices’: aid transparency, minimal overhead costs, aid specialization, delivery to more effective channels, and selectivity of recipient countries based on poverty and good government.  Based on these measures, we calculate an overall agency score using original data and 2008 OECD data. These scores only reflect the above practices; they are NOT a measure of whether the agency’s aid is effective at achieving good results.

There is slight improvement in transparency and more donors are moving away from ineffective channels. But transparency is still at unacceptably low levels. For example, two agencies (MOFA Japan and France’s DgCiD) fail to report any aid data at all.

The most conspicuous failures in both trends and levels are in specialization and selectivity. Luxembourg is as unspecialized as the US with a 70^th of the aid flow. Many such unspecialized small donors likely have most of their aid eaten up by fixed costs before the funds reach any beneficiaries. At the same time, allocation to corrupt countries is increasing, not decreasing. Aid to corrupt autocrats is not explained by emphasis on the least developed countries; donors such as the US, Sweden, and Norway do poorly on both income selectivity and autocracy/corruption selectivity.

The best bilateral agency is UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

DFID is one of ten agencies that fully reports aid flows to OECD, and it lists number of staff, administrative costs, salaries and benefits and its ODA budget on its website. DFID also has relatively low administrative costs and salaries and benefits relative to aid disbursements (2.6% and 1.6% respectively). DFID relies on more effective channels of aid disbursements, not tying any of its aid and dispersing relatively little food aid (1.3%) (pages 53-54).

Japan, New Zealand, and Germany also do well, rounding out the top five best agencies.  The United States ranks below average mainly because of poor performance on selectivity and choosing to allocate aid through ineffective channels. As we write in the paper, “the foreign policy needs of the US superpower and the lobbies for particular aid channels seem to dominate the politics of American aid” (page 54).

Another theme that emerged is that the Scandinavian countries’ reputation of altruism based on aid volume does NOT translate to good practices; they have below average scores on specialization and transparency and are mediocre in the overall ranking.

Lastly, the UN agencies on average are worse than the other multilateral agencies and the bilateral agencies, and the differences are statistically significant. Above all, they are worse on overhead and transparency. On overhead, they have an average ratio of 46 percent of administrative costs to ODA. UNDP reports no data on its operating costs or ODA, now even worse than its minimal reporting in 2008.

The two goals of the paper were to test if: 1) donors’ rhetoric matches reality; and 2) they are making any improvements in doing so. Our answer is no on both accounts.

Postscript: Fortunately, we are now part of a larger community running independent checks on aid. For other recent aid quality exercises, see Birdsall and Kharas, 2010; Knack, Rogers and Eubank, 2010; and Ghosh and Kharas, 2011.

FOOTNOTES
1. The dataset for the paper can be downloaded here↑

It remains to be seen whether Greg Mortenson, author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” will be able to avert a total reputation meltdown. But last Sunday’s 60 Minutes broadcast and a thorough exposé by Jon Krakauer provide convincing evidence for some serious allegations:

• That some of the most important, inspiring stories in Mortenson’s nonfiction books—stories that provide the foundation for his whole mission—fall somewhere on the spectrum between greatly exaggerated and completely invented.
• That Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute (CAI) lacks sufficient transparency and oversight.
• That some not insignificant number of schools Mortenson claims to have built in Afghanistan and Pakistan either aren’t being supported by CAI, aren’t being used as schools, or don’t exist at all.

Mortenson refuted the allegations in a letter to his supporters, saying that the story “paints  a distorted picture using inaccurate information, innuendo and a microscopic focus on one  year’s (2009) IRS 990 financial, and a few  points  in  the  book ‘Three  Cups  of  Tea’ that occurred almost 18 years ago.” But the rebuttals he’s provided so far do little to counter the weight of evidence against him.

What surprises me most about the story is not that yet another development demigod turned out to be a human.

What surprises me most is the way Mortenson’s charity—embraced by the US military and admired by President Obama, Oprah and literally millions of Americans—has  managed to avoid scrutiny of its spending priorities for so long. While the charity claims to spend 85 percent on “program activities,” less than half of that is spent where you might think it would go—to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The majority ($4.6 million in 2008) is actually spent on “education and outreach” in the US.

Of the money that does go abroad ($3.9 million in 2008), most goes to building the schools themselves: supplies, materials, labor and transportation ($3 million), rather than to teacher salaries and school supplies ($800,000) or scholarships for students ($40,000).

This allocation of resources might go some way towards explaining why, when 60 Minutes visited 30 of Mortensen’s schools, it said it found major problems with half of them, including new schools that were struggling without any financial support from CAI, and schools with no teachers and no kids. Time Magazine observed:

…Be it a charter school in Queens or an elementary school in Sarhad Broghil (where I first saw a Mortenson school), a school is just a building if it doesn’t have teachers.

In Mortenson’s second book, the construction of a school for Kyrgyz nomads in a remote corner of the Pamir mountains was featured as a major, triumphant success. But according to Krakauer’s account, that school has never been used. The community would have preferred a road or a health clinic to a school, and in any case it’s too far from where the nomadic community camps during the seasons when it’s warm enough for the children to attend school.

The Central Asia Institute’s 2009 IRS filing provides a list of 141 schools that it says are helping tens of thousands of students get a better education and avoid of a future of poverty and terrorism. But with only one audited financial statement in 14 years, and no attempt at any evaluation of CAI’s work, Mortenson is basically asking us to take his word for it. Because of a charismatic leader with a great story, and Americans’ eagerness to believe something good can happen where we’ve waged war in Afghanistan and Pakistan—millions of his supporters did.

But after the disclosures of this week, Mortenson’s word probably won’t be enough.

In an email to Aid Watch, World Vision disclosed that total transport and administrative cost per T-shirt was 58 cents, which is uncomfortably high relative to low market values (a quick spot check  produces estimates ranging from 20 cents to $1.20 for a T-shirt) in Africa’s saturated second-hand clothing markets.

Source: World Vision, March 2011

World Vision also sent us documents from two districts in central in Uganda* that received donated clothing, although NOT specifically the loser Super Bowl T-shirts that started this whole controversy. We learned that the donated clothing was used as part of World Vision’s health programs which aim to “improve access to better health services, safe water and sanitation.” Specifically, World Vision said:

Provision of clothing was done for women and children in extremely poor conditions to protect them from weather and to raise their self-esteem. Providing clothing also served to increase trust among the beneficiaries and encourage them to participate in other health services, including voluntary counseling and testing for HIV.

This led us to focus on the health and HIV/AIDS sections as we sifted through the documents for answers to two questions which arose in the debate.

First question we asked: Can World Vision show that they rigorously assess the need for gifts-in-kind in the communities where they work?

World Vision answered: Needs assessments are carried out by national offices, and the rigor of these assessments varies from office to office.

What the documents showed: World Vision sent us one program design document from the final phase of a 12-year, multi-sector program that ended in 2010, and one needs assessment from a neighboring region (WV couldn’t find the needs assessment for the 12-year project).

The needs assessment identified the most important problems faced by the community, and made recommendations how WV should deal with them. It did not discuss at any point the clothing needs of villagers, or how clothing donations might alleviate any of the problems mentioned in the 67-page report.

The program design documents, intended to “point out gaps that still exist in the community as expressed by the people,” made only one mention of gifts-in-kind. “Gifts in kind will be planned for on annual basis and this is meant to supplement the project fund in achieving project planned activities.”

The main report did not mention a need for clothing. However, I did learn that the region described is among those most heartbreakingly affected by HIV/AIDS, with high numbers of orphans and child-headed households, and after some digging I found an HIV/AIDS sub-report embedded within the main report that did mention clothing:

Most of these [orphaned children] lack care and support in terms of emotional coping, physical requirements like food, shelter, clothing, and limited access to basic social services like education and health.

Another embedded sub-report (actually a proposal for outside funding to support HIV/AIDS orphans in the area) was more specific:

Special needs will be identified for each of the selected families and the project will organize to procure and provide the essential needs for the children and guardians. These will include beddings, bicycles, clothing, cooking pans, washing basins and water tanks.

Our conclusion on the first question: No.

Second question we asked: Can WV point to any evidence that the 15-year distribution of Super Bowl T-shirts, or, more broadly, any distribution of clothing, has “facilitate[d] good, sustainable development”?

World Vision answered: No, “because the Superbowl clothing isn’t a program. It’s a donation. We evaluate the results of our programs…many of the programs where we use GIK have been enormously successful in facilitating good, sustainable development. Our evidence for that would be individual program evaluations from a variety of national offices.”

What the documents showed: WV sent us one annual report and program evaluations for each phase of the same 12-year project discussed above. After hours of reading, a picture emerged of a community decimated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and valiantly struggling to provide support for the large populations of vulnerable children made orphans or adopted into already over-stretched extended families.

An annual report from 2006 gave the only specific accounting of the type of gifts-in-kind distributed:

GIK was received and distributed to children and these included 115 pairs of canvas shoes, 50 pairs of baby shoes, 900 T- shirts, 225 Gin trousers, 500 pairs of socks, 125 dolls and 200 blankets. This benefited 1615 children in the community.

In a report from the first phase of the project, evaluators noted that some villagers were able to sell eggs from a poultry project to buy clothes (this shows that clothing is available for purchase in the community, and probably not at prohibitive prices for most people). Clothing was also mentioned as an obstacle to achieving the program’s “Christian Witness” objective: the poor don’t attend church because “they lack good cloth to put on and feel not worth attending.”

Regarding World Vision’s ability to show success in facilitating sustainable development through their programming in general, the 2006 evaluation said “tracking changes…attributable to World Vision support” is “quite difficult” because over the course of the 12-year project priorities and goals shifted, and because early baseline measurements don’t match up with later evaluations.

Nonetheless, the final report attributed many positive health outcomes to project activities. For example, reduced malaria incidence; improved sanitation practices; and reduced prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

We don’t see any basis for attribution of these outcomes to World Vision, since the program was not designed in such a way to make such attribution possible. The resources provided by World Vision—clinics built, medicines supplied, HIV awareness courses given—are characterized as improving health outcomes, but also as very thinly spread over a large area with acute health needs.

As to sustaining project gains as WV funding ends, WV reported that local organizations have been trained in skills like proposal writing, resource mobilization and networking so that they can take over WV services. Villagers in the final survey said they learned “vocational, business management, leaderships, improved farming, HIV/AIDS care, positive parenting, and sanitation management skills,” all of which would provide a “pillar to further development in this area.”

Our conclusion on the second question: While we appreciate WV’s transparency in sharing these documents with Aid Watch, we have to conclude that the answer is no. There is no real evidence in these hundreds of pages of reports that the clothing donations are more than a minor afterthought to World’s Vision’s health programming (although gifts-in-kind are a major source of World Vision’s revenue). Given the aforementioned costs required to ship donations from the US abroad there is no development-related reason to continue this outdated, dependency-creating practice.

*World Vision asked us not to publish the names of the regions, or any other identifying information about the projects.

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Related posts:

In Zambia, Pittsburgh won the Super Bowl: Why is World Vision perpetuating discredited T-shirt aid?

World Vision responds to blogger questions

Investors in the Kwality Kites Corporation gather to listen to the CEO’s ‘year in review’ presentation.

“In 2010,” begins the CEO, “we coordinated plans to deliver kites while supporting sustainable operations”

An investor raises her hand: “Can you tell us what you mean by ‘coordinated plans’ and ‘sustainable operations’ and what they have to do with the bottom line?”

“Of course” the CEO replies. “Here is a glossy picture of a smiling child flying one of our kites.”

“That is indeed a high quality photograph with a fine sheen” the investor responds, “but I am wondering how this relates to my investment.”

“In 2010,” the CEO continues, “we improved our understanding of our dynamic business environment, established and staffed various units, assisted in a professionalization program, and assessed our efforts.”

Another investor interjects, “What is the cost of these achievements? What is the value added? What was the outcome of these assessments?”

“These assessments” the CEO replies “are now being used to inform and guide our future efforts to address various issues.”

The investors protest almost in unison: “can you provide us with ANY specifics? We are all concerned about the profitability of the company.”

“Can you really measure the value of a child smiling?” replies the CEO.

–

I admit this is an absurd parody. That is, unless you’re the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), charged with implementing aid and other operations of the U.S. State Department in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. S/CRS recently released its “Conflict Prevention and Stabilization Operations: 2010 Year in Review” report.

From the S/CRS 2010 Report: "A boy flies a kite in the Kunar province of Afghanistan, where S/CRS plannerscoordinated U.S. efforts to deliver Afghan governance to the Afghan people."

The report provides no clear benchmarks for assessment let alone a basic discussion of the annual budget or expenditures. There is no discussion of why activities were chosen, how much was spent, or even the slightest effort to discuss the value added.

The report does provide a few actual numbers. We are told that the S/CRS oversees $442 million associated with “1207 programs” intended to respond to “destabilizing events,” In 2010, $90 million was approved for these projects. The ‘assessment’ concludes that “existing projects will take several years to complete” and that “previously funded programs continue to have an impact.” We learn that the Civilian Response Corps was deployed to 28 posts in 2010.

With no actual effort to assess the reported ‘highlights,’ we must rely on the pictures provided to distract the reader from the lack of content. This includes a half page picture of a young boy flying a kite in Afghanistan and numerous employee profiles including pictures with locals. Also included is a before and after picture of a dirt road which has since been paved. Still no discussion of cost or value added.

There is a major difference between my parody and the work of the S/CRS. If my story were true, the investors would lose their money. But ineffective efforts of the S/CRS will cost resources and human lives. If the S/CRS is unable to provide rudimentary reporting and transparency, how confident can we be that they can stabilize and reconstruct entire societies?  Answering this question is too important to be distracted by smiling children…even if they are flying kites.

A growing volume of critical writing on the Millennium Villages project (MVP) includes blog posts, journalistic pieces, scholarly works, and, recently, one partial social impact study. Nearly all point to project outcomes that could have been avoided had the project seriously engaged with the long history of field-based experiences in development.

Here, I will focus on just one example: Because the MVP did not critically evaluate the effect of its own assumptions about what works in development, a conflict between project goals and the needs of the villagers has emerged in at least one site.

The MVP is part of Millennium Promise, an effort to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  As a result, the MVP framed its interventions around the MDGs.  For example, in 2005 the MVP website described community participation in this MDG-centric manner:

An open dialogue [between MDG-trained teams and villagers] will cover topics such as local problems as related to the MDGs, constraints and opportunities for achieving the MDGs at their village level, initial discussions on possible solutions and approaches for achieving the MDGs, and general impressions/consensus on being included as a Millennium Villages Project site.

The project’s founders have stated that the MVP was built on the “core truth” that there are “known packages of effective and generally low-cost interventions” that can address poverty.  A review of the MVP described it as a pilot project seeking to “provide successful evidence of how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals”. The project’s focus on finding “successful evidence” for the efficacy of these packages of interventions suggests that the project has an interest in validating the importance of the problems identified in the MDGs and justifying the interventions of the MVP.

This creates a conflict of interest for the field staff of the MVP: What if the evidence does not show success? And what to do when the local community’s concerns do not align with either these solutions or the MDGs?

Those familiar with the history of development work know that such conflicts of interest are chronic. Take the classic by Robert Chambers:  Whose Reality Counts. He describes what happened when he examined a consultant’s glowing report on a World Bank irrigation scheme and found evidence that the conclusions were wrong:

My points were more or less accepted, but then the matter was consigned to an indeterminate limbo.  Nothing was done.  Far from being rejected or modified, the consultant’s conclusions were published unchanged, and without reference to the criticisms….The consultants knew that the World Bank, which had commissioned the study, was keen to justify the new approach.  They knew what result was wanted.  Supported by the consultants’ unchanged report, the new approach was implemented on a large scale.  So, even if bad news is reported, it may be avoided, rejected or finessed out of sight. (p.82)

Another disconnect appeared in a UNDP/OECD evaluation of a project in Mali: “it has to be asked how the largely positive findings of the evaluations can be reconciled with the poor development outcomes (1985-1995) and the unfavorable views of local people.” (1999)

Similarly, a classic work by James Ferguson (1994) recounts a World Bank project to teach better farming techniques in a mountainous region of Lesotho, out of touch with local people who had long ago learned to abandon the poor soils of that region and work as migrants in South African mines.

There are the same significant pressures on the MVP field staff to press participants to conform to project assumptions and expectations, and to reject or finesse evidence and feedback that does not. Those designing and implementing the MVP should have addressed possible conflicts between their goals and those of the communities. They did not. As a result, I was not surprised to see this quote from a woman living in a Rwandan Millennium Village, from a recent study:

The MV has to meet with local community to learn more about what people really want because sometimes the MV brings things that the community doesn’t need or want.

This and several other issues with the MVP were easy to see from the outset (see here and here). But to recognize them required a familiarity with the history of development and a self-awareness that the Millennium Village Project itself has never shown.

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Ed Carr is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina.  His book Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future was released by Palgrave Macmillan on February 1, 2011.  He blogs at Open the Echo Chamber.

Read all Aid Watch posts on the Millennium Villages project here.

The Foreign Assistance Dashboard is the first version of a site that will someday allow users to create charts and tables showing where and how well US aid funds have been spent.

On the plus side, it looks good, makes pretty charts, and it’s easy to use. In future iterations, US officials have said that it will publish data in an internationally comparable format. (This is important so that recipient countries, which receive aid from so many different donors, can get a full picture of aid inflows.)

The page on Pakistan tells us, for example, that $3 billion has been requested from Congress for Pakistan in 2011; $1.6 billion of that is for “Peace and Security,” and most of that is specifically for “Stabilization Operations and Security Sector Reform.”

On the minus side, it’s missing most of the information that actually matters to anyone tracking where the money goes and measuring its impact. The country information pages are incomplete because they exclude funds allocated to regional offices rather than country offices. And, as you can see from the below chart, the site has only data from USAID and State, and only shows appropriated amounts, not what has actually been spent.

While I admire the guts it took to publish such an aspirational matrix, I fear the day may still be far away when we will see a nice row of Xs in that last performance data column. Still, a recent editorial from transparency guru Owen Barder reminds why that is a goal worth pushing for:

The shift to a global information standard for aid sounds a rather dull and technocratic change, but a common standard for sharing information unlocks a world of possibility. It will enable the information from multiple aid agencies to be easily used by governments, parliaments and citizens in donor and developing nations.

It democratises aid, removing the monopoly of information and power from governments and aid professionals. It inspires innovation and informs learning. It reduces bureaucracy. It also makes it possible for communities to collaborate, for citizens to hold governments to account and for the beneficiaries of aid to speak for themselves.

I mean really pleased — my roster of supporters just doubled! I dropped the neighbor’s baby that I was holding and rushed over to my computer to click on the link, waiting with growing excitement as the link slowly loaded, to give me…to give me…finally…and…finally…and…again…finally……

Well, at least, I got an unintended rare glimpse of the world of blog censorship LIVE and in REAL TIME, self-imposed and otherwise. As the to-remain-anonymous anonymous witness-protection-protectee told me in an anonymously wistful anonymous email:

“He’s too strong.  He’s just too strong.”

Philip Gourevitch, writing in the New Yorker this week, has another:

…Surely at least we who work in journalism can do a public service by treating humanitarianism the same way we treat other powerful public interests that shape our world…Why should our coverage of them look so much like their own self-representation in fund-raising appeals? Why should we (as many photojournalists and print reporters do) work for humanitarian agencies between journalism jobs, helping them with their official reports and institutional appeals, in a way that we would never consider doing for corporations, political parties, or government agencies? Why should we not regard them as interested parties in the public realms in which they operate, as giant bureaucracies, as public trusts, with long records of getting it wrong with catastrophic consequences, as well as getting it right?

…[H]umanitarianism is an industry. So we should examine it and hold it to account as such. To treat humanitarian or human-rights organizations with automatic deference, as if they were disinterested higher authorities rather than activists and lobbyists with political and institutional interests and biases, and with uneven histories of reliability or success, is to do ourselves, and them, a disservice. That does not mean—as the many books I reviewed, and many more still, make clear—taking a hostile stance toward N.G.O.s. It simply means not accepting their hostility to critical scrutiny. It means not letting them claim to do our work for us. It means insisting on asking the questions for which they may have no good answers.

UPDATE: No winnners yet, see end of post.

Following last Friday’s post on the New Yorker profile of Justin Lin, I had this email exchange with the World Bank media officer David Theis, who kindly responded promptly to my inquiries.

Original Inquiry Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 11:30 AM:

David Theis
Media Chief, World Bank

Dear Mr. Theis, As I am sure you are aware, the current New Yorker has a profile of {World Bank Chief Economist} Justin Lin, especially his advocacy of an authoritarian development model. Does this reflect World Bank policy? In other words, is it official World Bank policy to endorse the authoritarian approach to development? If not, does the World Bank endorse instead a democratic approach to development? or does it simply take no position? Many thanks, Bill Easterly

Reply Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 12:29 PM:

Bill, No, we are not advocating an authoritarian development model. In fact, Bob Zoellick’s recent speech at Georgetown University (http://go.worldbank.org/5VEUBEBHY0) is entitled “Democratizing Development Economics.” Many thanks. David

My follow-up question Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 1:15 PM:

David, thanks so much for being so responsive. If you don’t mind, a follow-up question. Mr. Zoellick’s speech you mention is using “democratizing” in a different context. He does not bring up the issue of democratic vs. authoritarian regimes in developing countries. So when you say that you are “not advocating an authoritarian development model,” I am unclear whether you are saying you are against this model, or whether you are neutral. Could you please clarify? Many thanks, Bill

His reply Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 9:55 AM:

Bill, I believe “we are not advocating an authoritarian development model” is quite clear. Thanks. David

Bonus Reader exercise: find the word Democracy on any official World Bank website, or in any speech by Mr. Zoellick, or in any other official report authored by the World Bank.  The winner will receive two free tickets to the launch of the World Bank’s new Policy Research Report: “D#m#cr#cy: Not Advocating Its Savage Repression.”

Footnote: I also corresponded with David Theis on another question in the same series of letters that remains a bit unclear , and will be featured in a future post.

UPDATE: 3:30 pm no convincing winners yet as far as the World Bank offering an official embrace of Democratic Values, as opposed to isolated reports by individual authors and a few stray Zoellick remarks. You have got to do better, guys!! Or is it impossible?

UPDATE 10/12 1PM: We have a winner…

…except in reverse. Since nobody was able to provide a compelling example of the World Bank affirming democratic values, Aid Watch decided to give the prize to David Ellerman for his piquant comment that he was once forced to substitute the word “participation” for “democracy” in a major World Bank speech. This allows Aid Watch to selflessly quote its own previous posts deriding participation as a meaningless buzzword , which goes all the way back to colonial times and was therefore not seen as inconsistent with even Imperial Autocracy.

Sixteen months after I first filed a Freedom of Information Act request with USAID for the budgets of American-financed NGO projects in Georgia, I have reached the end of the road. Rejecting my appeal, USAID has confirmed that it continues to regard NGO project budgets as “privileged or confidential” information, and will not release budgets without contractors’ permission.

The opacity of USAID’s subcontracting makes it impossible for researchers to get access to comprehensive and comparable data that could inform debates about the effectiveness of delivering aid through NGOs. For example, the issue of aid fragmentation within NGOs could only be raised because Oxfam GB voluntarily provided a researcher with a list of all its projects abroad.

USAID is on very thin ice when it tries to push developing country institutions to become more accountable. The next time USAID lectures an African official on the importance of transparency in public procurement, I hope she will pull out a list of blacked-out budgets and argue that her ministry is following American best practice when it treats all financial details of its subcontracting arrangements as “privileged or confidential.”

Financial opacity also remains the default position for most NGOs. CARE and Counterpart instructed USAID to release more information in response to this FOIA, and they deserve credit taking for this step. However, USAID’s latest information release suggests that no other NGO has given the green light for such information sharing.

The recent public statements by NGOs and other aid actors reveal wildly divergent understandings of what accountability should mean in practice. As InterAction points out, “the issue at hand is what constitutes relevant information, and to whom specific information should be disclosed.”

What information is relevant? Scott Gilmore argued that we should be interested in accountability for outcomes rather than for expenditures, and many commentators on this blog have questioned the desirability or utility of public access to NGOs’ salary figures or NICRA rates, and raised concerns about privacy, security and competitive disadvantages.

I continue to believe that project proposals, including uncensored budgets, are essential components of a meaningful rendering of account. Proposals spell out what an NGO plans to achieve, when, where, why and how, and at what cost. If we don’t even know what a project sets out to do, and with what resources, how can we hold it to account for its success or failure?

Equally, there is disagreement on who qualifies as a legitimate stakeholder. CNFA and Mercy Corps have both emphasized that they feel themselves obliged to render account to institutional donors and beneficiaries, but not necessarily to third parties. This line of argument glosses over the sad reality that NGOs do not reveal project budgets to their beneficiaries either. Also, as charities enjoy tax-exempt status and spend public money, we are all donors, like it or not. And we all care about the beneficiaries, so we are all “aid watchers”.

If project budgets are not particularly relevant, and scrutiny by ordinary citizens does not bolster accountability, why do international NGOs regularly make their local sub-grantees post project budgets in public places for all to see? As far as I know, no Northern NGO has worried that such excessive transparency may compromise the privacy, security or competitiveness of community-based NGOs in the South.

This FOIA journey has shown one thing above all: NGOs (save Oxfam GB) simply do not want outsiders to see their project budgets, full stop. Not a single NGO has used this forum to announce its willingness to give beneficiaries or other stakeholders access to its project proposals and budgets in the future, even though every country director has these documents on his hard drive and could attach them to an email within two minutes.

Project budgets are shown only to those stakeholders who have the power to force NGOs to open their books: donors, headquarters, and audit institutions. The poor and powerless have to be content with whatever information NGOs choose to provide.

Can NGOs be accountable without showing outsiders where the money goes? The Humanitarian Accountability Project thinks so. “Public disclosure of financial information is not a requirement for HAP membership,” HAP recently confirmed. InterAction concurs, stating that it “purposefully does not define in our standards specific mandates for disclosure.” InterAction also highlights “the request of some donors to keep their financial support private.”

Transparency International, drawing parallels to the oil and gas industry, strongly disagrees: “Competitive advantage or even privacy, are not acceptable exceptions. Only personal physical security suffices.” Aidinfo observes that “the burden of proof is shifting to those who would keep information secret.”

Donor-abetted secrecy jars with President Obama’s call at last week’s MDG summit: “Let’s resolve to put an end to hollow promises that are not kept.  Let’s commit to the same transparency that we expect of others.”