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Help Wanted: Ideas to Inform White House Presidential Study Directive on U.S. Development Policy
October 2, 2009
One month and four interagency meetings into the Presidential Study Directive (PSD-7) to review and provide strategic direction on U.S. global development policy, what do we know about what’s going on?
We know the exercise includes all agencies with a stake in the development policy arena (which is many!). We know that it is not a study of foreign aid, but the entirety of U.S. development policies, programs and tools. We know the NSC is trying hard to base the deliberations less on opinion and more on analytics, data and experience from the field on what works. We know they want the group to be concrete about the specific role and comparative advantage of the U.S. government in global development. We know it will cover three main phases: (1) The What — what is the substance, objectives, priorities and trade-offs of U.S. development policy? (2) The Means and Tools – what do we need to make U.S. development policy more effective? and (3) The How — how to organize the U.S. government to achieve the stated objectives, both in terms of structural and non-structural (better coordination, sharing of information, comparative advantage vis a vis other actors, etc.)? And we all know that this is an incredibly difficult task in need of objective, bold thinking. So, who better than you guys, who follow this and care deeply about enhancing U.S. leadership on global development?
Put yourselves in the shoes of the interagency members grappling with a couple of big questions and take a crack at providing some direction:
1. How would you describe the global development policy agenda over the past decade? What should be the agenda for USG leadership in global development policy looking ahead ten years?
2. Moving forward, what should be the objectives and priorities of USG development policy? What trade-offs need to be considered as we seek to focus our objectives and priorities? What should be the division of labor between the U.S., other donors, multilateral institutions, and the philanthropic and private sectors?
The White House just started its public outreach on the PSD and genuinely wants input. What do we want them to hear?
5 Responses to “Help Wanted: Ideas to Inform White House Presidential Study Directive on U.S. Development Policy”
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October 5th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Thank you for asking for our input. I would like to see improved relations and qualitative assistance to Central and South America as a priority of USG development policy. These regions are close to our borders and they have recently (May, 2008) ratified a Constitutive Treaty of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in which they aim to imitate many of the positive aspects of the European Union. Article three of that treaty lists goals such as, “eradication of poverty and illiteracy, preservation of the environment, development of infrastructure to better connect the region, institution of universal health care and social security, and cooperation in the fight against corruption, nuclear weapons and drug trafficking.” I think the U.S. should help UNASUR to achieve these goals where at all possible, especially given the debated history of relations with South America. This will not be without challenges, as according to BBC reports, UNASUR is collectively against U.S. presence on Colombian military bases; however, the current opposition is evidence of the need for better relationships with our southern neighbors.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:49 am
The development community (including US aid, the World Bank, the Europeans, etc.) needs professional, independent, strategically engaged evaluation of its programs and projects based on cost effectiveness. This can only be fully achieved by establishing a professional association of development program/project evaluators along the lines of associations of accountants and auditors. As long as the World Bank (for example) controls evaluation of World Bank projects, positive bias and analytic compromises will continue. This undermines learning and incentives for professional excellence across the development community.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:30 am
US policy shift requires going back to the basics to transform countries from bottom up for mutual benefits. Numbers distinctive questions and issues come in mind.
1. First what is the objective of the US policy shift?
2, what are the historical facts on the ground to the failure of the past and the existing policy
3 What are the reasons of the absence or ineffectiveness of indigenous institutions in a given target country or regions.
3 What sectors (economic, political, civic) would be given priority to implement a given policy changes, and why?
4. What would be the role of the Diaspora, if any in advancing the policy decisions and how could they be organized in transparent way to be partners for change?
5. What would be the strategy to deal with the political reality of a given country or region to implement the policy decision?
6 What is the yardstick to measure mutual benefits to sustain a given program through the new policy shift? ( with out mutual benefits it can not realistically sustainable)
7. Who would implement the new policy decision? Is there the political will to change the old guard if necessary?
Possible policy solution
Policy shift must prioritize from bottom up, in terms of the size of the population and the importance of the sector where the majority are engaged in.
What is the sector[s] where the majority of the population engaged in for their daily survival?
For example; in case of Sub Sahara Africa, it is based on subsistence commodity production, and the principle US agency that assist is US Aid. The end objective must be to gradually transform self substance to commercial production through national market reform starting on basic staple commodities to build the basic market infrastructure.
Voluntary Market institutions formation or capacity building and support
A. Voluntary Indigenous farmers, traders, market intermediaries etc association formation or capacity building, agriculture market research institution formation or capacity building, and support of a national agriculture Market infrastructure reform/building
B. Galvanizing other Aid agencies and the policy makers to participate in an integrated national agriculture market reform and a one-stop information decimations mechanism to allow interested business, educational institutions, non governmental organization, government agencies, and the Diaspora if any.
i. To overcome duplications, and market destabilization
ii. To bring all interested group in the same page
iii. To allow an independent national market/economic data collection to measure progress, allow market research for further investment, to integrate the market in the international market etc.
On the questions of:
1. How would you describe the global development policy agenda over the past decade? What should be the agenda for USG leadership in global development policy looking ahead ten years?
The global policy agenda of the past decade has been focusing from top down -unrepresentative government as a partner to implement development assistance created more corruption, unscrupulous groups taking advantage of projects due to the lack of independent private sector because of the central government repression, further alienating the majority of the population.
Looking forward; policy must shift on independent and transparent indigenous market institutions formation from bottom-up, with a propriety given to impact the majority of the population through formation of sustainable and transparent national market formation to integrate the rest of the sectors.
2. moving forward, what should be the objectives and priorities of USG development policy? What trade-offs need to be considered as we seek to focus our objectives and priorities? What should be the division of labor between the U.S., other donors, multilateral institutions, and the philanthropic and private sectors?
As stated above, the objective must be to transform the indigenous economy for mutual benefit through transparent and sustainable national market reform by independent market institutions formation.
Again, priorities must to maximum reach of the population through sustainable and transparent market. The rest will be an off shoot of the market as wealth is created and consumption for basic commodities and services increases.
The division of labor will be clear when national market reform is initiated by indigenous market institutions. For example, farmers cooperatives formation or capacity building and traders association formation and capacity building etc, with in each institutions there is education-: production techniques, market management, information systems, research etc Technology input: food processing,, mechanization, irrigation, IT etc. Media: information dissemination etc…on and on. Collaboration for one clear goal is easy and creates the necessary transparency and accountability in the part of the donors’ community.
US policy must also incorporate, encourage and involve the untapped Diaspora communities to organize as institutions for mutual benefits to promote US economic interest at the mean time as an ambassador of good will. The bottom-up approach would benefit the intended countries as well as US in many ways including, speeding up the democratization process on the respective countries and Us investment in a given country.
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October 15th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Everyone ignores the most basic step needed for effective development policy – and without it – all efforts to assist in development are insincere – and might even harm those intended to be helped! Maybe someone reading this can persuade the new Administration to change things. Currently, the powers-that-be don’t think humanity is worth counting, and so they don’t count it. They give lots of lip service to reducing unnecessary death and poverty, but deliberately don’t measure it, so any efforts to alleviate what ails huge segments of humanity can never be properly evaluated and may even end up harming those intended to be helped. The VERY FIRST STEP in solving any problem is, of course, to understand the true scope and nature of it. If you don’t know what you’re up against, how can you address it? How can you be sure you’re targeting the right areas or measure the effectiveness of your efforts if you don’t have a good baseline to measure success or failure? When it comes to the very development of humanity, we still can’t.
“Accurate and timely data on deaths and causes of death are essential. . . But for more than a quarter of the world’s population – largely in Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East – there are no recent data available. . .The quality of the information suffers as proper systems for death registration operate in only 29 of 115 countries that report such statistics to WHO. These systems represent less than 13 % of the world population. In the remaining countries, mortality statistics suffer from incomplete registration of births and deaths, and incorrect reporting of the cause of death and age.” (World Health Organization, 10/05/07 [1])
“Millions of poor people are missing from national statistics. Living in informal settlements, they are simply not counted.” (UN’s Human Development Report 2006, page 37[2].)
“Even the most basic life indicators, such as births and deaths, are not directly registered in the poorest countries. Within this decade, only one African country (Mauritius) registers such events according to UN standards. Without reliable vital registration systems to track even the existence of births or deaths, naturally the data for the medical circumstances of those births or deaths—or the lives in between—are unreliable.”[3]
Because the powers-that-be haven’t seen fit to accurately count life and death despite the technology and resources available to do so (as demonstrated below), they instead use non-empirical ‘guess?timates’ and what is called statistical “modeling” based on the little real world data we do have, and engage in mumbo jumbo like this, beyond the reach of the average reporter, let alone lay person, to follow, verify, or credit (more on this at website link below).
Specific relief efforts can be counterproductive (**as also demonstrated at link below) because we don’t yet have sufficiently basic, real life statistics about huge segments of humanity and what really ails them.
Additionally, this very lack of knowledge of our lack of knowledge makes us vulnerable to being duped by promises and programs whose stated aims are to change the dismal state of humanity as it exists today. One must wonder about the seriousness of promises fashioned so that no one can ever determine whether the promises have been met, particularly when the promises have no accompanying provisions to measure their success.
The patience of those involved in gathering such vital statistical data on humanity is truly off the charts. See, for example, how patient Mr. Pali Lehohla, the head of statistics in South Africa, is. He’s willing to wait 51 (fifty-one) years for accurate statistics about the people residing on the African continent. Here’s a direct quote from him, which does not appear to have been made tongue in cheek:
“We have initiated the Africa Symposium for Statistical Development, an initiative that will see the 53 African countries each hosting the symposia. Two such events have been hosted, one in Cape Town, South Africa in 2006 and the other one in Kigali, Rwanda in 2007. The next one is scheduled to be held in Ghana in 2008. So, in the next 51 years we should see the development of statistics on the African continent grow from strength to strength and when we convene in South Africa in 51 years from now in 2058 we should proudly say “mission accomplished.”[18]
The World Bank also advises people to be patient. It advises that “Building statistical systems is a long-term process”[19].
The argument that we can’t afford to measure humanity now, however, is false. What is the approximate cost of being able to gather RELIABLE data on the scope of global poverty and the needless death and types of suffering it causes, and what does the failure to have already expended such relatively paltry sums to measure it say about the genuineness of philanthropists and UN Millennium Development partners’ efforts when they have already been made aware of this failure? Okay, the second question is really rhetorical but for the first – how much it would cost to get accurate statistics – the author has only seen one estimate in her reading and searching thus far, that it would cost $40 million dollars annually to obtain reliable data, this from Amir Attaran’s follow-up[20] to his article entitled “An Immeasurable Crisis? A Criticism of the Millennium Development Goals and Why They Cannot Be Measured”:
“Concerning the health MDGs, my paper recommended to expand the network of Demographic Surveillance Sites (DSS) as the single most efficient way to obtain timely, accurate measurements. According to a recent study of DSS in Tanzania, this costs $0.01 per person, per year. Thus to institute DSS and good quality MDG measurements for the 4 billion poorest people worldwide would cost perhaps $40 million annually.”
“In that context, for Sachs and colleagues to argue that the “international system lacks the resources” to effectively measure the health MDGs is without credibility. The sum of $40 million is under 0.1% of the global foreign aid budget.”
Humanity needs to be counted, and again it’s been estimated that this counting would cost under 0.1% of the global foreign aid budget. That should be the new White House’s top priority if it sincerely wants to help the development of humanity.
So, there you go, that’s my idea – spend this paltry sum and actually find out how many people live and die on this earth and of what causes so that we can truly target what needs targeting and truly measure the effectiveness of any development programs.
(For the footnotes referenced above, and for a whole article on this subject of which only a portion was copied above, see my website, http://www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org , more specifically http://WhatNewsShouldBe/id22.html
Angie@WhatNewsShouldBe.org
October 16th, 2009 at 5:22 am
How would you describe the global development policy agenda over the past decade? Over the past decade the global development policy agenda has been focused on aid effectiveness, the Paris and Accra Agendas, and achievement of the MDGs; and on trying to understand how to help improve development assistance efforts. It has also focused on the fact that security, and security reforms, fragility, conflict and violence are all part of development (or regression) and therefore part of development assistance. Lastly, it has slowly begun to recognise that “development assistance” is provided by many arms of government; this leads to risks of fragmentation, duplication and inefficiencies – in part due to the fact that only the aid agencies (and in some cases foreign affairs) using lessons learned about effective aid delivery.
What should be the agenda for USG leadership in global development policy looking ahead ten years?
The agenda for USG leadership for the next ten years should be: (a) create a system of pooled funding, analysis and action that cuts across the government departments that have the technical and political capacity to deliver in the particular sector/theme/country (b) focus on the development process as inherently political in nature – until we understand that incentives for change and drivers of change (negative and positive) are the motors of development, our technical capacity development efforts will continue to fall short. political (economy) analysis is crucial to effectiveness (c) consider how best to do no harm – the road to hell is paved with good intentions – and this is especially true for development assistance (from aid, defence, commerce or agrculture). (d) focus on PROCESSES more – and how or why these can change.
2. Moving forward, what should be the objectives and priorities of USG development policy? See above and: helping countries as far as possible develop their own private sectors and entries to international trade in terms that are helpful to them (not to the US subsidised farmers). This requires q totally different approach to development that starts with an information and dialogue campaign across the US about what development is, and why it is important, and how much the US does or does not do. Most Americans would be shocked to know how little the US does, and how badly most people live. but the US education system is such that most Americans truly have no idea…. Other priorities should be to focus on fragile situations/countries more.
What trade-offs need to be considered as we seek to focus our objectives and priorities? Trade-offs need to be considered between the desire for short term results and longer term strategies. In stable well structured States, aid modalities are focused on effectiveness, reducing aid dependency etc In more fragile countries that are not structurally stable and not very resilient, focus needs to be on qualitative process issues – objectives need to be very long term – with shorter (maybe very short) benchmark targets to help incrementally push thngs along.
What should be the division of labor between the U.S., other donors, multilateral institutions, and the philanthropic and private sectors? The division of labour amongst the many actors in this field should be decided on a case by case basis – and on a – who-will-be-most-effective basis. All those actors, however, would do well to stop viewing aid as a tool for self-promotion (“look at this school that the US built, do you love America more?”) and view aid as a way to global promotion. If we get it right, animosity towards the West, the G5, G7, G20 will diminish. And so animosity towards individual countries (the US) will diminish too. Should all bilateral agencies just give their money to multilateral institutions like UN agencies, World Bank etc? It is an idea, but probably wouldn’t be very effective. It would be good though, as the UK is doing, to focus on how to help those institutions reform and adapt to today’s needs. Should there be a lead donor in each country? In a way there already is. One thing is for sure though – the so called donor coordination efforts in a particular country – are superficial – a great deal more needs to be done in this (apparently) simple area.
The White House just started its public outreach on the PSD and genuinely wants input. What do we want them to hear? We want them to hear that they should read the multitude of studies, articles, papers, guidelines etc coming out of the research and think tank world across the globe so that they are well versed in the issues; we want them to recognize that the “western” model of development is not necessarily helpful in some countries – and look more closely at the Chinese trajectory and lessons that can be usefully learnt therein – (or Singapore or Malaysia etc). We want them to hear that government needs to join up – and act honestly.