How can foreign aid donors help, not hinder, transparent budgeting?

This post was prepared by Porter McConnell of OxfamAmerica.

Development aid, used in smart ways, can save lives and help people get themselves out of poverty.  But sixty years of foreign aid have shown that donors cannot fix the problems of poor people by themselves.  Poor people themselves are demanding accountability and performance from their governments, and our aid is most effective when it invests in strengthening this relationship.

Oxfam recently released a paper calling for specific reforms that emphasize recipient ownership—making US foreign aid support the efforts of governments and citizens to lead their own development.  In particular, reforms should follow these three principles:

Information:  Let countries know what donors are doing

•             Be transparent, publishing what the US gives overall every year in a form that recipient governments can use and their citizens (and US taxpayers) can access and understand.

•             Be predictable, providing countries with regular and timely information on three-to-five-year forward expenditure and implementation plans with at least indicative resource allocations.

Capacity:  Help countries lead

•             Better align technical assistance with what governments and citizens need, including by untying aid.

•             Support local efforts to improve domestic accountability, including by using public financial management systems when appropriate and supporting efforts by citizen groups, parliaments, and auditing agencies.

Control:  Let countries lead

•             Limit earmarks and Presidential initiatives that are inconsistent with country priorities.

•             Give recipient governments and citizens incentives to manage their own development effectively and hold each other accountable, including direct budget support in appropriate contexts.

As the report is careful to point out, every country is different, and donors should view the above as a continuum.  Where governments are corrupt or non-responsive, donors can provide information and work primarily with civil society groups.  However, where governments have a record of transparency and providing services to their citizens, donors can and should let countries control the development agenda.

To subscribe to Oxfam’s Aid Reform updates, click here.

Read a related IBP paper: Improving Budget Transparency and Accountability in Aid Dependent Countries: How Can Donors Help?

 

What makes governments change?

In an interview about the current controversy about parliamentarians’ expenses, a British journalist declared that it was just the shame and embarrasment generated by media coverage that motivated the government to deal with the unfolding scandal.

How to move governments is one of the key questions that citizens and civil society organisations (CSOs) ask themselves. And we don’t always have good answers to this question. Failed and successful advocacy campaigns must have a 100 to 1 ratio.

Of course the answer to this million dollar question depends on the country, the government and a large number of other factors. A strong leader of a one party state will not be moved by the same pressure as a democratic head of state that has a strong and independent media. And we can’t expect to move a party with a strong mandate in the same way as a tenuous coalition government.

It also depends who in government you are trying to move. A senior bureaucrat may be interested in research while the political head is more likely to be interested in public perception. We also know that not all public perception weighs the same amount to politicians.  A politician in a state that is aid dependent (Mali, Tanzania or Burkina Faso) may be more concerned about the perception of donors than the same donor in a state that gathers most of its revenue from natural resources (Chad or Angola).

Again a state that is heavily dependent on imports and exports would worry more about international investor and media opinion than in states whose economies are more inward looking.

Sometimes change is driven by ref orm minded burocrats. The IBP’s OBI has even found that competition between states sometimes moves governments to bring about reforms!

So from all of these possibilities and variables, what would you say is the most likely strategy to move your own government? Do you have any examples of how this works? Which successful advocacy campaigns have you been involved in and how did you get government to do what you wanted?

You can answer to this blog, or answer on Twitter,  Facebook or email us directly.

 

How to give money to the Poor

We recently posted on cash grant programs in Sierra Leone and Kenya. In the recently published Mainstreaming Gender in Social Protection for the Informal Economy, Dr. Naila Kabeer of the University of Sussex argues that the design of cash transfer programs may be more important in determining who participates in them and who benefits than whether they are of the self-selecting public works kind or the social fund variety.

She finds weaknesses in both kinds of program:
Public works-type programs can be put in place faster than social fund schemes and are more effective in reaching vulnerable groups through their self-targeting mechanism. However, they systematically exclude certain sections of the poor. The assumption that labour is the most abundant asset of the poor ignores the ‘time poverty’ of poorer women.

A major problem with social funds is the notion of ‘the community’. In societies characterised by pervasive inequality and unmet needs, the call for community participation may merely serve to keep the powerlessness of the poor hidden. Project managers who rely on traditional leaders or existing structures of power to sustain community management thus reproduce inequalities within the community.

According to Kabeer the important variable is therefore not whether these programs are of the social fund or self-selecting public works variety, but rather of whether they take local conditions into account. What do you think?

Click here to here to listen to the author discuss this book on the Commonwealth Broadcast Association’s ‘Pick of the Commonwealth’ – March edition #29 (interview starts at 20.22 minutes).

: : :

 

Proof that democracy works? Health Services and Community-Based Monitoring in Uganda

Recent research by Martina Bjorkman and Jakob Svensson for the Centre for Economic Policy Research investigatez the impact of community based monitoring on the quality and quantity of health services in Uganda.

As communities began to monitor local health service providers, both the quality and quantity of health servicesimproved. One year into the program, Bjorkman and Svensson found large increases in utilization, significant weight-for-age gains of infants, and markedly lower deaths among children.

A Citizen Report Card methodology was used to record the experiences and preferences of communities and fed back to service providers. Communities also monitored whether their recommendations and desires were implemented. This mechanism created the incentives for improved health service delivery.

The results suggest that community monitoring can play an important role in improving service delivery when traditional top-down supervision is ineffective.

This project was designed by staff from Stockholm University and the World Bank, and implemented in cooperation with a number of Ugandan practitioners and 18 community-based organizations. The 50 project facilities (all in rural areas) were drawn from nine districts in Uganda and reached approximately 55,000 households. Thus the project has already shown that it can be brought to scale.

Macro-level research by political scientists has underlined the importance of the so-called ‘democratic dividend’. While the link between democracy and concrete benefits to citizens can seem tenuous on a large scale, this project demonstrates that the links are much clearer at a local level.

: : :

 

You can’t govern without the people

Many people see government as a process of service delivery that should be technically sound and as cheap as possible. But that is not enough.

While technical skills and efficiency are important, effective and democratic government is not possible without transparency and accountability.

Without accountability, those in positions of power can safely ignore the will of the people. In such cases government may be efficiently doing things that are not useful to citizens.

 To direct and oversee government, citizens need to know what government is doing, who in government is doing it and when they are doing it. Without transparency, citizen participation is less well informed and less effective.

Recent research by the International Budget Project shows that some civil society organizations have developed new forms of citizen oversight over government finances. In the process they are making governments more accountable. They are also empowering citizens to engage in more effective forms of advocacy and thereby make governments more responsive.

Some examples of their impact include:

• The Uganda Debt Network has implemented new forms of citizen oversight that combat local government corruption;
• DISHA in India has shown how disadvantaged members of society can lobby government to spend more on them, and 
• IBASE in Brazil has demonstrated how citizens can be made more aware of the technical issues around  government budgets

Click here to see the full IBP report. And click here to see the six case studies of citizens organizations on which this research was based.

If you liked this post, we would appreciate a vote on any of the links below.

: : : : : : : : : : :