Welcome to the CIC's third e-conference –Recasting Development Assistance in the 21^st century.

 I will be online throughout the day to moderate the discussion, and guide us through the three discussion questions. Please feel free to offer your own answers to the discussion questions, react to our expert contributor’s comments or offer some challenges to the audience.

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 To start off the day, our first discussion question asks why have the billions of dollars of development assistance not been effective at alleviating poverty?

Our expert contributors have laid a strong foundation in answering this question. Ian Smillie suggests that a more nuanced approach to development is needed- that we must look beyond just economic growth to understand effectiveness. He also suggests that NGOs hold a wealth of development expertise that often remains an under-utilized and under-recognized resource in strengthening aid effectiveness.

Patrick Johnston outlines how the development assistance landscape has changed, welcoming a new breed of philanthropist organizations, the more prominent role of international NGOs and increased accessibility for citizens to become engaged in development. He suggests that this has important implications for accountability in development assistance.

Stephen Brown outlines the international communities increasing commitments to aid effectiveness, but suggests that Canada’s operationalization of these commitments may in fact undermine aid effectiveness rather than contribute to it.

What do others think? What are the key factors that have shaped the influence of Canada’s development assistance in the long term? 

Canada needs an effective strategic approach in place to development. This strategy will provide a framework for decison-making. In oder to ensure success, there has to be synergy, coherence and coordinated action within and betweeen different organizations, citizens and the government. The ultimate goal here is to attain a position where problems are quickly identified and addressed, as a result of having a mitigation strategy in place. When major challenges and failed policies are quicly identified, it saves resouces on projects that are not benefitting or capable of functioning well.

Good opening questions. In response I'd like to pose yet more questions... understanding there are different types of aid, including that for large infrastructure projects as well as aid to support government budgets, what can we say about how effective different types of aid can be? What are some of the conditions in which different types of aid can be most and least effective?

  I agree with Dunsi and would go on to suggest that many of these organizations just starting up are in need of further guidance from federal advisors  when establishing themselves as a charity, not-for-profit, or the like.  There are little to no readilly advertised support systems out there, or "how to manuals" on how to develop your own development project.  I think this leads to cases where projects are started with funding from various interests groups and not always successful since they don't have the right tools, resources, or advice, from the get go, to keep a good idea also a sustainable one.

The question assumes that development assistance has not been effective in alleviating poverty.  I think this is a false assumption.  While there is lots of examples where aid has not worked, there are also lots of examples of where aid has contributed to poverty reduction.  The success of official development assistance depends on many factors and is very context specific. It is not helpful to make blanket statements about its effectiveness.

It is important to recognize that aid can only contribute to poverty reduction, it can't make it happen by itself.  Too much is expected of the aid program.  There are many factors more important than aid.  At best, aid can support and strengthen domestic and community processes that contribute to proverty reduction.  At its worst, aid can reinforce negative processes.

When I look at issues of global hunger, the proportion of people experiencing hunger in developing countries has fallen from 38% in 1970 to well under 20% today.  There has been tremendous, although highly uneven global progress.  Even in Africa, some countries such as Ghana, have substantially reduced the proportion of people experiencing hunger, and aid has contributed to this progress (not its primary cause).

I do not think that aid should be sent to developing Countries in large amounts and to have the funds dirtibute by a large Government agancy. It seems that providing money to micro banks in the developing countries to distribute would be a more effective and efficient way of using our aid.

Our widely publicized response to the earthquake in Haiti might be an interesting case in which to examine both what works and what does not. Both government and individuals came through (with the rest of the developed world, it seems) quite promptly and generously. But beyond the immediate provision of relief, what has been accomplished? What will be accomplished? Perhaps someone will address those questions this morning?

We can't do everything everywhere. Canada should focus on providing aid in geographies and socio-economic situations where we have some expertise. My suggestion is to build on Canada's expertise in coastal and ocean scenarios where support of small local populations has the potential for long term success in promoting self sufficiency. Providing financial aid, along with a transfer of expertise, could go a long way to empowering coastal communities around the world. Keeping in mind pending global sea level rise and its challenges, Canada has much to offer - away from big over-crowded cities.

I do agree with Rod, because many developing countries especially many African countries grapple with corruption at all levels of government, it does not make sense to send aids in large amounts or to government agencies in most developing countries. In many cases, the aids sent to some of these countries do not get to the grassroots and end up not really helping those who need it. Good mechanisms must be in place to ensure that challenges like this are dealt with right from the beginning. We can have good plans and good intentions, however without good strategy in place, we will keep talking and 10 years later we will still be faced with the same problems we are faced with now.

Agreed.  So the next question is how, and where do we implement those strategies?

If we are to ask, truly, what it is that shapes Canadian development assistance, then I believe that the only fair answer would be the whims of a Junior Minister in whatever government is in power. Development organizations in general have short memories, and all to often follow whatever is in fashion at the time. Canadian aid seems to accentuate this - there is little accountability in the Canadian aid system, even after the passing of the Development Assistance Accountability Act. The result is that we have constantly shifting priorities, areas and countries of focus, which all of the commentators have noted in their papers. CIDA is also, unfortunately, being constantly reengineered, and every poor performance review of the organization leads to another program of restructuring. It's time for the Parliament of Canada to say enough, and allow CIDA to get on with it. I am convinced that the problems of Canadian ODA are political, and can only be solved through the Canadian political process.

This is not to say that CIDA has not undertaken some good initiatives, and done good things. But for Canadian aid to be more effective, CIDA must be supported to respond to the priorities of the people whom it ostensibly serves. All governments claim that they want to see this happen, but so long as I have worked in development (15 years) none have made a sustained commitment to move in this direction.

The argument that NGOs have a wealth of experience that could be tapped and must be supported is also true. But unfortunately, compared with many other countries such as the UK, Canadian NGOs have increasingly been followers rather than leaders - implementing CIDA programs and priorities for them rather than driving Canadian aid forward. NGOs have an important role to play, but rebuilding the Canadian NGO community, including ensuring that it has the funding and expertise to engage with the world, should be an important goal not only for CIDA but for the Canadian people (i.e. donations of time and money are always a good thing).

I had the same reaction as Jim Cornelius to the way the first question was framed.  In addition to the evidence he cites on hunger, UNDP's Human Development Index (HDI) is a useful tool for tracking trends.  UNDP found that HDI increased everywhere every decade, with the exception of Africa starting in the 1990s (mainly the effect of the AIDS crisis and the resulting fall in life expectancy).  To see the trends in a nicely animated chart, go to http://hdr.undp.org/external/gapminder/2003/hdi_trends.html. Again, this is not due solely to foreign aid, but it shows that overall conditions in developing countries are improving. Aid has contributed to this betterment of billions of people's lives.

The media tends to emphasize only failed aid efforts and misery in various parts of the world, which distorts the perception that donor country citizens have of aid effectiveness. For an example of a success story, see this blog entry by the CBC's Brian Stewart: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/10/15/f-vp-stewart.html. It is not by coincidence that this story is consigned to a blog, rather than prominent reporting on TV or in the press.

On the issue of whether Aid should be given directly to governments, I believe that the context is important. Some governments are quite effective in using Aid. I have worked in Vietnam for years, a country which tends to utilize aid funds and its own resources relatively effectively. Yes, corruption exists, but in this case, funding government programs rather than setting up separate systems only makes sense.

That said, this does not mean that one approach fits in all cases, even within countries. If Canada's goal is to support the health care system, then funding government providers makes sense. But if the goal is to empower disenfranchised indigenous groups (who throughout Asia and Latin America make up the bulk of the poorest), then direct financing of governments is naive at best. We need a more nimble approach to aid that is able to be context specific.

This dichotomized thinking between providing aid through government agencies and providing it to the grassroots is problematic.  It presents it as an either/or choice. Development generally does not happen if there are weak government institutions and services.  The notion that we will get development if we just bypass the government is questionable.  At the same time, there needs to be accountability, and demand from communities for the provision of effective services.  Much of the work that community based civil society organizations can do is help hold governments accountable.  I am struck that, even in China, there is significant public pressure on political leaders at the local level to perform better.  A lot of the work that is done at the local grassroots level involves strengthening local community organization that contributes to better governance.  We need to be thinking both/and and not either/or.

Many thanks for this great start to the discussion!

I think that Jim Cornelius brings up an important point- that aid is not a panacea and needs to be understood in context, and that development is too complicated to have its attribution be given to only one intervention (ie.aid). Similarly, if we really want to understand aid effectiveness, we need to examine the lessons from both the positive and negative perspectives.

Jim Cornelius and Jim Delaney also put forth some ideas about fitting the mechanisms of development assistance to the particular context being addressed. It seems from these suggestions, and my own experience, that flexibility and adaptability play an important role in making the most of development assistance.

I totally agree with Jim Delaney that Canadian ODA problems are political and that is a bit of a challenge in itself. It is also true that Canada has been a follower rather than a leader, however there are many successful stories, for example Ghana. There are also major failures, however Canada can build on the successes and become a major player globally.

I don't think we should get too hung up on the perceived failures of development aid. Assessing whether aid has worked is an extremely difficult question, and depends on a lot of factors. Growth itself is really hard to understand. Easterly talked about that at the launch of his new book in 2009 – he quoted Abhijit Banerjee saying that ‘It is not clear that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control’. And if growth is beyond macroeconomic control, and development is something related to but beyond growth (Ian Smillie), it is not surprising that the development community has little concrete understanding of what policies exactly will contribute to alleviating poverty and increasing capacity. 

I agree that providing aid by bypassing the Government is neither always practical nor desirable. Strong institutions and good governance are crucial for a development process and to bypass it is to neglect a very important area needing work. It is true that in many cases governments are corrupt and in the short term it may be more expedient to channel aids through non-governmenatal channels directly to the grass roots but I doubt that this is sustainable in the long run. If the goal is to foster societies that are self-reliant and not merely dependant on aid hand-outs, then there is no alternative for good governance.

I agree with both Jims ... the decision to channel funds through government or locally based organizations is not an either or proposition. The context will change from country to country. If one assumes that governments will always have some role to play in development, then the challenge rests in how to allocate aid and development dollars in ways that strengthen the capacity of the government to deliver effective programmes of development - while also recognizing the legitimate role of civil society organizations. Easier said than done. 

Christine asked a good question "how, and where do we implement those strategies?" The answer to this question is multi layered and cannot be covered in this forum. One notable and important suggestion  is the ability to engage major players and to bring on board personnels of the different countries Canada provides aids to. These personnels know how things work in their countries, they know the milieu and are able to provide information that will enable successful sustainable practices.

Following up on Stephen Brown's comments, we have a major problem in the aid business with failure, unlike the business world.  it is assumed that all aid must work, and if there are any failures then all aid must be a failure.  At the same time, thousands of restaurants go bankrupt every year and yet we don't say the restaurant business is a failure.  The newspapers don't focus all their stories on the restaurants that go out of business.  In fact they tend to focus their reviews on the restaurants that are successful.  If we were more accepting of failure, and saw this as opportunity to learn and improve performance, and gave more profile to programs that are  working (and not just PR profile used in fundraising or the political speech), then we could have more honest and useful coversations.

Stephen Brown is right about negative coverage of aid programs in the news media. Essentially what it does is to reinforce a complacent in-turning of our attitudes towards the rest of the world. Guilt-free cocooning.   

But his reference to Brian Stewart’s column on the success of the Sprott family’s initiative in Ethiopia might have noted an important question at the end of the piece:   “The big question, of course, is whether the Bati model will be seen solely as an excellent boutique model of concentrated reform, or whether it can be scaled up to regional and national levels.”

Maybe we should be asking what makes small-scale “boutique” interventions so effective?

The issue of poverty alleviation is deep, complex, and multi-faceted. There is no single cause of poverty in developing countries, just as there is no single cause of poverty in developed countries like our own. The only thing that we everyone seems to agree on is that there are no easy answers to this problem. Both Jeff Sachs AND William Easterly are right-- as are Jim Cornelius and Dunsi Raibu. In my field work, I have seen evidence that supports both sides of the story. The question is how to reconcile these competing truths.

My diagnosis of the problem is that the way in which donor agencies and the international community carries out development projects is flawed. We see a problem, we come up with a solution that we think *might* work. In the implementation phase, the solutions sometimes work (this is where you get the Jeff Sachs successes) and sometimes don't (this is where you get the William Easterly failures). What the international community has NOT been good at is adjudicating between different proposed solutions-- if there are five or six different possibilities for dealing with say, maternal mortality, which one of these is the most effective? In most cases, we don't have the answer to that question or others like it. Where are we going to get the best bang for our development buck?

So let's turn the original question on its head-- instead of asking what has been done wrong, let's be more precise about the problems we want to solve. In this respect, I think there is much to be learned from conducting field experiments to determine the effectiveness of development policies. (*More on field experiments below.) If field experiments are conducted properly, we can actually get the answer to the question that I posed earlier. Some of the most exciting work in development is being done in this field and CIDA will hopefully start taking note of these developments. On the academic side, some of the most promising research is being done by Esther Duflo and the MIT Poverty Action Lab (http://www.povertyactionlab.org/). (Duflo has just been awarded a MacArthur Geunius Grant)

I think this is the next step in thinking about how to make international aid money more effective.

*Field experiments

The best way to understand field experiments is to think of what pharmaceutical companies do when they test new drugs. They take two groups of people which are roughly the same in composition, administer the drug to one group and give the other group a placebo (or do nothing) to them. The results between the two groups are compared to see if the drug had the intended effect. (Read more on double-blind trials.)

Now apply this method to international development policy. For example, if you want to know if a given policy intervention has an impact, it's possible to follow this methodology and get a decisive answer. Apply the "treatment" to one group but not the other, and then compare. Carrying out this method is more complicated than I'm letting on-- you need to be careful about bias, your groups need to be large enough, information should not be shared between the groups, etc. It also happens to be logistically difficult to carry out these types of experiments-- not to mention expensive-- but the upside is that you can find out unambiguously if a given intervention works. You are able to establish causality-- this is rare for social science research. In this sense, it is the gold standard.

**My apologies but  I'm in Oxford which is five hours ahead of EST so I'm going to have to leave the conference early.

Following up on Jim Cornelius’  comment, Dunsi and Ian have also alluded to the importance of learning from past experiences as to how to make aid more effective.   We saw particular examples of this in Canada’s reaction to the earthquake in Haiti, where NGOs made an effort to come streamline their fundraising and implementation efforts, following in part from the fragmentation and competition that was well publicized after the Tsunami in Indonesia, as pointed out by Ian Smillie. As Jim suggested, there are gold mines of lessons learned within development circles, however, these aren’t always well-shared or publicized (though I think that there is an increasing trend of doing so). As Heather Keachie suggests- perhaps the emphasis shouldn’t be on the failure of aid, but rather what we can learn to continually improve.

What  do you think might be the most effective ways to integrate this learning into programming? Are the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms now in place sufficient? Is it just a matter of capturing and applying these lessons or is a more fundamental shift needed?

On the theme of balancing out the negative news stories, if you haven't already, visit www.africagoodnews.com as an example of citizen-led initiatives to influence perceptions of development and present a different picture of life in developing countries

A follow up to Stephen Brown's post #13 - please find live links below to an animated chart from the UNDP's Human Development Report which shows how the Human Development Index increased everywhere every decade, with the exception of Africa starting in the 1990s (mainly the effect of the AIDS crisis and the resulting fall in life expectancy). 

http://hdr.undp.org/external/gapminder/2003/hdi_trends.html

and an example of foreign aid success story, from a blog entry by the CBC's Brian Stewart:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/10/15/f-vp-stewart.html

I agree with Stephen and Heather.  Aid overall needs a better commications strategy to share knowlege of successes with the public.  Furthermore, I would also like to see greater engagement of, in Canada's case, of Canadians.  Particulary connecting to the rich cultural connections that our Diaspora bring, and thier contribution to the development of thier home-countries through remittances.  Greater synergies with other influencing factors such as: trade, remittances, etc.,  to development interventions would further increase aid effectiveness.  

In addition,a realistic long-term (yes, longer than 5 or 10 years) strategy for devleopment goals in a country should be designed. It should keep at its core a focus on building up the automony of the country to address its own poverty reduciton issues. This image should remain the prize all development practicioners keep our eyes on.  Aid need work to stimulate sustainable development through organic and appropriate means within a country. It is a catalyst; that's it.  It is not meant to become a permanent player in a countries future stability.  

I am always a little hesitant to say that donors need *more* monitoring and evaluation systems. Donors--CIDA included--have become all too focused on measuring impact, and M&E systems take up an increasing amount of management time in development projects. There is indeed a need for focused and smart impact assessment systems - experimental methods of the sort noted by Christine may provide one important data point for improving policy (though I believe that they are only useful in some cases, where interventions are discrete and measurable).

But I think that a key issue is that each donor agency, and indeed each project, has become responsible for measuring their own impact and results. I'm not sure that this is the best way to learn about development effectiveness. It could be much more productive for development projects and programs to focus on measuring what they do -- discrete achievements -- and leave impact measurement and the 'big questions' of impact of poverty, etc. to other agencies. Canada and Canadian institutions would do well to coordinate with partner governments and other donors to develop integrated impact assessment and learning systems.

Currently, we see a cacophony of impact surveys. I recently worked with a multi-donor rural development project in Lao PDR which had no less than three impact assessment systems (with each system consisting of multiple surveys and reporting formats), reporting to each funding agency. The burden on the host government partners was severe, and the major cost of all of this measurement was that there was less change to measure!

Within this, Canada's own IDRC could and indeed does play an important role to mobilize knowledge and develop the capacity in developing country institutions to lean about what works in development.

While we are talking of succeses, people may also want to look at the following excellent books:

If aid, or any other effort that aims to reach the poor in developing countries, is to work, then the people who deliver it have to understand what makes thinks tick on the ground. The reason vaccination programs work is that vaccinators have to go to the people they are vaccinating. It won’t happen by waving a magic wand in a donor capital or developing a huge plan unless someone goes village to village and vaccinates individual people. Although far from a panacea, the reason microfinance works is because you have to go to the person who will take the loan.

 The farther away from the recipient one gets in the planning process, the less likely likelihood there is of success. Canada and other bilateral donors have pumped money for years into the primary education system in Bangladesh. The principle is good, but it goes wrong as soon as the barn door is opened because they have to deal with an inept (to use a nice word) ministry that simply can’t deliver the goods. They can get classrooms built because there are contracts to be let, but education is not about classrooms, it’s about what goes on inside them.  Most of the upgrades in teacher training haven’t worked because there are fundamental problems in the selection, posting and supervision of teachers on the ground. The results, after hundreds of millions of dollars, are disappointing to say the least, and yet we bang on with the same approach, year after year.

 Several Bangladeshi NGOs have created small, non-formal primary schools for dropouts from this ineffective system. Their schools are taught by teachers recruited in the area where they will teach. Parents associations help to supervise, setting the school calendar and timing. More appropriate textbooks and teaching aids are developed. The schools equip children to get back into the formal system, so they have to follow the broad national curriculum, but they can use innovative teaching methods and cover five years of primary education in three.

 The reason it works is because the Bangladeshi NGOs go to the village; they see what works and what does not, and they adapt to local conditions and needs

 The dichotomy between big aid projects and what NGOs do is that NGO efforts are often not cost effective, or cannot be replicated. Or the donors and host governments say they cannot be replicated because they have a fixation on old models that cannot work. BRAC in Bangladesh has 36,000 non formal primary schools. Other NGOs have as many. Things like this can be scaled up if there is enough drive to make it happen.

 Easterly talks about the difference between “planners” and “searchers” and says that the reason so much fails is because the purse is held by “planners” who never go to a village, and who couldn’t run a 7-11 if their life depended on it. Somehow we need to get more “searchers” into the mix, or in engineering parlance, more “dirty fingernail people”.

Like Jim Delanley, I am really hesitant on the question of accountability. Of course it would nice to have clear answers to whether donor money is working, but from my own limited experiences, that puts huge burdens on the often small organizations. This ties into another policy direction I think needs mentioning: consistent aid. The most damage done in terms of reducing aid effectiveness is when donors will not commit to long term funding or require extensive reports and paperwork to continue the project. CIDA is notoriously bad on consistency because they keep reorganizing and shifting their priorities. But the donors are not the only problem - with so many small NGOs clamouring for aid money, it's hard to know where to allocate funds and donors naturally want to get the most bang for their buck. It seems counter intuitive (even to me sometimes), but more grassroots development NGOs are not necessary the answer. Consistent money and internal accountability seem to me the best strategies we've got at this point.

“How can development assistance be made more effective?"

A critical analysis of qualitative and quantitative research across multiple disciplines, found no definition for leadership in a North-South cross-cultural context (partnerships). The lack of definition is seen to promote power imbalance, facilitate distrust and apathy, and hinder output to the detriment of all stakeholders. In its absence, leaders rely on leadership practices based on cultural norms; an approach proving ineffective in relationships that increasingly rely on cross-cultural partnerships to address social and economic development.

Where leadership definitions in a north context abound. A benefit of defining leadership is donors, agencies and institutions have a place to develop, measure and monitor leadership skills and competencies; recognizing those attributes, traits and characteristics as influential on outcomes. In the absence of a definition, a leader’s ability is limited and aid output is gloomy (Bryson & Crosby, 1992, Senate Report, 2007, United Nations Development Programme, 2000, WaterAid, 2008).

Research has shown that where many factors influence cross-culture relations/partnerships, the practice of leadership is paramount.  Despite its significance, leadership and development of leadership are mostly left to chance. It is not uncommon in a north/south partnership where each leader should have a hand on the leadership reins for a south partner to pass their rein back and the north partner to hold it rather than giving time and attention to returning it to reduce disparities and remove inequities ( ODA objective).

“How can development assistance be made more effective?” . . . give focused and meaningful attention to leadership and leadership development. 

Most aid organization have invested heavily in developing and improving their monitoring and evaluation systems, and if funded by government donors, have been required to do so.  CIDA has been pushing results based management for over a decade. This has forced greater clarity in determining what we are trying to achieve and measuring what is being achieved.  In theory, all this work is supposed to lead to learning and improved programming.  From my experience, much of this work gets stuck at the accountability stage (accounting to donors for what you have achieved) rather than contributing to learning and improved program design.  And because it is used primarily as an accountability tool, there is a tendency to look for the positive outcomes and ask fewer awkward questions, because failure is not acceptable.  How to create a better balance between accountability and learning is a big challenge.

While we have a had a good start to the discussion, I am always left with the feeling in arguments about Canadian foreign aid that we are squabbling after pennies thrown into the dirt by the side of the road, debating how best to spend what is entirely inadequate for any of the needs we can identify, while the Canadian motorcade sweeps by en route to some far more important and ultimately pointless engagement.

The decline in spending on foreign aid is a more troubling sign of the increasing insecurity of our world than an uptick in military expenditures or regional conflicts.  If we assume that this decline is the result to some extent of political pressure (or the lack of it), we could easily argue that a culture that does not care will never find a way to help.  We can all point to examples of individuals and NGOs that are dedicating their lives to helping others less fortunate, whether abroad or at home, but I wonder (and worry) about the culture of indifference in the making all around us.

 Individual Canadians can be generous in the moment when disaster strikes (witness the Haiti relief), but such personal generosity contrasts with the initial niggardliness of the federal government, whose first declarations of aid were eventually multiplied many times over because of the public response.  Given their inescapable reliance on polling information, one might assume that such a miscue was the “20^th time” when the numbers are wrong.  I would also not be alone in wondering if a different Governor General and a country further from our shores would not have led to a weaker response, even in the moment, much less in the longer term in which what we will be able to do to help rebuild Haitian society remains unclear.  Spontaneous generosity does not lead to structural development, which requires both thought and commitment.

 I have taught applied ethics for a long time, and have become increasingly troubled by some attitudes that are appearing among my groups of students – enough so, that I want to pursue some research in this area.  A majority of these students – even those who are recent arrivals in Canada -- feel we have no strong moral, ethical or even religious obligation to help “the poor of the world,” however this group might be defined.   It is nice to do so, and might make us feel good for a little while, but there is nothing substantive.  Yet when these same students are asked about whether they have an obligation to future generations, in the context of making different environmental decisions, there is almost unanimity that they have such an obligation, that it is strong, and they need to make lifestyle changes as a result. 

 What concerns me is that they see no inherent contradiction in these two positions.  However bleak our environmental prospects might be, people have hope things will be different, and there is some realization of the need to make permanent social and cultural changes.  Yet somehow our culture has cast development assistance in such a light that it falls beneath even the threshold of charity.  When it comes to development assistance or a sustained concern to better the life conditions of people outside of Canada, this kind of indifference makes an ethic of care for others irrelevant, and creates a political culture in which governments that follow instead of lead will even further reduce the number of pennies they throw from the limousine (or LAV) in passing.

You're right, of course. Commitment is a huge problem. Canadian commitment to foreign is 'mile wide but an inch deep'.

But of course "commitment" to education or the SPCA or the environment is also weak, depending on how it is presented, how important it is to the individual being asked, and so on. If you ask people if they care about their house burning down, or about crime in the neighbourhood, they care, and they will get committed pretty quickly to solutions. By treating foreign aid as charity, by treating people and countries far away as though they have nothing to do with us, we have managed to convince ourselves and a generation distracted by technology and bombarded with useless information that all this is optional. That attituide in the 1930s resulted in a very bad war in which a lot of us/us died.

I agree with Smilie that practitioners confuse growth with development.  There is also a lack of vision among donors who seem to be constrained by politicians' limited time horizons.  Sustainable growth, in the context of our world, is an oxymoron.  Our resources are, after all, limited, and sooner or later "growth" as it is currently defined will have to stop/reverse.  It concerns me that donors are nonetheless perpetuating the "developed" worlds' approach to rampant resource and energy use, rather than applying lessons learned and enabling aid recipients to leapfrog into more sustainable models - as Africa leapfrogged into cell phone use and largely bypassed land lines. Rather than investing in dead-end projects like the expansion of coal use for energy production, donors should be focussing much more on things like appropriate architecture for extreme climates, sustainable alternative energy technologies and means to reduce energy use, innovative approaches to common transport and urban planning, water harvesting and conservation, effective waste management, sustainable agriculture, etc.  The failure of structural adjustment policies  has underlined the critical need for good education, health, labour conditions  and other social support systems, for effective "development", and yet conditionalities persist that undermine  improved social conditions for the poor.

Peter Denton (post #34) has raised two key, inter-related issues; the views of the Canadian public towards aid and development and the underlying rationale used to solict public support. Public opinion polls of Canadians over the past decade have been fairly consistent; a strong majority of Canadians believe that we have a moral obligation to provided assistance to poor people in poor countries. It will be interesting to see whether this sense of "moral obligation" is declining for a younger cohort of Canadians as Peter seems to be seeing amongst his students. I wonder if this might be explained, in part, by an increasingly disenchantment with governments and what some seem believe as their inability to make a difference in reducing poverty. Certainly, a number of young Canadians I know who are actively involved in development tend to look at the government as part of the "problem" and not part of the solution. And, the public opinion polls show that, even those Canadians who believe we have a responsibility to developing countries, are mistrustful of the ability of the developing countries to ensure that it gets to the poor. We've seen comments to that effect in earlier posts. The issue of Canadian public opinion becomes crucial because, ultimately, decisions about ODA expenditures are political decisions. If the views of the Canadian public are changing in fundamental ways, this may have significant implications for the future of Canada's involvement in development. 

Ian, you are spot on (though on the subject of local crimes, people's attention span tends to last until the spree stops in their neighbourhood).  I have a done a lot of work on the inter-war period, and the parallels 80 years later are chilling.  But how do we get outside the problem of people thinking that "no man is an island" refers to the latest episode of Lost, which they missed because they were watching Dancing with the Stars?

That fact that we now consider foreign aid 'optional' doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'm doing some research on the G20 right now and they spend a lot of time in their communques talking about how interconnected countries are now, and how vulnerabilities in both developed and developing countries cross borders. The logical conclusion would be then that development (often growth in this context) could be a self-interested imperative in much the same way that environmental action has become - we need to change our our behaviour now because even climate change happening across the globe will affect us too. But the only indication of this attitude I've seen is couched in the language of 'security' - i.e. supporting 'development' in order to secure 1) our own national interests; and 2) reduce potential conflict.  But I don't see how to translate that into an imperative to care about the bottom billion, or that not everyone gets access to justice, for example.

I think that there are three erroneous assumptions implied by much of the discussion that surrounds the efficacy of external aid that have to be clarified before the dicussions get down to reality.

Assumption1. The discussions imply that foreign assistance or intervention can kickstart development.  Development, whatever its definition, can only originate in the country itself.  I worked in UNDP New York in the mid-1980s and a group of us were asked to prepare papers on "What is necessary for Africa to develop?" I wrote a one sentence answer -- "When African leaders take responsibility for what is happening in their countries--Africa will develop". I still hold that view, although many countries Including India, China, Brazil and numerous smaller ones are now obviously making serious efforts to "develop". But the decision has also not been taken in many countries, and pouring money into them is money wasted.

Assumption 2. Money from western governments, charities and NGOs sent to developping countries is for development . Much of it is not.  Enormous sums are spent on emergeny relief and rehabilitation-- necessary as this spending may be-- it is not development. It alleviates a catastrophe, maintains the status quo or restores an old status quo, but does not necessarily bring about change or progress--you can think of it as a doctor keeping a patient alive, wihtout being able to cure them. Much money is also humanitarian aid, often to individuals or groups identified by foreigners -- what we called charity in the old days. Again, this money will assist a village or perhaps and individual, which is good, but it is unlikely to bring about widespread change. There is also a danger that the emergency and humanitarian aid will breed dependency. Both these types of expenditure save lives and better peoples' lives in the short run-- but rarely bring change on a larger scale. The third is development assistance which can be techical aid or investment (large or small) which supports local initiatives by NGOs (BRAC for example as cited by Ian Smillie) or governments.  This money could still be wasted and requires careful planning, but is the most likely to bring about change. This is not to say that all three types of "aid" are not important, but we should be clear what we are talking about and what our expectations are.

Assumption 3. The UN, NGOs, and charities are always disinterested humanitarians (The bilateral organizations and the IMF/World Bank are rarely assumed to be disinterested humanitarians.).  Ian Smillie also touched on this. Many of these organizations have their own agendas which are as much about growth of the organization and the preservation of jobs as overseas assistance. The Lancet this week published a report on declining maternal death rates and noted that the UN had requested it to delay publication of the article until after some fund-raising meetings.  UN organizations-- UNAIDS in particular-- have a long history of massaging data to provide the worst possible image of a situation (bad news is good for fundraising).  US NGOs have been major players in lobbying the US government to continue to provide commodities rather than cash as food aid as they depend on food aid distribution for their existance.  I once consulted to a major Canadian NGO involved in aid and was told by the CEO the his mission was to make the NGO the largest in Canada. 

Patrick, what I find hopeful is when I confront students in a course I teach on sustainability and global citizenship that environmental sustainability and social responsibility are each impossible without the other, they get it -- but it takes some serious thinking.  We explore the nature of the current technology to which Ian referred, and then move to how we understand the difference between information and knowledge, and the difference between knowledge and wisdom, in the context of the ethical decisions we make every day.

Not everyone has the opportunity to do this kind of thinking, and there seems to be little enough in evidence of it when you flip on the news....

This has been great and lively discussion, and that I think has started to touch on some of the fundamental challenges in sustaining positive development outcomes, and John Gordon has just provided us with some additional food for thought. I would like to try to summarize some of the more recent discussion around some emerging points and suggest a next step for the discussion.

One of the salient points from my perspectives centers around the health of systems as critical to shaping the potential of development interventions, as suggested by Ian Smillie. This echoes some previous contributors who also suggested that strengthening governance systems, including supporting the human resources and processes to do the work on the ground, is critical. This idea also ties in with Peter Denton’s and others’ comments that spontaneous generosity does not lead to structural change.

Several people have suggested that influencing Canada’s approach to development assistance lies in political processes, and that we, as citizens, can have a significant influence on that process. However, as Peter Denton and Ian Smillie suggest, changing the perception of aid from one of disinterested charity to one where people see their own future as tied and reliant on the well-being of others is, as Patrick Johnson suggests, crucial to influence political decisions around ODA.

While I think that we could easily spend the day discussing some of these issues, I would like to move the conversation towards the second discussion question: What is CIDA's role in a world where contributions from NGOs, philanthropic organizations and remittances far outweigh national development agencies for on-the-ground impact?

In tackling this question, I would encourage people to think outside of CIDA’s current structure and process and focus on what you see as an inspiring and motivating vision in how Canada’s development agency  can contribute to development?

Given the great discussion so far, I am looking very forward to people's comments!

Part of the problem is that the source(s) of poverty aren't taken into account when we consider the solution. To what extent did the rich countries of the North industrialize through the exploitation of countries or colonies in the South? You don't have to be a neo-Marxist or dependency-theorist to believe that the North has contributed to underdevelopment or "maldevelopment" in the South. How much damage have the structural adjustment programs imposed by the North caused the South? To what extent do current trade policies, including Canada's, do harm to developing countries' economic prospects? 

If we re-examine the sources of our prosperity and the causes of impoverishment in the South, it becomes hard to see aid as mere charity, something we give out of pure benevolence when we can afford it. So beyond an ethic of solidarity, I'd say aid also has to be seen to a certain degree as morally mandated (and inadequate) compensation for past and current practices. In addition, aid in only part of what countries like Canada can do to fight global inequalities. Many non-aid policy changes in the North could have a great impact on development in the South.

Hello,

Great discussion everyone,

I agree with Terresa Augustine Post 32 & Ian Smillie Post 30. The right kind of leadership is paramount.

Leadership is a key to a large part of what missing in development. I think it is possible to imagine leadership at the micro level being much more robust in connecting the developing regions of the world to what works or fits from the developed world. To be successful assistance or aid must be of course applicable to the exact situation on the ground. With appropriate leadership at the micro level, meaningful value can be extracted from the international community. Villages that can correctly recognize the value within them and become capable of projecting there worth outwards have an increasingly better chance at providing meaningful leadership at the macro level within their country, their region and the international community. I would emphasize that with the back drop of recasting development in the 21^st century we are actually talking about every last place on earth. We must remember that the development within our backyard needs a fair bit of work as well; we did just crash the entire global economy. That said there is a tremendous abundance of evidence that we can do right by ensuring we assist in delivering 21^st century solutions with the massive reductions in resource and energy that we absolutely know are possible. The combined effect globally of reducing our resource commitment and ensuring access to the developing world to those same technologies creates an accelerating convergence which substance is primed and ready. What is needed is the acceptance, the global acceptance of this greater good for all humanity.

Anna, thanks for keeping discussion going and on track. I think that highlighting the importance of the non-government and private sector in development need not diminish the role of government to government ODA. CIDA does have a role to play in providing the kinds of financing for public goods that private remittances and indeed FDI do not play. So whereas the Gates Foundation may provide financing for important research, and families may pay for hospital care using remittance money from overseas, there are often gaps when it comes to supporting the infrastructure for service delivery - hospitals, management systems, trained doctors. Bilateral and multilateral aid can be effective mechanisms for assisting governments to develop these systems. It bears repeating that CIDA - a public institution that cooperates with governments - plays a role that is very different (though no more or less important) than private sector actors.

Another challenge is the shift that Robert Zoellick has just highlighted in the leadup to the WB/IMF Spring meetings: the weakening of the North-South divide. CIDA can no longer work within a framework where the North provides funds and financial assistance to 'develop' the South. A key role, I believe, should be to cooperate much more closely with multilateral agencies. CIDA has already made some progress in this direction, with a major contribution to IFAD under it's new food security agenda.

It's closing in on midnight here in Hanoi, so I will sign off for now. Thanks to all for the stimulating discussion. I look forward to reading the rest in the morning.

Peter asks how we get people to think beyond their narrow world and to understand that events elsewhere, whether the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 or the devastation in today’s Congo, actually do have a bearing on our lives and our future. The issue in 1938 was not Czechoslovakia per se, but the rise of Nazism and the rearmament of Europe. Czechoslovakia was a symptom of these and other problems. The issue for us today is not the Congo – it is an issue, but not the overarching issue – the issue is a world where hundreds of millions of people are left out, becoming a breeding ground for pandemics, war, mass migration, environmental degradation, pollution and many other things that will all come home to roost for the next generation – our next generation.

Our government plans to halt aid increases for Africa next year until, as the Foreign Minister says, He knows that past aid was properly spent. This comes hot on the heels of him bragging that we have doubled aid to Africa over the past four years. We have not, but that’s beside the point. Why would you double aid if you didn’t know how it was being spent?

The logic is backward. Instead of grabbing for a tag line to justify cutbacks, he should be explaining to Canadian why this is important, as Stephen Harper does every day in explaining why we are in Afghanistan. These are difficult messages, and if you don’t keep explaining them in terms that relate directly to the lives and experience of Canadians, we won’t ever come near to doing it right.

Bev Oda, our Development Minister, has said several times that we are the most generous nation on earth (per capita) where Haiti is concerned. She makes it sound like charity. If she sees things that way, what are the rest of us supposed to think? Sure, there would be a charitable impulse in the relief effort if we had such an earthquake in Winnipeg, but we would also see reconstruction and development as an obligation and a necessity. If we left Winnipeggers to their own devices, we would pretty soon have anarchy.

Aid has been dumnded down far too much – often by NGOs who are trying to raise money, and who tell potential donors that ending poverty is easy and cheap and quick. It is none of those things.

This is a great discussion!!!  For those in the Toronto area, perhaps we could like to get together to continue this conversation over a drink? Please let me know who is interested. You can also reach me at sunszu@usa.net.

Kind regards,

Sabrina

To respond to Anna's question about a role of CIDA: maybe some such central agency could give thought to promoting  a favourable climate for development. Corruption is pretty widely considered to be a blight: what constraints might be possible? 

 The US, UK and EU all have identified support for the growth of informed independent news media as one significant answer. (Canada seems much less convinced about the value of this approach – why would that be?) 

What form such support should take is a difficult question. Journalism training is important, yes, but so also are business models that enable media organizations to publish or broadcast independently. And speaking of broadcast, when radio and television licences are gifts from governments what sort of watch-dog role are grateful recipients likely to be?

Perhaps – if we do seek the most effective use of  ODA and if we are  concerned about good governance – support for independent journalism should be part of the package. Maybe some of it could be conditional on recipient governments moving towards creation of independent broadcast authorities, or increasing media access to court proceedings and court records as a way to strengthen the rule of law. And maybe if Columbia is to be a new target for assistance, some question might be asked about the progress of  investigations into the murder of six journalists last year.   

I would like to reiterate that Canada with 30 Million - can't address much of Africa's issues - let alone the world's ills. We need to be selective with our goals and resources. Haiti may be a good example where there is a clear link between the area in need and the strong Haitian population in Canada. I think we want to promote not just the flow of resources from Canada to other nations, but to foster a real relationship where both parties benefit. The Canadian government and society (both fairly democratic by world standards) has much that could be shared with a few select nations who have a need and an interest in improving their lot. I think NGO's don't have the depth of experience or interest in promoting good governance and improved societal functioning - no matter how much money they have. Training, tutoring, mentoring are all things that cost money - but are beyond just sending a check.

I agree with Post #49 - a free press would be an excellent export from Canada/CIDA - as an important part of good governance.

If governments are to be held accountable, a stong, independent media is important, as Ian Porter suggests. You need a lot of other strong, independent organizations as well -- the judiciary for example, and Canada has sponsored programs that send Canadian judges overseas to work with counterparts in developing countries. You also need independent voices in civil society who can speak out when rights are being abused. This is something our current government doesn't understand. It has cancelled funding to a wide variety of Canadian and developing counrty NGOs because it doesn't like their message, and now it has threatened the Canadian Council for International Cooperation for defending them. CCIC has been forced to give its staff layoff notices this month because of what it has been told by CIDA. This is shocking. It is pure Mugabe territory. If we want to promote democracy, fairness and good governance in other counrties, we had better start taking a long hard look in the mirror

Canada's aid should be provided to the poorest of the poor countries where our bucks will make the most bang.  Why has the Harper government focussed so much on our trading partners and those the government seems to think are good for Canada to invest in. Development Assistance needs to be focussed on those countries in which investment is LEAST likely.

I have been following the discussions since morning and would like to make my two cents contribution with respect to Africa. I think it will be good for CIDA to place less emphasis on Westphalian sovereign state and NGOs and instead focus on regional institutions such as the African Union and SADC where new norms are emerging and community organizations in rural areas. Most of the development money in the last four decades (as the recent OECD aid data show) has supported elitists and urban-based project and I would like to see it go back to its roots.  

I agree with Lambert (post #53) that Canada's official development assisstance should be going to those countries which need it most, as that is the point of aid. Focusing our aid in Latin and South America, where we have vested economic interests, is antithetical to the point of aid. This is because we are furthering our own economic interests rather than helping others. We should be sending our official development aid to those countries which need it most, i.e. African countries, like Malawi.

 I think that Canada’s development agency should have a strong role in Canada as much as internationally.

Within public health, there is a line often used that part of our job is convincing every ministry that they are also a health ministry.  Similarly, as Stephen Brown suggested in post #54, Canada could significantly contribute to development assistance by ensuring that every ministry is, at some level, is a development advocate. The challenges to this are significant, as such a move would require strong and sustained support from citizens, which suggested by several posts above (#47, 32), remains lacking.

Perhaps then, there is a role for Canada’s development agency in making stronger efforts to educate and mobilize its own citizens? CIDA does support in-Canada outreach by NGOs, however, the discussions here today suggest that more is needed.

 Posts #49 and 52 suggest that assistance should be directed by principles and values, perhaps rather than sectors (though these are certainly not mutually exclusive). I couldn’t agree more with Ian Smillie’s emphasis on supporting independent institutions. Along with an independent media and rule of law, in my own work, the importance of locally-based skilled researchers able to tackle issues relevant to local populations, and socialize the evidence, is a tremendous contributor to transparency, awareness and action for change. 

Granted sending money simply to countries we have vested interest in is not the best way to evaluate need, but the question remains; what is?  Many urban cities in Africa are receiving far more attention then some of the more rural areas that are greatly effected by the HIV pandemic.  Furthermore, there are many communities in other countries that Uzbekistan, areas of China, and rural communities in South America that go largely un-noticed by both homeland support systems and development organizations.

What is CIDA's role in a world where contributions from NGOs, philanthropic organizations and remittances far outweigh national development agencies for on-the-ground impact?

Ideas include -

1. Facilitate establishment of an ODA Coalition of stakeholders i.e .NGOs, government agencies, untied aid parnters, experts, Diaspora, philanthropists, independent media, others.  Where a leadership coalition has the capacity to go off track, be another project, campaign or political platform, it also has the opportunity to stay on track and demonstrate leadership. Individual sector, discipline and industry agendas, knowledge, skills and competency poured into a shared-interest/vision  (fiscal, moral, security, other reason), offer what is increasingly identified as an effective way to lead forward together.
   
   John Gordon’s post #41 offers 3 assumptions – 1. What is necessary for Africa to develop? . . . When African leaders take responsibility for what is happening . . . Equally, what is necessary for ODA results, expected or promised returns, and possibly the associated improvement of citizen engagement – is when leaders take responsibility for what is happening. A well-established coalition distributes responsibility for shared vision.
   
2. While recognizing the value of leaders being responsibility for results, one must know what is for what purpose it is being measured and then have meaningful mechanisms in place to measure for purpose (of improvement.)
   
3. Bring new thinking (transdisciplinary), perspectives, perceptions to established or entrenched ways with the goal to realized preferred future not protect position or past.

Maybe we should get the discussion back to basics. One of CIDA's problems, and not different from other bilaterals, is that it (and we today) tend to talk about abstract notions, "sectors" and very lofty goals. Canada has rarely put any emphasis on agriculture in its aid programs, and yet agriculture, notably food production, is absolutely essential to any country's wellbeing. We are not alone; the OECD donor average is about 6% on agriculture. At the same time we send an awful lot of food aid, which we all know can be a serious impediment to local food production if not handled well. And there is nothing to suggest that any donor has handled it all that well. Canada has a new emphasis -- "food security" -- a nice jargony term that can pull the wool over the most jaundiced eye, and we "focus" on "micro nutrients". Great. I'm sure it is terrific. But nothing will substitute for agriculture. 90% of Africans are farmers, so by ignoring them, we ignore what 90% make their living from, we ignore probably half if not 80% of African GDP, and we ignore the real problem of nutrition, which is not micronutrients. It is food.

Now you can't plan agriculture in Saskatchewan from Ottawa. You can't plan it in Moose Jaw either. You have to go and spend time with farmers and listen to how they see things. The answer may not be agriculture, it may be CN freight rates, but you won't understand it properly unless you listen to them, and maybe even spend a night on  a farm (God forbid!)

My first posting overseas was in Sierra leone in 1967 and my most recent visit to Africa was last month. I spent a lot of time on this recent visit listening to groups of rural women, and I was reminded of what I wrote above by subsequent discussions with aid officials in Kampala who had no idea what was going on in the rural areas.

CIDA has become a contracting agency. Its few field people are generalists, too busy managing an ever-growing stream of  consultants and "monitors" to become experts at anything. Consultants come and go; CIDA officials, policies and Minsiters come and go, and we remain stuck with abstractions about "governance" when we should be talking about judges, and about micronutrients, no doubt valuable, but still more one of those cute donor "innovations" than the substance that farmers need on the grround..

Let's get back to basics. Lets learn -- really learn what works, and stop flitting from lamp to lamp like dizzy moths. Agriculture would be a good place to start, but whatever we do needs to begin with farmers and what they know, not a serach for some brilliant Canadian "initiative" that will take the world by storm and leave farmers with the storm damage.

I think sometimes we still suffer from bigger is better approach like that NGO director who thought it was his goal to make his NGO the biggest one out there. I think Canada needs to start with a simple goal, to use our money and political and financial inlfuence each year to obtain the maximum benefit ( with measurable yardsticks that don't change) for the poorest  nations of the world.

This would mean our Federal Government would work more with a team mindset with NGO's and organizations to aid with their efforts as well.

Has there ever been an attempt for Canadian organizations and NGO,s, church organizations and like minded organizations to speak with one voice with the Federal Government to try and influence their aid goals? I would think with other organizations like AVAAZ now out there putting pressure on Governments around the world for social change that might be a good time to attempt organizing in this fashion once again. This could be a way to make sure that Canada's youth get involved with this important issue.

I have been following the debate and am glad to see so many people following, however it seems that like many seminars, panels and books, the discussion is being kept always at the general level, which is frustrating for students who are interested in creating long lasting change.
Lack of coordinated objectives, and evaluation standards are problems facing foreign assistance generally, and convincing people to give to"charity" has many unintended political consequences for coordination and an aggreesome of what is "success".

In Ian Smillie's article "Focusing foreign aid isn't just about money" he raised an interesting way of future policy within CIDA
He says: 

"We are not a major donor, so the volume of our aid will never give us great policy leverage with most developing countries. But if Canada were the most knowledgeable donor in the world, say, on basic education, countries would come to us first for our expertise, rather than our cash. Our muscle would come from knowledge, rather than our bank account. Such an approach would give us a much bigger bang for our buck, and would allow us to move to a form of aid based on the merit of proposals and their implementers, and the potential payoff of the investment. This does not require concentration on a small number of countries; it requires a focus on learning, and the application of lessons from one project and one country to another."

I was wondering what your thoughts were on this as a feasible plan for the future. Do you think focusing on subject specific areas is something that would bring expertise in leadership, coordinate objectives and relate Canadians to the more specific vision?

I often agree with Ian Smillie, but I must take exception to his views on agriculture and specifically nutrition. Most developing countries diets have sufficient calories, but are deficient in essential protein and fats. They are also defficient in micronutirients (vitamins and minerals) which protect against a myriad of diseases (iodine for example which protects against goitre). Until people are eating well-balanced meals, supplementary micronutrients are often the cheapest way to keep them healthy (or healthier). 

As for agriculture and 90 per cent of Africans being farmers. The problem is not keeping them on the farm, but getting some of them off. The whole question of tenure in Africa is a no-no, but additional development is unlikely to take place until tenure problems are solved-- and only African leaders can take on this issue. The sustainable-livelihoods approach, at least provides options for small farms with too many farmers, but the current solution in some countries appears to be making huge long term land-leases to non-Africans rather than creating a situation in which competent Africans can become commercial farmers. 

CCIC tries to represent its NGO members and does challenge the government. The current government response is to tell them that they have 3 months of funding left, pending a review of whether CIDA should fund them at all. They have had to give all their staff layoff notices.

That aside, we have something like 300 international development NGOs in this country, all trying to be different so they can attract funding from individual donors and from CIDA -- if they can catch it's attention. Getting such a fragmented and competitive "community" to speak with one voice is like herding cats. Of course you can herd cats: just open a tin of cat food. When CIDA opens the tin, watch how all the meowing stops. Not a question of a single voice; now there is no voice at all.

Ian made an excellent point .  CIDA has to go to basics. Support for agriculture is a must for anyone who genuinely wants to help Africans.  I will add education especially secondary education which has been neglected in the last two decades or so.  We made secondary education almost free because we know how important it is yet donor allocations of aid money in the last three decades seem to suggest secondary education is unimportant. It is commendable that CIDA has been supporting primary education but as I argued (or better put ranted ) during a recent talk at Cornel University I am yet to see any society that has “developed” without investing in secondary education.  If the government of Canada wants African women to control their destiny and reproduction, it's better off spend the money on education.

Hard to keep up with the comments! I usually agree with John Gordon, and perhaps I shouldn't say discouraging things about micronutrients. My problem is not with micronutrients, it's with the constant search in distant capitals for brilliant new short cuts to development. African farmers could produce two or three or four times what they do with the right incentives and inputs, but the donors are all looking for silver bullets in other places. And so are many African governments. If donors were to focus on this fundamental question together, and if they weren't constantly looking for "signature initiatives" (like mother and child health, which has been an MDG for a decade and well known to many of the Ministers we foolishly hope to "influence" at the G8) we might all be a lot farther ahead. And so would African farmers.

Unfortunately many African farmers are leaving the land because they can't make a go of it. Most wind up in urban slums; some in rebel armies...

Excellent discussion. On the question of how to make aid more effective, one has to include a central determinant: effective organizations – e.g. NGOs, government ministries, businesses or even aid agencies. The attributes of effective organizations and related research is discussed more often, for example, in the Harvard Business Review or the public administration literature – and not often enough in development literature, reports, discussions and the media. 

Beyond commitment, effective organizations have a pragmatic culture of inquiry and a rich knowledge of the local political and economic environment. Management and leadership continually ask (and share) what aspects of their programs work (and why)? which aspects aren’t working and what they do about it? Management discusses these issues openly, fairly early in the conversation, and has some data. They act fairly fast on shortcomings. They do not spend a year doing a strategic review, and they have fairly simple M&E and planning systems. Designing an RBM framework does not necessarily lead to a culture of inquiry. The complexity of using the current versions of Treasury Board program architectures, and risk and results measurement frameworks etc. have led among other things to a logjam and another big consultancy market. 

Alternatively, one could use other terminology. Easterley’s “searchers” is a more recent equivalent of the “culture of inquiry”. I like the title of an old paper: “Development Projects as Policy Experiments”, Rondinelli (1985?). Development is a continual experiment where one would expect learning from hypotheses and data (including data on the experimental development of the organization itself). As we know, this is too seldom the case. In reports, I used to playfully include the adjective “experimental” in front of the noun “project” – knowing that the donor reader would likely want it deleted. “How can we state that taxpayer money is being used for experiments; that implies we do not know what we are doing!”   The massive public investments in research experiments in the sciences, in health and in education were somehow part of a different mental model.  

 One can fairly quickly determine if an organization has some elements of a pragmatic inquiry culture, or is moving in that direction. Working internally with senior management in BRAC a couple of decades ago, led to my own epiphany. BRAC also possesses a rich mixture of business, financial and organizational development savvy. Recently, Ian has so capably described BRAC in more detail elsewhere.  (book plug!)

 In my experience, the numbers of development organizations in the full inquiry mode are few -- more often than not, they are NGOs and businesses at the micro level; much less seldom in ministries and aid agencies at the macro level. And here lies the organization development challenge, as others have already mentioned. Engineering this is impossible without particular attributes in place first – both personal/leadership attributes and a political environment (externally and internally within the organization) that is supportive. Many development officers (e.g. in CIDA) know this. But they are constrained by many other considerations.

 I think it also sobering to remember that our own development as a country grew out of the experiments and many wars in Europe going back to before the Magna Carta (which concerned such things as taxes, unlawful confinement, and holding the King accountable).  We are still experimenting with how to deal with these issues. 

Like we easily blame corruption for every problem in Africa, the land tenure system is a challenge but nowhere close to a major obstacle to the development of the agriculture sector. We can actually turn it into an asset if we make the effort to understand it in its own terms and use its strengths. In any case, no democratically elected government in Africa will touch it and I do not presume for a moment that we want military regimes to use force to change it.

Sorry if this takes us back to a thread from a few hours ago, but I only just rejoined the debate -- very hard to keep up!  One thing that is important to keep in mind is that training individuals will be of limited use if the space they operate in is restricted.  Training seminars, especially study tours abroad, are often seen as perks rather than opportunities to do bring about change afterwards.  Donors contribute to this when they pay participants “sitting fees” as an incentive to participate.

There is limited use of training journalists, for example, to be more independent if the newspaper is owned by a politician who imposes a certain editorial line. Training judges is not very helpful in a system where the judiciary will not be permitted to be independent. Training should not be a solution in search of a problem. Often judges and journalists are biased, not because they don’t know how could or why they should be more independent, but rather because they operate in a system that does not allow independence, or at least has major disincentives.  I strongly believe in capacity building, but we should not forget about the political context. We need to identify the problem correctly before offering a particular solution.

This is not that different from food aid, cited by Ian (Post #59), which given the subsidy-driven agricultural surplus in the North, also become a solution looking for a problem, rather than the best way to deal with hunger and malnutrition in the South.  That is another example of a non-aid policy issue that has a major impact on development.

That is also why any significant improvement in Canadian development policy cannot be limited to CIDA alone. Part of what has make DFID (the UK's CIDA) so successful is the commitment to development by important senior politicians, including the prime ministers, finance ministers (Chancellors of the Exchequer) and foreign ministers.

Stephen Brown is absoutely right (post # 68) in saying that an effective aid and development programme requires a commitment to development by a host of federal ministries and departments - and not just CIDA. Last fall's report to Parliament on the ODA Accountability Act was instructive. It identified 12 federal ministries that undertook activities and expenditures that are officially included in our ODA count. The report, however, was not so much a single document as it was 12 individual reports with a single cover. Each report organized and reported information in completely different ways and even the writing styles were different. If harmonization is one of the principles of aid effectiveness a la the Paris Declaration, it is probably a principle that we should apply closer to home within the federal government.  And, it is a principle that needs to be taken to heart by international development NGO's. Of the 300 Canadian based NGO's Ian referred to in post #63, only one third are members of CCIC. 

The idea of training journalist is gaining currency here but I am extremely sceptical about how training journalist will improve the lots of poor people. The Germans have been doing that in places like Ghana for more than two decades and I do not think many Ghanaians will say that their living conditions have gotten better because of that.  Granted that training journalists in poor countries is a good idea, what kind of journalistic goods do we want to export to poor countries? I will suggest that the one that will be a bit helpful in poor societies is investigative journalism, sometime I do not think we are really good at.

In my view, we do not need new grand ideas. We should just do the basic stuff right. My money is on agriculture and education. I will recommend however that we use different institutions to disburse the resources. In the case of Africa, I think the African Union could be helpful. It is a notoriously frustrating institution to work with at times but it has been designed in such a way that you can easily detect any corrupt practice and it is good at getting things done if it wants to. I will use it instead of government at vehicle to disburse resources directly to agricultural groups, schools etc. African governments can then be asked to assist in monitoring the projects in their countries.

Patrick Johnston makes a good point about the report to Parliament on the ODA Accountability Act. Not only were the reports of the  12 different departments poorly "harmonized", overall the report demonstrated that the Government remains in the very early days of understanding the implications of the Act - and that at this stage, it regards it as a matter of compliance, rather than as a forward looking agenda for re-formulating Canadian aid around the Act's three principles: poverty reduction, the perspectives of the poor, and consistency with international human rights standards.

Patrcick also refers to the Paris Declaration, and I'd like to introduce another couple of topics to this discussion. Firstly, to  what extent are international agreements on aid effectiveness such as the Paris Declaration important for Canadian aid; or should - as Ian Smillie suggests in earlier posts - CIDA and other actors concentrate far more closely on learning about how development works on the ground? I think high level policy commitments are certainly important; but  to those actually "living and doing" development , they can have very little relevance and meaning.  

And secondly: does any one have an opinion on the Government of Canada's decision to "freeze" aid after 2010/11? This seems like a pretty cynical use of the aid budget as an easy target for savings in order to balance the overall budget. On the other hand, maybe we should stop being so obsessed about aid amounts - and start talking more about moving away from aid dependency, through strengthening domestic resource mobilization, or addresssing capital flight.

I have to jump in here to say how delighted we are at the CIC national office to see so many people, our members and contacts, taking advantage of this opportunity to connect with our featured experts as well as with each other. This session is an impressive accumulation of deep thinking and a wonderful series of thought provoking contributions. This is the third of a series of e-conferences that we have held to stimulate ideas that will feed into our Global Positioning Strategy (GPS) Project. I just wanted to quickly thank you all for your contributions and attention. Over the course of this series, we have attracted over 600 registrants into our online community from 92 countries. We appreciate your input and attention, and I encourage those of you who are registered but who have not yet jumped in with reactions, opinions and ideas, to please do so.

This is a great discussion, and certainly a challenge to keep up with all of the comments and great contributions.

By summarizing some of the discussion to date, I will try to pull together some of thoughts emerging from this discussion, which I think also offer answers to our third discussion question of this forum: How can development assistance be made more effective?

Those of us working and interested in development have a responsibility to do our homework (seems like an obvious point, but may bear repeating). An important component within this is listening and learning from those that we are seeking to serve, and supporting those voices to ‘influence-up’ in the design, implementation and re-design of development programming. The closer the programming is to the ‘ground’, the more effective and responsive it is likely to be.

Doing our homework also means understanding the global context of where there is the greatest need, and I would add, where there are gaps in current programming. Multiple donors with silver bullets and signature programs often do little to affect the broader systems that so strongly shape people’s lives and opportunities. There are multitudes of examples- a particularly obvious one is the overwhelming availability of funds for HIV-specific programs that develop parallel health systems that then compete with national primary health care systems for human resources. This echoes Stephen Brown’s comments on paying attention to the systems within which people operate.

These approaches are critical to effective decision-making at an institutional and political level as part of Canada’s development assistance.

Several people have also highlighted the need for organizational strengthening- supporting leadership and management capacities at the individual, organizational and institutional levels to strengthen resilience, partnership building and adaptability in the context of changing circumstances (including shifting political landscapes). This also includes building culture of inquiry and learning within Canadian organizations as much as those in developing countries.

Given the healthy discussion so far, I invite people to continue offering insights, challenges and concrete suggestions as to how to make development assistance more effective, bearing in mind that part of this discussion is to help inform Canadian policymakers and the public on original and pragmatic approaches to a more meaningful role for Canada in the world in advance of the G20/G8 meetings.

Having said this, I also hope that this discussion will help us get closer to building a vision that is inspiring and motivating for Canada and Canadians.

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Les participant-e-s francophones à cette conférence virtuelle s'intéresseront peut-être à un colloque en chair et en os intitulé « Coopération, partenariat, développement : quelle légitimité ? » qui aura lieu le 10 mai à l'Université de Montréal dans le cadre du Congrès de l'ACFAS. Plusieurs thèmes soulevés ici feront l’objet des discussions approfondies.  Pour de plus amples renseignements, y compris comment s’inscrire, veuillez cliquer ici.

Oops, sorry for the mess. I don't know what went wrong there.

Voici le lien pour le colloque mentionné ci-haut : http://www.acfas.net/programme/c_78_460.html.

  Thomas (Post #70)  expresses healthy scepticism about the efficacy of journalistic training. Any connection between news reporting and an increase in national wealth (which Thomas questions) is indeed tenuous, just as it is in the case of the incomes of  individual reporters and editors.   But  I wouldn't choose Ghana as an example of the failure of training. The news media in Ghana offer something for every taste and persuasion and range from sober to squalid. But isn't it interesting that recent elections were followed by a transfer of power that has been exemplary by many international standards.  We may not be able to put a number on the value of an independent, diverse media but you can sure tell the difference when that element is missing.

 Stephen argues (#68) that training journalists is not much use " if the newspaper is owned by a politician who imposes a certain editorial line." A much more serious problem is when no other politician  is allowed to have his organ playing a different tune. The partisan press was the rule, not the exception, through most of the history of the news media in Europe and North America. George Brown's Globe in Toronto was a Grit rag. The Mail was Tory. Think of the National Post today. The problem, in other words, is not partisanship, but suppression of diverse expression.

It may be that training has received too much attention, at the expense of support for legislation that fosters the development of informed independent media (independent broadcast authorities being part of that)  or of measures to increase the financial independence of news organizations. But however we regard the issue, I don't think we can exclude media from broader questions about social and political development. 

Re Bill Morton's question (#71) about Canada freezing aid, that is usually the cue for someone to say "It isn't the amount; it's how well we spend it. We need to spend our aid money better and then we can ask for more."

That   might be a legitimate position if it weren't for all the good projects, good governemnts and good organizations that are underfunded, constantly being cut back or even having to halt good work because the on-going donor refrain is that there isn't enough money. If Bev Oda and Lawrence Can't find good ways to spend more money, you can, and so can I.

Bev Oda has said repeatedly that on a per capita basis we are the most generous donor country in Haiti. True, perhaps, but not elsewhere. In fact Canada is one of the least generous donors, coming in at a third of what the Nordics, Netherlands and Luxemboiurg give In fact we come #18 out of 22 donors -- noit a very generoud picture.

And now we're going to freeze it at curtrrent levesl. What that means is that as we emerge from the recession, our aid levels will drop as a percentage of GNP, making us even cheaper than before, at a time when the poorest countries are trying to dig themselves out of a hole that is much deeper than ours ever was. Some friends!

I am glad Anna has asked us to think about niches and stay away from proposals that will worsen the duplications going on at the moment. I will suggest it will be helpful for Canada to focus on secondary education which is one of the abandoned areas in donor programming. Keeping boys and girls in school between the ages of 12 and 19 is so critical and I'm amassed that the data we have show that little resources have gone to secondary education in the past four decades.

 Institutional reform is popular here but I will caution that any effort to reform institutions of developing societies must recognise that the government is just one amongst many governance institutions in developing societies.  It may be helpful to look for the different governance arrangements in the societies we want to help.  Identifying these institutions is a major step towards finding the right leadership/partners to work with and hold accountable. In Africa, I will suggest that any institutional reforms must include indigenous and regional governance arrangements. How about Canada prioritizes local governance institution like chieftaincy (which by the way rules majority of Africans) and regional institutions such as the African Union in its institutional reform programming? The state can be left to  the British, Americans, and French who usually devote more money to Africa.    

How can development assistance be more effective? By ensuring that wherever possible we leap frog obsolescence or poor practices and provide the best of what the 21^st century has to offer. Resource reduction and energy reduction to provide all of humanities needs while not sacrificing but improving quality of life translates into being more effective. Certainly we hold this true in the developed world and it is for me the most important upgrade we can deliver to the developing regions of the world. Why would we want to introduce the most costly form of development when so much is known about 21^st century resource reduction and efficiencies?

My personal opinion is that this conversation has, ironically, been pretty removed from the front-lines of development; the "customers" of development spending. This is often the problem not only in development conversations, but also in formulating policy and priorities and interventions.

I remember a year ago visiting a series of programs in Malawi and asking an incredible woman who works for a Malawi-based development agency what she sees as the number one problem preventing her projects from being more successful. Her answer: time. It takes time to test and listen to people on the ground and adjust she said. But the pressure from above for "outputs" means that the listening to people part is removed, and activities are pushed out regardless of their efficacy.

In fact, the lack of feedback loops from the ground is one of the major problems. There's a whole lot of accountability in development, but unfortunately most of it is upwards: implementing organizations are accountable to their project managers in the funding organization who are accountable to their directors who are accountable to the Minister who is accountable to the Auditor General who is acting on behalf of taxpayers ... or something like that. The practical result is that everyone forgets about the people who they're supposed to be serving. Results Based Management forms becomes the point rather than results, Logical Frameworks are the focus rather than logical interventions.

Here's three very specific and practical ideas:

1) Every senior staff member at CIDA (manager and above) must spend 1 week every 12-24months in the field. And this doesn't mean in the city in a developing countries, it means in the field. Sleeping in a village, eating there, carrying water, tilling the fields, etc. (Associated with this, CIDA should seek to only hire people who have significant -- 1-3 years -- field experience. Get rid of the graduate degree requirements, and start emphasizing practical development knowledge.)

2) Create a world-leading example as a development agency of actively promoting downward accountability. Build an independent evaluation unit that will "audit" (i.e. randomly select) development interventions CIDA has funded and dive deep to the level of recipients to understand what is happening with recipients (I'm not naive ... this is very challenging to do as Christine has said above, but it is possible). Where our assistance isn't in the form of budgetary support, build financial incentives into our funding agreements for field level results, perhaps even setting aside 10-20% of funds for results that are proven to still be achieved at the 5-10year mark after a program has been completed (i.e. 20% bonus if more than 95% of water points are functioning 10 years after a project has ended).

3) Since development can't just be about money and needs to be about ideas, how about funding the establishment of development centers of excellence or policy research? There are a few in Canada, but I bet this country could support 3-5 more excellent research centers for development thinking.

We haven't heard much today about a "whole of government" approach to development assistance, or how security issues may need to be addressed simultaneously with that assistance.  There are always reasons to stay home or spend less -- fueling or being fueled by the culture of indifference that the examples of current government policy seem to reflect -- but it seems what we most lack is a consensus about goals and outcomes.

Perhaps we are going about it the wrong way -- do we really need to have a list of goals and outcomes, consequences of one action or another? Benchmarking progress in time for the next federal election or change of cabinet?  This may be precisely what breeds public cynicism about the usefulness or value of ODA, because the conclusions depend on who is doing the measuring, when and why.

What if "whole of government" meant measuring what we spend on ourselves against the needs and priorities of others elsewhere who have less?  What if we instead regarded development assistance as a principle and not as a political football, to be punted -- or frozen -- at will?

If we can't have a global attitude toward development assistance, how will we ever develop the global attitude to address the impending crises in resource availability or the effects of climate change?

Either this program or something else messed up my computer, which accounts for my bad spelling in my last post – CIC grabbed it before I was finished.

George is right about spending a night in a village – something I said in # 59 above.

While my computer was rebooting I returned to a book I am reading and found this paragraph, which has food for thought:

When you are in a hole, stop digging. Discard your patronizing confidence that you know how to solve other people’s problems better than they do. Don’t try to fix governments or societies. Don’t invade other countries or send arms to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and naïve institutional reform schemes. The aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies.

With the full recognition that there is no single, one-size-fits-all "solution" to making aid and development more effective, let me make one, modest suggestion.

One of the continuing criticisms of CIDA - and many other donors - is that it is not a learning organization.Changes in development assistance programs and priorities do not appear to be informed by a rigorous and ongoing assessment of what works - and what doesn't work - in the real world. This lack of a field-based, feedback loop has been a theme recurring thoughout this e-conference.  And it as a theme that is repeated constantly by thoughtful aid critics like William Easterly.

Legitmate questions will be raised about whether CIDA - or any other large organization, for that matter - can really evaluate itself and become a learning organization. Maybe it can model the learning behaviour of an organization like BRAC but I suspect that there will always be questions about its ability to do so. OK. So why don't we assign that responsibility to a third party? I'm thinking, in this instance, of IDRC - the International Development Research Centre.

I am not suggesting this possible new role for IDRC as an alternative to but rather a complement to IDRC's existing mission. It would leverage IDRC's networks around the world and, from what I can tell, its very positive global reputation. This change might entail an amendment to IDRC's governing legislation.  And, it would definitely require new resources.  But, in the scheme of things, these are relatively minor obstacles if there is any merit to the idea.

While CIDA might be IDRC's primary "client", any of the other 11 federal departments that report ODA expenditures could also benefit. And, why limit the potential of IDRC's newly acquired development evaluation/learning expertise to governments? International development NGO's might become clients as well as philanthropic organizations. The Toronto based Mastercard Foundation, for example, is now awarding multi-million dollar grants for micro-credit initiatives in a number of developing countries. I have no doubt that it will use some of its substantial resources to evaluate and learn from those grants.

In fact, why limit our thinking to Canada? Why couldn't IDRC become an international centre of excellence in aid and development assistance  evaluation and assessment and market its expertise to donors of all kinds; - bilateral or multilateral - government, NGO's or foundations - North or South? Canada would have to become a model, learning country before IDRC could market its expertise globally but - why not? Perhaps this is the kind of value-added leadership, appropriate to our size, that Canada can contribute to the world of international development?

Now, there are probably lots of reasons what this newly imagined role for IDRC won't, can't or shouldn't work. But this is my last post of the day and I wanted to take up Anna's charge to us to make concrete suggestions about how we might continue to increase the effectiveness of aid and development.    

It's been a great learning experience. Thanks, everyone.

The issue of environmental accountability of Canadian aid needs to be examined. CIDA makes annual contributions to the Multilaterall Development Banks and then has no control how the aid money is used. Developments in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia are a case in point of a looming environmental disaster threatening biodiversity in the region.  

More than ten new hydro dams are planned along the Mekong river in Laos and Cambodia.

A major world centre of freshwater biodiversity- Tonle Sap in Cambodia and the entire Mekong River will be affected by the proposed dams and many fish species will be affected including the Mekong Giant Catfish.

Canada should work with other member countries to establish a system of accountability for the contributions that are made through the Multilateral Development Banks, particularly when the contributions are used for project loans that have negative environmental impacts in developing countries

Thanks George for your comments, I couldn’t agree more with the importance of connecting with the ‘customers’ of development.

 I think that your suggestion of longer-term bonuses (or holdbacks, whichever way you look at them) have promise, not only as a form of extending, and possibly overlapping, interest in the success of initiatives from funders, but may also help in attracting funds for projects that continue to remain active past the 7-8 year mark as they will already have a committed % of the funds needed.

 Patrick’s suggestion of IDRC taking on an more of an independent evaluation role for Canadian aid may not really fit with IDRC mission (which is to support research capacity in developing countries). However, I think an interesting option would be to tap into the many researchers in developing countries that IDRC has the privilege of working with, who have both the expertise and are often able to connect the realities of the field with the development interventions ( I say this while also being reminded of Ian Smillie’s earlier comment  about the disconnect between urban (where highly skilled researchers are often found) and rural (where some development interventions are found) perspectives)

With respect to your third suggestion George, a recent initiative that Canada (through IDRC) along with the Hewlett Foundation and the Gates Foundation, is funding provides support to independent policy research institutions in developing countries- some focused specifically on development and many on social, economic and agricultural development. These again, are institutions around the developing world that could be great resources in helping Canada think about how to improve its development assistance. 

Wow so much to read!  This has been a fascinating experience.  I thank everyone who's taken part and offered insight. 

There has already been discussion of the negative impact of corruption in the discussion above, perhaps the reverse side is how development initiatives can promote a more equitable distribution of resources.  We live in a world where services, goods and credit are often ironically more expensive for the poor.  Even in North America, the past decades have seen increasing disparities between the very rich and the rest of us, encouraged by the current global economic model. As a key element of CIDA's mission is poverty reduction in developing countries, the initiatives it funds need to address this issue of equity to succeed. We all grapple with this in designing development projects but, ultimately, it must also be addressed at the highest levels. For that, we return to the need for push back to our politicians and multinationals - including some things that have already been mentioned such as investigative journalism, working at the grassroots level, educating individuals and communities on their rights, ensuring all the key stakeholders are around the table (even Hilary Clinton subscribes to this one...at least for the Arctic!), influencing policies through advocacy, and empowering local solutions.  If the local problem is food security, then I agree with Smilie, you need to support small-scale farmers.

Thank you to our expert contributors Ian Smillie, Patrick Johnston, and Stephen Brown, and to our moderator, Anna Dion, for participating in the discussion today.

Thank you to CIC members and friends who contributed to this e-Conference.