Scribbles

I had a dream last night. I had just arrived in a country on field mission, and had left my computer bag and suitcase in the car while having a quick bite in a restaurant on the way from the airport. When I came back, the windows were open and everything in the car was stolen.

Made me think of the times I have been robbed. Knowing I have been to the world’s worst (and poorest) places, only few times actually:

Once my attache case was stolen from the car in Goma. In Kampala, they opened a window on the ground floor and grabbed everything they could get hold of through the safety bars.
In transit from Angola to Malawi, they stole $1,000 from the double bottom in my camera bag in Zimbabwe.
And in Rome, they robbed the house I was living in, and nicked the GPS out of my car.

But once, I was really lucky. A few years ago, I was driving around in Kampala, trying to find a place that sold galvanized nuts and bolts – a rare commodity back then. After parking the car near the matatu station I sped out of the car to a shop, only to find that… I had no wallet. Went back to the car, and recalled I had put my wallet on my lap while driving. Probably it had fallen out of the car as I got out.
I was sitting in the car, my heart in my shoes (Flemish saying) while thinking of my wallet’s content: National and Ugandan ID card, credit cards, cash, drivers license, debit cards… God, it would take me ages to replace it all. And many phone calls to block all cards…

A guy knocked on the side window. He said “Are you missing anything, sir?”. “Yes”, I sighed. He asked: “I think I know where to get it, how much is it worth to you?” I answered: “Two hundred shilling”.
“Wait”, he mumbled and sped off.

A few minutes later, which seemed like hours, he re-appeared and gave me my wallet. I could not believe it. Everything was still in it. All credit cards, all papers, even the cash.

I could have kissed the guy. I gave him 300 shilling. He returned my gesture with a big smile. I waved and drove off. Thinking of how lucky, and how blessed I was that day.

Dambisa Moyo was born and raised in Zambia. She has a PhD in Economics from the Oxford University, a Masters from Harvard and an MBA in Finance from the American University in Washington DC.
She previously worked for the Worldbank, and in debt capital markets at Goldman Sachs. (Full)

Just to illustrate she is not “just anyone” when one considers the insights registered in her book “Dead Aid”, subtitled “Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa”.

From her website:

In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth.

In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the “need” for more aid.

Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in poverty—without reliance on foreign aid or aid-related assistance.

Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions.

There are a series of interesting articles covering her book and her opinions:
- The Anti-Bono (NY Times)
- Aid dependency blights Africa. The cure is in the credit crisis. (Independent)
- The road to ruin (Guardian)
- Everybody knows it does not work (Guardian)
More here.

Of course the aid “industry” has reacted. But barely. As of today, a Google search only shows two articles: A half-assed reply by the co-founder of “One” in the Financial Times, and a more relativating answer by the CEO of SOS Children UK.
Update: Feb 23: Another half assed answer by Oxfam

Dambisa clarifies in one article:

She makes it clear at the outset what kind of aid she means. She does not mean humanitarian or emergency aid, mobilised in response to calamities; she does not mean charity-based aid, given to specific organisations and people on the ground, in order to achieve specific things (she sits on the boards of several charities, one of which distributes antiretrovirals); she is hopeful about a new attitude to food aid, whereby the money is used to buy food from farmers within a country, and then distribute it to those in need, instead of flooding the place with foreign food that undercuts local growers. What she means is “systemic aid”, the vast sums regularly transferred from government to government, or via institutions such as the World Bank. (Full)

My response, as an aid worker, is this:

1. Don’t limit the discussion
If one limits the discussion only to aid given to a government (bilateral or via IMF/Worldbank), we are limiting the discussion too much. We do need to question any form of aid. Even though aid given to government institutions is an obvious (and easy) target of criticism.
But also humanitarian aid, emergency aid, should be looked at. Why, after decennia of foreign aid, is the West still crawling over each other to provide relief in cases of natural disasters? What is done to institutionally ensure these countries (which are always the same, by the way), can (mostly) take care of their own disaster response?

2. Aid has proven to be ineffective.
It is clear that traditional aid does not work. And has never worked. Otherwise aid organisations would have been able to prove at least some progress in countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, Afghanistan,…
If it took us 40-50 years to come to that conclusion, so bit it. A pity of the money wasted, but at least let’s start changing the mechanics now.

3. But everybody was happy?!
Aid has been a self-fulfilling and self-fueling economic mechanism. I have always said there are three markets in the world economy: the official market, the black market and the aid market.
All three keep the world economy turning. Unfortunately mostly the “first world economy”. Here is how I see it work:
- Too many donor governments are all too happy to channel foreign aid through whatever means. After all, they need to look good on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) performance scale. And it is good for public opinion. Helps get people re-elected.
- Too many aid organisations are all too happy to transform that donor money into projects. After all, they need to sustain themselves. No, or hardly ANY aid agency will turn down money from a donor. No matter how ridiculous or un-needed the targets are (hats off to MSF for refusing more Tsunami aid two weeks after the disaster, stating they had sufficient funding. Which aid agency would have the courage to do that?)
- So one loves to give, the other loves to accept. All happy-happy.
- Foreign “aid” as such is an industry by itself. It employs people, it keeps “the economy” running. But whose economy?
No surprise a lot, if not most, of the goods procured by aid organisations is produced in “the West”. Many services are procured from companies in “the West”. In this aspect, not much difference between “a war in Iraq” and “foreign aid”, is there? Both are wagging the dog of ‘our economy’.
- Foreign “aid” has been targeting mostly countries a donor country had a political, economical or military connection with. “Aid” was just a way of keeping government counterparts happy. No matter if the aid was effective or not. It kept the targeted country as an ally. We got cheap resources from them, or they did not ‘fall’ into the hands of the communists, or more recently in the hands of the islamists.

4. The worst was if aid would actually work
For the ‘west’, it has always been best if a developing country sitting on a lot of natural resources (oil, diamonds, gold, minerals) was unstable.
It was a way to get those resources cheaply. During the Angola civil war, their oil was sold for many years in advance, only to keep the cost of war going.
Look around you: which countries have gone through the most devastating levels of poverty and civil war? Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, DRC, Somalia, Sudan… I bet you if we make a top 10 list of the countries (in the world) with the longest civil wars, and you tick those with abundant natural resources, you would be surprised of the correlation.
OK, I will relativate: natural resources or a country’s strategic (political, religious or geographical) position.. Should cover all on the top 10, top 20 list.
So if aid would have been effective, and would have brought peace, prosperity or stability, in what way would it not have been decremental to the Western Economy? God forgive if a country like that would become an economical power. An independent political entity with its own mind. Gosh, think what that would have done to the political position of the powers-that-be?

5. So what is the way out?
- I agree with Dambisa: government to government aid does not work. As electorate, we should hold our governments accountable to give us real and verifiable figures of effectiveness.
- Worldbank aid does not work. Same thing: Show us verifiable figures of effectiveness.
- Effectiveness of aid in no matter what shape or form, should be measurable along the same criteria. Criteria should include clear and concrete targets from the onset, and measures of achievement. Aid should measured by the effectiveness for the individuals targeted, not by the effectiveness for institutions (which can not be measured).
- Any aid organisation, any humanitarian organisation should work on a voluntary funding basis. No guaranteed annual funding. Funding per project. You don’t perform? Next time you don’t get funding anymore. Worldbank the first to start.
- Aid, any aid, should be audited by external bodies. Objective figures should be provided for overhead.
- Aid, any aid, should be governed by the same measures of governance quality as the commercial market (as long as it is not the US-standards of governance. We all saw where that one brought us).
Why don’t we apply ISO-9002 to aid? Let’s make an ISO standard for aid. After all we spent trillions on aid. And it our money. Us, tax payers, need to know. We cry foul when we see the government wasting money on ineffective road building or useless prestige projects, but don’t cry foul when we pour billions over the ‘poor’? Because we get soft hearted when seeing children crying on TV? Think what you do to that child to ensure it stops crying the next year. And the year after. And the year after.

OkayOkayOkay. I am getting off my soapbox now.

Pictures courtesy deadaid.org, AP, princeton.edu and Logan Abassi (MINUSTAH)

“Tall trees catch a lotta wind”, the saying goes. With cost of UN peace keeping operations now peaking at US$8 billion per year, no wonder the troubled UN department is front page news (again).

Deploying and supporting its record number of 113,000 staff, the blue helmets came into the press cross-fire (again) due to the most recent debacles in DRC and Darfur where they don’t seem to have any direct positive impact on the peace process.

But one should look at both sides. It is all to easy to blame it on “the UN”, as if it was some piece of soap in a bathtub: difficult to grab, and a generic nuisance. “The UN” does what its memberstates define what it should do. If member states only want a ‘token’ peace force in some country, a ‘token’ it will remain, despite best efforts on the ground.

Two pieces I recently read, at least tried, to see things in perspective. One from the New York Times:

More than a decade after United Nations peacekeepers failed to prevent massacres in Rwanda and Srebrenica, Bosnia, what many consider the organization’s flagship mission appears to be slouching toward crisis once again, diplomats and other experts say.

The most immediate cause, they say, is a sharp rise in the number of peacekeeping commitments worldwide and a type of “mission creep” that has added myriad nation-building duties to the traditional task of trying to keep enemies apart. The new demands come at a time when member states with advanced armies in particular have become more resistant to committing additional troops or even necessary equipment like helicopters.

Those challenges have only added to a deeper and longstanding problem: the continued lack of clarity about how the United Nations should intervene when its members lack either the military force or the political will — or both — to halt carnage.

“Peacekeeping has been pushed to the wall,” said Bruce Jones, the director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, which is working with the United Nations on reform efforts. “There is a sense across the system that this is a mess — overburdened, underfunded, overstretched.” (Full)

And one from the book “Blood River” by Tim Butcher (more on this book in a later post):

I have seen numerous UN missions around the world, in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and all over the Middle east. Each was castigated by the international media and commentators for being inefficient, bureaucratic and ineffective, but such criticism always misses the point.

Yes, the missions are sloppy and poorly focused, but that is precisely because the international community’s attitude to complicated problems like the collapsing Yugoslavia, or rampaging west African rebels, is sloppy and poorly focused.

When the United Nations Security Council addresses these international problems, the questions it ends up answering is not ‘What is the right thing to do?’ but ‘What is the least we can do?’. UN missions around the world evolve at the pace of the lowest common denominator between the nations of the world, and that common denominator is pretty low when nations with interests as divergent as China and America both hold prominent positions in the UN Security Council.

Picture courtesy genetologisch-onderzoek.nl

Sometimes news about Zimbabwe makes me bitter. Sometimes, I can only get sarcastic. Like when I read this article:

Zimbabwe: Judge Accuses Grace Mugabe of Seizing His Seized Farm

A Zimbabwe High Court judge has accused President Robert Mugabe’s family of using political muscle to wrestle a farm allocated to him during the land seizures.

Court documents in our possession filed on November 10 last year show that High Court Judge Ben Hlatshwayo had been allocated Gwina Farm, located in Banket, Zvimba District, in Mashonaland West province and measures approximately 580 hectares.

Hlatshwayo’s affidavit exposes Mugabe and his family as multiple farm owners through their company Gushungo Holdings that carries out farming activities at Mazowe Farm, Sigaro Farm, Leverdale Farm and Bassiville Farm.

Gushungo Holdings is cited as the first respondent and the Minister of State for National Security, Land Reform and Resettlement is cited as the second respondent. (Full)

So I wonder what kind of conversation would have transpired between Mugabe and Judge Hlatshwayo. Maybe something like this:

- Hey Mug, this is H.
- …Hello?
- Mug?? This is H.
- [ticking against the phone]
- Mug???
- [background noise] Ah.. Yeah right.. Sorry, had it upside down.
- Mug?
- Yow! Woosdiz?
- Hey Mug, this is H.
- Yow H., my man, whatzup?
- Hey man. Lisssnn. Your woman is causing me grief, man!
- Which one?
- Grace. That one. She no good, man!
- Why?
- She seized my farm.
- Which one?
- Grace!
- No, which farm?
- Gwina.
- Where the %%$£ is Gwina?
- In Banket!
- Which one?
- Grace!
- No which village?
- Banket!
- No dude, we got no blankets here.
- No Banket, dude, Banket in Zvimba.
- [background noise, whispering] ..no, in Gwina.. [female voice screaming "lemme talk to that no-good judge"]…[background noise].. Hey H?
- How Mug !
- H, listen, dude, Grace says it’s hers.
- Which one?
- That farm.
- No dude, it’s mine!
- No, it’s hers!
- Hey, I seized it first. I seized it from that white dude.
- She says ‘no mind, I seize it from you’.
- But it’s mine, I seized it first!
- It no matter, she’s boss’ girl, she can seize all she can.
- But not from a me, I am a homie from your blingbling clan!
- No dude. She seizes.
- But dude, I will sue her sorry ass!
- Which one?
- Grace’s!
- Hey H, stay away from my woman’s ass!
- Dude, I will sue her sorry ass. And yours too!
- No you can’t!
- Yes I can. I am the judge-man!
- You no judge man for long then!
- Yes I am. I got that hammer thing!
- I will seize your hammer thing! I can seize all, I can. I seized the economy. I seized the government. I even seized the central bank, man. Your hammer is mine. Seized!
- Nooooo [whining] don’t seize my hammer thing! I only got one. But I got 30 seized farms!
- Hammer mine. Seized. Should’ve stayed away from my woman’s ass!
- But she seized my farm.
- No matter. She like second layer seiz… eh.. eh.. second layer seizer. She seized the farm. I seize your sorry ass. And the hammer.
- [click]
…

More satire on The Road

Cartoon courtesy The Economist

After seven years of work in Afghanistan, the U.S. government’s premier development agency continues to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually to private contractors that frequently fail to demonstrate results, according to aid workers, former diplomats and audits by the agency’s [Ed: USAID] inspector general.

President Obama said last week he was “committed to refocusing attention and resources on Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He named special envoy Richard Holbrooke to oversee aid and diplomacy in those countries. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she wants the U.S. Agency for International Development to assume development tasks ceded to the Pentagon.

Yet USAID’s multibillion-dollar Afghanistan reconstruction effort continues to struggle. Of six different audits conducted in the last year by the agency’s inspector general, only one found a program working largely as it was supposed to. (Full)

The article lists a summary of the different projects in USAID’s $7.9 billion spending in Afghanistan since 2002 and links to the audit reports.

Apart from the fact this is rather bad news for USAID, and the beneficiaries – the people of Afghanistan-, it begs to question “what can be done to make aid more efficient”?

To me, the aid organisations function in an “aid market economy”, with the same principles governing a market economy: reputation, marketing, reporting, performance, effectiveness, cost efficiency… Not -like the commercial market- with the goal to maximize profits, but the maximize aid efficiency.

You could apply the same principles from a commercial market to the “aid market”: demand and supply. The demand being “aid organisations requesting funding” and supply being “the world’s capacity to give”.

As, the supply is limited to “the world’s ability to ‘give’ “, say x billion USD per year, each development and aid organisation is competing for those funds, which are much more limited than the need.

What if we could instigate a bit more of the “market economy” dynamics to this equation? What if, just as a commercial company has to publish their net results at the end of the fiscal year, and has to prove its efficiency in its market to its stake holders, what if we institutionalize this better, and more transparently to the “aid business”?

What if we push more to have aid organisations concentrate on net returns: both short term and long term impacts of their programs? What if donors would push more for NGO’s, UN organisations, IO’s to have their operations surveyed by external auditors, and to have the reports made public (like this one from USAID)?

Would this not only ensure more efficiency of aid? Would this also not help donors assess where their ‘aid funds’ are better invested? And in the end, increase the net benefit to the stakeholders: the beneficiaries.

Otherwise the world can spend yet another century of aid. Ineffective aid.

Interested in aid and accountability: Check “Keeping a critical eye on aid & the UN” in the “Links: Aid Resources” header in the side column.
Picture courtesy Sabrina Quezada (WFP)