Sometimes it IS about the money

There’s widespread agreement that more aid and?more NGO donations are not a simplistic panacea to solve development problems. Judith Tendler ?35 years ago wrote about the paradoxical phenomenon of aid abundance, in which donor agencies have trouble finding enough ways spending the money they already have; it’s still true today.

Yet things look very different at the other end of the aid delivery system. During a July trip to northern Ghana, I talked to a community leader in a? small farming hamlet outside of Bolgatanga, Ghana about availability of bed nets. The nets are working to prevent malaria for those who sleep under them, he says, but the town does not have enough nets to go around. “Everybody cannot sleep under one net,” he says.

When you reach the end of the road, it IS about the money. More money that reaches the end of the road means more malaria nets, fewer cases of malaria, fewer tragic deaths. The debate has never been about THAT,? it is about WHETHER the money reaches the end of the road.

So it comes to how likely it is that different official aid agencies and NGOs are to make the money reach the end of the road. This is a bit different than whether different aid interventions “work” according to randomized evaluation (RE). Even if the interventions pass the RE test, how do you know that one hundred additional dollars given to?one particular?agency will translate into additional?interventions??

My visits in northern Ghana were with local volunteers from the international NGO Nets for Life . Their basic idea is to use the trustworthy network of the Anglican church, including??local bishops, priests, and church workers?to deliver the?life-saving bed nets. I have been involved with Nets for Life at both ends now: both in board meetings in New York and at the receiving end in northern Ghana. I can’t claim to have performed any kind of systematic evaluation of Nets for Life, and even if I had, it would hardly be cost effective to for every concerned individual to perform their own time-consuming and costly evaluation of every small NGO program.??We need a much better system for identifying who is doing better reaching the end of the road, where it IS about how much money the agency can raise.?

Until then, I have a very favorable opinion of Nets for Life, based on hearing about their mode of operation,?seeing them in action in the field in visits to their intended beneficiaries in northern Ghana,? and also based on?the impressive attitudes, knowledge and dedication of everyone I have met involved with Nets for Life.

So to bring closer the day when we know more about NGOs, get to know your NGO as well as you can, using every method possible,?and share the information you collect with other actual and potential donors to that NGO (which is what I am doing in this post).? Again, this is all to assess the essential question: do donations reach the end of the road?

If the answer is yes, then yes it really IS about the money.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

View the original article here

Is aid sometimes for ruling party members only?

From our newly-published blog post for the New York Review of Books:

Foreign aid observers have often worried that Western aid to Africa is?propping up autocratic regimes. Yet seldom has such a direct link from aid to political repression been demonstrated as in “Development without Freedom,” an extensively documented new report on Ethiopia by Human Rights Watch. Based on interviews with 200 people in 53 villages and cities throughout the country, the report concludes that the Ethiopian government, headed by prime minister Meles Zenawi, uses aid as a political weapon to discriminate against non-party members and punish dissenters, sending the population the draconian message that “survival depends on political loyalty to the state and the ruling party.”

The aid agencies say their?own investigations fail to find widespread evidence of the misdeeds that the report documents—withholding government-provided seeds, fertilizer and microloans from non-party members, barring suspected critics of the regime from food for work programs, and denying emergency food aid to women, children and the elderly for refusal to join the ruling party. However, some aid officials admitted to Human Rights Watch (HRW) knowing about them:

As one western donor official said, “Every tool at [the government’s] disposal—fertilizer, loans, safety net—is being used to crush the opposition. We know this.”

Our post concludes by suggesting ways that the aid community might help Ethiopians rather than their rulers.

We of course welcome alternative views, including criticisms of the HRW report and?HRW’s operations in Ethiopia.

This entry was posted in Aid policies and approaches, Democracy and Freedom, In the news. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here