Global Development: Views from the Center
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March 22, 2007
Millennium Development Hole is Evaluation Gap
Posted by Ruth Levine at 11:58 AM
An editorial in today's issue of Nature takes aim at the development establishment - and fires. "The political commitment to helping the developing world is failing to deliver on its promises," according to Millennium Development Holes (subscription required). "The problem is made worse by the questionable evaluation of progress."
Excoriating development agencies for prettying-up defective data on aggregate health and other MDG-related indicators for "pseudo-scientific" estimates of progress since 1990, the commentary then goes for the jugular:
Indeed, the lack of data makes it impossible not only to track progress, but also to assess the effectiveness of measures taken. Has the existence of the MDGs changed pre-existing trends? Are bednets helping to control malaria? Are improvements in Asia down to the MDGs or simply economic growth? Currently, it's impossible to tell. Meanwhile, spurious claims of achievement are promoted.
The way forward, Nature suggests, is in more, better and independent evaluations:
Funding the scientific evaluation of interventions would pay dividends in enabling rigorous project management. But although billions of dollars are now flowing into aid and disease control, researchers complain that they struggle to get even tiny funds for evidence-based research to assess which interventions work. "If I want 10 tons of DDT it's no problem; if I want $10,000 to see if the 10 tons made any difference, forget it," says one malaria researcher.It is important to take action towards the goals rather than use the lack of reliable information as an excuse for inaction. But investment in an evidence-based approach to aid interventions, assessed independently of the UN, is also essential. Otherwise, in 2015, the MDGs could be buried in history's graveyard alongside other well-intentioned but failed development efforts.
Interesting in its own right, this unfavorable assessment of the international community's ability to measure progress and learn from experience carries an implicit warning. As the clock ticks toward the 2015 MDG deadline, such critiques can only grow louder and more potent.
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Comments
I hope this is not a misplaced comment but I am looking for a bit of guidance in the development of our organization's theory of change and concept of development and how it relates to the international development community.
It seems clearly that the favored methods for accomplishing international development are based on providing health care, pharmaceuticals, micro-loans and the like.
I could not agree more with the vital role each of these play in development work, however, I am finding more and more that even were these measures to be absolutely perfectly implemented, we would still have significant problems.
I am the director of an NGO working with at-risk youth and their families in North and Latin America. I remember a professor talking to us about how to change things back when I was at the university and talking about Haiti specifically. He pointed out that even if you could get a $1 or so into the hands of a head of a household in Haiti, many times that man or woman would use it to buy a lottery ticket.
At that moment, I began developing a belief that has just grown over the years of working with addicts, street sex workers, street kids, squatter's settlements and governments. It is the belief that we can only develop the world by developing people. People being equipped to live with self-worth, hope, faith in the future and in the capacity to manage their live and who are given the resources and taught how to use them, even held accountable for using them seems to be the only thing that can change the world.
If we give micro-loans but don't develop the recipient, don't we have a marginal to nothing return on that aid?
If we give out every good drug but never help a person develop the hope in their future based on their own development that will allow them to exit high-risk behavior, don't we again magnificently depreciate the return on our investment?
Why are we not learning to effect the ecological systems (families, communities, neighborhoods, individuals that make them up) and then how to evaluate this work?
I read Jeffrey Sachs, The End to Poverty, and just sat awed by the fact that it seems the true work that needs to be done is seen as without value.
Ok...let me have it. Please correct my mistaken certainties and show me how to correct the ship!
I thank you for taking the time to respond.
Jamie Johnson
Posted by: Jamie Johnson at May 16, 2007 01:11 PM