Rich Country Commitments to Foreign Aid

Which wealthy nations are helping poor ones the most?  The Center for Global Development has just posted a ranking. Each year, the Commitment to Development Index ranks wealthy governments on how well they are living up to their potential to help poor countries. The Index scores seven policy areas that affect the well-being of others around the world: aid, trade, finance, migration, environment, security, and technology. Overall scores are the average of all the dimensions.  

To explore the map to find out, click here for the interactive version.

The Battle for Hearts and Minds

Robert Kaplan, writing a commentary for Strategic Forecasting, argues for a harder more competitive approach to foreign aid.  Certainly controversial, the full article can be obtained here.  Extracts are below...

Geopolitics connotes hard power, concerned as it is with the struggle over control of geographical space, a struggle that is primarily military and economic. Unsentimentality is the order of the day. Geopolitics and realism go hand in hand, therefore. Humanitarian aid would seem to have no place in this worldview. But that, as it turns out, is far too simplistic.

For power is also the power to persuade, and persuasion can take the form of winning friends, one village at a time. A policy that is purely military and economic has no idealistic component, and in an age of global media an idealistic component is required for credibility in the public space. In fact, foreign aid, as it came to be known during the Cold War, was a critical part of America's struggle against world communism. Building schools and roads, and teaching children how to read and farmers how to take advantage of the latest agricultural methods, was not merely altruistic; for it had the ulterior motive of demonstrating the superiority of America's values over those of its adversaries. When in 1961 President John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps, though his words were suffused with idealism, realpolitik was not far from his thoughts.

But the meaning of foreign aid has subtly shifted in the post-Cold War years. According to a commonly received narrative prevalent in the media, because communism has been vanquished, foreign policy is finally able to pursue idealistic ends untainted by realpolitik. Henceforth, foreign aid should be purely humanitarian, with minimal concern for whether or not it benefits U.S. national interest.

Ironically, this very altruism that abjures national interest has made America's foreign assistance programs not better but worse. Foreign aid is like any other organized pursuit: It requires a competitive mindset to excel. Aid workers must be aware of the ideological, philosophical and political opposition they will likely encounter in the field and prepare strategies to defeat it. They must learn to compete, in other words...

... because the military thinks competitively and the foreign assistance bureaucracy does not, the military is far more effective than the State Department, with the result being the militarization of foreign policy. Counter intuitively, the way to reduce America's reliance on hard power is to get the foreign aid bureaucracy to adopt a harder, more competitive approach to its own soft power. If the aid community thought competitively, like the military and the intelligence communities do, it would be more effective in the field, and the militarization of foreign policy would consequently diminish. "The imbalance between military and non-military instruments of power is likely to continue unless civilian agencies develop approaches which account for the contested landscapes in which they function," Schadlow explains. She quotes an Australian government aid expert: "Aid is 10 percent technical and 90 percent political."

Aid, in other words, is a form of political warfare, something that America's Cold War presidents well understood. That doesn't mean, for example, that you export democracy-building programs to every non-democratic country as part of a moralistic foreign policy that pays no heed to realpolitik. For there may be a few places where you will want to cultivate authoritarian leaders, and such programs would then undermine your strategic goals. Aid is not some politically neutral tool that operates separately from foreign policy -- rather, aid, as well as seeking to do good, must also advance a state's interests. And the more tough and competitive the aid mindset, the more likely it is to succeed.

We must stop putting humanitarian aid on a pedestal. While the geopolitical interests and moral values of a great power like the United States do not always overlap, most of the time they do, and therefore there is nothing debased or cynical about seeing civil and military power as two inextricable aspects of the same foreign policy machine. Indeed, efficient humanitarian aid requires language and other forms of cultural area expertise, which is also of use to the military. The military, meanwhile, uses operational and strategic planning processes to determine who the opponents are likely to be once soldiers and Marines hit the ground. The aid bureaucracy should do likewise. Each branch of foreign policy can assist and leverage -- and learn from -- the other... 

... Face it: the militarization of foreign policy was not only the result of decisions taken by the younger Bush administration, or even of a State Department starved of funds. It was also the result of the thoroughly undynamic mindset of Foggy Bottom. Rather than have the military become softer, the State Department has to become harder. That's the real road to soft power.

Obtain full article from Stratfor here.

Pennies from heaven

Giving money directly to poor people works surprisingly well. But it cannot deal with the deeper causes of poverty.  Article from The Economist (link here).

SOME unlikely things combined to change Gabriel Otieno Anoche’s life. A satellite passing over east Africa took pictures of his roof. Some keen-eyed people in the Philippines, monitoring the satellite data remotely, spotted the roof’s lack of luminosity, showing that Mr Anoche lived under thatch (not tin). In western Kenya, that is an indicator of poverty. Then Google and Facebook contributed money to Give Directly, a charity which hands out no-strings-attached cash to the poorest people it can find.

The 25-year-old carpenter knew nothing of this until he came home one day to find that strangers had given his wife a mobile phone linked to a bank account. Next came a $1,000 windfall, which they were free to spend on whatever they liked.

The idea sounds as extraordinary as throwing money out of helicopters. But this programme, and others like it, are part of a shift in thinking about how best to use aid to help the poorest. For decades, it was thought that the poor needed almost everything done for them and that experts knew best what this was. Few people would trust anyone to spend $1,000 responsibly. Instead, governments, charities and development banks built schools and hospitals, roads and ports, irrigation pipes and electric cables. And they set up big bureaucracies to run it all.

From around 2000, a different idea started to catch on: governments gave poor households small stipends to spend as they wished—on condition that their children went to school or visited a doctor regularly. These so-called “conditional cash transfers” (CCTs) appeared first in Latin America and then spread around the world. They did not replace traditional aid, but had distinctive priorities, such as supporting individual household budgets and helping women (most payments went to mothers). They were also cheap to run...

Read the full article here.

Impact Evaluation on the Rise

“Impact Evaluations: Can we learn more? Better?" conference was just co-hosted by the Center for Global Development and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). The conference was an opportunity to take stock of the current production of studies that aim to attribute changes in outcomes to particular interventions. In 2006, the Center published a working group report which argued that too few good quality impact evaluations were being conducted, what it called an “evaluation gap.” 

In response to that report, 3ie was created in 2009. Now, four years later, the time is ripe to look at what has happened and consider what else might be done to make sure good evidence is available and used in improving public policy.  There is a great deal more good research being done. The number of impact evaluations being published has more than tripled between 2007 and 2011. The total, about 120 in 2011, is still far less than is probably needed if you consider that there are more than 100 countries working in more than a dozen sectors with numerous interventions worth assessing.

Details on  the quality of the increase of evaluation are detailed in this CGD article.

UN Post 2015 Development Goals

The 27-member U.N. High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda unveiled its recommendations to replace the MDGs with a new framework that will affect international cooperation and the delivery of foreign aid until 2030.
The report will have its share of supporters and skeptics.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the panel’s recommendations and promised he will offer guidance while the document is fine-tuned before being reviewed by U.N. member states at the General Assembly in September.
Likewise, the report satisfied European Development Commissioner and panel member Andris Piebalgs, who asserted the report makes it clear that “the post-2015 framework should address the whole range of root causes of poverty and unsustainable development” and that the framework “should be truly universal in its application and coverage.”
Goals, transformative shifts
The report sets out 12 highly-anticipated universal goals, along with 54 associated targets aiming to translate the ambition of the goals into practical outcomes:

1. End poverty
2. Empower girls and women and achieve gender equality
3. Provide quality education and lifelong learning
4. Ensure healthy lives
5. Ensure food security and good nutrition
6. Achieve universal access to water and sanitation
7. Secure sustainable energy
8. Create jobs, sustainable livelihoods, and equitable growth
9. Manage natural resource assets sustainably
10. Ensure good governance and effective institutions
11. Ensure stable and peaceful societies
12. Create a global enabling environment and catalyze long-term finance.

The much-debated issues of inequality and climate change were mentioned among the six crosscutting issues to be addressed: peace, equality, climate change, urbanization, youth and sustainable consumption and production patterns.

The report also outlines five transformative shifts needed in society to drive the goals and create an enabling environment for achieving targets:

1. Leave no one behind: “We must ensure that no person — regardless of ethnicity, gender, geography, disability, race or other status — is denied basic economic opportunities and human rights.”
2. Put sustainable development at the core: “We must make a rapid shift to sustainable patterns of production and consumption, with developed countries in the lead. We must act now to slow the alarming pace of climate change and environmental degradation, which pose unprecedented threats to humanity.”
3. Transform economies for jobs and inclusive growth: “A profound economic transformation can end extreme poverty and promote sustainable development, improving livelihoods, by harnessing innovation, technology, and the potential of business. More diversified economies, with equal opportunities for all, can drive social inclusion, especially for young people, and foster respect for the environment.”
4. Build peace and effective, open and accountable institutions for all: “Freedom from violence, conflict, and oppression is essential to human existence, and the foundation for building peaceful and prosperous societies. We are calling for a fundamental shift — to recognize peace and good governance as a core element of wellbeing, not an optional extra.”
5. Forge a global partnership: “A new spirit of solidarity, cooperation, and mutual accountability must underpin the post-2015 agenda. This new partnership should be built on our shared humanity, and based on mutual respect and mutual benefit.”

The panel has attempted to address the full spectrum of development issues in crafting its recommendations, consulting thousands of stakeholders in the process. But whether or not a global consensus will be achieved remains to be seen, as the U.N. leadership sets in motion a High-Level Summit on Post-2015 and the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals keeps its recommendations under wraps until 2014.

The full report linked here.

An excellent commentary by Charles Kenny from CGD is linked here.

Some Trends Improving

Given all the constant bad news, it is nice to see that some trends are improving.  This is a series of charts published in the Washington Post a few days ago.  They speak for themselves...

If the World were 100 PEOPLE:

Based on research and the inspiration of Donella Meadows and her "State of the Village Report" published in the early 1990s.  Today, the 100 People Foundation carries on working with students to better understand the complex issues facing our planet and the resources we share. By framing the global population as 100 people, our media makes education more engaging and effective, and improves students' abilities to remember and relate to what they learn.

Currently, they are traveling the globe to meet and create portraits of the 100 people representing all 7 billion of us sharing the planet. Their vision is to create documentary films, photography, and educational tools that facilitate face-to-face introductions among the people of the world in ways that cultivate respect, create dialogue, and inspire global citizenship.

If the World were 100 PEOPLE:

50 would be female
50 would be male

26 would be children
There would be 74 adults,
8 of whom would be 65 and older

There would be:
60 Asians
15 Africans
14 people from the Americas
11 Europeans

33 Christians
22 Muslims
14 Hindus
7 Buddhists
12 people who practice other religions
12 people who would not be aligned with a religion

12 would speak Chinese
5 would speak Spanish
5 would speak English
3 would speak Arabic
3 would speak Hindi
3 would speak Bengali
3 would speak Portuguese
2 would speak Russian
2 would speak Japanese
62 would speak other languages

83 would be able to read and write; 17 would not

7 would have a college degree
22 would own or share a computer

77 people would have a place to shelter them
from the wind and the rain, but 23 would not

1 would be dying of starvation
15 would be undernourished
21 would be overweight

87 would have access to safe drinking water
13 people would have no clean, safe water to drink

Sources: 2012 - Fritz Erickson, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Ferris State University (Formerly Dean of Professional and Graduate Studies, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay) and John A. Vonk, University of Northern Colorado, 2006; Returning Peace Corps Volunteers of Madison Wisconsin, Unheard Voices: Celebrating Cultures from the Developing World, 1992; Donella H. Meadows, The Global Citizen, May 31, 1990.

Below is a short video by Allysson Lucca portraying the stats.