Dambisa Moyo and Dead Aid

By Alanna Shaikh | 27 March, 20091 December, 2011 | 12 Comments |

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dambisa Moyo, and her ideas about aid. For those who don’t recognize the name, here’s your capsule summary: She’s Oxford and Harvard educated, and a former economist at Goldman Sachs. She just published a book called “Dead Aid,” in which she states that aid is causing Africa’s problems, not alleviating them. She’s getting a lot of media attention – they call her the anti-Bono.

Now I will tell you that I have not actually read Dead Aid. I don’t get review copies of books, so my copy is still making its way to Dushanbe so I can read it. But, I have read six interviews with her, two op-eds she wrote, an excerpt from the book, and seven different reviews of Dead Aid. We can assume I’ve got the general thrust of her ideas.

And this is what I finally figured out: international aid needs criticism, and it needs skeptics. Without critical thought, we blunder around, destructive and embarrassing. But Dambisa Moyo is not providing the insight we need.

Her Background

People seem to be assuming Moyo knows about foreign aid because she’s from Africa. They tell us repeatedly that she has “skin in the game,” or that African voices need to be heard. And that is true. But there are plenty of Africans who are well-versed in international aid, and have things to say. Why have we chosen Dambisa Moyo to be the spokesperson for aid to Africa?

Aid is not what Moyo is educated in, and it’s not what she’s worked on. We wouldn’t assume Duncan Green could run a hedge fund because he’s an NGO bigshot, or ask Owen Barder to take over a failing bank.

So why do we leap to assume a banker will understand aid? It strikes me as a form of condescension, or even racism, to assume she knows all about poverty alleviation because she’s African. (And Bill Easterly agrees with me.) Moyo’s degrees are in chemistry, finance, and economics. If she wrote a book about African government and private sector spending, or oversaw a major bond issue, I’d sit up and pay attention. I look forward to her next book, about the policy errors Western governments made that led to the financial crisis. That is a book she is more than qualified to write. But she’s not especially qualified to write about aid, unless you count being born in Africa or being an expert in the private sector as a qualification.

Her definition of aid

Moyo states that when she discusses aid, she’s not talking about humanitarian or emergency aid, “charity-based aid, given to specific organisations and people on the ground, in order to achieve specific things,” or locally-purchased food aid. She is objecting to is budget support. Her book ought to be titled “Dead Budget Supplements,” but that is a much less exciting title. Her argument may be targeted, but that’s not how her book is being read. By choosing to frame it in broad terms – or allowing it to be framed as such – she’s creating a movement against programs she herself supports, like the distribution of anti-retrovirals, that really are aid.

Her arguments just don’t make sense

She attacks the World Bank for making loans that were contingent on free-market policies being adopted. Yet she is in favor of the free market, and argues that it will lift Africa out of poverty. Why then is she opposed to the World Bank’s support of it? She doesn’t make a case anywhere for why bond-financing is better than loans from international financial institutions. Both serve as cash infusions to possibly corrupt governments, after all.

Over and over, Moyo makes causal claims without explanation or data to back them up. She argues that, somehow, the problem with Africa is “pity.” Aid doesn’t work in Africa because people feel sorry for Africans, but she doesn’t explain how that effect happens. She says that aid increases the risk of civil unrest, again without explaining how it does so.

She does say many things I agree with

Badly managed aid, especially budget supplements, can lead to Dutch Disease as surely as striking oil or mining diamonds.
A multi-party system is really not the same as a working democracy.
The international aid system can be kind of revolting.
Badly managed aid can do great harm.
It’s a little freaky that we’re taking major policy advice from rock stars.

The bottom line

I am critical – very critical – of international aid. It’s hard to get it right; there are difficult choices to make, and bad aid can do harm. That’s what this blog is all about. But it can be done right, and it needs to be done right. Done well, it will save lives and improve our collective future. We should focus our energy on learning to provide aid in a way that works.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’re a banker, apparently everything looks like it needs a bond issue.

On process

By Alanna Shaikh | 23 February, 20091 December, 2011 | 2 Comments |

A friend of mine recently attended a meeting that was intended to develop a process to guide the preparatory meetings for the coordination meetings with the Ministry of Health. And the thing is, when you’re in the thick of it, these meetings make sense. You do need a unified message before you talk to your host government, and without some ground rules, the prep meetings to develop that message can get genuinely ugly.

All of this led me to think about process, and its sibling, bureaucracy. I’ve always had a pretty unpopular belief in the value of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, to me, is the core of an organization. It’s what keeps an organization functioning when its staff changes. Without the forms and the regulations, you don’t have an organization. You have a cult. The structures are what makes it about more than just whoever works there at the moment. Bureaucracy puts the “organize” into organization.

That does not mean, however that bureaucracy should rule your work. It’s supposed to help the work get done. The work does not come second. And everyone accepts that. In fact, most non-me people hate bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with process. Plenty of people will sing the praises of “process.” Having a well-thought-out process means that you are Doing a Good Thing. If your intervention fails – the village women don’t feed their children more beans, or the Ministry of Education refuses to adopt your snazzy new curriculum – well, at least your process was good. Everyone benefits from being part of it.

I call shenanigans. Process is a jargon word that we use to obscure what’s going on. If your process is a series of meetings (and it almost always is), say so. And a good process is a process that achieves your goals. No more and no less. Nobody benefits from your stakeholder interviews if their input never turns into anything.

Lastly, some food for thought. A project I was connected to wanted to solve a problem they were seeing in a lot of rural clinics. The clinics would just use up all of their medicines, and then request more from the central supply. Since new drugs didn’t arrive instantly, there could be stock-out periods of a week or more while they waited for the new drugs to come.

To fix this, the project wanted to implement a pharmaceutical logistics system. They brought in a consultant from Europe, who worked with a group of clinic managers and Ministry of Health staff to estimate ongoing demand from different kinds of drugs. Based on these estimates, they then set re-order points for drugs. So, if you distributed, say, 10 IUDs a week, you would reorder IUDs when you were down to 15 of them, giving you a week and a half of time until the new ones came. The consultant turned these plans and estimates into a training system, and the project went around training rural clinics to use the new method.

Nobody ever did. Despite the training, and the eminent logic of the system, nobody ever did. Rather than try to determine why, the project wrote off the exercise as a failed pilot project and carried on. (My own suspicion is that clinics ordered their drugs when they knew that central supply had them, and were afraid that if they ordered according to some system, their orders would go unfilled.)

One of the project staff, when describing the whole fiasco to me, said something I’ve always remembered. “We paid thirty thousand dollars for the consultant, the curriculum, and the trainings,” he said. “If we’d given that thirty thousand to the government in return for a promise to improve their ordering system, every clinic in the country would be using it by now.”

(photo credit: markhillary)
Chosen because that’s exactly like many of the meetings I attend.

Bill Easterly and the Culture of Nice

By Alanna Shaikh | 29 January, 20091 December, 2011 | 18 Comments |

I was really excited to see that William Easterly has a blog now. And it’s not because I am a big fan of the man. I think many of his conclusions are just plain wrong, and he’s prone to ugly sweeping generalizations. He seems to assume from the get-go that other people are stupid and/or thoughtless. But he’s brilliant, and he’s not at all nice.

Development and aid work is mired in a culture of nice, and that culture keeps bad work from being eliminated and good work from getting better. We’re too nice to call a bad project a bad project. When we criticize, we criticize in abstractions. No one has any problem identifying bad products as bad – Vista, for example – but no one will ever call a bad program bad. If you look at my post on NGOs that do harm, you’ll only see anonymous comments about unnamed projects. We’re addicted to nice.

The charitable reason for this behavior is human decency. When good people are making a good faith effort to do work that matters, you feel like the worst kind of jerk calling them out for waste or incompetence. And every project benefits one or two people. Nobody wants to be the one to say that those one or two people were not worth the effort.

But there are a couple of people who like Vista, too. That doesn’t keep the rest of us from explaining exactly what’s wrong with it. After human decency, however, comes self-interest.

We change jobs a lot in this field. Project funding runs out, and you have to find your next gig, or your next donor. Most of us have worked for three or four different NGOs or companies, and perhaps a government agency. You don’t want to talk smack about a potential employer, and a potential employer could be just about anyone. And, of course, a potential employer doesn’t want an employee who criticized his last boss in public. So we all shut up, and organizations that everyone knows are sinkholes of mismanagement and despair just keep on getting grants and contracts.

I don’t really know how to fix this. I am not ready to tell you here on the world-wide-webs exactly which of my former employers sucked because I too would like to continue getting jobs. I started my “things I don’t believe in” series as one way to address the bad work no one wants to talk about, but I think it is still the kind of generality that doesn’t do enough good.

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photo credit: devillibrarian
Chosen because both smiley faces and cookies effectively represent the culture of nice.

Nothing, something, and more

By Alanna Shaikh | 11 December, 200815 November, 2011 | 12 Comments |

Bad development work is based on the idea that poor people have nothing. Something is better than nothing, right? So anything you give these poor people will be better than what they had before. Even if it’s your old clothes, technology they can’t use, or a school building with no teacher.

But poor people don’t have nothing. They have families, friends – social ties. They have responsibilities. They have possessions, however meager. They have lives, no matter what those lives look like to Westerners.

The “it’s better than nothing” argument is meaningless. No one is starting from nothing. If you find yourself saying, “our program/charity/intervention is better than nothing” that’s more than just damning faint praise, it’s a sign that you have a problem.

Good development work is based on the idea of more. Identify what people have already, and what they value. Work with them to figure out how they can get more of that. More education, or more money, or more food. More control over their lives. Whatever it is, the focus should be on getting more of what they need – not some of whatever we can find.

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(photo credit: Turkairo)
Chosen because the look in this girl’s eyes and her carefully tied scarf prove my point.

A manifesto of sorts

By Alanna Shaikh | 26 November, 200815 November, 2011 | 8 Comments |

Development work is designed to change people’s lives. Its specific goal is impacting human beings and the way they live. Done badly, it does damage. This makes it inherently serious, as serious as practicing law or medicine and it should be treated that way. If you want to practice medicine, you don’t start your own clinic. You go to medical school.

I am not telling you not to get involved. We need good people working in development. We need them desperately. But warm bodies and enthusiasm don’t help people. Good programs help people. And it’s very hard to create good programs if you are starting from scratch. There is an enormous body of knowledge, both academic and practical, on how to improve peoples’ lives. Not taking advantage of that body of knowledge is unfair to everyone involved.

Dear everyone who’s ever thought of starting an NGO

By Alanna Shaikh | 22 October, 200815 November, 2011 | 13 Comments |

Don’t do it. You’re not going to think of a solution no one else has, your approach is not as innovative as you think it is, and raising money is going to be impossible. You will have no economy of scale, your overhead will be disproportionately high, and adding one more tiny NGO to the overburdened international system may well make things worse instead of better.

Now that you’ve ignored me, here’s the rest of my advice:

1) Make your bones. Go work for an existing NGO that addresses the same problem, or one like it. Learn from the existing knowledge in the system so you don’t waste time re-inventing the wheel. If you’re not qualified to work for an existing organization, you’re probably not qualified to run your own.

2) Identify a new funding source. If you’re just going to compete for the same donor RFPs and RFAs that everyone else does, you’re not bringing anything new to the world. If you didn’t get that grant to reduce child mortality in Liberia, another organization would. The children of Liberia benefit equally either way. If you can bring new money in, then you’re having a genuine additional impact.

3) Hire experienced people to work with you. There is a certain charm to a bunch of inexperienced people trying to change the world together, but a group that combines new ideas and actual experience can produce genuine innovation.

4) Your finances are probably the most important part of your NGO. Your donors will want to see your financials before they give. Your projects will require a steady stream of reliable funding to succeed. You can’t do good if you can’t pay your bills.

(photo credit Mosieur J.)