Author : Minouche Shafik
Date : June 12, 2009
Summary : Despite the economic downturn, the development industry is growing and fragmenting as more and different actors enter the field. This is in a context of wider changes in global governance in which new alliances are emerging to solve different global challenges like poverty or climate change. All development organisations need to find their niche in this more complex architecture and developing countries need to become more assertive about aid being aligned with their country strategies and systems. Given the absence of market forces or enforceable regulation, these trends in the aid industry place a higher premium on transparency, benchmarking and independent evaluation. [1]
Summary : Despite the economic downturn, the development industry is growing and fragmenting as more and different actors enter the field. This is in a context of wider changes in global governance in which new alliances are emerging to solve different global challenges like poverty or climate change. All development organisations need to find their niche in this more complex architecture and developing countries need to become more assertive about aid being aligned with their country strategies and systems. Given the absence of market forces or enforceable regulation, these trends in the aid industry place a higher premium on transparency, benchmarking and independent evaluation. [1]
A More Fragmented and Diverse Aid Industry
The development business is changing rapidly with a growing number of players and greater fragmentation in the way they operate. Today there are more than 40 bilateral donors and over 200 multilateral agencies. Official development assistance, as reported to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD, rose to a high of $120 billion in 2008. There are several new or expanding development actors, ranging from large ones like China and the Gates Foundation, to new global funds to the millions of NGOs and charitable organisations operating across the world. The scale of international private philanthropy is difficult to measure, but recent research has estimated $49.1 billion goes from developed to developing countries each year.[2] While this growth has brought additional resources and dynamism, the sheer scale of the increase in development players makes existing coordination mechanisms increasingly unwieldy.
Fragmentation also manifests itself in smaller projects and programmes. The number of aid activities registered with the DAC rose from 17,000 in 1996 to 81,000 in 2006. But the average size fell from $3.2 million to $1.6 million over that period. With a proliferation of small projects from new players, the median size of a new project had actually fallen to $67,000.[3]
In addition to greater fragmentation, the aid industry is becoming more bilateral.. The multilateral share of official development assistance (ODA) is flat in nominal terms, and declining as a share of the total, as more and more countries choose not to have their objectives diluted by multilateral governance structures.[4] As countries' objectives diverge, compromise through multilateral structures is harder to achieve and the ability for those institutions to adapt and innovate diminishes. As a consequence, the recent growth in aid has been driven by bilaterals, global funds, and private philanthropies that respond to specific issues (like HIV or education) without requiring compromises on a broader development agenda.
Notwithstanding the significant impact of the global recession on all flows to developing countries, this trend of increasing multiplicity in official development assistance, philanthropy and private capital is set to continue. This simultaneous growth and fragmentation of the development industry is not merely an interesting phenomenon for observers. It has a real impact on developing countries, as they deal with more players, and poses a challenge to fulfilling greater policy coherence. Development actors should adapt to this new landscape in three ways: first, by establishing suitable networks to coordinate solutions to global problems; second, by concentrating on their own comparative advantage; and third, by establishing clearer mutual accountability between donors and recipients.
Global Governance and Variable Geometry: Form will Follow Function
It has become increasingly apparent that the current structures of global governance and aid architecture are ill suited to the needs of the changing development landscape. The DAC is reviewing its membership and reaching out to expanding donors such as India and China in an attempt to bring these players into multilateral fora that establish norms, share good practices, and monitor progress. Both the philanthropies and the NGOs have extensive networks for collaboration with their peers that will have to become ever more effective.
The emergence of the G20+ as the key forum for responding to the global economic crisis is an important example of form following function. It reflects a more pragmatic approach to global problem-solving that brings key representatives to the table to solve a massive collective action problem. Interestingly, a similar formulation was suggested in 2006 by the International Task Force on Global Public Goods which proposed a "Global 25 or G-25 " a representative group of heads of state and government with strong links to formal international institutions - to provide leadership on issues such as climate change, infectious diseases, financial stability, trade and peace and security.[5] It seems likely that we are entering a world of "variable geometry" - more contact groups, more "Gs" (G7/8/20/25/77), more global funds, more coalitions and partnerships of private sector, NGOs and government around specific development issues or around themes like international standards for business or the environment. Rischard (2002) argues that these "global issues networks" provide an important addition to global governance and problem-solving that have the advantage of speed, flexibility, and legitimacy.[6] As form follows function, it will be a messier world, but one in which the opportunities for the nimble and networked to influence outcomes will be great.
All Players Need to Find their Niche
These changes imply that all development actors will need to be clear about their niche, especially as scrutiny increases in tougher economic times. Bilateral aid donors will need to define their comparative advantage - on fragile states or low income countries, by region or by sector. DFID, for example, will focus its bilateral programme increasingly on fragile states and its multilateral contribution on those institutions which are most effective at addressing the needs of the poorest. Emerging powers like China, India, Brazil or South Africa do not like being called "donors" and prefer the language of "partnership"; no doubt they will bring new models to the bilateral and multilateral development agenda.
The international financial institutions will continue to be important to provide countercyclical financing (as has become so apparent in this economic crisis) and providers of wholesale funding for larger scale investments such as infrastructure and programme aid. The UN system's role as a standard setter and enabler of global norms and action will become even more important.
The private philanthropists and foundations are well placed to be the venture capitalists of the development industry, able to take more risks than public funders and create innovations that can later be mainstreamed through public finance. NGOs will continue to be important providers of humanitarian and development services, but will also be key for holding governments and the private sector to account. But as their roles grow, there will be an imperative for both the philanthropies and NGOs to become more transparent and accountable.
Greater Mutual Accountability
More choice for poor countries is a good thing, but it will become even more imperative for poor countries to become better equipped to manage their aid flows strategically. For aid recipients, they will need to become more assertive about greater aid effectiveness, embodied in the agreements in Paris and Accra, to achieve more coherence, a better division of labour and more alignment with developing country plans and systems. For donors, the debate should shift increasingly to aligning behind countries' priorities and having clear mutual accountability with developing country partners. With more players, there is a greater role for "naming and shaming" by independent watchdogs, NGOs and evaluators to monitor and lobby for better donor and recipient performance.
From Architecture to Networks
The international aid architecture going forward will feel less like architecture as it is applied to buildings (solid lines and structures with clear divisions and responsibilities) and more like architecture as it is used in describing the internet (a place where connections are made where parties with common interests find each other and transact business). Increasingly, issues will migrate to the fora in which they can most effectively be resolved. There are some real advantages to network-based systems - they tend to be more resilient and more innovative. Development organisations will have to find their niches in this new, more complex world.
Will this new network of aid delivery be more effective? There are very real risks of more bad projects and greater transaction and coordination costs. However, there is also the possibility of more resources, greater innovation, and faster progress on fighting global poverty. One way to increase effectiveness in this new aid world is to put an even greater premium on transparency, benchmarking and independent evaluation. Regulation and coordination are unlikely to work.
The efforts of many NGOs, think tanks and aid agencies to highlight who is delivering effective development is key. There may be a case for the certification of "good aid" that, like the fair trade label, informs the public which development efforts (public and private) are delivering good results. These can be at the global level (such as CGD's ranking of development performance of donor countries), regional (such as the numerous NGOs that are monitoring the Gleneagles commitments to Africa), or at the country level (such as the recent independent evaluation of donor performance in Mozambique). Like Google's use of hits to measure the utility of various internet sites, this kind of comparative information will tell taxpayers and developing countries where to get the best value for money in the aid business.
[1] Thanks to Marco Petracco-Giudici and Cecilie Rogenaes-Panxha for excellent (and immediate) research assistance. I am also grateful for comments from Suma Chakrabarti, Richard Manning, Nancy Birdsall, Denis DeTray, Lael Brainard, Colin Bradford, Owen Barder, Pete Lewis and to participants in seminars at the Department for International Development, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, Oxford University and the London School of Economics for their helpful comments on earlier versions. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect official policy.
[2] Kharas, Homi (2009), "Action on Aid", Wolfensohn Center on Development at Brookings, April.
[3] Kharas (2009).
[4] Andrew Powell (IDB and UTDT) and Matteo Bobba (IDB), "Multilateral Intermediation of Development Assistance: what is the trade-off for donor countries?", IDB working paper, June 2006
[5] International Task Force on Global Public Goods, Meeting Global Challenges, Stockholm: Sweden, 2006.
[6] Jean-Francois Rischard (2002), High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them, Oxford: Perseus Press.
- Comments RSS feed
-
Send this post to a friendSend this post
Date : October 18, 2009 10:28
It is a great honour for me to leave a comment .
I would like to emphasize the importance of transparency in all this work .
Mainly the transparency of the mistakes done .
For instance in Madagascar there was a coup in March 2009 ,and the first condition of the putschiste is to restaure the financial aid .
I like to emphasize that financial aid for a putschiste governement is spoilt money ,and this is a big lesson everyone must keep in mind even how better the improvement of the financial institution become .
Honesty must be a leitmotiv for all first .
Date : September 9, 2009 18:38
Dear Minouche,
Thank you for sharing these very insightful remarks. It is striking how much our analyses converge on all of these issues. Not only do I recognise the changes we are witnessing in your description of this new world of aid, but I also share your view of the ways to move forward on the road to better aid effectiveness. Transparency, benchmarking and independent evaluation sound to me as a very convincing agenda for action.
The proliferation of public and private actors in the aid industry has clearly put and end to the oligopolistic cooperation model that characterised the aid industry for most of its existence. I like to say that the world of aid has moved from classical collective action problems between a given number of state or inter-state actors to a much tougher challenge, which we have called "hypercollective action" - i.e. building coherence among the actions of a much larger set of very different players . As you justly put it, the current structures of global governance are ill-suited to the needs of this new reality. I would like to share a few additional thoughts from our end on ways to move towards effective hypercollective action.
1) First, I fully agree with your call for a pragmatic response to the balkanisation of our policy. Moving down the path of greater aid efficiency will imply staying clear of ideological dead ends. I see two deceptive solutions to the proliferation of aid actors, which remain fashionable to this day:
- The first is the "institutional genocide" temptation, i.e. attempting to reduce the number of players to go back to the "good old days" when bilateral and multilateral aid agencies monopolised the field. The aid industry is clearly in need of organisation and clarification. But, as you say, whether we like it or not the trend of proliferation is here to stay, and the voluntary retreat of state or non-state actors on any significant scale is highly unlikely. Rather than fighting against the tide, what matters is dealing with this changing reality, so that the diversification of actors improves rather than worsens the quality of the development solutions we deliver. Diversity is not the problem, incoherence is. It is what we ought to address.
- The second is the "gosplanist" illusion. My sense is that the field needs to nurture a culture of alliance rather than administrative coordination structures: erecting a gigantic coordination machinery is not the holy grail of aid effectiveness. This is why, as you very justly put it, networks are the way the field will progressively structure itself: multi-actor coalitions can address specific issues more efficiently than individual donors, by pooling the right type of resources and expertise on a given problem. It is through concrete collaborations that actors learn to work together hands-on. The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund or the DNDI initiatives offer good examples of such effective multi-actor networks, where bilateral and multilateral organisations, foundations and NGOs learn to cooperate.
2) Secondly, actors will need concrete incentives to enter these collective learning processes. These will need to include both carrots and sticks.
- In fact European development aid has recently gone down this road, in a pragmatic and flexible approach to donor coordination. Several innovative mechanisms have been set up over the last years to encourage European donor agencies to work together and co-finance projects. In these instruments, EU institutions play a special role: rather than implementing the projects like any other donor, they provide the framework through which multi-actor convergence happens. They also provide an important financial incentive for donors to team-up, in the form of a 'top-up grant' that complements the partners' own funding. The EU Infrastructure Trust Fund is one of these schemes, whose principle could be reproduced elsewhere - especially in post-conflict situations, where donor collaboration is most crucial. I am convinced that "top-up schemes" of this type could provide efficient incentives for different donors to collaborate.
- As you say, negative incentives are also important to discipline ill-behaving donors. You touched upon this naming-and-shaming role of independent evaluation, which will help actors find their "niche" and concentrate on what they do best. Here again I enthusiastically agree, as institutions that rely on their reputation are indeed likely to respond to such incentives.
3) But evaluation should serve another important role: outlining possible arbitrage decisions for global policymakers, based on independent research.
Development professionals often complain about the seemingly irrational decisions taken by their political masters. But can they really be blamed? There is today no mechanism that would give an assembly of decision-makers (be it the G-20, the G-25 or a future 'Economic Security Council') a synthetic and reliable vision of strategic options from which to choose. The result is misallocations of aid at the global level. The 2007/2008 global food crisis is a good example of this pathology of our increasingly decentralised aid industry. Aid to agriculture fell from 17% of total ODA in 1982 to only 3.7% in 2002, as each donor shifted its funds to other priorities. It is not before a large inter-donor consensus was reached that something had gone wrong that the course was effectively corrected - i.e. after the ravages of the food crisis. Could this sad episode of collective misjudgement have been avoided? Finding a suitable allocation of funds across sectors is always a delicate balance, to which there can be no 'right answer'. But in an industry where allotment choices are fully decentralised, its actors are bound to repeat this allocation mistake if they are not helped by independent research and analysis on the resulting global funding priorities. Strong independent evaluation ought to serve that role too, signalling to the aid business when its collective choices are going wrong.
The good news is that evaluation has moved down this promising road in recent years: both DFID and AFD have been involved in a fascinating experience in the field of microfinance, which serves exactly these two purposes. CGAP works on quantifying and analyzing global funding flows. Its research is invaluable in determining the health of the microfinance sector - which associates thousands of actors of different shapes and sizes. Recently, it has also been asked by a coalition of donors to work on improving the transparency of the field by analysing their performance. CGAP's SmartAid for Mircofinance Index measures how well donors are set up to support microfinance, outlining strengths and areas of improvements. Each audited donor is given a score, which reflects its performance on five areas agreed by all funders as critical for effective microfinance. Improving evaluation will imply building more CGAPs and SmartAid indexes, to cover the various components of the growing aid industry.
4) Finally I would like to build on what you say regarding multilateral actors.
I firmly believe that they too should find their 'niche', and concentrate on their real added-value. My sense is that rather than being mere 'supersized donors', they should become the agents of effective hypercollective action - i.e. conceive themselves as platforms for multi-actor cooperation.
Today, multilateral institutions too often operate as if they were mere 'n+1 donors': they devise, finance and implement projects and programs in the countries they assist in much they same way as other actors of the field do. The paradox is that in host countries where donors abound and aid absorption capacity is scarce, they are in 'competition' with other actors of international cooperation to finance health, microfinance, education or environment programs. This is a fantastic waste of potential! Indeed the added-value of multilateral organisations lies in the multi-actor forum they provide, the information and knowledge they are able to muster and the volume of financing they can pool. In the new world of variable geometry you describe, multilateral actors should progressively move away from their operational role to become the organisers of policy dialogue, the knowledge-managers and standard-setters, as well as the rewarders of collaborative action.
I am working on a paper on this topic at the moment, where I try to develop these ideas; I will share it with you soon. I am looking forward to pursuing this fascinating discussion. Thank you again for starting it in the columns of this blog.
JMS
Date : September 5, 2009 03:32
Date 17 August I tell about information going to community should be smoothly and in time . Internet is very good for this purpose.
And feed back from community help leaders regulate the Policy is very important .
Information like blood in the body .
Use WTO Website and E-learning ( ITTC -WTO ) I feel the world is very near me . The way in the life is more easy .
We can't image the World without Internet .
MOET -Vietnam have programme to sell 1 millions computers of INTEL company to teachers .Teachers will take credit and buy it ,they pay back every months small money in one year .Computer will be private computers .
We do not use the government budget , it can't be collective property .
The impact for future is big.
Vietnam have to Invest to 3 points : Foreign language - Internet - International LAW .
Thank you
Date : September 3, 2009 23:31
Minouche: A terrific contribution - particularly on different funders filling different niches. And on the premium we should put on transparency, benchmarking and evaluation in the evolving network- and- niches aid system.
But we are not sure those three good things will get to the heart of the problems in the big official aid programs, bilateral and multilateral. Rigorous evaluation for example, has provided good evidence that aid for "solidarity" programs - "micro" and focused programs meant to reach people and improve individual lives- in health and education and water services delivery, where foundations and philanthropists are increasingly active, has worked. That is less true of aid for "transformation" at the "macro" level, i.e. meant to promote growth and improve governance by building roads and ports, modernizing the customs office, and so on, where the official donors are the big actors.[1] "Transformation" aid goes in the form for example of budget support, sector-wide programs and major infrastructure - where it is more difficult to establish a counterfactual, and where it is far more difficult to imagine that "like Google's use of hits to measure the utility of various internet sites, this kind of comparative information will tell taxpayers and developing countries where to get the best value for money in the aid business."
How can the official donor community get a better handle on whether and how and under what circumstances these macro transformative programs are working? We think that experimenting and learning from the Cash-on-Delivery approach could help. COD Aid automatically provides more information for developing country citizens and for donors' taxpayers by establishing an agreed benchmark for what is progress, and by requiring measurement of that progress against a simple outcome (whether children learning more, deforestation rates reduced, etc) that developing country citizens and donor taxpayers can easily understand. Indeed, the accountability problem is not so much "mutual accountability" as you frame it, between donor and recipient governments (the "partners") as it is accountability of the recipient government to its own citizens. COD Aid because of the transparent goal makes the recipient government fully accountable to its own citizens for the amount of progress and the resulting amount of aid it gets.
Nancy Birdsall, William Savedoff, and Ayah Mahgoub
[1] For more information please read Nancy Birdsall's "Reframing the Development Project for the Twenty-First Century" and Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray's "The End of ODA". Both are available at www.cgdev.org.
Date : August 17, 2009 06:03
Dear CHRIS BENNETT
Thank you for accepted our idea
In Vietnam teachers are intelligent in community .We starts from EMIS.
Worry, but democracy can be came by peace way .This is peace way.
I my self translate good documents in to Vietnamese and post it in http://edu.net.vn and in side system.
Foreign language is big challenge for Vietnam in the way to Integration in to the world. Very few in community can use English if I don't say only in high level ( some in one organization )
My work is expensive help for development .I do hope more and more persons help the way information came down to community and enterprises
Thank you for attention
Date : July 27, 2009 18:51
Merci pour cette brillante démonstration.
Mais quelque soit la forme de la figure que prend le monde, le centre de gravité est le même. Lui suit toujours une trajectoire rectiligne et il ne reste qu'aux hommes de lui tracer cette trajectoire. un monde à géométrie variable, mais à un centre de gravité unique. quel est ce centre? En réfléchissant un peu plus sur cet article, nous pouvons en faire une base pour la mise en place d'une véritable politique de développement
Bonne réflexion
Coordialement
Baba
Date : July 23, 2009 16:44
As the development world is becoming more atomized, its architecture while becoming more complex presents the threat of creating silos where intervenants in international development will "gang up" depending on the source of their funds, the politics and interests of their donors, their geographic and/or sectoral focus. Coordination between so many actors with different and often diverging understanding of issues and solutions is utopic at best. As the fauna in the sector becomes more diversified, the
Date : July 15, 2009 20:45
It is really pleasing to listen that more players are coming forward to help the needy, inspite of the economic turn down. The most important is the response of global community to emergencies like calamaties, wars... which has really improved.
But bilateral aid always have a tag attached to them. Donor countries will only be intrested in some resource rich countries may be oils, minerals , or strategic geographic position. And many times the funds don't reach the ground needy, but engulfed by system inefficiencies and corruption. Many times neither the donor country nor the receiving government , are bothered by the outcome. The donor is more intrested in appeasing the government and may be the media public rather than how well the fund worked.
But the muliteral aid of UN, of NGOs and private parties are little better , given that performance of the fund is regularly monitored and many times they reach directly the needy.
In this scenario as the Author has suggested , the rating of funds is really required. While rating the worth of a fund, it's long term impact to be ascertained.As some old saying goes "Give a fish u can feed a person for a day.. But teach him fishing, u will feed him for life".
So what is required is to teach 'fishing' - skill enhancement of local community so that they can become self reliant.
As one of the articles rightly points out " Financial aid based on performance.." There is defiently a serious requirement for auditing , the social auditing of the funds.
The local people of the receipent country for whom the fund is meant, should also be made a part in deciding how to spend the fund in a effective way.
So it is definetly a task for UN to really streamline and develop a system which provides an hastle free environment for cooperation.
Prenons du recul le temps d’un billet « Génaf
Date : July 7, 2009 19:21
[...] trouvé très intéressant, sur l’excellent blog idea4sdevelopment. Il s’intitule De l’architecture aux réseaux : l’aide dans un monde à géométrie variable et a été écrit par Minouche Shafik, la secrétaire permanente du DFID (le ministère [...]
Date : July 5, 2009 23:29
Dear Minouche Shafik
Thank you for such a succinct description of the changing structures behind development aid.
Our recent experience confirms your views.
The Self Sustaining Building Programme is being formed to address just two, albeit large, issues, climate change and MDGs. It is a prime example of a functionally focused organisation that will operate globally applying very specific skills, building design, environmental assessment, project finance and management. It will be a classic example of a niche player.
Having explored the most effective way of working for our new organisation, we are finding network operation and virtual offices are quite feasible and highly cost-effective. The essential disciplines of project accounting and control are not compromised by such ways of working and transparency can be enhanced. We can be closer to our teams through the internet and have low cost meetings with full documentation whenever necessary. Travel needs are significantly reduced.
By providing adaptable project frameworks, we expect our organisational form to adapt to function in each individual project case. This takes to the project level the long established DfID strategy of recipients specifying needs rather than donors imposing.
We will ourselves establish a global network on our specific area of work as you have predicted.
Che Thuy Nhu, I especially like your last point on using the network to reach out to communal levels. These new organisational forms combined with high speed, low cost, computer based telecommunication can transform our ways of working, enabling us to be directly responsive to local need and to cooperate directly with local projects.
Kind regards
Chris Bennett
Date : July 4, 2009 19:46
Querida Minouche:
Es paradójico que en este mundo globalizado el flujo de capitales para el desarrollo tenga que esperar a pasar por las manos de los países desarrollados. los países pobres proveen de materias primas a los países desarrollados por lo que la falta de recursos no es su principal problema, su problema es la alta taza de transferencia de la riqueza que ha permitido que los países desarrollados acumulen las riquezas propias de sus procesos de transformación pero también las correspondientes a a las materias primas extraídas de los países pobres. En esta época post crisis es necesario reconvertir este sistema de transferencias permitiendo al país en vías de desarrollo acumular su recurso proveniente de ser productor de materias primas, y con ello que tenga mayores armas para poder entrar a las vías del desarrollo, es necesario también que tenga acceso a un mayor capital social y para ello es necesario la inducción de mecanismos de reproducción social que permitan a la larga fortalecer el capital social local y aprovechar redes locales para la producción de capitales económicos, desde luego esto no es fácil pero desde su ubicación como organismo internacional tienen la posibilidad de sugerirlo aun nivel en que pueda hacer eco en los oídos adecuados. el gran secreto de las alternativas para el desarrollo ha sido la reducción de las tazas de transferencia, es necesario que esto ahora opere a nivel global a fin de evitar llevar al mundo a una nueva crisis financiera.
Gracias por contribuir a la creación de un mundo mejor.
Date : July 4, 2009 19:37
Dear lady Minouche Shafik
The work on social development in world level is some times under valored for the national governs and subsumes the big labour of institutions same UN or the different dependencies, but now, after the global crisis and the renewal of financial structures if necessary the reconfiguration of transfer systems. Is paradox, the transfers is send ed to the poor countries after of the regular flux of capitals, the poor countries provide resources to the developed countries but this only retrieve this in transfers after regular flux in aid international and develop programs. is necessary reconfigures the flux reduce the transfer primary taxes and renewal the social capital in the origin of resources, this flux renewal the capacity of the poor countries of produce resources, and renewal the economic flux in her territories. is complex but is more easy if is proposed for the world instances capacity for this.
Thanks for contribute to make a better world.
Date : June 28, 2009 16:58
As this article points out, fragmentation in the aid industry carries the risk that large numbers of uncoordinated projects will result in duplicated efforts and incoherent policies. In particular, actors may overlook obvious synergies between various sectors, e.g. intestinal parasite control via deworming medicines in combination with sanitation and hydrological controls to break the cycle of reworming.
However, as the article also points out, a host of small players is likely to lead to high levels of innovation. Under this scenario resourceful aid agencies now have a large number of potential partners to chose from freely. There is nothing to prevent small, nimble groups from creatively coordinating efforts or piggybacking on large donor projects to effectively deliver aid.
One important point that the article does not address is that the aid landscape now looks promising for testing new ideas and creating a larger body of evidence-based solutions to development challenges. Given the long history of mistakes in approaches to development, such research is crucial for future success. Evidence-based solutions give aid recipients and watchdog groups leverage over donors and implementers up front, before aid is delivered, thereby diminishing preventable failures. WIthout evidence, all mutual accountability mechanisms come into play after the fact, after money is wasted on efforts that do little to help.
Date : June 18, 2009 09:51
To Lady Nemat (Minouche) Shafik
Very interesting to know the aid flow in the world from yours article. The number average money for one project is 67.000 let us understand the size of our work, and how to mobilize it to the work .I thing - most important is knowledge like special money for projects. Other words it calls quality of human resource.
You raise the requirement for " Development actors should adapt to this new landscape in three ways: first, by establishing suitable networks to coordinate solutions to global problems; second, by concentrating on their own comparative advantage; and third, by establishing clearer mutual accountability between donors and recipients."
This is good; it should be expanding in when the aid came to Vietnam .This for orientation: Is this investment destroying the environment? This investment rescue people from poor life? How stimulate the comparative advantage?
Third, by establishing clearer mutual accountability between donors and recipients."
Internet can be helping the third objective? In Vietnam the government put the e- government as priority for development.
Recently the Viet tell company put for Ministry of Education and Training ( MOET ) Internet net work and Google help the schools and provincial levels have the Email with the end gmail.com
I think the International agencies in Vietnam should know about this net work to get feedback form communal levels .If this net work working good we can reach to remote area. This is good 2 way for Poverty alleviation programme.
Thank you
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
