txteagle

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Share your failures on FAILfaire.

Déjà vu all over again

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

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.

From AidWatch

Hogging the limelight

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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!