Print
Share
What Would Google Do? (Donor Cooperation Edition)
November 2, 2011
It is now clear that donor coordination meetings are not the answer to making aid more effective, and donors such as USAID are becoming interested in a more decentralized ‘Google Maps’ approach to aid coordination, facilitating well-informed decisions by people on the ground. For this to work, donors need to publish detailed project level information in an open, reusable, internationally consistent data format. Some donors are not yet showing the necessary resolve.
We now know that the development system has met just one of the 13 targets it set in 2005 for making aid more effective. That is not surprising: the problems diagnosed in the Paris Declaration are real and important, but the solutions that have been pursued in its name have not been practical. There are better ways to achieve the aid effectiveness which the Paris Declaration envisages.
Here is an example of the problem, from Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami:
“Last February in Riga [close to Calang in Indonesia], we had a case of measles. The epidemiologists from Banda Aceh gathered, fearing that the measles would spread among displaced people, but the girl was cured in two days. Eventually we discovered that this child had been vaccinated three times by different organizations, each without a vaccination card or any type of control. The symptoms were the result of these measles vaccines”.
Informal translation of an article in El Pais (April 13, 2005)
This is a graphic example of a widespread problem in development and humanitarian aid: a coordination failure leading to a substantial waste of money.
Following Paris, a conventional wisdom has grown up on how this kind of problem should be tackled. The regional health department should call a big meeting of all the donors and NGOs who might be interesting in running an immunization programme. They should share information with each other about their plans: which vaccines they intended to administer, and where. Under the leadership of the ministry, the donors should agree a division of labour to eliminate overlaps and ensure that aid is used efficiently.
Similar committees would have met to plan and coordinate every other kind of intervention to avoid overlap and make the best use of limited resources.
You don’t have to have a degree in Political Science to be able to see why this committee approach does not work. A country director for a large government aid agency recently told me that he spent more than half his time in donor coordination meetings. Most of each meeting is taken up by donors listing what they are doing. (Not surprisingly, he has now quit.)
So what is the alternative?
Once an aid agency has been licensed by the health ministry to provide vaccinations, it could simply publish online, in an accessible format, details of its plans and activities. Another organization planning its own programme could then easily check how they can best fit with what other agencies are doing. With open information sharing, no child would be vaccinated against the same disease twice; and under-reached populations could be easily identified and served.
This is an example of an important general point about improving aid effectiveness. Aid staff on the ground should not be stuck in endless coordination meetings: they should have the information they need to make good decisions about how to have the biggest impact, within a regulatory framework established by government, without being constrained by inappropriate rules and incentives imposed on them from far away.
A Google Maps approach to development?
There is growing interest in a ‘Google Maps’ approach to development coordination. We have seen welcome moves towards mapping of aid projects, for example by the World Bank, USAID, and Canadian CIDA. But as the example of vaccination in Banda Aceh illustrates, the key to making this information useful is that sufficiently detailed data from many different organisations is available in one place.
Some of the momentum towards greater aid transparency is driven by the need for increased accountability to taxpayers in donor countries. This is a laudable goal, but if data publication is targeted on this purpose alone it misses even bigger potential benefits from transparency. The US Government is making gradual progress on its Foreign Assistance Dashboard and a geographical coding system: but on current plans the data will not contain enough substantive detail. It will record information which is good enough to get a broad sense of where aid is being spent (‘top level administrative region’) but will not record specific locations (‘street corner’). This approach may be enough to meet the needs of a US accountability agenda, but it will miss the opportunity to use robust project level data and geo-coding to track and coordinate aid, to close down the space for corruption and waste, and to link feedback from project beneficiaries to specific aid funders.
It is also important that aid information is published in a reusable open data format, which has been agreed by a large group of donors in the IATI standard. Several donors – including the World Bank, the European Union, DFID, Australia and the Netherlands – are now publishing their data this way. Other donors have plans to do so. While it is welcome that Canada is publishing more detail about its aid projects, as the website makes clear the target audience for this information is “all Canadians”. This information is of almost no use to people in developing countries because it is not published in a form which is compatible with data from other all the other donors. Open data – in the sense of being genuinely accessible and comparable – enables civil society, parliamentarians and citizens of developing countries to be part of the coordination and accountability from which they are presently excluded.
In contrast to Canada, the United States has said it will ‘cross-walk’ its aid data to the IATI standard, which is extremely welcome. But so far they have not done so. While the implementation of a Foreign Assistance Dashboard is an important step towards domestic US accountability, all this data will only be of use internationally to make aid more effective and accountable when it is also published according to the international data standard.
Of course, USAID and State Department have limited resources and should be spending their money as much as possible on aid rather than administration. But as the World Bank has found out with its Mapping for Results project, it is not tremendously complicated or expensive to geo-code aid projects – and it will be even easier if that is done at the outset by front line staff who have detailed knowledge of the projects, rather than retrofitted afterwards in Washington. Nor has it proved difficult or expensive to organize data into the IATI format: I am told it took UNOPS just four weeks to implement IATI, from start to finish. There are many other donors, and organisations such as the Development Gateway, AidData and aidinfo, who have experience in geo-coding projects and publishing information in IATI format, who would be glad to help to design procedures, set up systems, and even to share their computer code. Furthermore, the administrative savings from reducing duplication by publishing open data are estimated rapidly to outpace these modest implementation costs. This is not primarily a question of money, but of leadership, recognition of the value of transparency which serves international as well as domestic audiences, and a willingness to reach out to work with others.
We can – and must – make aid more effective. This means making sure that decisions on the ground are likely to yield the biggest possible impact, and for that we need not more coordination meetings but better information, greater decentralization, simplified systems, fewer perverse incentives and more accountability.
Possibly Related Posts
- Enhancing the Transparency of U.S. Aid to Pakistan: It Starts with a Click
- Help Wanted: Staffing the New U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan
9 Responses to “What Would Google Do? (Donor Cooperation Edition)”
Post a Comment
We value frank and constructive exchanges and encourage you to use your real name in your comments.
November 3rd, 2011 at 7:32 am
There are two possible approaches to coordination in complex systems involving large numbers of fairly autonomous actors: centralised and decentralised. The committee based approach tends towards the former. Decentralised (i.e. localised) coordination requires the kind of transparency that you discuss above, re each agency’s own plans and activities.
However, for localised coordination to work well a second kind of transparency is also needed: transparency about who one’s agency is locally coordinating with on what issues. This requires a second kind of public mapping, in the form of social network visualisations, showing organisational actors and their relationships.
Producing this kind of data is not that difficult. As part of series of reviews of maternal health projects in Indonesia I constructed matrices relating the project’s outputs (named in rows) with other agencies (named in columns)and with cell entries describing the nature of the coordination with each other agency in respect to each output, …where it existed. In addition to this raw data, the project’s coordination priorities can be expressed by ranking of the column and row contents.
Network data in this matrix form can easy be converted into network diagrams by most social network analysis software, including those using non-proprietary formats like graphml. In a given country, this kind of data could be uploaded onto a mapping site managed by an independent party, so anyone can see who is coordinating with who re what plans and activities. I suspect this might also quickly show who is not doing much coordination work.
[In the field of Social Network Analysis the contents of these kinds of individual matrices are considered as a kind of "ego network". Here [http://mande.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ngo-issues.jpg]is one example of a number of multiple ego networks aggregated into one composite network, showing which Ghanian NGOs were working with which issue coalitions, some years ago. Textual/numerical on the individual actors and relationships can be embedded in the diagrams, and made available via mouseovers, and double-clicking. Large and complex networks can be explored using various filters, to focus on specific types of actors and relationships]
November 3rd, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Similar to the case of multiple vaccination to the same child due to lack of coordination and sharing information among the players at the field resulting measles problems, in Microfinance arena, there is multiple financing to the same poor borrowers leading to over indebtedness and excess debt stress to the poor household without much hope for the cure unlike in above child health issue . Here I don’t see any subtle difference in these (mis)usage of the aid inputs defeating the intended development purposes. It is therefore important to have better information exchange and accountability with more ethical considerations from the ‘ end ‘ perspectives of the development aid
Dr.V.Rengarajan
November 6th, 2011 at 11:12 am
It is truly amazing that this issue is not higher on the agenda. Aid transparency towards taxpayers is all nice, but to be able to play the market for aid delivery: division of labor, best value for money, assure coverage without overlap and quality control, it are the field data that must be public.
Like with every market, there can only be a market if there is information sharing. It seems to me that the use of standards should be imposed (by the donors if necessary), but that the information itself best resides with the unit that can adapt it best: the field operator.
This means that every system to collect data will have to be very much decentralized. Think rater Limewire than Google.
The benefits in lives saved and money better allocated from such a system could be enormous.
November 6th, 2011 at 11:35 am
Owen, first of all, belated congratulations of your Washington appointment.
I was just curious to see whether you had read this recent aricle by Gwynne Dyer and whether this is old news for people in your business: http://www.straight.com/articl.....-distaster
November 6th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Clearly transparency and development agencies publishing data on their programmes is vital, but even this ‘Google Maps’ approach has its down side. It assumes that each agency has the personnel to read through the data that is being published, analyse it and factor it into its own planning. In a place where a lot of development agencies are working that is potentially quite a task.
The fundamental problem is of course aid fragmentation and we should be working towards a situation where there are fewer aid agencies active in any one place and so less need for coordination. Ultimately what would be even better, as is well recognised in the Paris Declaration, is using country systems – if all the aid agencies mentioned in your example had been channeling their aid through budget support to the national Ministry of Health and they had been running a single vaccination programme the chances of this girl being vaccinated 3 times would have been much lower. Of course the Ministry would have had to have its own records system, but if it alone was responsible for that the chances of that working would be better than having several agencies all doing their own thing and then publishing the data.
So the real answer to the problem you pose is not better donor coordination by mapping programme data instead of by coordination meetings, but rather reducing aid fragmentation and more extensive use of country systems.
November 6th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Owen, you say that data publication cannot solely be driven by the need for increased accountability to taxpayers in donor countries.
I agree that it would be preferable if other arguments got the same results, but my experience has been that arguing from the perspective of the taxpayer/charity-giver can be one of the most persuasive lines of attack when dealing with conservative organisations.
(I’ve detailed some of attempts to obtain information from DfID, Oxfam and other UK aid organisations on my blog: http://thatsthewaythemoneygoes.blogspot.com/)
In fact, I think that if rich-country donors (particularly charity-givers) were more knowledgeable and vocal on this subject then a lot of aid organisations might quite speedily come on board.
November 7th, 2011 at 8:13 am
@rick – thanks. I like the idea of thinking of understanding collaboration and coordination as a form of social network analysis. As you say, there is a growing range of software which can help us to visualise and manage this information.
@Dr Rengarajan – I could not agree more. This problem occurs (and recurs) in very part of the development sector, from vaccination to microfinance to clinics to wells …
@Sam – Indeed. The idea of decentralised coordination has not taken root yet in development, nor the obvious corollary that this requires access to detailed information.
@Erroll – Thanks for your (off topic!) link. I don’t agree with Gwynne Dyer on this one. I think Claire Melamed was spot on in her Global Dashboard piece:
http://www.globaldashboard.org.....n-problem/
Owen
November 7th, 2011 at 1:56 pm
I’m very much a fan of the idea, but would like to add a word of caution regarding its practicality.
I’m currently based in Liberia where we have a fair amount of coordination challenges. Nothing *huge* but you can definitely feel it. However, a web based approach to coordination would probably not solve any of the problems. The reason is bandwidth.
UNHCR has a wonderful website where they compile all the data related to refugees in Liberia. Unfortunately I cannot access the website because it is too heavy for my bandwidth. And our internet connection is considered to be fast compared to what many other organizations have to deal with.
There is an international organization in the next town with whom I have to exchange data on a biweekly basis. However, there internet connection is so slow that they cannot receive the excel sheet I need to share with them. So instead, we are burning CDs which are sending by car.
Granted, rural Liberia might be an extreme example. But even when I worked in Haiti I found the most efficient method of coordination was face to face. Yes, we did have a GIS person who produced maps with where organizations were working so that we could coordinate better with other organizations. But we shared and discussed those maps face to face.
November 9th, 2011 at 2:55 am
It seems like the larger problem is that these (huge) organizations are making national/regional/local decisions on how to allocate their resources–it seems like this is not their forte. Couldn’t some of these issues be mitigated if, rather than these monolithic companies operating independently, they acted as contractors under national governments? That is, Indonesia certainly has the capacity to decide where it needs resources directed; why can’t the government compel these aid org’s to only do work that they allow (and where appropriate, pass as many of these decisions to local governments, which should know even better how resources need to be allocated!)