In 2011, the British Department for International Development undertook a thorough review of how it allocated money to 43 multilateral organisations ranging from the World Bank to the Commonwealth Secretariat. The Multilateral Aid Review was intended to improve both the value for money of Britains multilateral aid, and the transparency and accountability of aid spending.
This is a joint post with Rita Perakis
Last week, CGD and Social Finance launched a new high-level Working Group to consider Development Impact Bonds, a new mechanism to enable private investment in development outcomes. Owen Barder and Rita Perakis explain.
There is nothing new about the idea that development assistance is an investment: spending money today in the hope of future benefits. Putting money into immunizing kids or giving them an education is an excellent investment in the future well-being of those people. But if there are financial returns they are often far in the future and cannot be directly linked back to the investment. For many development investments the returns are mainly social, not financial. And the absence of financial returns on a reasonable timescale could be why there is no market for investing in development. There is a small pool of investors who are willing to be paid in good karma; but most would rather be paid in dollars, sterling or euros.
This is a joint post with Julie Walz.
Two years ago, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, plunging an already poor and unstable country into complete and utter chaos. In the days and weeks that followed, international responses and donations were overwhelming. Yet almost all of the assistance provided to Haiti has bypassed its government, leaving it even less capable than before. Humanitarian agencies, NGOs, private contractors, and other non-state service providers have received 99 percent of relief aid—less than 1 percent of aid in the immediate aftermath of the quake went to public institutions or to the government. And only 23 percent of the longer-term recovery funding was channeled through the Haitian government. Figure 1 shows the breakdown of relief aid from all donors to Haiti, by recipient.
This commentary also appeared on The Huffington Post and Global Post
Last week at a United Nations conference, donors pledged more than $10 billion to finance reconstruction and development investments in Haiti. The United States promised a hefty $1.15 billion.
But pledging money is the easy part. The United States, the lead donor and friend with the greatest interest in Haiti's future development, can do much more, in two ways: its own aid programs can be more effective; and it can take steps beyond aid that are far more critical to long-run prosperity for Haiti's people.
The U.S. response in Haiti must be about more than aid, CGD president Nancy Birdsall told Congress this week. She urged members of Congress to push for better trade and migration policies—in addition to more flexibility with our assistance efforts—to help Haiti rebuild after the earthquake.
As I blogged Monday, the Haiti government owes the rest of the world about $1.25 billion. Seems like a lot of money.
Proposition #1: Details matter
Proposition #2: People hear what they expect to hear
Lemma #1: People often misunderstand details
Theorem: Foreign aid agencies continue to use tranched operations even when a small modification would work better.
I leave the proof to the reader, but this theorem came to mind during recent discussions about Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid) as it would apply to financing primary education.
I am pleased to share with our readers at Owen’s request this discussion of Cash on Delivery Aid, which appeared yesterday on his blog, Owen Abroad.
Linking Aid to Results: Why Are Some Development Workers Anxious?
By Owen Barder
The Center for Global Development is working on an idea which they call Cash on Delivery aid, in which donors make a binding commitment to developing country governments to provide aid according to the outputs that the government delivers. I think this is a good idea in principle, and hope that it can be tested to see whether and how it could work in practice. The UK Conservative party have said in their Green Paper that if they are elected they will use Cash on Delivery to link aid to results.
Linking aid more closely to results is attractive from many different perspectives. My own view is that linking aid directly to results will help to change the politics of aid for donors. Many of the most egregiously ineffective behaviours in aid are a direct result of donors’ (very proper) need to show to their taxpayers how money has been used. Because traditional aid is not directly linked to results, donors end up focusing on inputs and micromanaging how aid is spent instead, with all the obvious consequences for transactions costs, poor alignment with developing countries systems and priorities and lack of harmonisation. If we could link aid more directly to results, I think donors will be freed from many of the political pressures they currently face to deliver aid badly; and it would be politically easier to defend large increases in aid budgets.
Very interesting op-ed in Sunday’s WashPost on U.S. efforts to promote health care in Afghanistan that cuts to the heart of the debate over integrating development into U.S. foreign policy. The authors, two noted health experts, claim that American programs have done immediate good: up to 100,000 infants and children have been saved from early death this year alone.
In a masterful essay this past Sunday on how we can help the world’s poor (that was the title), Nicholas Kristof managed to honor Jeff Sachs (“indefatigable”) and Bill Easterly (“powerful and provocative book”).
But he probably has set off another round of the “ferocious intellectual debate” between those two and their adherents. That’s because he didn’t really get to the question the ferocious debate is actually about.