Cassette tapes "cause" conflict

Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian published a very worrying paper in 2014 showing that US food aid causes conflict in recipient countries. Their research design used total US wheat production as a source of quasi-experimental variation in the amount of food aid countries received, to show causality rather than just correlation.

A new paper by Paul Christian and Christopher Barrett apparently debunks the study, showing that the "causal" correlation is spurious. Replace "US wheat production" with "US tape cassette sales" and you can almost exactly replicate the results.

Which reminds me of an earlier paper showing that "average male organ length" is a strong predictor of GDP growth. We only have about 200 countries, which is not a lot of observations to power a robust statistical analysis, so you should take most cross-country empirical analyses with a pinch of salt. These "male organ" and "cassette sales" papers are helpfully colourful reminders.

HT: Jeffrey Bloem

The Global Education Architecture is Broken

So says Nicholas Burnett in a (sadly, gated) essay for the International Journal of Educational Development.

Nicholas has some authority on the topic, as chair of the Board of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, and previously Director of the UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report.

In his opening paragraph he writes;

"The international architecture for education is failing the world. There is little leadership; global priorities are obscure; the major debates are increasingly irrelevant and divorced from reality on the ground; the number of children out-of-school has stagnated for a decade; little progress has been made in tackling the global learning crisis; knowledge about what works in education is surprisingly limited; global public goods are massively underfunded; huge global financing requirements show little prospect of being met; and the neediest low-income countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, do not receive the external financial and technical support necessary if they are to develop their education systems."

Tell us what you really think Nicholas. 

He criticises:

"the work of the Right to Education Initiative lobby and its recent Abidjan Principles, which would have governments place severe restrictions on private education."

Points to a major problem being the decline of UNESCO:

"In the past, UNESCO could have been counted on to be the central voice advocating for education, including education as a human right, in international fora. UNESCO has become so weakened, however, by its internal politicization and inadequate budget, that it is no longer the respected international voice on education, rather just one of many rather weak voices. These problems preceded the withdrawal first of United States' financial support and, more recently, of US membership but these steps now mean that UNESCO cannot function effectively as it has insufficient resources. UNESCO’s total regular budget for education is now only $51 million per year."

With a few other choice quotes:

"It is a real paradox that those working in international education increasingly (and rightly) call for systems-wide approaches but fail to study their own non-functional international architecture system. 

... 

It is astonishing both how little we know about what works in education and how poorly we disseminate what we do know. 

... 

If the situation is bad regarding generating knowledge, it is even worse regarding promoting innovation in education. 

... 

There is thus no systematic regular review of how the international architecture is performing."

Well written and well worth reading in full.

The best thing about cash benchmarking is it highlights just how small most aid is

The best take on the new cash benchmarking study from Rwanda was this one by Michael Kevane:

"the main takeaway is that neither intervention (when evaluated at the low Gikuriro cost of $141 per household) improved child outcomes." Yikes. I guess though if household size = 7 that is only $20 per person.

Should we really be surprised that giving someone $20 doesn't improve any measurable outcomes? Maybe Kevane's maths is wrong and household size is smaller, but $20 is so small we could double it and still not expect to see anything.

That's one big advantage of cold hard individual cash transfers, they make explicit what the actual amount per person is, which is not so obvious when its one big community project costing loadsamoney and affecting loadsapeople. John Quiggin made this point years ago.

Last year, DFID gave £2.6 BILLION pounds to countries in Africa. That's so much money! How are they still so poor when we give them BILLIONS of pounds every year? Well, hold on, there are 1.2 billion PEOPLE in Africa. So that works out at just over £2 each for the whole YEAR. Of course it doesn't go to everyone, let's say the money is perfectly targeted on the poorest 10% of people. So they get £20 each.

Somehow there is a lot of magical thinking that by pooling money together it somehow automatically has totally outsized impacts. Of course its possible that smart investment in research or better governance can have truly outsized impact if it can nudge a country toward a slightly higher growth rate, but that isn't what most aid is even trying to do, and even when it is they stuff is wicked hard and we can expect most attempts to fail.

Aid is great but less hubris please. And less ridiculous implicit expectations from what aid could plausibly achieve from the sceptics too.

Rising DFID Spending hasn't Crowded Out Private Giving

Last week I was poking around the ESRC’s 'Administrative Data Research Network’ and discovered the Charity Commission data download website - containing every annual financial return made by every individual charity in England and Wales since 2007. The data comes in a slightly weird file format that I’d never heard of, but thankfully the NCVO have a very helpful guide and Python code for converting the data into .csv format (which was easy enough to use that I managed to figure out how to run without ever having really used Python). 

One obvious question you could ask with this data is whether the private income of international charities has dropped as DFID spending has gone up (more than doubled over the same period) - it is conceivable that people might decide that they could give less to international charity as more of their tax money is being distributed by DFID.

That does not seem to be the case at all. There are two ways of identifying international charities - by their stated area of operation, or by their stated objective category. I’ve coded charities that have no UK activities as “International”, and also picked out the charities that ticked the box for "Overseas Aid/Famine Relief” as their activity category. These two categories do overlap but far from perfectly. 

Charities have multiple categories of income - I focus here on the ‘voluntary’ category which basically means all donations, whether large or small. 

Charities with exclusively international activities, and those focused on 'overseas aid' did appear to take more of a hit than domestic charities from the 2008 global financial crisis and recession, but since then growth has tracked the income of other charities (and is 40-50% higher in 2015 than in 2007 (not adjusting for inflation)). 

You can download the Stata code here, csv files (large) here, and variable descriptions here.

Cash-on-Delivery Aid for Trade Facilitation

One of the new ideas in our CGD trade-for-development-policy-after-Brexit paper was using the "Cash on Delivery" approach for trade facilitation. "Cash on Delivery" is an idea well developed by Nancy Birdsall and William Savedoff but still under-actually-piloted, and as yet not proposed for use in trade facilitation, for which it may actually be a really good fit. From the paper:

"The UK can improve upon its existing Aid for Trade offer by making increased use of results-based programmes. “Cash-on-delivery” aid (paying for outcomes, not inputs) is most appropriate where local contextual knowledge matters, where the best combination of inputs is uncertain and local experimentation is needed, and where precise design features and implementation fidelity are most critical (see, for example, the discussion by Savedoff [2016] on energy policy). All of these criteria also apply to Aid for Trade.

A typical Aid for Trade programme might carry out an extended diagnostic project to identify the constraints to change, and then design and contract a project to address these constraints. The payments would typically be made for activities (for example, technical assistance for improving a certain process) that, according to a theory of change, should lead to the desired outcomes. But contracting for activities and inputs doesn’t allow for sufficient experimentation and change.

A better approach is to contract for outcomes (i.e., to offer cash on delivery) and allow those with the required information the flexibility to determine the best way of achieving those outcomes.

Common concerns around cash on delivery focus on exactly what outcomes are contracted for, how they are measured, and whether there is any risk of distortion of priorities according to what is measurable or gaming of indicators. Indicators should be quantifiable, ideally continuous (to allow for variable payment in proportion to the degree of progress), and independently verifiable. Another common concern is how governments might fund any up-front investment costs. Here, then, the proposal is not that cash on delivery should replace all aid, but simply that it replace a portion of aid in a piloted manner. Further, if the outcomes are focused on “soft” rather than “hard” infrastructure, these up-front costs should be limited.

With trade, contracts could be based on the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ indicators. We have reasonable econometric evidence (Hoekman and Nicita 2011) that these indicators of the cost of importing and exporting (in both time and money) are associated with greater volumes of imports and exports.

An alternative but similar set of possible indicators that could be used as outcomes for contracted payments are the OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators, which probe border procedures in more detail. Moïsé and Sorescu (2013) estimate that streamlining the costs represented by these indicators could reduce trade costs by 15 per cent for low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Rather than trying to tell a specific country how best to reduce that time and cost, we could instead just write a contract to pay a specified amount for each hour the country reduces the time it takes goods to clear the border and exporters and/or importers to comply with documentary requirements.

The potential gains to developing countries are high. The estimated gain to a low-income country from reducing its cost of exporting to that of a middle-income country is 2 per cent higher exports (Hoekman and Nicita 2011). For a typical low-income country, such as Malawi, with total annual exports of around US$1.5 billion, a 2 per cent increase would be worth US$30 million a year. The expenses associated with reducing export times would almost certainly cost less than this amount.

In summary, the UK could take the lead in applying a more innovative and potentially much more effective approach to Aid for Trade by using cash on delivery. It could be used as a complement to the other proposals in this note and, as a relatively new approach, could be established relatively promptly as a pilot."

The Case for Restrictions on New Charities

"Drawing upon the all-pay auction literature, we propose a model of charity competition in which informed giving alone can account for the significant quality heterogeneity across similar charities. Our analysis identifies a negative effect of competition and a positive effect of informed giving on the equilibrium quality of charity. In particular, we show that as the number of charities grows, so does the percentage of charity scams, approaching one in the limit. In light of this and other results, we discuss the need for regulating nonprofit entry and conduct as well as promoting informed giving."

Information, Competition, and the Quality of Charities, by Silvana Krasteva and Huseyin Yildirimb

How much of a jerk do you have to be oppose aid?

Angus Deaton wrote a few months ago about “Rethinking Robin Hood” (he was also on EconTalk a couple of days ago).

His argument is that a) the poorest in the US are maybe worse off than we think, and b) we should rethink the "cosmopolitan” ethical rule that places an equal weight on foreigners as co-nationals. Of course, he says, we shouldn’t totally disregard foreigners, we just have lower obligations to them, and greater obligations to people in the same nation as us. Which is all fine and everything, but its also a bit of a straw man. The interesting question, if we can agree that we have lower but not zero obligations to foreigners, is *how much* lower are our obligations to them?

In one of my favourite ever blog posts (now offline, but summarised on Dani Rodrik’s blog), the anonymous blogger “YouNotSneaky” calculates how much you have to value the welfare of a foreigner in order to oppose immigration (or “How much of a jerk do you have to be to oppose immigration”). The answer is you need to think that our obligation to foreigners is less than 1/20th of our obligation to co-nationals in order to oppose any immigration. Personally, I’m not at all comfortable with that low of a weight, but I suppose your mileage may vary.

In principle you could make some kind of similar calculation with regards to foreign aid, but I’m guessing that the less than 0.7% of GDP we so generously lavish on the global poor isn’t anything close to how much we would spend if we were actually really anywhere close to being "cosmopolitan prioritarians” and treating our obligations to foreigners as equal to those to co-nationals.

Is the EU Financing Genocide in Sudan?

Update on the Worst Aid Project in the World:

Yasir Arman, the main opposition leader in Sudan, alleges that EU money to support “migration management” in Sudan is actually being used to arm the Janjaweed Forces that carried out the genocide in Darfur.

"We received specific and detailed information about a plan drawn by Omar El Bashir and his security apparatus to finance the Janjaweed Forces, reconstituted as the Rapid Response Force, from funds provided to Sudan by the EU, especially funds from the German Government and technical support from the Italian Government.

This plan is under the direct supervision, control, and command of the Presidency of The Republic. It is executed by the National Intelligence and Security Service, of which the Rapid response force is part.

This devilish plan, which was hatched and implemented over the past three months, has put the Rapid Response Force in charge of guarding Sudan borders with the false intention of curbing immigration to Europe, stopping human trafficking, and fighting terrorism. The goal is to link these forces to European interests through what is called “The Khartoum Process” to stop human trafficking. The objective is to ultimately add international legitimacy to the Janjaweed Force and hide its crimes against humanity and the killings of Sudanese civilians, but under European Countries’ and the international community blessings.

So far this plan has already been put into action and was widely covered in the media. The Commander of the Rapid Response Force has held several press conferences and meetings where he claimed the loss of over one hundred and fifty (150) trucks while carrying out its border control duties at the Libyan and Egyptian borders. He did not give details of the forces he was fighting, the times and locations of these fights, or images to support his claim.

The timing of all of this is planned in such a way to receive more funds from Europe to buy more military equipment while it is still the rainy season to prepare for using them during the coming dry season in conflict zones. This means more killing of civilians, especially in the three conflict zones. It is clear that the Government of Sudan is aiming to fund its wars against its own people with European money and support from the international community.

These Janjaweed Forces have attacked and committed atrocities against civilians from Sudan and neighboring countries at the Sudanese Egyptian and Libyan borders. We therefore urge the EU to be aware of this plot and to stop funding these forces because that amounts to supporting genocide and prolonging the suffering of the people of Sudan.

We call upon our offices in Europe and in the United States to raise and highlight this issue in the European and the British Houses of Parliament and in the American Congress by officially writing to these bodies since this is a matter of great urgency. We also call upon all Sudanese people and Sudanese activists inside and outside of Sudan to give great importance to this matter, which supports the continuation of genocide in Sudan. We also draw the attention of the ICC that this issue relates to wars against humanity in Sudan.

It is strange that, lately, the Rapid Response Force (Janjaweed) started talking about fighting terrorism and it is expecting to receive American funding after it guaranteed the flow of European funds.

It is worth-mentioning that the Janjaweed force was the primary source of terrorism in Sudan. We must not forget that it was originally formed for the sole purpose of ethnic cleansing in Dar Fur, and over the years it has committed atrocities against Sudanese civilians all over the country, including many women rape cases in Dar Fur, which was well documented. The Janjaweed was recently reconstituted from Janjaweed to Rapid Response Force and got attached to the Sudan National Intelligence and Security Service to hide its past and give it legitimacy, hoping that we will forget its criminal past.

We are confident that the European and the world public opinion will not be caught off guard while General Bashir implements this criminal plot."

HT: John Ashworth

Struggling for the right words… contender for absolute worst ‘aid’ project in the world

Der Spiegel reports… the EU is planning to provide training, equipment, and DETENTION CAMPS to the government of Sudan, which is led by a wanted war criminal, in order that they can prevent human beings from crossing the border out of Sudan in the direction of Europe. The project is to be coordinated by the German development agency GIZ. Wow I feel sorry for the idealists at GIZ who signed up in order to help people, and now they’re building detention facilities for war criminals.

"The ambassadors of the 28 European Union member states had agreed to secrecy. "Under no circumstances" should the public learn what was said at the talks that took place on March 23rd … Europe wants to send cameras, scanners and servers for registering refugees to the Sudanese regime in addition to training their border police and assisting with the construction of two camps with detention rooms for migrants."

Let’s recap that arrest warrant for the wanted, at large, alleged war criminal who is the President of Sudan, the man we are apparently hoping to pay to do our dirty work:

"Charged, as an indirect (co) perpetrator, with ten counts of crimes: five counts of crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape: two counts of war crimes: intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities, and pillaging; three counts of genocide: by killing, by causing serious bodily or mental harm, and by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the groups’s physical destruction, allegedly committed at least between 2003 and 2008 in Darfur, Sudan.” (my emphasis)

I mean, certainly you can criticise things like sanctions and aid conditionality, but is there any point at which we might consider it to be a bad idea to do business with this government? Is there any moral threshold here? Does Sudan need to get to be charged with 4 counts of genocide before we stop giving them stuff? Is only 5 counts of crimes against humanity not quite enough??

Note that the arrest warrant refers only to Darfur, ignoring all the other confirmed bombings of civilian and humanitarian targets by military forces in South Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, ignoring deliberately destroying crops during a famine, and ignoring the reports of slavery and child soldiers in Northern/Central Sudan.

I despair.

ht: John Ashworth

Why Germany is probably doing more for Syria than the UK

How do you compare the good that the UK is doing with its whopping 0.7% aid budget, against the good that Germany is doing by accepting large numbers of refugees? A smart (German) friend asked me if there are any numbers on the size of the remittances we might expect to see from Syrian refugees in Germany to Syria. Of course, remittances are far from the most important reason for accepting refugees, but they do allow for a nice easy cash sum with which we can make a comparison to aid flows.

The UK is spending somewhere between £200 million and £400 million on Syria this year. For comparison, whilst Germany is ramping up aid spending, it is still less than 0.4% of GDP overall.

But in terms of numbers of refugees, Germany expects to take 800,000 this year (compared to just a few thousand in the UK), though fewer than that have been documented so far, and not all will be Syrian. Let’s assume for a moment that the total will be 400,000 from Syria, and they will be quickly processed so that they are able to work. If every Syrian refugee in Germany was able to send home £1,000 to family and friends, that already equal Britain’s aid budget for Syria. Is £1,000 a realistic prospect? One way to think about this is to look at remittances from existing migrants in Germany (p33) to the middle east. There are currently around 67,000 migrants from Lebanon living in Germany, who send back to Lebanon almost $1 billion a year - that’s around £9,500 each, which seems almost implausibly large, but who knows, the Chinese and Vietnamese also send home large sums, and the Nigerians send home even more. In any case, it certainly seems plausible, even likely, that Syrian refugees to Germany, once permitted to work for even low German salaries, will be able to send home at least £1,000, if not more.

Is “technical assistance” counterproductive?

Duncan Green reviews a fascinating new AidData survey on what developing country policymakers think about donors.

One of the key findings he points to is that

"Reliance upon technical assistance undermines a development partner’s ability to shape and implement host government reform efforts. The share of official development assistance (ODA) allocated to technical assistance is negatively correlated with all three indicators of development partner performance."

Obviously alarm-bells should be ringing about such firm causal conclusions being drawn from a correlation. One of the best ways of assessing these things is with some rigorous eyeball econometrics - take a look at this chart showing the relationship driving that claim.

Looks to me like that is a pretty weak relationship, and you could just as easily have drawn a totally flat line (no relationship). And indeed, deep in the weeds, Table E.11 tell us that this is a simple correlation between these two variables with a sample size of just 44 data points (countries). It might technically pass a statistical significance test, but it doesn’t really tell us that there is a reliable correlation, let alone causality. And even if you believed the estimated negative relationship - it’s really not huge - implicitly going from 0% aid on technical assistance to a massive 50% of aid spent on technical assistance would only reduce the perceived quality of your advice by 0.55 points on a 5 point scale.

Bottom line for technical assisters - don’t give up your day job quite yet.

Does foreign aid harm political institutions?

Good news for reflective aid business -types who like agonising about what the point of it all is and sometimes wondering whether we’re even making things worse (err... talking about a friend... not me...). Also even good news for developing countries I suppose.

A new paper in the Journal of Development Economics by Sam Jones & Finn Tarp* using new data on aid (from aiddata.org) and institutions (from the Quality of Government Institute) finds no evidence that aid has undermined institutions on average, if anything there seems to be a positive relationship. I’m less confident in the positive findings than reassured that in *none* of their various different approaches is the relationship negative.

Now you’re probably thinking “what about the 2006 CGD review paper by Todd Moss, Gunilla Pettersson & Nicolas Van de Walle, described by Blattman as "the best summary I know of the evidence”, which concluded that aid could have a harmful effect on institutional development”? Well the word “could” is important there - that conclusion was somewhat speculative, and this new evidence from Jones & Tarp fills an important gap in terms of systematic quantitative evidence on this topic, and should probably shift your priors at least a little in that direction.

I wonder what Angus Deaton would say?

---

* Thanks to UNU-WIDER the paper is open-access, which is great for what it is, but obviously having public institutions pay private journal owners something greater than the cost of production isn’t an ideal long-run equilibrium, and we really need something that fundamentally shifts the whole publishing industry.

The State of the Humanitarian Aid System 2015

“ALNAP” launched today the 2015 “State of the Humanitarian Aid System” Report.

One of the key findings highlighted in their fancy infographics:

"44% of aid recipients surveyed were not consulted on their needs by aid agencies prior to the start of their programmes”.

In totally unrelated news, the DFID-ODI-CGD High Level Panel on Humanitarian Cash Transfers chaired by Owen Barder published it’s report a few weeks ago, arguing that much more use should be made of cash transfers, because most of the time they are more cost effective than giving out stuff.

In further totally unrelated news, DFID published two press releases today highlighting substantial non-cash aid in response to humanitarian crises in the Central African Republic and Malawi.

In Owen’s words: "the questions should always be asked: “Why not cash? And, if not now, when?”"

Is rescuing migrants from the Med good value for money?

Thousands of people die each year trying to cross the Mediterranean to seek asylum in Europe. Christopher and Regina Catrambone, American and Italian entrepreneurs, decided to take matters into their own hands and set up their own private rescue mission.

Naturally when I read that

"a fundraising drive by the activist organisation Avaaz reached $500,000, slightly less than a month’s costs”,

I started wondering about cost effectiveness. Elsewhere the Guardian article states

"Setting up Moas was not cheap, with monthly operating costs of up to €600,000"

and

"The Phoenix rescued 1,462 people in 10 weeks"

So let’s go with the higher figure of €600,000 per month - over 10 weeks (2.3 months) that is a total cost of €1.4m (roughly $1.6m or £1m). And to save 1,462 people, that is a cost of £700 (~ $1000) per death averted.

Is that a lot or a little? As Owen has pointed out, the UK NHS considers anything less than £100,000 per death averted to be good value for money.

At the other extreme, childhood vaccinations, "long recognized as among the most cost-effective uses of limited health resources in low-income countries” (Disease Control Priorities) cost $275 per death averted.

At face value, Catrambone’s "Migrant Offshore Aid Station" (MOAS) looks like a pretty good value for money philanthropic bet.

Effective Altruism, RCTs, NGOs, & the Government End-Game

Good Ventures just gave a $25 million unrestricted grant to Give Directly on the advice of Givewell. That’s a lot of good news in one sentence, but it’s not even the best part. Givewell buried the lede when they mention around paragraph 20 that;

"GiveDirectly plans to discuss partnerships with the following types of institutions:

- Donor aid agencies
- Developing country governments (national and local). (For example, several governors in Kenya have already approached GiveDirectly about running cash transfer programs in their counties.)"

That’s what it’s all about. To really get sustainability and scale in social policy you need government involvement - that’s why the best NGOs combine a mixture of immediate direct service delivery in places where government just doesn’t have the capacity to deliver, with support to interested governments to build that capacity for the longer-term, often at the local level where administrators struggle to actually implement well-designed central policy documents, and with innovation in new models of service delivery, that governments might later adopt, of which GiveDirectly is clearly a strong example. Similarly whilst Innovations for Poverty Action and J-PAL may have started off following that recently infamous Kremer-Miguel deworming study by working on service delivery through small NGOs, their focus is on things that can work at scale, and having built a reputation through working with NGOs have been able to transition to working with governments (for example in Ghana and Peru).

As Jessica Brass writes,

"Government and NGOs learn from each other to improve what they do. In particular, many government agencies notice the successes achieved by NGOs and, whether intentionally or not, mimic their actions"

So yes, maybe some of the effective altruists can be accused of being philosophers not development wonks, and potentially even naive about politics, but for every anecdote-backed theoretical case for how aid might undermine the process of building citizen-state accountability, I can come up with an anecdote-backed theoretical case for how aid can support improved governance through innovation in service delivery models, and until we get some quantitative evidence on the issue, I don’t see how else we’re going to resolve the debate.

Did I miss anything?

How much does the new deworming replication matter for Effective Altruists?

It doesn’t at all, as far as I can tell. As Calum points out, what matters is the systematic review of evidence not one study. And the new Cochrane systematic review doesn’t seem to have responded to the criticism from Duflo et al to their 2012 review, that it ignores quasi-experimental and long-term evidence on positive impacts of deworming (specifically Bleakley 2004, Ozier, and Baird et al).

A replication of the famous Miguel and Kremer deworming paper that launched the whole RCT in development economics movement, is published in the Journal of International Epidemiology today (along with comment from Hicks, Kremer, and Miguel, and reply from the replication authors), with coverage in the Guardian and by Ben Goldacre for Buzzfeed.

You may remember Berk Ozler's review of the draft of the replication paper back in January - concluding

"Bottom line: Based on what I have seen in the reanalysis study by DAHH and the response by HKM, my view of the original study is more or less unchanged."

You can probably expect to see more on the replication coming from @cblatts, which I’m not going to get into, but back in 2012, Givewell were convinced that the Cochrane review shoudn’t change their recommendation to donate to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative or Deworm the World.

The ambiguity does make me a little queasy, and pushes me more in the direction of GiveDirectly (I see basically zero risk that giving $1000 to someone on a very low income can really be totally wasted, in the way that an ineffective drug could theoretically have zero impact).

Labour Beyond Aid

The UK Labour Party has a new pamphlet out with ideas for future development policy, labelled "Beyond Aid."

How does it measure up?

CGD looks at 7 components of "Commitment to Development" in the annual index; aid, trade, migration, security, environment, technology, and finance.

Labour's pamphlet talks extensively about 2 of the 6 non-aid components of the index: the environment and security.

There is next to nothing on trade, migration, technology, and finance.

Out of 26 countries, the UK ranks 4th overall which is pretty good. Though that varies a lot between the components; Aid (4), Trade (7), Finance (2), Migration (13), Environment (11), Security (7), Technology (20).

There's more to International Development than Aid, but also more than climate change and security. 

"I didn't come into politics to distribute money to people in the Third World!"

Justine ‘I didn’t come into politics to distribute money to people in the Third World’ Greening, the UK Development Minister, spoke at Sussex yesterday. I wanted to ask her if the above quote was true, but she over-ran the allotted 20 minutes, leaving time for only 3 questions before she was whisked off by her advisors. I also wanted to ask, given she was apparently so proud of her focus on emergencies and the UK response to Syria, why the UK has only taken in 143 Syrian refugees out of 380,000 people in need of resettlement, and whether, given her pride in cross-government collaboration, she agrees with the actual real not-taking-the-piss Foreign Office policy that it is better to let Syrian refugees drown in the Mediterranean, because rescuing them would create a "pull factor", or whether on the contrary she agrees with the churches, that this is an "abdication of moral responsibility."

 

She also seems to think that she invented the idea of economic development and that investing in ports and infrastructure might be an original idea. Did someone forget to brief the Minister about what the "WORLD BANK" has been doing for the last 50 years? Also whilst it may be important to make the case for aid to many audiences, this was not one of them. Seriously, she told us about the importance of aid for our own (UK) self interest about 3 different times (note probably at least half of IDS and I imagine the audience were not even British, and those that were are presumably firmly committed development people).

 

Snark aside, DFID gives us a lot to be proud of, we give a lot of money, and on the whole I think we give it well. It's just a bit depressing when our dear development leader looks so bored by the whole thing (or perhaps I'm just reading her as uninterested because of the alleged quote above?). Amusingly, the former accountant's eyes only really lit up when talking about a project sending folks from the Institute of Chartered Accountants to Zambia (though that is probably honestly a brilliant idea). She also clearly looked most pleased talking about the projects which involved some kind of new gadget or had some benefits for Brits - be it the aid match to double your donations to NGOs, the International Citizen Service, or school twinning. All fine ideas, but perhaps not the most transformative.

 

I should add that I didn’t think Mary Creagh’s vision was all that much more inspiring, despite Charlie’s reminder that the universal health care focus is a good one. Which is all quite odd in the context of the recent 0.7 bill. 

The Future of the UN Development System

A new book from the co-Director of the Future of the UN Development System (FUNDS) project (can't believe they didn't call it the "FUN" project). Mark Malloch-Brown (former UN deputy-secretary-general and UNDP administrator) says;

"There is no better compilation of insights about the UN’s lack of cohesion, growing turf battles, declining capacity, clumsy implementation, and cooptation by bilateral and private interests of the family of organizations that calls itself—somewhat awkwardly—the UN development system."

Ouch.

One of the inputs to the book is a global perceptions survey of the UN system, summarised thus:

Four views emerge across the survey: 

• The UN’s development functions are less crucial than such other functions as security, humanitarian action, and setting global norms with teeth. 

• The UN’s development organizations are still mostly relevant, but some are not particularly effective. 

• The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF consistently receive the highest rankings among operational agencies; regional commissions receive the lowest rankings. 

• The UN faces two major institutional challenges: poor internal organization and the predominance of earmarked funding.

What the survey misses, and what is really crucial, is that what we should care about is not just the effectiveness of organisations but the cost-effectiveness, or value for money. Houses in London are "effective" at keeping people dry, but they aren't exactly great value for money from a cost per square metre perspective. 

Good news from South Sudan

Charlie Goldsmith emails with updates on the Girl's Education South Sudan project:

"Our majority-South Sudanese team are proud that South Sudan, which has been so beset by trouble in the last year, has the chance to show positive ways in which it is a world-leader. 

Charlie Goldsmith Associates have been particularly involved on design, technology for, and delivery of: 

• The South Sudan Schools Attendance Management System, through which enrolment and attendance of individual pupils - almost 900,000 of them by now - from top to bottom of the education system is recorded, with schools asked to report daily to a freephone number through SMSs from teachers’ own phones.

• Cash Transfers to individual girls in P5-S4 and their families: more than 50,000 will be made in 2014, and around half a million, to 200,000 individual girls, by 2018. In 2015, we expect payment of the majority of these to be by M-Money. 

• School capitation grants to fund investments in quality: almost 3000 schools have been approved to receive these grants, having passed hurdles including opening a bank account, and making a school development plan and budget, and there have been outstanding examples of value delivered, notably in terms of economical construction. GRSS is now looking at rolling this model of funding direct to service delivery units across to the health sector. 

• A multi-year programme of investment in knowledge, evidence and research, much of it delivered by our specialist partners Forcier Consulting and, earlier on, Education for Change, including detailed school and household surveys, learning assessments, and a major subnational PFM performance survey.

The Government of the Republic of South Sudan (GRSS) budgets to spend 60m SSP of its own money a year (roughly £12m GBP) on school capitation grants, as part of the wider Local Services Support programme, supported by among others, the ODI Budget Strengthening Initiative. It's worth highlighting that this £12m a year spent by the government of South Sudan is slightly more than the DFID project itself (£60m over five and half years - a great example of leverage and sustainability where aid money can help to increase the effectiveness of potentially much larger government spending. 

You can find some examples of practical good news that has resulted - girls with the resources to be in school, teachers paid, classrooms and latrines quickly and cost-effectively constructed - and scans of how each school has budgeted to spend its capitation grant, including detail down to the cost of a latrine in a given school, and the accountability now being returned by schools.

In addition to the CGA work, other members of the consortium are delivering really exciting things too, particularly interesting are the BBC "Our School" programmes in local languages. Since they have one programme per State per topic, and have done about 14 topics this year, it is really quite a significant library of decent resources of people saying sensible things about education, including the practicalities, not just the slogans, in their own language. In due course, the project is going to do important things on in classroom education quality too. 

Using innovative technology elsewhere

We think some of these approaches and tools are broadly applicable:

• Monitoring enrolment and attendance at an individual level, in near-real time, on a public website (data on individuals can only be accessed by permissioned login), is a step of assurance and usefulness of data that goes beyond what some EMISs offer.

• Getting funds direct into the hands of individuals and down to bank accounts of service delivery units like schools and primary health care units, gives country governments and their partners assurance that funds have reached their destination, and sets good incentives for funds to be used correctly, and the leverage and information to follow up if there is a problem. Putting funds to individuals and schools and clinics at local level stimulates the local economy, and, in particular, financial inclusion - in South Sudan, Eden Commercial Bank are opening five new branches in County towns during 2014, driven partly by the additional transaction volume provided by capitation grants and cash transfers, and other banks have set up travelling account opening services. 

• The technology approach is designed for a low-connectivity/not-always-on environment, and for users using their own mobile phones/devices.

These approaches are operationally effective, and showing promising signs of effect on retention and enrolment, in South Sudan: how much more might they achieve in an environment where there were fewer barriers to accessing public services?"