Ark Blogging: The British government’s new plan to get children learning

Over at the Ark blog:

"The new DFID education policy “Get Children Learning” was published last week. As its name suggests, the policy is all about moving the needle on learning outcomes. It sets out a strategy to tackle the learning crisis in developing countries, which has left 90 percent of primary school leavers in low-income countries without basic literacy or numeracy.  As a strategy, it’s relevant and ambitious, and it’s been widely welcomed by the education sector. 

Of course, tackling a crisis this deep and complex is easier said than done. So how does DFID plan to do it? 

Three priorities underpin DFID’s strategy to tackle the learning crisis and form the backbone of their new policy: better teaching, education system reform, and targeted support to the most marginalised kids. And permeating the strategy are three themes - more and better research; more attention paid to the political economy of education reform; and the “Best of British” - how UK expertise can be better leveraged to improving schools in developing countries.  These themes are interesting because each represents a fairly fundamental shift in or crystallisation of thinking from DFID, and together they provide some insight into how the strategy will be executed. The “Best of British” theme in particular reflects a new willingness by DFID to think more strategically about how to facilitate cross-system learning.

Read the rest here

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.

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?”"

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?"

Value for money in technical assistance to governments

The DFID project completion report is out (here) for the South Sudan ODI fellows from 2009-2012. It's pretty good. (this doesn't include my cohort).

the fellows delivered - and exceeded - the desired outputs and the programme has achieved - and exceeded - the desired outcome, at slightly under budget. Given the minimal oversight given to this programme by DFID South Sudan, a large part of the credit must go to the project partner, ODI, at least in respect of its selection and briefing of the fellows, who were very well suited to the tasks in hand. The majority of credit must, however, go to the fellows themselves, for undertaking their work professionally and working to sustainably build colleagues’ skills and capacity. 

Taking into account all of the evidence gathered in this review it seems clear that the ODI Fellowship for the Government of Southern Sudan programme delivered very strong VFM over the review period 2009 - 2012. It is an impressively performing programme, particularly given the difficult context to deliver results in South Sudan that it managed to overcome - if anything performing better in value for money terms than the global ODI programme did in more benign environments. 

This review found that the programme was implemented to expected timelines and budgets, with strong performance by the fellows translating into very strong performance on value for money metrics. The programme over-achieved in relation to the desired outputs and outcome, while making a small cost saving.

DevBalls - Exposing the absurdities of the aid industry

Someone at DFID seems to have had enough.

"DevBalls is an online space for comment on the international development aid industry. 

DevBalls is here because the aid industry has - functionally and morally - lost its way. And those who should hold it to account - the media, researchers, politicians - don’t. DevBalls is here because aid can only become better when its absurdities and hypocrisies are open to view. 

DevBalls is compiled by a group of aid professionals who control its content. We welcome relevant contributions sent to [email protected]. Anonymity is guaranteed."

The blogosphere has been pretty light on cyncial scorn since the demise of Bill Easterly's AidWatch, so DevBalls looks like one to watch. Won't be comfortable reading for DFID or ODI or ASI.

What should DFID do internationally (i.e. not in client countries)?

From the Development Studies Association:

DFID is discussing what their priority international actions should be over the next 2-5 years and beyond. By international actions they mean actions that use their spending, effort and influence to cause something to happen outside the borders of the intended beneficiary countries, but which indirectly benefits them. This broad definition includes global public goods, such as international financial regulations or a global climate deal; but also spending to alleviate problems with high spillover effects across many poor countries such as via peacekeeping efforts or communicable disease; or actions which improve the actions functioning of global markets. In short, they aim to refresh their possible international policy agenda with new or better ideas. 

Stefan Dercon has been asked to lead an initial consultation both within and outside DFID to set up a focused set of priorities and to ensure that DFID concentrates on those international actions that are both the most important for poverty reduction and where DFID could have the most impact.Please download a short note that sets out the task and the context.

Evidence on global education: A lit review in one chart

From Stefan Dercon's presentation at the recent "Town Hall" event on funding opportunities for international education research. He explains further in this blog post. Other presentations from representatives from the World Bank, USAID, and ESRC, are available here. 

DFID discovers "Economic Development"

Justine Greening sounded very pleased with herself this morning for discovering this thing called "economic development." Very impressive stuff from an "International Development" Minister. Actually the policy changes all sounds pretty reasonable and balanced. I like the talk of new partnerships between UK accountants, insurers, Stock Exchange folks, major retailers, and their counterparts in developing countries. Perhaps just a few things rankled:

"For the first time we have financed business projects in developing countries through returnable loans…which means our money comes back when businesses are successful."

Isn't that what the CDC has been doing since 1948?

"Smart aid can take the form of building a better tax regime, helping to reduce trade barriers, or giving entrepreneurs and small businesses an economic launchpad. 

It can also be focusing on what the Prime Minister calls the Golden Thread. In other words, helping to build the institutions, the values by which individual rights to liberty and property are safeguarded…elements that represent a green light to companies thinking about investing in a frontier economy."

I buy that aid can help improve tax regimes (look at Rwanda and Burundi) and reduce trade barriers. But build institutions? If the lesson you got from Acemoglu and Robinson is that aid can build institutions, I'm pretty sure you're reading it wrong.

"I’m acutely aware that Britain’s future economic strength depends on us increasing our global exports ... We all recognise the importance of the world’s new emerging powers ... But what about tomorrow’s BRICS and MINT countries? ... we could wait until these markets have grown, until they are less risky and the opportunities are more obvious. ... But how much better to start our relationships with these countries sooner rather than later." 

Which is basically fine in practice, but perhaps we should be careful about our language given that actually we started our relationships with most of these countries some time ago ...

(ahem: see the few countries that Britain has not invaded) 

... and that in many cases our self-interested engagement with developing countries didn't work out so well for them (see for example the mysterious case of the disappearing Indian colonial-era textile industry).

"As the Prime Minister has said, we’re in a global race and if we want to be ahead of the game, we can’t simply follow the crowd."

TOO MANY METAPHORS. And finally:

"Smart"

Does repeating the word 11 times make it so?

Statistical literacy at DFID

Some fascinating results from a new survey of DFID staff about their use and knowledge about evidence (credit to DFID for doing this and for publishing it), including these delicious stats:

84% seem to know what an RCT is
77% know what a census is, aaaaaaand
39% know what a national sample survey is.

hmmmmmmmmm........... maybe there is a point somewhere after all in all of this scepticism about the RCT hype ........?

New DFID Education Policy

DFID released a new "position paper" on education policy yesterday, with lots to like, and lots that chimes with how we are thinking about education at OPM.

First and foremost, the paper rightly places learning front and centre. It's really quite astonishing how neglected actual learning has been in the race to get kids into school, though as this paper shows this is starting to change.

Then there are mentions of the importance of noncognitive skills, of conceiving of education as a process of lifelong learning - including early child development, preschool, through to tertiary and technical education - and focusing on value for money*.

Then there are interesting innovations, such as Payment by results (reminiscent of CGD's "cash on delivery"), and exploring new ways of working with low cost private schools in Lagos and Sindh (OPM is working on research and evaluation for the Lagos project).

And lots of emphasis on research, including highlighting the Young Lives survey, talk of further longitudinal surveys, and a mention of the ESSPIN Nigeria survey some of my colleagues have been working on.

So what's missing?

Although the paper is right to place learning at the heart of the agenda, I don't think it really acknowledges just how little we actually know about how to improve learning. As Lant Pritchett demonstrates in his new book - if you add up all of the results from individual evaluations of various inputs, the total impact on learning outcomes just doesn't come close to getting us to where we want to be. 

This implies we need some radical experimentation. Payment by results and low cost private schools are two promising avenues, but given that this is, in DFID's words, a "learning crisis" - are these enough?

So what to do? Well firstly just more experiments, both large and small, and urgently. 

One idea would be to listen to the one thing that J-PAL and IPA are really pushing. After over a hundred large scale experiments and evaluations of education projects, they have one big idea, which happens to fit pretty neatly with DFID's agenda. This is remedial education, using young low-cost teaching assistants to help the weakest kids catch up. This is an idea developed by Indian NGO Pratham and with rigorous experimental evidence of impact, which IPA has taken and is working with the Government of Ghana to replicate and evaluate on a national scale, working through government systems. Why isn't DFID funding the next programme like this?

---

*As a sad little footnote, unsurprisingly DFID's worst value for money in education seems to be coming from, you guessed it;

"The cost of classroom construction, for example, ranges from $1,400 in Ethiopia to $30,400 in South Sudan, where years of conflict have dramatically increased the cost of materials and the mobility of skilled personnel.

Aid to Rwanda: "Best value for money in the world"

Tony Blair has an article in Foreign Policy backing aid to Rwanda, and Laura Seay responds here. I'm not going to get into that debate, beyond to say that on balance I think we probably should be restoring aid to Rwanda, but I was intrigued by this quote from TB:

"[Rwanda] is frequently cited for its aid effectiveness by the World Bank and Britain's Bilateral Aid Review acknowledged that aid to Rwanda "offers the best value for taxpayers' money in the world."

How are they measuring that value for money? I took a look at the DFID Bilateral Aid Review technical report. This constructs a Need-Effectiveness Index, which combines measures of poverty and state fragility (need) with a measure of governance (effectiveness). Rwanda comes in the top 25% on this index but not the top 10%. So that can't be the measure of "best value for money."

Maybe "value for money" is just referring to the effectiveness part of the index? This is captured entirely by the World Bank CPIA (Country Policy and Institutional Assessment). So I looked up the index (now renamed to IRAI which contains a nested acronym within an acronym - meta - "IDA Resource Allocation Index" - where IDA = International Development Association, the part of the World Bank which does grants and interest-free loans). The data is available here, and Rwanda scores very highly but not quite "the best" - stable at a score of 3.8 between 2009 and 2011 (where 1 is the lowest and 6 is the highest). The top country in 2011 (the latest publicly available ranking, remembering this is only "developing countries", I'm not going to get into how that is defined) is Georgia on 4.4. The top African country is Cape Verde (4.0) followed by Ghana (3.9).

So there you have it, Rwanda "offers the best value for taxpayers' money in the world" where "best" is defined as "amongst the best but not necessarily actually number 1" and "value for money" is measured exclusively by score on the World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (which to be fair is probably as reasonable a measure as actually exists).

Chart of the day: Evidence-based aid in the UK

This chart from the LSE "Impact of Social Science" handbook shows a ranking of UK government departments by the number of references to academic research found on their websites. DFID comes third.

A few reasons not to cut aid to Rwanda

The Rwandan High Commissioner to the UK has a good article in today's New Times on the aid cuts, highlighting the farce of continued donor failure to meet our own commitments on the predictability of aid. 

Budget support to Rwanda was frozen not because the country has failed to use it for the benefit of those who need it most, but to influence a political end in the DRC. There is no direct link between what is happening in the DRC and what aid achieves for ordinary Rwandan citizens. This is definitely not the right way to solve DRC’s problems. Rwanda should not be penalized for the failures of another country... 

One important point to underscore is that these political decisions directly affect the poor. They compromise the quality of aid which has an adverse effect on the quality of development outcomes and results. But fundamentally the belief that aid is primarily aimed at reducing poverty and improving the welfare of the poor is greatly undermined. Even ordinary citizens begin to perceive aid as a tool only intended for political control and to buy political leverage and influence. 

Well worth reading in full. Some of the points he makes include the frankly phenomenal successes that the Rwandan government has achieved over the past five years, with the support of foreign aid, such as

- the rapid growth in the economy, 
- the rapid fall in poverty, (faster than anywhere else in Africa, and amongst the fastest ever) 
- the rapid increase in agricultural output, 
- the rapid improvement in access to finance, 
- the improvements in healthcare (basically no malaria to worry about thanks to mass bednet provision), and
- increases in school enrolment.
- that people in Rwanda feel safe (the safest place in Africa?), 
- and see Rwanda as one of the least corrupt countries in Africa.

Despite this impressive progress, the government is impatient, and wants to deliver more and faster. A spokesperson for Tony Blair notes that "a recent study by the British Government showed that Rwanda was one of the most effective users of aid in the world."

Of course things in DRC are complicated and it's hard to know what is really going on, but I can't help feeling that putting all of these gains at risk by seriously threatening the economy of Rwanda is just a bit irresponsible.

(I should add that I'm presently in Kigali working on a project for the Government of Rwanda. These opinions are mine and only mine, so you can of course discount any of this as you wish, but the facts.... they are just facts).

What Works in Aid to Education

From a new review by Abby Riddell:

many of the lessons of what works in foreign aid to education are known, but they are not implemented. These lessons are of two sorts,  

1: the interface of aid with education systems in recipient countries To make a difference, what is of paramount importance is to start at the level of the whole education sector—rather than to pick out the sub-sector most popular with donors and channel a disproportionate share of funds to make this ‘work’ better, for this distorts a government’s sector-wide planning. [Ed: Girl's Education anyone??]

2: the ‘nuts and bolts’ of education systems themselves—what makes them work, how the different bits fit together and how aid monies can distort priorities, making the government co-ordination efforts more difficult as well as creating fragmented accountability. Add to this the projectized capacity development and the untouched institutional or organizational development, together with any lack of leadership or ownership of the capacity development, and the distorting influence of aid monies likely trumps their contributions.

Cash transfers in Northern Kenya

The BBC have a short clip here of the new DFID Minister Justine Greening visiting the Hunger Safety Net Programme in Northern Kenya, where eligible households are said to get $40 every couple of months via a "Smartcard."



OPM is managing the evaluation of the project: you can see the Year 1 impact report here.

Dowden on DFID

Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society on the new DFID Ministers. Interesting stuff.

How does it look from Africa? Two things matter for African presidents and ministers. They like to establish personal relationships and trust in face to face talks with the same people over a long period. Secondly they like to deal with people who know something about their country’s history. They do not like ministers who talk down to them (as Mitchell did) or those who just read a brief on the plane as they fly in (as Douglas Alexander did). 

The recent reshuffle ignores these aspects and casts doubt over how much this government cares about development and its relations with Africa.

... 

[Greening] talks of a line by line investigation to ensure value for money which sounds good, but is actually nonsense. How can someone with no experience of development, with an annual accounts mentality, judge the value of long term development projects?

... 

although the indications are not propitious for a dynamic team working creatively to help get Africa nearer to the MDG targets in the next three years, I will not write off any of these appointments. But they look more like internal political expediency than what Africa and the rest of the developing world needs right now.

DFID Livelihoods Program in South Sudan

DFID is planning to spend up to £100 million on food security and livelihoods in South Sudan over the next 5 years, the largest of all its programs. Is that a lot or a little?

DFID's expected results in this area are to support 1 million people to achieve food security.

Not knowing the details of the program, I am going to imagine for a second that DFID has a zero-overhead cash transfer or food voucher planned. 

£100 million over 5 years, divided between £1 million people, is 5.4 pence a day each. 

"Hello there Mr. Deng, here's 5 pence, buy yourself a sandwich yeah? Go nuts with it, I'll give you another 5p tomorrow! Sorted yeah?"

So - to get to an even slightly more realistic sufficient basic daily income, all we need is for economies of scale, support to production, and that vocational training, to have a 1000% return. Good job that we have all that evidence about the massive massive returns to livelihoods programs. Wait...

Shameless self-promotion

More from the UK Parliament International Development Committee report on DFID support to South Sudan:

DFID also helps to fund the secondment of ODI Fellows to key ministries such as the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning—which is generally regarded to be one of the better ministries in Juba. It was clear that the ministers we spoke to highly valued this technical expertise.

British MPs on UNMISS

This comment from Tom is worth repeating:

It's worth quoting the whole of the section of the executive summary of the Commons International Development Committee on South Sudan: "UNMISS...has been slow to produce a peacebuilding strategy. UNMISS is also a hugely expensive operation, costing the UK taxpayer £60 million in its first year—two thirds of DFID’s annual development and humanitarian budget. UNMISS does not currently provide value-for-money and its resources have not been deployed most effectively. The UK Government should press the UN for an urgent review of UNMISS’s cost, mandate, assets and operations."

Here is the link to the full report.