Month: September 2008

Why donor coordination is so difficult

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |


Donors don’t fail to coordinate out of stupidity or greed. Donors fail to coordinate because coordination is really hard.

First of all, donors give for a lot of reasons. Certainly they want to support international development, but they have secondary needs. Domestic constituencies need to support foreign aid, or the money to support it vanishes. A nation may have strategic goals in a particular country or region, and it may have laws governing what kind of aid it can provide. All of these factors mean that nations end up making their foreign assistance plans alone.

When the time comes for donors to coordinate, they can’t just make their plans together. Instead, they’re forced to take existing plans and somehow make their plans fit together. There is very little room to modify or change what’s been developed. More often than not, donors do one of two things. They claim regions of a country, one per donor, or they just make a big list of who’s doing what and where, and call that list coordination.

Everyone involved is making a good faith effort to do foreign aid better, but the institutional roadblocks are hard to overcome.

A lot of people have asked me to write about Accra. I’m not going to – that kind of high-level stuff is not my specialty, and there is an awful lot of good writing out there already. (CGD, whom you know I adore, has a good summary here.)

(photo credit Don Nunn)

What should I study if I want a career in international development?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |


You can go two ways on this (at least) and it depends on your basic skills and aptitude.

The first option is acquiring some hard skills. Engineering, nursing, IT, and teaching or training are good examples. An appropriate terminal degree, combined with a minor in a foreign language (not French or Spanish unless you can become fluent. Turkish and Urdu are good choices for poor language learners as they are a little easier to learn and yet are exotic enough that no one expects fluency. If you’re good with languages, go with one of the major difficult ones – Russian, Arabic, or Mandarin Chinese) or international relations will open a lot of doors.

The second option is to study international development and/or its related disciplines. This will require a graduate degree and it covers a lot of different study options; I’d include international or public health, public policy, conflict studies, “development studies” and the big one, development economics. The trick to this path is that it can be very hard to go abroad with these kinds of degrees, because you’re not really doing anything a development project needs in the field. You run the risk of getting tracked into headquarters-based jobs – academia or think tank if you’re lucky, program backstopping if you’re not so lucky. The best way to mitigate that risk is to acquire whatever hard skills you can (grantwriting is a good one) while in school, and intern as much as humanly possible. Abroad if you can, of course.

Anyone want to talk about their own study and where it led them?

ETA: Ethan Zuckerman commented below and mentioned a big thing I left off – time overseas. If you want a job in the developing world, people will feel a whole lot better if they already know you can hack living there. I talk about this in my Damsels in Success post a bit. One useful thing to say here: STUDY ABROAD. It’s the easiest way to fully immerse yourself in another culture. And choose somewhere tough. Auckland or Paris does not count. I did my own study abroad in Cairo, and I know that employers saw that as clear evidence that I could adapt easily in other places. (And they’re right – if you can live in downtown Cairo, you can live almost anywhere.)

(photo credit: clarkstown67)

Important Ideas: Stakeholder and Capacity-Building

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |


Stakeholder – A stakeholder is anyone who cares about a particular project or institution. Stakeholders in a new housing development might include neighbors of the new development, local businesses, the company doing the developing, local and national housing authorities, people who want to live in the new development, and the owners of the land where the housing will be built. The word stakeholders is actually literal – everyone who has a stake in what’s going on. It seems like jargon, but I am not sure it is.

Stakeholder is a word people love to hide behind. It’s easy to say you’ll involve stakeholders in your decision-making without seriously thinking about who those stakeholders are or how you’ll involve them. You can claim you’ve met with “stakeholders” and make it sound comprehensive, when you’ve only included a few of the people who care about your project. (If you’re being particularly transparent, you call them “key stakeholders” to justify your limited outreach.)

Capacity Building – This is another term which means something important and is often used as a shield. In its simplest form, capacity building is teaching; when you take it further, things get more complicated. (For one thing, you need to give people tools they can use to keep learning.) The idea of capacity building is that even with enough people and enough money, you may not be able to govern, solve problems, or function. One example would be FEMA in the Katrina response – they had money and staff but weren’t able to actually provide rapid emergency help. They lacked the capacity to do hurricane response. If, say, Switzerland’s national emergency operations center sent people to do a series of workshops for FEMA officials, monitored the agency, and took them through some disaster response exercises, that would be capacity building. And next time a hurricane hit hard, FEMA could use the resources it already has to help hurricane survivors in a timely way.

(this entry is dedicated to pragzz)
(Photo credit: AlphachimpStudio)

Your money does not make you special

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |


As long as I’m ranting, I’ll tell you about the other kind of expat that bugs me. People who think their money makes them special. An American living in Turkmenistan once told me that she loved living there because it was like being a rock star. You know, I understand enjoying the ability to hire someone to clean your house and iron your clothes. (I haven’t bought a single piece of all-cotton clothing since I moved back to the US; that’s how much I hate ironing.) It’s very nice to be able to afford to live a comfortable life.

To actually revel in the inequality, though, makes me ill. Having more money than an Egyptian doesn’t make you smarter, more skilled, or more knowledgeable than he is. It makes you born in the developed world; you won a geographic lottery. That’s it. Feeling superior on that account is just pathetic.

Photo Credit: Tracy O

Suffering does not make you special

By Alanna Shaikh | | 18 Comments |


Some people – disaster response personnel and Peace Corps volunteers in particular – come home to the US and can’t re-adjust. Fat, sedentary Americans and their trivial concerns strike them as ridiculous. Those people bug me. They bug me a lot. They stand around airports looking superior and worldly and they can’t buy a damn sandwich without talking about the decadence of choosing between so many kinds of meat.

I understand how you can get that way. The contrast in lifestyle between the US and the developing world is heartbreaking and stunning. No thinking person can live through that contrast and emerge unscathed. It leaves a mark on you, and it should.

The thing is, though – pudgy happy Americans, drunken Brits, and overfed Germans are living the life that everyone on this planet wants. Those Darfurian refugees who shattered your heart would give both arms for the chance at a place to live, a gas-hogging car, and as much McDonalds as they can eat. The actual purpose of development work is to help the whole world reach a point where they can live in blissful ignorance of poverty.

There is nothing noble about suffering. People don’t do it on purpose, and a difficult life does not automatically make you stronger, wiser, or morally superior. Mostly, it makes you hungry and miserable. And having met and cared about people who do suffer does not require you to despise those who don’t.

Photo Credit: Amapolas

Jargon of the Day: Food Aid

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


Jargon: Food Aid

Translation: This isn’t exactly jargon, because food aid is exactly what it sounds like. Food, given away to people who need it. It may be given in a food-for-work scheme, where the donor has people do work for the common good such as digging latrines or rebuilding schools in return for the food. It may just be distributed according to some criteria about who is sufficiently in need (very often female-headed households).

The thing about food aid, though, is it is almost never locally purchased. It is generally produced in the donor country, and purchased from those domestic farmers, then shipped abroad as food aid. This supports a domestic market and farmers in the donor country. If food is purchased in the recipient country from local markets, we usually don’t call it food aid. We just call it hunger relief, or “an effort to improve food security.”