Pop Goes The Weasel

The End of the Beginning

2011-12-31T12:57:00.002Z

I've decided to close this blog.

A visceral disgust in development NGOs' unwillingness to be open with their donors prompted me to start back in 2007. I was shocked that these do-goody organisations feared transient negative publicity more than long-term ineffectiveness.

Along the way I've been pleasantly surprised at the power that can result from good arguments and a means to communicate with the world. When I started I had no idea that what I wrote would be heard outside of the echo chamber, let alone persuade DfID, Oxfam and others to open up.

2011 saw a sea change in attitudes towards open data in development and there are now major organisations such as Publish What You Fund, aidinfo and IATI working towards these ends. I feel we've turned a corner now and it's time for this blogger to hang up his hat.

Thanks for following - and please do stay in touch through my profile.

Oxfam commits

2011-11-30T21:34:00.002Z

Here's an interesting post about Oxfam's commitment to publish to the IATI standard.

It's fantastic to see how seriously they are taking the responsibility. They've come a long way since 2007, when their reluctance to publish first inspired this blog.

Kevin Starr at IIT Design Research Conference 2010

2011-08-28T13:45:00.001+01:00

Kevin Starr at IIT Design Research Conference 2010 from IIT Institute of Design on Vimeo.

2011-07-31T14:20:00.008+01:00

In response to the Information Commissioner's decision notice about my FOI request for information in DfID's ARIES database, DfID sent me a CD with this Excel file.

It contains internal performance scores for about 2,800 projects conducted by DfID. Most of the scores were recorded either as part of a project's annual review or when a project finished.

I have conducted a very preliminary exploration of the data, which shows the variation in the performance of DfID's programmes (called 'Budget centres'):

[This table is based on the most recent (non-zero) output scores for each project that had them. 'Budget centres' with only 1 project are not shown]

Even this initial examination of the data poses some interesting questions about what is being funded and makes one curious to know more. Why have projects in Liberia done so well while those in Rwanda have floundered?

The dataset also contains information on projects which have had their funding suspended, information about the perceived risk of each project and detailed information about the desired outputs from each project. I hope others will help integrate this dataset with other datasets to reveal new patterns.

The letter I received from DfID made the point that under the UK Aid Transparency Guarantee "from 2011/12 onwards, project scores will be published as part of ARs [Annual Reviews] and PCRs [Post Completion Reports] and as a separate dataset". This is particularly encouraging as it would mean that the publication of performance information would be standard and regular, rather than only in response to ad hoc requests like this.

2011-06-28T20:39:00.002+01:00

The full text of the decision notice from the ICO is now available for those who are interested.

Decision time

2011-06-25T09:12:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I received the Decision Notice from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) about my FOI request for the project information in DfID's ARIES database.

Almost 2 years after I originally made the request, the ICO has found partly in my favour: DfID must publish 64 fields relating to the 8,000 projects in the database.

However, 6 of the fields - those which contain comments relating to project performance - have been withheld under the argument that their disclosure would be likely to inhibit civil servants' ability to freely and frankly exchange views and advice.

According to the letter (which will be published on the ICO's website), DfID must publish the information within '35 calendar days' of 23 June 2011.

What's going to be released? The Decision Notice only shares the titles of the fields but together with this user guide to the ARIES database (PDF), we can guess at what is likely to be most interesting:

'Total impact score' - a measure of how effectively the project achieved each of its outputs
'Output risk' - a measure of the risk of project failure
'Disbursement suspended' - information relating to the suspension of disbursement
'Method of scoring' - whether reviews were conducted by DfID staff, consultants, etc

It is really exciting that so much information will be released and I look forward to examining it and mashing it up with other datasets. Hopefully the data publication won't be a one-off: it would be great if the fields were regularly published on DfID's website.

What's been refused? The fields which won't be released contain comments made by DFID staff and partners in relation to the projects under review. The ICO argues (para 88) that because some of these comments "could potentially embarrass foreign governments", their disclosure could make civil servants "more circumspect in expressing their views about the performance of a project" - and that this would therefore make them less able to provide free and frank advice.

This makes sense. But here's a question: wouldn't it be possible for each of the records to be assessed to determine which records are sensitive and which are not? Not according to the Decision Notice: DfID explained to the ICO that doing so would place "an impossible burden on the department", particularly since the expertise required to do such a review is spread right across the organisation. It is obviously not right to place such a burden on DfID and I accept the Commissioner's decision on this.

Stepping back from this particular FOI request, we are still left with the problem that rich information about what works (and doesn't work) in development will still be withheld from the public domain. Perhaps the problem could be approached in a different way? Rather than attempting to review the entire dataset at one fell swoop, a team from DfID or ICAI could annually review a subset of the comments (say, for projects completed 1 year previously) and determine which information could be released and what should be redacted. At least then there would be a mechanism for releasing the raw data - and ensuring it isn't lost to the sands of time.

It is clear that a lot of people worked hard to respond to this request. My thanks go to everyone at DfID and the ICO who were involved.

DfID's muscle

2011-06-14T18:47:00.002+01:00

According to this FOI response I received from DfID, from next financial year NGOs which are funded through a Programme Partnership Arrangement (PPA) will be required to publish information about DfID-funded projects in line with IATI standards.

The requirement to publish data in the IATI standard by 2012/13 forms part of the Memorandum of Understanding between DfID and the organisations (para 19).

According to the accompanying letter:

"Each PPA partner is required to submit an annual report to DFID for appraisal. The format of this report has still to be finalised but it is intended that it will include a requirement for all PPA partners to show the progress they are making towards becoming IATI compliant."

DfID should publish these annual reports automatically (but if they don't I expect they'll be obtainable under FOI).

About 40 of the largest development NGOs receive funds from DfID through the PPA. Once each NGO has set up the mechanisms for publishing DfID-funded projects in IATI format, there won't be any excuse for not publishing information about all their other projects too.

Make Aid Transparent

2011-06-08T01:00:00.002+01:00

Great video from Publish What You Fund to launch their new Make Aid Transparent campaign.

Their website encourages people to sign a petition asking governments to provide better information about the aid they distribute.

The recent AidWatch 2011 report scored European donor countries according to their transparency. As a rough calculation, if we divide each country's aid spend by its transparency score then we can identify the countries where improvements would have the greatest effect.

France and Germany come bottom of the list. They are each responsible for about €9 billion of aid (2009 ODA figures) but scored dreadfully on transparency across the board.

Let's hope this campaign concentrates on these two laggards.

unique ideas about unique ids

2011-05-22T17:07:00.006+01:00

I recently came across opencorporates.com, a madly ambitious project from the prolific Chris Taggart.

The website started in Dec 2010 as an open database of all companies in the UK - based on scraping the Companies House website. It has since gone global: by recruiting other scrapers, opencorporates now contains details of companies in over 20 jurisdictions.

It looks like it could soon become the world's central database of corporations.

The power of a database like this comes when it is connected to other databases. Like this list of all organisations funded by DfID for example. (Most will be registered as a corporation, even if they are also registered as a charity or NGO).

If the databases were connected then we could receive updates every time information about any of the organisations funded by DfID changed - for example every time a Director left, an annual report was submitted or the company changed registered address. In time, if other datasets were also connected, we could conceivably get updates every time any of the organisations was taken to court - or every time a press release was written about them.

This brave new world of linked data is coming fast. For the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), it it is crucial that donors use unique identifiers (based on their registered company number) when referring to other organisations, so that this data can be connected to other datasets.

Although DfID should be applauded for being the first donor to publish data in the IATI format, not including unique identifiers for recipient organisations is a big omission.

If DfID know the company numbers for organisations they fund, then they should include them in their IATI data release; if they don't know them then they should start collecting them.

New ICO update

2011-04-18T22:22:00.001+01:00

Another update from the ICO on my FOI request. Don't hold your breath!

"The draft decision is now with the designated signatory awaiting the final review before it is issued. We are nearly there now and hopefully a decision will be made fairly soon.

I apologise that it has taken us longer than expected to issue a decision. I can assure you that it is primarily to do with the complicated nature of the information under consideration rather than any avoidable delays on our part."

ICO update

2011-01-04T21:33:00.003Z

Just heard from the Information Commissioner's Office on their handling of my Freedom of Information complaint. The officer handling the complaint emailed me:

"The Department responded to a number of my queries between September and November last year. I had to then seek input from our policy team. I am currently in the process of setting up a meeting with one of our signatories and other managers to further discuss some of the issues raised by the Department’s response.

Although I cannot specifically indicate when the investigation would be completed, I should point out that we are aiming to close all freedom information cases which were created before April 2010 by the end of March 2011. Your complaint was processed on 24 February 2010."

Which I think means they are still working on it.

Pro-ability

2010-12-30T22:32:00.002Z

I've just finished Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, whose radical individualist philosophy is provocative and challenging.

At its heart, the book is an argument for the human mind: she argues that science, medicine, industry - progress - result from brilliant people applying reason to the problems they face.

However much ordinary folk toil in labour, she says, it is only the creative, intelligent, fearless few who invent and lead, so producing value in the capitalist system and driving forward humanity.

How many people could have discovered electricity? How many people could have produced the ipad?

Perhaps there is a rather unpalatable fact that some people, by their genes, or upbringing or disposition, are always going to be more productive than others.

It may not be fair and it may not be the way we would have wished it to be. But if it is an historical fact that the effort of a few individuals has been central to human progress, then shouldn't this fact be reflected in development policy?

What would a 'pro-ability', rather than a 'pro-poor' policy look like? What would we change if we wanted to maximise achievement rather than fairness?

Here are some ideas:

Maths, science and technology olympiads for a country's brightest students
Overseas university scholarships for promising students (with a monetary incentive to live in-country after graduation)
Seed funding for entrepreneurs who have shown early signs of success

txteagle

2010-11-02T22:27:00.002Z

I've just learned about txteagle, a company that connects organisations to the millions of mobile phone users in East Africa.

Nathan Eagle, CEO, suggests that western firms break their tedious tasks down into SMS-sized chunks and pay a few pennies for each one that's completed. It's Amazon's Mechanical Turk taken to extreme.

Couldn't txteagle also be used to gather feedback on development projects? The service is big in Kenya. People on the ground could tell us how this is getting on for example.

Chartjunk

2010-10-01T19:42:00.004+01:00

Earlier this week Publish What You Fund produced an 'interactive map' of UK aid spending in conjunction with Open Knowledge Foundation.

I have a lot of time for these two organisations but unfortunately the tool they've produced is pretty lame (in their defence they say it's "work in progress"). Here's what's wrong with chartjunk like this:

Circles are misleading graphical elements since it is more difficult for the human eye to compare areas than to compare lengths (as you would with e.g. a bar chart).
It is difficult to compare one year to the next, since the circles move position and many of them are not labelled.
The provenance and accuracy of the data is not made clear and the 'More info...' button doesn't ever fulfil its promise.
It is not immediately apparent which circles are subsets of other circles (i.e. 'India' is in 'South' and 'Asia' but 'Bangladesh' is not in 'India')
There is no comparison with any other dataset so there it is difficult to make any new insights.

What would be a better way to explore the data provided DfID?

I've put the dataset on UK aid spending together with this data on time required to start a business, collected by the World Bank.

It's not the sort of comparison you usually see. Hopefully the resulting chart is interesting (look out for the log scale on the y-axis to spread out the data points).

Quibbling

2010-09-28T20:05:00.004+01:00

Last week NPC published an excellent report calling for charities to be more willing to publish evidence of their impact. The researchers write:

When surveyed, donors consistently say that the two most important factors in trusting charities are how the money is spent and what it achieves. For ‘informed donors’, annual reports, annual reviews, impact reports and charity websites will be their first port of call to find out what they want to know. If charities are not communicating their impact in these materials, donors will look elsewhere for those that are.

The report analyses the annual reports of 20 large charities (including Salvation Army) and shows how they largely fail to communicate the difference they have made to people's lives (their outcomes) - even though most are good at describing what they do (their outputs).

I have only one quibble with the report (there always has to be a quibble): while the researchers always name specific charities when they highlight 'examples of good practice', they couch criticism in general terms so that specific poor performers aren't identified.

Maybe they felt that naming and shaming organisations would be unfair since they were randomly chosen? Or that it would be pointless because people generally learn from good - not bad - practice?

But the mistake of this approach is to believe that organisations are willing to be transparent, if only they were shown how.

The truth is that charities choose to remain opaque because it is risky - in terms of both income and reputation - to tell the truth. If it were to name and shame, NPC would help rebalance the equation by making it more costly for charities to avoid publishing their outcomes.

PS Check out OpenCharities - hopefully the seed of a new platform for collaborating about charity outcomes.

Haddads and Haddad-nots

2010-09-08T20:56:00.005+01:00

The Institute of Development Studies today released a report based on a survey of people in the UK.

The press release seems bland enough but IDS Director Lawrence Haddad's quote contains slippery logic:

This survey suggests development charities and the Government need to take a fresh approach to engaging with the public about aid. We need to hear more from the people whose lives have been changed by aid. We should do more to understand what UK taxpayers' need to hear to be convinced that aid works. And we need to be honest about what works and what doesn't, so we can learn for the future.

I actually think the opposite is true:

We need to hear more from the people whose lives were not changed by aid. UK taxpayers should do more to understand what the aid sector needs to hear to be convinced that there is a transparency problem. We need to demand information about what works and what doesn't, so that we ensure that the aid sector learns from the past.

Won't somebody please think of the children?

2010-09-01T22:53:00.006+01:00

After every high there is a comedown.

Yesterday I uploaded Oxfam's spending data but today I received a reply from Save the Children, repeating their refusal to publish what they fund.

Frankly I consider their argument to be absurd:

I have investigated this further for you and for security reasons we wouldn't be able to give you the names and locations of our overseas projects. If we were to make this information public it could put our overseas staff and the children within our projects at risk.

The problem with making the 'security argument' is that lots of things could put people at risk. Inevitably we have to draw the line and say that the likely benefits of action outweigh the potential risks.

In any case it would be reasonable for Save the Children to choose not to disclose details about a minority of projects if they were particularly sensitive (this is what Oxfam have done).

One can't help but think that there are more risks to the NGO's reputation than there are to children's lives. In fact, it's more likely that children's lives would be improved if aid agencies embraced transparency, rather than cowered from it.

Information wants to be free

2010-08-30T17:29:00.006+01:00

Oxfam has broken ranks.

In response to my formal complaint that the NGO was breaching its 'Open Information Policy', Oxfam have sent me the details of every overseas project they funded in 2009-10.

They admitted there had "been a breakdown in our internal communications" and that the information should have been made available immediately. Thanks to Joss Saunders (Company Secretary) for doing the right thing!

The spreadsheet of all 1017 projects is now online. It contains the title, location and allocated funds for every project in 2009-10. I had to scan in the list (the originals are here) so some of the titles have come out a bit dodgy (but I typed in the expenditures so they should be kosher).

As far as I'm aware this is the first time a major British international development NGO has published their spending to this level of detail. It's a really exciting time for the open aid data movement.

Some of the projects have laughable names: "Social dialogue and pedogic strategy on racism in Guatemala [sic]" and "Promoting active citizenship for the Right to the City in Cochabamba". But let's not judge a project by its title. Instead we should encourage Oxfam to release more information about the purpose and evaluation of these projects so that they can be properly judged.

One interesting thing I've noticed is that the funding for the projects follows a log-normal distribution (see the chart here). So the small projects are tiny compared to the big ones. If we look more closely at the data we can see that Oxfam is active in about 60 countries, but in about half of these it spends less than a £1m (at that level of funding a country office can't do much more than maintain a physical presence). Wouldn't it be better if Oxfam concentrated on making a measurable difference in just a few places?

There's obviously a lot more analysis to be done. What's interesting about working with this data is that as soon as you have it you want to know more: 'what is this project?', 'why was so much spent on that?', 'were any of them effective?' Hopefully the pressure on Oxfam (and others) to publish aid data will grow - and not diminish - as a result of them taking this first tentative step towards greater transparency.

2010-08-21T16:05:00.000+01:00

Share your failures on FAILfaire.

Déjà vu all over again

2010-08-02T22:07:00.004+01:00

In 2008 I asked 8 large international development charities to provide a detailed breakdown of their spending that year. None were able to.

In July 2010 I repeated the exercise with the same charities to see if anything has improved. It hasn't.

Here's what I requested, for each overseas project funded in 2009-10: 1) the name of the project 2) the location of the project 3) the total expenditure on the project in 2009-10. You can read the original emails here.

ActionAid - directed to Annual Report
British Red Cross - directed to Annual Report
Cafod - directed to Annual Report
Care International - no response
Christian Aid - directed to Annual Report
Oxfam - directed to Annual Report
Plan International - no response
Save the Children - directed to Annual Report
Tearfund - directed to Annual Report

(NB. None of the Annual Reports has the list of all funded projects that I was after)

All the organisations claim to support transparency. ActionAid, Plan, Save the Children and Oxfam are signatories to the INGO Accountability Charter. This states that "By signing this Charter we seek to promote further the values of transparency and accountability that we stand for, and commit our INGO to respecting its provisions." What's the point if they won't answer a simple query about spending?

Others have produced 'Open Information Policies' (lite versions of Freedom of Information) - ActionAid, Save the Children, Christian Aid and Oxfam all promise to release information in response to these sort of requests. But when a request is actually made, they balk.

So it seems that we are in an odd situation where all of the organisations agree with the transparency argument and understand its importance for donors, taxpayers, partner organisations and aid recipients. But they don't know how to change their organisations so that a standard request for information is responded to properly.

PS I'm going to submit formal complaints to the 4 organisations with Open Information Policies - I'll let you know how I get on!

Sharpening the knife

2010-07-05T07:54:00.002+01:00

Yesterday's Telegraph reported that DfID has conducted a study into the effectiveness of UK's aid (it is not entirely clear whether this is new or not). Andrew Mitchell seems to be softening up his department for cuts.

The department has further admitted to inaccuracies in many of the self-assessments of its initiatives – suggesting that the true proportion of failing projects could be as high as one-third.

2010-06-24T18:22:00.000+01:00

From AidWatch

Hogging the limelight

2010-06-04T14:07:00.003+01:00

Becky Hogge has completed an impressive study of how open data initiatives can be encouraged in middle income and developing countries.

The study starts with an interesting section on the unfolding story of how 'free our data' campaigns in the US and UK gained traction. It goes on to examine the factors that might facilitate or obstruct similar developments in other countries.

There are several unexpected findings - such as that the 'middle layer' of engaged and skilled bureaucrats was crucial to government data being opened up.

Becky also draws attention to the important differences between the political economies of developed and developing countries, such as the presence of a 'fourth tier' of donors. She quotes Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan activist:

“I think in many cases NGOs hold just as much data as the Government. And so I’ve always argued that similar efforts [should be directed at NGOs], especially in Africa where NGOs are so involved in health or water, or disease. You’ve seen the World Bank starting to release its data sets now, but they’re sometimes just as bad as Government in terms of holding onto information.”

2010-06-01T08:02:00.002+01:00

Number 10 has today issued a press release including the following commitment:

Full information on all DFID international development projects over £500 to be published online from January 2011, including financial information and project documentation.

I'm not yet sure what the implications of this are and whether it will include performance information.

Fed up, not fed back

2010-05-29T19:29:00.004+01:00

In lots of ways, going round the feedback loop is getting faster and faster.

Get Satisfaction gives you real-time feedback from customers on their experience with your products.
Five Second Test gives you real-time feedback from the public on how they interact with your designs.
Twitter gives you real-time feedback from your friends, co-workers, customers and stakeholders on all your actions and your thoughts.

But what's happening to the feedback loop in development?

William Easterly rightly says:

We need to be getting more and more creative about systems of decentralized evaluation and more informal kinds of feedback on aid projects, taking into account the real challenges such systems face so that they are accurate and representative of beneficiaries. The internet and cell phones make such systems much more feasible now. Some NGOs are already experimenting, like my pals at globalgiving.com.

2010-05-29T17:37:00.003+01:00

Glasspockets, a project run by the US-based Foundation Center, is a project encouraging charitable foundations to be transparent in their giving.

They've got an excellent Grants Database that exerts subtle peer pressure on recalcitrant foundations. And they've constructed a set of performance indicators that international development NGOs and other donors could learn from.

Not yet expired

2010-05-29T17:22:00.002+01:00

If you don't already read Owen Barder's blog, you should.

Here's his concise summary of the new aid agenda. Follow the links for the full presentation too.

GOV vs NGO

2010-05-29T17:03:00.005+01:00

Last month Martin Brookes, New Philanthropy Capital, argued for charities to be legally required to publish performance data. This is a great idea that I have highlighted on this blog previously.

The problem is there is effectively zero public pressure for this.

The Freedom of Information Act was only introduced after decades of campaigning by individuals and organisations philosophically committed and institutionally designed to keeping check on the state (aside: check out these fascinating first issues of the 'Secrets' magazine from 1984 onwards).

As long as there aren't organisations that represent charity-givers the government won't legislate in this area. What we need is an association that derives its legitimacy from a broad base of support among regular charity-givers. It would be dedicated towards improving the effectiveness of charities and advising members on where to put their money.

(New Philanthropy Capital is an interesting organisation but seem to be more of a consultancy for high-value donors than a broad association for all charity-givers).

In my opinion only a body like the one I've described could effectively mount a campaign for the legislation that Martin rightly calls for.

back-door progress

2010-05-25T19:03:00.009+01:00

This blog began in response to the reluctance of 8 British international development NGOs to reveal what projects they fund.

In the last year we have seen the World Bank, DfID and other governmental and multilaterial donors opening up their data and providing detailed breakdowns of their expenditure.

But despite a lot of promises, NGOs have failed to follow suit.

Increasingly I think that NGOs will only release their data if they are made to do so by either governments or individual charity-givers. Without significant external pressure, they simply won't do it.

Now there is place that this pressure might come from: concern about terrorist financing.

In 2007 the Home Office and Treasury conducted a review of charity rules that called for more transparency. But the response from the sector was so ferocious that they took that line no further.

Now fast-forward to March 2009: the European Council has just published the 'Stockholm programme' which is all about anti-terrorism.

One of the measures is:

"promote increased transparency and responsibility for charitable organisations with a view to ensuring compatibility with Special Recommendation (SR) VIII of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)"

The Financial Action Task Force is an intergovernmental organisation originally designed to stop drug trafficking and money laundering. After 9/11 it was charged with tackling international terrorist financing.

Its ominous-sounding Special Recommendation VIII includes:

"Non-profit organisations are particularly vulnerable, and countries should ensure that they cannot be misused...to conceal or obscure the clandestine diversion of funds intended for legitimate purposes to terrorist organisations"

Eurosceptics have been spooked. Statewatch have released a briefing expressing concern about NGO independence. It seems as if the idea of binding Europe-wide rules has been rejected.

It will be interesting to see if this goes any further. My hunch is that anti-terrorism measures have a life of their own. Despite his Euro-bashing, even David Cameron might adopt Recommendation VIII if there is another attack.

Then a step towards charity transparency would have been introduced by the back door.

2010-04-13T23:18:00.003+01:00

Interesting article in the Independent about a Freedom of Information request to DfID about overseas corruption which has been refused out of fear of harming international relations.

At least the new Information Commissioner seems to be more bold in tackling the culture of non-disclosure in public authorities.

"It can't go on forever. At some point, you have to call people's bluff."

Hopefully this case will be overturned on appeal.

Really Simple Silly

2010-03-02T18:52:00.002Z

DfID has finally published RSS feeds for the project information database.

For some reason they chose to provide feeds for only some of the countries in which DfID works. After 5 minutes tinkering I managed to get the country-specific feeds in Yahoo Pipes.

If you want to access this then go here, type in the country name (default is Indonesia), click 'Run Pipe' and then click 'Get as RSS'. That should let you monitor one particular country without being bombarded by information about others.

I see, oh!

2010-02-24T19:24:00.003Z

I know that some of you have been following my FOI request to DfID for performance information.

Today I submitted a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) about the way it's been handled.

In my view DfID have misapplied the exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act in their attempt to avoid publishing this information (you can read the details in the complaint itself).

The complaint to the ICO has been kindly supported by Andrew Mitchell MP (Shadow Secretary of State for International Development), Karin Christiansen (Publish What You Fund) and Toby Mendel (Centre for Law and Democracy). Many thanks to them all!

Snow white and the 7 dwarfs

2010-01-30T19:00:00.007Z

Today I've written a short paper outlining 7 proposals for the UK's Department for International Development (DfID).

I've tried to highlight practical ideas which haven't already had much coverage (although you might still have come across some some already, or even thought of them yourself).

All of the proposals stem from a desire to fix the 'broken feedback loop' - between aid beneficiaries - and decision-makers, tax-payers and charity-givers.

After the general election, there's a big opportunity for the new International Development Minister to tackle this problem. They're going to need all the help they can get.

The paper isn't meant to be a comprehensive solution to the aid sector's problems. Incremental improvements are usually more profitable than grand strategies.

If you have any thoughts - supportive or critical - then please do share them.

2010-01-26T21:44:00.007Z

Here's a crucial exchange from the Committee of Public Accounts' grilling of DfID staff about aid to Malawi:

Chairman: We know that if you put enough money into any scheme you will achieve something, but we are a value for money committee, we are looking at efficiency...

Dr Shafik: ...I think the NAO Report does also say that the DFID programme in Malawi has contributed clearly to poverty reduction...

Chairman: I am not arguing about that. That was precisely why I said what I said. If you spend enough money you are going to achieve something, but what I want to know is how can we as a value for money committee be assured that you are achieving value for money when clearly you are lacking in data about how effective your programmes have been in terms of value for money?

But obtaining better data on aid effectiveness is two-fold:

The easy part is to demand more evaluations and to demand that they are of higher quality.

The difficult part is designing interventions which are evaluable in the first place. That is, funding projects which can be subjected to a clear, fair and unambiguous test of whether they have succeeded or failed.

How much will aid have to change to become evaluable?

2010-01-24T16:55:00.002Z

Here is a startling account of how organisations resist criticism and change.

The following is an excerpt from Burt Perrin's review of DfID evaluations (p.17), which was commissioned by the Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact.

A key issue regarding the role of committees and DFID managers concerns their authority with respect to commenting upon and approving deliverables, in particular drafts of final reports. Frequently, management and/or steering groups will provide very detailed comments, sometimes using Track Changes, to ‘suggest’ changes or even rewriting parts of drafts, deleting some critical comments and replacing these with other more positive statements. These ‘comments’ are sometimes strident and very directive.

In my view, such ‘feedback’ provided to almost all the evaluations reviewed represents a clear threat to their independence. In most cases, it appears that evaluation teams were able to deal with requests for inappropriate modifications in a responsible fashion. But this can be difficult, where even the expectation of negative reaction to critical comments can lead to self censorship. In my view, there are two studies, the Private Sector Infrastructure evaluation and the Pakistan country programme evaluation, which clearly crossed the line such that their independence was compromised...

In the former case, very strong demands for change to drafts were made, including indicating what the evaluation ‘needs’ to say. Important considerations were omitted from consideration or changed from evaluation questions to assumptions, including questions raised in the terms of reference and the preliminary literature review (whether or not infrastructure support necessarily contributes to poverty reduction, and the value of a facility approach itself).

In the case of Pakistan, some documentation was withheld from the evaluation team on the grounds of confidentiality. The evaluators also were very clearly and strongly told that they just could not say certain things that the Government of Pakistan at the time might find objectionable, out of concern for ‘sensitivity’, even though this included reference to a published article in a UK newspaper (e.g. ‘We cannot allow the sort of judgement in this sentence in what will, effectively, become a public document … The regime and media here will not make the distinction between us and our consultants.’).

For these and other reasons, it was not possible for the evaluation report to speak of the actual reasons for some of the reported findings. There were also separate internal reports that call into question the transparency and integrity of the formal published evaluation report and the management response.

Rotten Controlling Technocrats

2010-01-24T15:14:00.006Z

William Easterly has co-published a new book of essays on Randomised Control Trials (RCTs). RCTs are a way of rigorously evaluating interventions in a similar way to medical trials.

In a recent talk he gave a forceful explanation of why economists should be 'thinking small' like this when assessing what works:

What we can say now is that this attempt to find the determinants of growth has failed so decisively, so comprehensively, that anyone today who makes any policy recommendation based on a growth regression has zero credibility.

Instead, he argues, RCTs should be used to measure the effectiveness of small-scale interventions. Those shown to work can then be rolled-out more widely.

Some critics have argued that a positive RCT result in one context doesn't necessarily mean the intervention will be successful elsewhere.

I think this line of argument will lose its power over time, as more and more trials are conducted. Once hundreds or thousands of trials have been done, people will have the information to adapt interventions to new contexts.

I'm in no doubt that RCTs offer an exciting new way to approach aid effectiveness. But there's one remaining concern, which few commentators have written about.

RCTs try and make development evaluation a scientific discipline. I firmly believe it is wrong to present 'science' as the only route to knowledge - especially when considering people's lives.

Let's not forget that 'scientific thinking' was at the heart of many fascist and socialist movements. Science has a self-legitimising power which can be very difficult to keep in check.

How will we cope with RCT results that suggest unpalatable or unethical interventions?

What will we do if a community rejects a project that we know will be good for them?

2009-12-02T18:54:00.001Z

Just came across Leicester City Council's International Development Strategy.

Need I say more?

When the tracks diverge

2009-12-02T18:33:00.002Z

New Philanthropy Capital recently held a conference bringing together the world's "nonprofit analysts" - the people who try and measure the effectiveness of charities and other social organisations.

No doubt this is a good thing. And their plans to establish an association of analysts must surely be supported.

Yet at the same time it feels slightly sad. Are the ambitions of NPC really limited only to creating a professional body of people similar to themselves?

Here's an important question: where is the redistribution of power?

In the end people's lives aren't going to be radically improved by better evaluation or analysis. We already know what the answer should be because we engage with it every time we buy something. Clients must be given choice.

Who will make them do it?

2009-11-26T18:37:00.003Z

An interesting point has been raised by One World Trust in their recent study of development effectiveness initiatives run by NGO partnerships:

"self-regulatory initiatives frequently lack enforcement mechanisms...this can sometimes lead to free riding (signing up to the initiative purely to show the organisation in a good light - without any real action on the part of the NGO to implement)."

There's quite a fashion for self-regulatory NGO bodies: Global Effectiveness Framework for NGOs, G3, INGO Accountability Charter and the BOND Statement of Principles.

Few have a sanctioning mechanism.

How can donors and taxpayers effectively demand for rigorous, enforced regulation?

2009-11-18T17:08:00.002Z

The Queen announced Labour's draft bill for international development in her speech today.

It contains a legal obligation on the government to spend 0.7% of GNI from 2013 on official development assistance.

In my view laws shouldn't be introduced for the sole reason that they constrict future governments. One generation shouldn't dictate to another like that.

But there's a more important point about the debate over international development, which is overwhelmed by cries for more funding.

In other sectors these voices are at least matched by calls for improved effectiveness in the way funds are spent.

The wait of public interest

2009-11-03T19:29:00.003Z

I heard yesterday that my Freedom of Information request to DfID for its project evaluation data has been rejected.

Apparently, disclosure could a) harm UK international relations b) prevent civil servants from doing their job and c) unlawfully identify individuals and their personal information.

I've vigorously argued each point (see the link for details) - and I've asked for an internal review of the decision. If anyone has any further suggestions for how I can pursue this then please let me know.

One glimmer of hope is that the exemptions applied for a) and b) are both subject to the 'public interest test', i.e. they can be over-ridden if the benefits of disclosure are great enough.

PS. One of DfID's 'Departmental Strategic Objectives' (i.e. what Minsters judge them on) is to improve the 'portfolio quality index' - a measure of the proportion of projects evaluated as successful. This measure runs off the performance data in ARIES - surely this is a strong public interest argument for disclosure?

2009-10-22T20:55:00.004+01:00

3ie have published a paper comparing the way 5 countries set up their evaluation departments.

The authors discuss some interesting questions, like: how independent should oversight bodies be from government? what powers should evaluation departments have to enforce their findings?

They look in depth at Mexico, Colombia, Chile, South Africa and China - as well as briefly summarising the situation in Spain, UK and US.

One of their insights is that in the first 5 countries the pressure for evaluation comes largely from donors, but in the West it is the public that demands evidence-based policy.

It's quite right that the institutional mechanisms should vary between countries - there's no requirement for one-size-fits-all.

But it's also worth reflecting on the many problems which have arisen from the tendency of countries which are recipients of aid to respond to their paymasters, rather than their citizens.

It's crucial that evaluation departments establish their own communication channels with taxpayers and show they are independent of donors - as well as the government.

2009-10-19T22:59:00.001+01:00

Exciting paper from CGD on a 'collaborative market' for aid.

One particularly interesting idea is that:

Aid institutions are in a kind of political equilibrium balancing the interests of donors and recipients. Reform efforts that simply move away from equilibrium will not be implemented or sustained, and may do more harm than good. To have effective and sustainable reforms we need to try to change the political equilibrium.

A sharp break (a revolution?) is needed.

FOI on the international stage

2009-10-15T22:12:00.002+01:00

Here's an important 'Approach paper' from the World Bank, which suggests major changes to the organisation's information disclosure policies:

This paper proposes consideration of a paradigm shift in the Bank’s approach to disclosure, from a policy that spells out what documents the Bank discloses (a “positive list”) to one under which the Bank would disclose any information that is not on a list of exceptions—a policy that would be more consistent with the Bank’s expressed presumption in favor of disclosure.

It's exciting to see an international organisation taking the initiative in favour of transparency, even if it faces short-term risks in doing so.

Mad matrices

2009-10-13T19:48:00.005+01:00

Here's my response to the IATI consultation on the proposed standard for publishing aid information:

Dear all

I am writing in response to the IATI's Consultation on Part 1 of the IATI standard.

My comment relates to the 5th category of information: 'Results data (indicators on output, outcome and results)'. In Appendix B both of the fields in this category are listed as being free text. Appendix C indicates that they are links to the results matrix and final results matrix respectively. My reading of this suggests to me that you do not therefore anticipate that the information contained in these matrices will be published as part of the standard - only the references (URLs?) pointing to those matrices will appear.

This seems to me a missed opportunity. I would emphasise the tremendous potential value in being able to compare the results and outcomes of different projects and organisations using the information as it appears in these matrices. This is extremely important information which could be used to identify successful initiatives and those which are failing, both across donors and countries.

I would like to suggest, therefore, that the IATI standard makes an attempt to include these matrices. I presume that the perceived difficulty of making the matrices that are used by different organisations compatible with one another has precluded their inclusion in the consultation document, but this is a shame. In an ideal world, the standard would contain a form of matrix which could be used by all projects and organisations. That way, researchers would be able to compare 'like with like'.

If this is too difficult, a middle ground would be simply to include the project matrices in the standard, even if different organisations use different types. Then at a later date researchers would be able to analyse and compare the matrices without having to format them.

Simply having a link to the matrices is really the worst option, as people will in reality find themselves following links to PDFs (from which data cannot be extracted), files which no longer exist, files in a wide variety of formats and so on.

I hope you find this comment useful and relevant. I look forward to seeing the final standard.

Yours sincerely

Francis Bacon

http://thatsthewaythemoneygoes.blogspot.com/

2009-10-12T21:33:00.002+01:00

Interesting article on UK's aid spending in today's Times.

But what changes will the Tories make to aid spending when they come in? They've agreed to keep to the 0.7% promise but I suspect they won't be able to resist the temptation to exert greater political influence over the direction of spending. Perhaps DfID will come under the FCO and more spending in Afghanistan will be marked 'aid'?

Who owns it?

2009-09-23T22:32:00.002+01:00

Although its argument is sound, Oxfam America's recent report on the control of aid flows can't help but attract cries of hypocrisy.

One of the 3 themes is 'information'; they piously call for country donors to be transparent about what they fund.

Making US foreign aid transparent is not just important to US taxpayers. It’s fundamental to smart development. Unless recipient countries get comprehensive, accessible, timely, and comparable information from donors, intended recipients can’t hold their governments accountable, and those governments can’t plan, prioritize, or explain to their populations what they are doing.

Why can't Oxfam follow its own advice and publish details of what it funds? At the moment even donors aren't privy to a full breakdown.

Unlocking aid

2009-09-21T21:11:00.002+01:00

Aidinfo and the Open Knowledge Foundation have launched a consultation on their International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). It aims to establish common standards for recording and publishing aid information.

The central message is that aid information should be open: legally open, technically open and easy to find. This has been the OKFN message on a wide range of issues.

The next and more difficult step will be to agree on what types of information should be recorded for each aid project - and in what format.

Come on GHIs

2009-09-19T12:41:00.004+01:00

In June the Lancet, a medical journal, published this free article on the effect of Global Health Initiatives (GHIs) on country health systems.

These GHIs generally target specific diseases such as HIV/AIDS or malaria. Their influence is massive: in 2007 the three biggest (the Global Fund, PEPFAR, and GAVI) donated over $7.5 billion.

Yet this extremely detailed report tears into the GHIs for failing to evaluate their impact on country health systems.

"No robust prospective studies of the effects of GHIs on country health systems have been done."

GHIs are characterised by their focus on scaling up selected services that have proven to be effective in the past and by their use of performance-based assessment to deliver their interventions. It's sadly ironic that they have failed to collect the evidence on the effect they are having on their key partners.

2009-09-17T23:03:00.003+01:00

Here's an episode of Radio 4's Iconoclasts on the effectiveness or otherwise of foreign aid.

Kevin Watkins (who works on UNESCO's Global Monitoring Report) says:

"It's absolutely clear that a lot of aid is not maximising its potential, in many cases you have donors who are pursuing the wrong policies, propping up the wrong governments, not having the right focus on stabilisation and growth-orientated policies...that's all a given, we all accept that."

Health warning: Linda Whetstone (International Policy Network) is shrill and misinformed throughout.

Timeless values

2009-09-15T22:16:00.003+01:00

Great quote on the International Budget Partnership website:

“To protect the Treasury from being defrauded, let all money be issued openly in front of the whole city, and let copies of the accounts be deposited in various wards.”

(Aristotle, The Politics quoted in Shah, 2007:234).

Anti-comms

2009-09-06T21:46:00.004+01:00

The International Policy Network has released a slightly wild-eyed critique of DfID's communications spend.

The thrust of the argument is spot on: 'Communications' shouldn't be used to covertly fund political activities, especially those of dubious benefit for development.

But doesn't this line of attack still miss the target? In 2008-09 DfID's communications budget was £140 million, but this is out of an overall spend of £6.1 billion.

To focus on the communications budget is therefore to distract attention from the more deep-rooted problems with aid transparency and effectiveness, which are of a different order of magnitude.

2009-09-01T22:06:00.002+01:00

The DfID response to my latest FOI request says that there are over 3,000 DfID projects which have had their performance assessed and recorded on the database.

They say they won't publish it because it "supports the operational management" of the projects (rather than being "key project content").

I've asked them for a data dump of all the records relating to these hidden fields. Once it's released, it should be possible to do a mash-up with the already-published information in the PPI.

DfID divulge data

2009-08-27T19:04:00.003+01:00

DfID have today released the first version of their Project Information Database.

There is a wealth of information there but it is important to ask straight away - what other information does DfID have which they have decided not to publish?

In my most recent FOI request I obtained a full list of the project information stored on DfID's databases.

This includes the following fields:

Performance Review
Is an Annual Review Req
Ann Review Exempt Just.
Annual Review Due Date
Annual Review Prompt Date
Annual Review Authorised
Summary Review Authorised
Is a PCR Required?
PCR Exempt Justification
PCR Due Date
PCR Prompt Date
PCR Deferral?
Deferral Justification
PCR Authorised

Output Scoring
Outputs
Impact Weight %
Output Performanc
Impact Weighted Score
Risk

Project Scoring
Review Date
Total Impact Score
Output Risk
Project Purpose Score
Purpose Justification
Overall Risk score

Method of Scoring
Sources of Information

Scoring Responsibility
Partners Involved

Knowledge Sharing/Lessons
Date
Lesson Category
Notes

Conditionality Review
Disbursement Suspended
Cause
Date Suspended
Consequences

As far as I can make out these fields have not yet been included in the online database. Instead, under 'Aid effectiveness' they have included the following, rather irrelevant, indicators:

Use of partner country public financial management systems
Are partner country budget systems used?
Are partner country financial reporting systems used?
Are partner country audit systems used?
Are all 3 partner country public financial management systems used?

Are partner country procurement systems used?

Use of programme based approaches
Does the contribution fit within a single programme/budget framework?
Is the contribution led by the host country/organisation?
Is there a process for co-ordinating donors?
Are at least 2 partner country systems being used?
Is this a Programme Based Approach?

As mentioned last time, I have another FOI to determine the criteria the department used when selecting which indicators to be published. By coincidence the deadline for replying to that is tomorrow! I wonder if they were concerned I might steal their thunder...

2009-08-25T21:53:00.002+01:00

This is an interesting paper on different approaches to impact evaluation, published by the increasingly active 3ie.

It includes contributions from big thinkers such as Robert Chambers and Martin Ravallion - who offer widely different visions of both the philosophy and implementation of evaluation.

Self-regulation

2009-08-03T19:29:00.002+01:00

The One World Trust have found that there are at least 50 civil society self-regulatory initiatives on development. They are listed in a new database all about self-regulation, which claims to be the first of its kind.

FOI failures

2009-07-30T22:00:00.002+01:00

DfID have responded to my FOI request on their plans to publish aid information from their database.

Disappointingly they won't give out information about Ministerial decisions on the matter, but hopefully my latest FOI attempt will prove more fruitful.

Meanwhile, here's another tantalising glimpse of what's to come:

Publishing Project Information (PPI): As part of our commitment to improving transparency, DFID will publish summary project information on its website from early 2009. Information published will include project descriptions, dates, purposes, locations, sectors, aid effectiveness, summary financial data and whether or not conditions are attached. These items will subsequently be made available as a feed to AiDA and other external stakeholders for use in their analysis and information systems. We are also working on publishing more detailed project documentation later in 2009.

Mashing with DfID

2009-07-24T18:16:00.003+01:00

Check out this transcript of the 1st meeting of Open Knowledge Foundations' Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development. (I'm andeggs)

We're going to mash around with DfID data that's due to be released on August 10th. I've got an FOI about it here.

One Word: Radicalism

2009-07-16T19:44:00.003+01:00

The Tories have published their ideas for international development, called 'One World Conservatism'.

Its got a very encouraging bent towards transparency and evaluation. Here are some of the highlights:

We will ensure the impartial and objective analysis of the effectiveness of British aid through an Independent Aid Watchdog.
We will commit up to £10 million per year to the 3ie to commission impact evaluations of programmes supported by multilateral aid projects that DFID gives money to.We will volunteer bilateral DFID projects to be evaluated by the 3ie, and actively encourage all multilateral projects to which DFID gives money to have their programmes evaluated by the 3ie.
We will publish full information about all of DFID’s projects and programmes – including the results of impact evaluations – on its website, and have them translated into local languages. This information will be published in a standardised format so that it can be freely used on third-party websites.
We will also work for greater transparency across the whole aid system. We will require all bodies receiving DFID funds, whether NGOs, multilateral organisations or governments, to move towards greater openness and transparency.

Why are the Conservatives so far ahead of Labour on this one?

2009-07-08T18:42:00.002+01:00

Last August, a consultancy called Agulhas had a look at DfID's progress on aid effectiveness. Overall it rated the department highly, although this paragraph is telling:

"the evaluation finds that DFID (like most donors) likes to project a positive image of its own performance, and tends to gloss over imperfections in the aid process. (Development NGOs are also guilty of overselling the impact of aid in their ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign.) In the view of a number of internal and external respondents to the evaluation, DFID is over-sensitive to external criticism, and unwilling to engage the public in a frank debate on the effectiveness of external assistance."

White flag

2009-07-07T22:19:00.002+01:00

This paragraph is buried deep in DfID's new white paper on development:

"Part of making international aid more transparent is each donor publishing information of the projects they fund. The UK will make information about the projects we fund available to the public both here in the UK, and in the countries we work, through the launch of a new searchable database on the DFID website." (para 7.21)

Now it's up to everyone else to follow suit.

Bah humbug!

2008-07-14T19:03:00.005+01:00

Just finished reading William Easterly's A White Man's Burden. In it he describes the unspoken system failure at the heart of the aid merry-go-round:

"I feel like a kind of Scrooge pointing out the ... tragedy [of ineffectual aid] when there is so much goodwill and compassion among so many people to help the poor ... the foreign aid bureaucracy has never quite gotten it - the central problem is that the poor are orphans: they have no money or political voice to communicate their needs or motivate others to meet those needs".

When you buy something in a market or make a vote in a democracy you are sending feedback to the seller or politican. This makes them accountable and pressures them into making decisions whic are your interest, rather than theirs. As the aid system is largely unaccountable the organisations the poor receive a dreadful service.

Since there is no direct line from the poor to the people making decisions, there is a principal-agent problem: aid agencies have too many objectives and each objective is the responsibility of several aid agencies. That is, no one faces the chop when the thing goes wrong.

Having described an all-too-familiar programme failure (this time by CIDA), Easterly writes:

Aid agency watches should tough on such disasters, if only with the aim of strengthening the accountability lobby in foreign aid... The way forward is politically difficult: truly independent evaluation of specific aid efforts... only outside political pressure on aid agencies is likely to create the incentives to do these evaluations.

In the end Easterly sees the way forward as being reliant on pressure from the people who stump up the cash for international develompent: taxpaying citizens.

Mobilize the altruistic people in rich countries to put heat on the agencies to make their money actually reach the poor, and to get angry when the aid does not reach the poor.

We're angry all right!

PS. Check out Easterly's ranking of aid agencies here.

Look harder, Lockhart

2008-07-10T19:50:00.003+01:00

June's Prospect carried an article by Clare Lockhart, co-author of Fixing Failed States. She argues that the aid system has failed:

It's wasteful since so much is spent on overheads
Recipients cannot hold NGOs to account
Projects are not thought through with business rigour
Aid can undermine reconstruction through, for example, distortionary wages

In place of NGO bumph, she argues for greater funding of developing country government activities: "At the heart of the problem lies the failure of the aid system to invest in the restoration - or establishment - of a functioning government, market and civil society."

She's right the system has failed. But her analysis of why it's failed is wrong.

The heart of the problem is actually that the aid system is over-ambitious, unaccountable, opaque, unco-ordinated and not incentivised to succeed. Rather than striving to remake society, aid agencies should try to be effective in achieving specific well-defined goals (such as "Build a road from A to B").

Clare's approach is statist - she calls for "sustained commitments" to governments for "ten to 15 years or more". But, as she notes, aid currently failes to complete even relatively small-scale projects, like building schools (in Afghanistan only 6 out of 140 that had been promised delivered on time). how can it be expected to achieve something so much more ambitious?

What's her suggestion for keeping these externally-funded governments in check? Aid agencies to be made more accountable to beneficiaries.

But this will never happen as long as someone else is paying their wages. Instead, aid agencies must be made more accountable to donors and tax-payers - only we can really demand more.

Disasters at DEC

2008-07-08T13:51:00.003+01:00

According to the FT, the Disasters Emergency Committee have stopped commissioning evaluations of how the money is spent. According to the article this "potentially raising questions over whether millions of pounds in donations are being used effectively." It certainly does.

NAO it is available

2008-07-08T13:49:00.001+01:00

The NAO report mentioned in the post below is available here.

NAO or never

2008-06-28T23:01:00.005+01:00

I've been given a copy of an unpublished National Audit Office report into NGOs' responses to the South Asia earthquake in 2005. It a damning analysis of aspects of the relief effort, for instance:

Single person summer tents were airlifted from the UK even though they were unsuitable for a Pakistani winter
Temporary shelters were distributed without technical advice being given on their construction - causing injury and death as a result
NGOs were largely unco-ordinated and failed to plug into the 'cluster' system

But most serious is the following assessment of the charities' evaluation of their impact:

While financial reporting systems enable accurate reporting of inputs and costs, it is more difficult to assess impact. Reports submitted to donors did not always show clearly what had been achieved specifically with the donors' funds as opposed to others sources of funding...The problem was exacerbated by apparent inaccuracies in reports to DFID and DEC. For example:
With £300,000 of funding, one NGO claimed to have produced 15,000 temporary shelters and a second NGO 3,300.
3,750 blankets cost one NGO £78,000 while another purchased 19,800 with £54,000.
In addition, above it was stated that some NGOs had underestimated family size in planning. At least two increased the average used when reporting against objectives; thereby appearing to increase the numbers reached. For example; one NGO stated that it had met its objective for beneficiaries reached. However, as it had had to distribute more tents per family, while it distributed the planned number of tents, it achieved only 82 per cent coverage for provision of winterised shelter in the target area.

Without assurance that reported figures for purchases and beneficaries are accurate it is not possible to determine where there are errors in reporting and where there are actual variations in performance. Robust analysis of what agencies have achieved with funding is vital for DFID to be able to assess the performance of the agencies it is funding and could also provide an opportunity for agencies to identify areas for improvement in their systems. Agencies should ensure that they have good systems to record outputs and outcomes by donor, and DFID and DEC should review reports for inconsistencies and undertake analysis of the figures.

Only one thing to add: The reports should be published so that there can be public scrutiny of where the NGOs were effective - and where they weren't.

Not a load of CODswallop

2008-06-26T18:55:00.004+01:00

Here are the presentations and papers from a recent Brookings conference on aid. Most of them relate to the macro v. micro initiative debate, recently stirred up by Prof. Banerjee from MIT.

However the most interesting thing is a set of slides from Nancy Birsall's Center for Global Development on an idea for development programmes delivered through 'Cash on Delivery' (COD).

The idea is that donors would only get paid for their outcomes (not inputs). For example, a donor working on education would receive $100 for every child who completed a year of primary school. This would obviously put much greater pressure on donors to perform.

Marking up

2008-06-26T18:30:00.005+01:00

Development Initiatives have announced an ambitious and exciting project called 'aidinfo' which seeks to make aid information more transparent and accessible to the world:

People in rich countries will be able to find out more quickly exactly where and how their money has been spent – and the impact it has had. They will be able to find out what people think of the services. They will be able to hold their own governments to account for whether aid money has been well used. And if they see that aid is spent wisely, they may be willing to provide more in future.

Their memorandum to the Commons Committee on Co-ordination for Aid Effectiveness, suggests the standard may be based on the International Development Markup Language.

A word of advice to DI: concentrate more on the political hurdles than the technical ones. There is widespread and entrenched resistance to transparency.

It is important to me

2008-06-26T13:41:00.003+01:00

In May the Charity Commission published a survey of 1,000 Brits, in which the following unequivocal views were expressed:

96% of respondents agreed that "It is important to me that charities provide the public with information about how they spend their money"
90% of respondents agreed that "It is important to me that charities explain in a published annual report what they actually achieved"

So why don't they do it?

In a word

2008-06-25T23:28:00.004+01:00

At an initial cost of at least €143,000, a group of civil society organisations (CSOs/NGOs) have belatedly begun to examine how their effectiveness can be improved. The process is called 'Framing and Promoting the Effectiveness of CSOs as Development Actors' and kicks off with a meeting on 29th June run by CONCORD.

An interesting tension that emerges from the concept note and FAQ paper is that between 'aid effectiveness' and 'development effectiveness'. Governments signed up to the former as part of the Paris Declaration, but CSOs have agreed that they would rather the latter:

The concept framing the process is “development effectiveness”, which goes beyond the concept of aid effectiveness enshrined in the Paris Declaration. While the latter is perceived by civil society as being a narrow and technical agenda designed to govern official aid, “development effectiveness” is much broader in scope and frames effectiveness in terms of the impact development has on poor and marginalised communities and territories. It therefore reflects more properly the diverse roles CSOs play in development. Aid effectiveness can be conceived as a part of development effectiveness.

Of course civil society organisations are not the same as governments and it is not unreasonable to imagine them adhering to a different set of accountability principles. But this paragraph reads suspiciously like CSOs are preparing for a cheeky manoeuvre.

They would be well advised not to try and slide from a tightly defined concept (aid effectiveness) to a more loosely defined one (development effectiveness) for the sake of convenience. Donors are watching!

Tailored suits, tax-free salaries, white Land Cruisers and Geneva

2008-06-25T13:36:00.003+01:00

Newspaper commentators are not often worth reading but this sustained attack on internationalism by Simon Jenkins is. Here's the best bit:

We are all still hardwired to treat international as a good thing. In the process we have abandoned the constitutionalism and accountability that should govern any form of government if it is not to run amok. The one facet of neoconservative America that I share is frustration with the UN and related organisations' inability to walk the talk.

Charismatic compulsion

2008-06-20T20:08:00.004+01:00

Paul Collier, author of the Bottom Billion, recently spoke at TED. He points out that Angola's annual oil revenues were $50bn, dwarfing the entire $34bn aid to the poorest billion people; and argues a set of international standards on good governance in extracting commodities.

Sure, fine, but as the previous post pointed out net private resource flows to the developing world from US citizens and companies exceeded $130bn last year. It is cross-border links which are really growing; and which aid organisations must exploit.

Tittle-Tuttle

2008-05-19T19:53:00.002+01:00

Robert Tuttle, US Ambassador to the UK, wrote a great letter to the Guardian a while back; this is the most important bit:

In 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, net private resource flows to the developing world from US citizens and companies exceeded $130bn, more than the sum of ODA from all OECD members combined. These flows included capital investments and credits of $62bn, remittances of $41bn, and private charitable giving of $30bn. When added to US ODA of $21.75bn in 2007, these resources represent more than 1% of US GDP.

There is therefore a huge imperative to harness that private giving for the good. But as he says "the effectiveness of aid is as important as its volume".

He's wearing clothes

2008-05-06T07:20:00.007+01:00

A new and thought-provoking book on 'philanthrocapitalism' has been published by Michael Edwards (a grants officer at the Ford Foundation). It's well worth a read, especially since it's free to download.

His main argument is that business thinking can damage civil society. Since, in his view, capitalism is the cause of so much suffering in the world, it can only go so far towards creating a solution to the world's problems. As he sees it, technology and the market cannot change the political and social root causes of poverty and cannot provide deep 'structural change'.

But the evidence to date is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is civil society which has failed to bring about beneficial change. In international development particularly there are barely any examples of outside organisations instigating or promoting social movements which successfully improve the lives of those at the bottom of the pile.

In any case, rigorous evaluation can determine the extent of success or failure of particular projects, including those which seek to empower disadvantaged groups or support social change. Projects should be evaluated against one another without recourse to ideology.

In the final chapter, Edwards calls for greater accountability of donor organisations - a theme which we have returned to many times on this blog. He writes:

[We should] commission independent impact evaluations for any tax exempt activity above a certain size, and publish the results. Require all foundations and social enterprises above a certain size to compile a publicly available summary of all evaluations every five years, and to solicit feedback from grantees and beneficiaries, and independent experts in the field.

I agree that tax-exempt organisations making charitable donations should face legal requirements to at least publish a basic list of the projects they have supported (including the size of the donation), if not evaluations of those projects as well.

More than a wet flannel

2008-05-05T15:04:00.004+01:00

Here's an interview with Matt Flannery, cofounder of Kiva.org, a site which allows people in the developed world to make loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries over the internet.

Interestingly he predicts that:

"[In the future] we could allow women in Ghana to lend to women in Mexico. Increasingly you will see a general trend of blurring of the lines between first and third world. We’ve already had Mexicans lending to Mexicans. We’ve had Malaysians lending to Iraqis. We’ve had all sorts of blurring distinctions between the haves and the have-nots and that’s playing itself out on our site, which is really, really interesting to watch...Eventually I think you will see people in the global South actually lending to people in the global North. So someone in Chicago can take a loan from someone in Kampala, Uganda. That will be really, really interesting as well then all scenarios start playing themselves out."

Of course that future relies on Kiva surviving that long. At the moment they survive on 'tips' and grants from charitable foundations. I suspect that won't last long.

They're gonna getcha

2008-05-05T14:46:00.002+01:00

One World Trust has published the list of international organisations, businesses and NGOs who are in its sights for the 2008 Global Accountability Report. The development organisations which should be worried are

African Development Bank
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
Care International
Catholic Relief Services
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International
International Committee of the Red Cross
International Planned Parenthood Federation
Islamic Relief
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Plan International
Transparency International
United Nations Children’s Fund

Including Transparency International was inspired!

Whose knowledge is it anyway?

2008-03-25T22:20:00.003Z

I've just finished reading Banerjee's important little book on evaluation in international development, in which he calls for the use of randomized trials as a way of assessing the effectiveness of interventions. His argument is overwhelming: without proper experiments, what do we really ever know?

Half of the book is devoted to replies from 'aid specialists' (bravery for which the author should be applauded), many of whom criticise his proposals for one reason and another. One of their objections holds weight - much aid nowadays is delivered as sector support, which cannot be subjected to randomized testing. Some of our knowledge about the way countries develop will always have to come from sources other than field experiments.

I will add one further, rather esoteric, point. The use of randomized trials sustains a technocratic approach - it does not challenge the positions of officials in donor agencies. Wouldn't it be even better to give the beneficiaries of aid genuine customer choice and control over the service they receive, rather than relying on an analysis of what generally works and then imposing it upon everyone?

Mystery shopping

2008-03-23T08:29:00.004Z

What do you make of this? On 5th February 2008 I contacted eight large international development charities, all of whom are signatory to the International NGO Accountability Charter.

I asked each of them to publish a detailed breakdown of their expenditure for the last tax year. For each project funded within 2006-07 I wanted to know a) the name of the project b) the location of the project c) a list of funders for the project and d) the total expenditure on the project in the tax year.

None of the organisations has been able to produce me with this list. None were even able to give me just the names of the projects they funded over that year.

Their excuses were as follows:

ActionAid - "we try to balance the need for transparency with what we think readers will find digestible, useful and informative"
British Red Cross - "administrative processes [must] remain cost-effective, thus maximising the money available for our front line services."
CAFOD - no reply
CARE International UK - no reply
Christian Aid - just a link to the annual report
Oxfam - see this post and this post
Plan International - no reply
Save the Children - "this is a considerable amount of information for us to prepare and will use valuable resources".
Tearfund - a link to total grants made to top 50 partner organisations.

This is simply unacceptable. Producing a list of funded projects annually certainly is time-consuming, especially when financial data is included as well. But charities which take a large proportion of their income from the public should consider themselves to be under a moral duty to be transparent. Publishing a list of funded activities would obviously improve aid co-ordination as well.

No doubt these thoughts were in the chief executives' minds when they signed the International NGO Accountability Charter. This states that "By signing this Charter we seek to promote further the values of transparency and accountability that we stand for, and commit our INGO to respecting its provisions." The Charter goes on to say: "We are committed to openness, transparency and honesty about our structures, mission, policies and activities. We will communicate actively to stakeholders about ourselves, and make information publicly available."

I call on these organisations to meet their commitments.

Philanthropy without borders

2008-03-22T13:53:00.003Z

New Philanthropy Capital have just published a new report for private international develoment donors. Part of their advice is that donors ensure their money follows projects that evaluate their outcomes. I found the following excerpt extremely compelling:

Despite a growing number of project evaluations, there is virtually no systemic evaluation of the impact of NGOs, which are facing some of the same incentives as official agencies to emphasise observable effort rather than focus on less observable results. Any information on results that is publicly shared is heavily biased towards success stories. As Roger Riddell notes in his recent book, Does Foreign Aid Really Work?, ‘regrettably, there has always been and remains to this day an almost complete absence of data and information with which to assess the wider and systemic impact of NGO development interventions and activities’...Imagine a world in which an effective marketplace for giving existed to ease this complexity. There was publicly-available evidence on what works and the impact of charitable, as well as private and state, projects. There was also evidence on which giving practices generated the best results. Donors were not frustrated by the lack of information or overwhelming complexities of the system. Rather they were galvanised and inspired to support life-changing initiatives. And they could see the impact that their donations had made. Glimpses of this world exist. Much more is needed. Donors need information on which organisations and projects are tackling different issues in different countries. They also need evidence of the results of these activities. Online information sites and giving exchanges are beginning to bridge the information gap. But they are fragmented and, in most instances, do not show evidence of results.

The future...and beyond!

2008-03-22T13:49:00.002Z

People will not doubt focus on the recommendation that the US government's development functions be aligned with its other foreign policy objectives, including democratization and defence. But there is much else besides in the new HELP commission report, 'Beyond Assistance'.

In particular there is a strong and welcome focus on improving aid evaluation. Starting from the finding that the "foreign assistance system is broken" the authors repeatedly stresses that the government should "better evaluate projects based on the outcomes they achieve"; "programs must be innovative - which requires our nation accept and learn from failure...Interventions in states must be quantifiable, with numerical goals and timetables, and programs must have specific objectives, which could be measured, evaluated, and re-assessed."

Other notable recommendations include:

Focussing aid on America's comparative advantages (listed as agriculture, technology, small business development and education) rather than trying to tackle all aspects of poverty
Moving from an aid system of top-down provision to one in which programs are demand-driven
Working with private partners and philanthropists
Concentrating on programs which promote economic growth, rather than social programs

Stone keys

2008-03-22T13:41:00.003Z

Just wanted to quickly highlight this report from Keystone on online philanthropy markets. The author, David Bonbright, quickly gets to the nub of the argument: the markets are only going to drive change when there is robust and comparable evaluation of project outcomes.

But I'm afraid the idea that these markets will collaborate to produce common evaluation standards is rather fanciful. It seems more likely that one of the more enterprising websites will develop its own evaluative approach and then capture market share. Whatever, happens, let's hope it happens soon.

In response to the report, Perla Ni of GreatNonProfits.org wrote a shameful piece in the Financial Times, arguing against the use of measures of charitable effectiveness. Amazingly, her argument seems to rest on the idea that "presenting potential donors with metrics suppresses donations", as if that were therefore a reason to resist them. Did you ever think such self-serving collusion could be possible?

The world watches

2008-03-22T13:39:00.001Z

I've spent the last week in China and am becoming convinced its recent history is so impressive it warrants a complete rewrite of development theory.

Apparently, from 1981-2001, 400 million people have been lifted from abject poverty in China. That means that 80% of the world's progress in tackling poverty has, without question, been due to international trade encouraged as a result of economic reform.

International development agencies have essentially played no role in this at all.

Lange time coming

2008-03-22T13:36:00.001Z

Here's a thought provoking piece on new solutions to global poverty from Mark Lange, a former speech writer to George Bush (don't let that you put you off) in the Christian Science Monitor (ditto).

Like Paul Collier, he writes that we should focus on the billion people at the bottom of the pile; for him fighting relative inequality is a distraction with an unjustifiable opportunity cost.

There are some great ideas in here. The following practical suggestions really stood out for me:

Linking the pay of managers in donor agencies to country-based outcomes
Using vouchers as a form of development currency; the poor could exchange them with NGOs or other organisations for basic services
Instituting an international minimum wage based on the country's PPP price of a basket of subsistence goods.

Parsing the time

2008-03-22T13:32:00.002Z

Here's an interesting site called UNdemocracy.com which might be useful for people campaigning at an international level or calling for more more representative global governance.

The developers of the site parse transcripts of the UN General Assembly and Security Council to give easy access to speeches and voting patterns.

For example, you can see at a glance that:

The US was the only country to vote against a Resolution on the Rights of the Child
A whole load of Pacific island states suspiciously voted against extending the mandate of the 'United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East'
A resolution on the right to development was adopted despite significant resistance from developed countries.

According to an article in the Guardian, over time the site will develop some of the features associated with MySociety's sites (such as PublicWhip and TheyWorkForYou) which should make it even more powerful.

Inhumin

2008-03-22T13:28:00.003Z

Perhaps because it is more exposed to public scrutiny, humanitarianism always seems one step ahead of development.

For example, in terms of information management there's loads of software out there for logging and sharing information about humanitarian projects. Huminman, a site maintained by Matthew Slater (see picture), tries to centralise information and resources on this subject. There are reviews of various pieces of software (some relevant to development), a library and the obligatory blog.

Get me out of this relationship

2008-03-06T19:55:00.003Z

BOND says that "the quality of an NGO’s work is primarily determined by the quality of its relationships with its intended beneficiaries".

I worry about this. From the point of view of the poor, why should the quality of 'the relationship' matter? It is the outcome in terms of:

health
education
wealth
or some other predefined goal

...which matters. Whether they had a friendly relationship or not is neither here nor there.

BOND's Joni Hillman writes that:

For a sector that works with fundamental issues of power and change, we are surprisingly reluctant to address them closer to home. These debates have been moving up and down the agenda for many years but we now seem to have reached a point where internal and external pressures are combining to demand that 'something must be done'.

That's right. But instead of quality standards, organisational learning, declarations and (urgh!) outcome mapping we need to consider something which will actually work.

The only people who can really pressure government and NGOs to change are tax-payers and individual donors. A system of open, frank feedback from the 'beneficiaries' of aid to those who fund it would finally bring about the genuine accountability that the sector craves.

A marketplace for aid

2008-02-05T21:46:00.000Z

Here's a plug for a Thorsteinn Gestsson, an Icelandic ideas-man.

He's published an exciting proposal for a web-based 'aid market' which chimes with many of the themes of this blog. Although it's a bit rambling in parts (also like this blog?) it contains the seeds of some revolutionary ideas.

Oh, and his blog is here. It's almost as good as this one.

Skeptical swedes

2008-02-04T14:49:00.000Z

Edelman has published its 2008 survey of opinion-leaders' trust in business, government, the media and NGOs. Ignoring the fact that one person's "opinion leader" may not be another's, this generates some interesting stats.
For example this is a list of surveyed countries in declining order of trust in NGOs (weighted by trust in institutions overall):

France
Italy
Ireland
Germany
UK
USA
South Korea
Poland
Spain
Netherlands
India
Japan
China
Russia
Sweden

Fewer than a third of Swedes say they trust NGOs to do what is right!

Handy ideas

2008-02-04T07:54:00.000Z

Did you see this interview with Percy Barnevik, adviser to Hand in Hand? This is the most profound section:

Do not call this a master strategy, however. Barnevik has no time for what he dismisses as "big plans" to eliminate global poverty. George Bush, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, the G8 countries, the UN, even rock grandees Bono and Bob Geldof are all derided for their big ideas. "When I hear about a new plan, it is like starting to watch an old film," he told European business leaders gathered in Helsinki, Finland, last summer. "You know from the start there is no happy ending. The best plan is no plan."

OWT's Christmas present

2007-12-10T22:32:00.000Z

One World Trust today published its 2007 Global Accountability Report. It compares 30 intergovernmental, non-governmental and corporate bodies on measures of transparency, participation, evaluation and complaint handling.

The international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) under study (in order of best to worst performing) are:

Christian Aid
International Accounting Standards Board
International Save the Children Alliance
Aga Khan Foundation
Human Rights Watch
International Organization for Standardization
Medecins Sans Frontiers International
MERCY Malaysia
Greenpeace International
Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)

The headline findings are:

Only 3 INGOs have transparency policies and two lack readily-accessible ‘contact us’ functions
All the examined INGOs make commitments to engage external stakeholders but only four have organisation-wide guidelines in this regard
Over half the INGOs have evaluation policies but only two commit to being open with evaluation results.
The overall quality of INGO internal complain handling is high but external complain procedures are where the sector’s accountability capabilities are least developed.

One World Trust are now carrying out their survey of 30 organisations every year. One suggestion: why don't they also include a review of a selection of previous years' organisations to see if they've improved or not?

Something Is Being Done (SIBD)

2007-12-09T17:34:00.000Z

Just finished reading Bill Easterly's 'Planners vs. Searchers' article - a gem.

Among many bold and fresh ideas there is one which stands out: that the world's international development machinery has become..."stuck on infeasible grand objectives like "ending world poverty"." They constantly come up with new plans, strategies and frameworks for achieving this massive goal, even though these repeatedly fail.

It struck me that instead of persevering with impossible efforts to change the lives of the most vulnerable and needy, we should try and do what we we know works, for those we can help.

The meaning of accountability

2007-12-09T15:36:00.000Z

Here's a classic article on the meaning of 'accountability' as it applies to a range of players in world politics.

Grant and Keohane argue that forms of accountability of an institution can be split between

Participation: performance is evaluated by people affected by use of power by the institution
Delegation: performance is evaluated by people entrusting the institution with power

The authors identify three components of accountability: standards, sanctions and information. It is difficult to pinpoint the use of any of these components when it comes to international development NGOs. Neither the poor nor donors effectively hold them to account.

Institutional mechanisms are particularly weak in terms of information:

Crucial to the efficacy of an information system for controlling abuses of power is that control over it not be limited to power-wielders and the entities that originally authorized their actions. On the contrary, the system should be open to new groups, seeking to provide information relevant to the question of whether power-wielders are meeting appropriate standards of behavior—–and to make that information widely available...Furthermore, the costs of providing information through web sites are now so low that it is difficult to use cost or inconvenience as an excuse; people around the world are increasingly used to being able to get the information that they want almost instantaneously...NGOs must also be increasingly transparent if they are to remain credible.

Anybody@home?

2007-12-09T13:54:00.000Z

Here's an interesting piece from the Economist on volunteer distributed computing. It discusses how the world's idle computing power can be harnessed for public good, by using them to work on time-consuming and repetitive tasks simultaneously.

In the past, these projects were only used for scientific endeavours - such as modelling the physical properties of proteins or scanning radio signals for signs of extra-terrestrial life. The numbers of people taking part is vast: 5.2 million people are registered with SETI@home.

A new set of volunteer computing projects is now emerging. They:

Tackle non-scientific problems: Africa@home and the World Community Grid are both dedicated to international philanthropy
Employ participants' brains as much as their computing power: The ESP Game and Herbaria@home get participants to do things which computers find difficult.

Africa@home will soon launch a project which will ask participants to look at satellite images of poorly-mapped regions of Africa and ask them to identify cartographic information, such as roads, villages and fields. If successful this would obviously have huge potential for governments, aid agencies and climate change scientists.

There must be plenty of other ways in which volunteer computing could be used for international development. Here are some ideas:

Identifying trends in local markets to help people know when they will get the most favourable price
Identifying trends in population dynamics and migration following conflict or disaster
Identifying trends in the way diseases spread amongst different groups

Three-eyed monster

2007-12-08T18:43:00.000Z

Let's have a closer look at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (known as '3IE') which has been driven forward by Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development (the subject of the previous post).

In Bellagio earlier this year a group of development agencies decided upon the wording of a proposed founding document for 3IE. It will be a non-profit membership body which will commission 'rigorous' impact evaluations of development programs. The founding members are:

African Development Bank
Asian Development Bank
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Canadian International Development Agency
Center for Global Development
Department for International Development
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Millennium Challenge Corporation
Ministry of Finance, Lesotho
Ministry of Finance, Nigeria
Ministry of Finance, Uganda
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands
Ministry of Health, Mexico
Ministry of Trade, Indonesia
National Treasury, South Africa
Planning Commission, India
UNDP-Regional Bureau for Africa
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

They should obviously be applauded for their insight and ambition and other development agencies (most notably INGOs) should be encouraged to join 3IE as soon as possible.
However, in the spirit of constructive criticism it is worth highlighting three crunch questions as a litmus test for the robustness of the organisation:

Will the evaluation standards be explicitly defined, rigorous and methodologically sound?
Will the process for choosing impact evaluations ensure that the right studies are conducted?
Will there be institutional safeguards to ensure that members' blushes are not spared?

I hope the answer to all three is 'yes'; time will tell.

Heralding a new dawn

2007-12-05T07:59:00.000Z

Here's an interview with Nancy Birdsall, posted on the International Herald Tribune website.

I asked Nancy a question about programme evaluation and she kindly responded, giving details of the work of her Center for Global Development in this field.

Seven years slow

2007-11-26T19:57:00.000Z

nfpSynergy has published an interesting report on what it calls the "21st Donor" (you have to register to download the free report) which examines how attitudes towards giving are changing.

One of its ten recommendations for engaging donors in the new millenium is to:

Make donors stakeholders, with a real say in how they give and how their money gets spent. While this does not mean that donors have the final say in how the money gets spent...it does mean that their views are really important. Therefore dialogue between donors and service deliverers becomes more important.

It goes on to explain:

Those charity sector interviewees who dealt with wealthier donors highlighted a trend towards greater interest in two overlapping areas: firstly how charities measure and demonstrate impact, and secondly a desire to specify how their donations are spent. These two trends are linked because a desire to specify how donations are spent is, at least in part, an indication that the donor does not entirely trust the claims of impact...Individual donors’ increased interest in impact and directing the spending of their money is really just a catch-up with the rest of the funding world. Indeed, all the major funders of the sector: central government, local government, lottery bodies and charitable trusts attach great importance both to prescribing their areas of interest and to measuring the impact of their funds. One of the ironies of this trend is that many service-delivery people are appalled at the idea of being donor-led in their response to individual donors, but are already heavily funder-led when the funders are central or local government.

What's worse: state or charity?

2007-11-24T15:52:00.000Z

In case you've missed it, there's been quite a furore about this article by Martin Brookes, Director of Research at New Philanthropy Capital. In it he calls for the creation of a "non-departmental public body under the auspices of the Cabinet Office" to be "concerned with assessing and improving the performance of charities".

His argument is:

Most other private and public bodies have their performance scrutinised
If charity is about more than assuaging guilt then we should care about its outcomes
'Charity' is not a homogeneous group and we should discriminate between them
Charity's purpose and origin is not so different from other sectors of society that it should escape accountability
Analysing charity performance is not too hard or beyond available methodology
Lack of scrutiny is not healthy to the taxpayer or donor
Informed donors will pick their charities better and so make more impact
Greater public scrutiny is anyway inevitable
Charities are overly sceptical of outsiders' involvement for irrelevant reasons: they work hard to get funding and feel perpetually beleaguered

It's an interesting article, much of which is impossible to disagree with.

However, the mistake Martin makes is to think that the state regulation is the best mechanism for holding charity to public account. This for three reasons.

Firstly, the state is often even less effective than the charitable sector. Although regulatory bodies such as Ofgem and Ofcom (which Martin cites) are usually considered better than other government departments, they too are steeped in the public service ethos of inefficiency, lack of vision and slow responsiveness.

Secondly the comparison with the private sector is invalid because most businesses are actually regulated by their shareholders or other investors, more than by state regulatory bodies as Martin suggests. In those few industries (such as utilities) in which there is state regulation, it is largely to ensure that the companies remain competitive, rather than assess their productivity per se.

Thirdly and most importantly the state, private sector and charitable sector exist together in a stable tripartite relationship with which it would be foolish to tamper. Ultimately taxpayers should monitor government, investors monitor business and donors monitor charity. There may be some cross-over but where possible this should be conducted through open debate in the public media, rather than through institutionalised structures of control.

If assessment of the performance of charities is handed over to the state it will stifle the growing willingness among donors to hold charities to account. If people begin to feel (as many already do) that the charitable sector is simply an arm of government then public donations will fall and the state will be left as the only player - an obviously unhealthy situation.

Most of Martin's argument is correct and he must be applauded for speaking out on the issue. But my feeling is that the government would instead do better to actively support the third sector in being more open with the public. Rather than regulate charities' performance themselves, the Cabinet Office should cajole them to regularly publish details of their activities and support them in setting up rigorous accountability standards.

Teach a man to fish

2007-11-13T20:18:00.000Z

Here's an interesting piece by Nik Kafka, director of the agricultural network Teach a Man to Fish.

In it, he bemoans the lack of engagement of development charities with new social enterprise models:

The direct result of our extraordinary creativity in raising huge volumes of donations at home is that it cramps entrepreneurial flair, and reduces the incentives to find better models for creating social change overseas.

It's not that UK development NGOs are not capable of being entrepreneurial, far from it. When it comes to fundraising no avenue is left unexplored - you can't walk down a street or open a magazine these days without being tapped for direct debits or the occasional goat!

But UK development NGOs seem to have far less appetite for designing new business models for social change and taking them to scale.

The way to develop this appetite is to change the way development agencies are evaluated. Instead of being measured on their inputs (e.g. 'cash raised' or 'projects undertaken') they must be more robustly measured on outputs (e.g. 'increase in beneficiaries' annual income' or 'educational levels added'). Then they will have to seek out new models to reach these goals.

We can't trust donors...can we?

2007-11-13T19:18:00.001Z

It's all very well calling for more accountability to donors - but can we trust them to make the right decisions?

New research from the University of Southampton suggests we can. Looking at the results of a large survey, it finds:

Although only one in ten people give to overseas development charities, the mean amount given per donor was much higher than for other causes. (Table 1)
The distribution of donations towards overseas development is very skewed. The Gini co-efficient is 0.63 and the top 10% of donors account for almost half of the value of all donations. (Table 2)
Although overseas giving is correlated with personal income, it is not when the regression is controlled for variables associated with income such as education. The difference between the controlled and uncontrolled correlation co-efficients is larger for overseas giving than all other causes of charitable giving. (Table 10)

In broad terms, this means that most publicly-raised money comes from a very few people (about half the money comes from 1% of the adult population). More than any other cause, the higher the education level of the donor, the more they give.

If donors are such a well-educated and exclusive bunch, why don't we trust them to influence what happens with their money more?

These are the report's authors Professor John Micklewright and Dr Sylke Schnepf:

FOI requests applying to development agencies?

2007-11-08T07:55:00.000Z

Gordon Brown recently harped on about liberty as a traditional British trait in a rather blatant and awkward attempt to divert attention from the fact he is a supporter of anti-libertarian terrorist laws and that he is Scottish in an age of rising English nationalism.

One of his ideas was to extend Freedom of Information legislation, which is widely agreed to have been a success since it was passed in 2000. The law gives journalists and members of the public the power to demand information from public bodies, providing that the cost of retrieving it is not too high.

Now Brown wants to extend Freedom of Information so that it covers:

Organisations which appear to the Secretary of State to exercise functions of a public nature.
Organisations which are providing, under a contract made with a public authority, any service whose provision is a function of that authority.

The consultation document doesn't give any more detail about the type of organisations which would be covered by this second point. But presumably development agencies funded by DfID, especially those under the given cash under the Partnership Programme Agreements funding stream, would be covered.