Foreign Aid & Civil Society
Delivering Development Assistance
I tend to rant a lot about the problems of development aid. Well, here is one more for the list.
Projects are the de facto vehicle of choice to deliver development assistance worldwide. But as I’ve learnt, for almost two months of the year all real work must stop. This past December was devoted to wrapping up program management for 2005 – accounting, expense and project reports. The first month of 2006, when I hoped work would resume, is given up to renewing old projects, developing new ones and approving AWPs (Annual Work Plan) and budgets. That is a lot of wasted time.
Donors have pushed for this operational paradigm, and it has been adopted by the UN, NGOs, and even philanthropic agencies. I suspect it has something to do with the principle-agent problem inherent in the donor/Non-profit organization (NPO) relationship. Most aid delivering agenices take money from donors and spend it elsewhere – and they know more about their work than do the donors. So the donor is forced to place other controls – such as how or when money is spent.
The NPO contributes to the problem. In its search for legitimacy, the UN and other NPOs have embraced measures such as administrative cost ratios, and cumbersome rules on spending money. Using less money on administration or having elaborate procedures for claiming expenses is seen as good operating procedure.
This is absurd and self-destructive. When we work in the private sector, do we ask a unit to renew its contract each year, or the head of corporate strategy to come up with a new plan every year – as if the world stops for 2 months? Does the amount we spend internally have anything to do with our ability to increase sales? Quite the contrary.
The external environment in which we operate is not bound by the calender. Why should our work be? Is it not logical that spending less on developing our competence would hinder, not enhance, our goal of helping others; that more dollars directed towards those in need is not necessarily BETTER dollars?
In an academic’s world this full-stop is called grant/fellowship writing, where no experiments can be done, and a full month is wasted to get the so-elusive-and-hard-to-get resource called Money!