Charles Kenny

 
Charles Kenny

Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development researching the demand side of development, the role of technology in quality of life improvements, and governance and anticorruption in aid.

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How Aid Dependent Is the Man in the Moon?

May 15, 2012

By in Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance

Charles Kenny

There’s much excitement in the Twitterverse today that Africa has the same surface area as the moon.  According to Wikipedia and NASA, Africa’s landmass is 11.7 million square miles, compared to the moon’s 14.7 million square mile surface area.  But take out the seas on the moon and you probably do get to around the same landmass.

Now let’s compare U.S. assistance programs to the two bodies.  The CBO estimated that the moon program cost NASA about $170 billion in 2005 dollars.  OECD DAC data for U.S. ODA to Africa (North and South) from 1960 to 2010 was worth a cumulative $168 billion in 2010 dollars.  So, give or take, the U.S. spent as much sending technical experts (aka astronauts) to the moon as it did on all assistance to Africa over the past fifty years.  That would be somewhere over $10,000 per square mile.

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Fake Aid

February 15, 2012

By in Aid Effectiveness Tags: ,

Charles Kenny

This is a joint post with Justin Sandefur

Winning hearts and minds is a key part of the US Military’s counterinsurgency strategy in  Afghanistan, and a major rationale for USAID’s $15 billion investment in the country.  This strategy rests on Secretary Clinton’s vision that defense, development and diplomacy are closely linked, mutually reinforcing goals — a win-win-win foreign policy love triangle.

Some development experts, channeling their inner Dr. Phil, have been skeptical of this model.  But much of the industry has been won over by the lure of Pentagon-sized budgets for real aid projects serving real development goals like rural development and girls’ education.
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Lies, Damn Lies and Surveys about Foreign Aid

August 30, 2011

By in Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance

Charles Kenny

This is a joint post with Ruth Summers.

Want to know what Americans think about the foreign aid budget?  They think it is big.  If they thought it were small, they might want to cut it less.  On the other hand, they might not.  In fact the real problem isn’t the actual or perceived size of the aid budget, it is what people think is done with it. They believe a lot of aid money is wasted. Want to shore up support for development assistance?  Rather than say ‘but it is such a small amount!’ try persuading people it might do some good.

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Next USAID Innovation: Learning from Failure

June 22, 2011

By in Aid Effectiveness, Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance, USAID Tags:

Charles Kenny

I spent part of yesterday at a United Nations Foundation meeting with Dr Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID.  There was a lot of discussion of development applications using mobile phones (m-development) and how to do them better –things like interoperability and collecting models in an ‘m-app marketplace.’  And there was the usual back-and-forth between those who wanted to see more transformative projects where IT reformed whole agencies and ministries and those who thought that way madness (or at least obscene overruns) lay.

But I thought the most interesting discussion was around learning from experience –particularly in an area where technology is evolving rapidly, so a robust evaluation may not be completed before the project itself looks as dated as an integrated rural development scheme or a structural adjustment loan.  The randomized trial result suggesting limited evidence of educational spillovers from a distribution program of Nintendo 64’s might not carry too much weight for those wanting to hand out Wiis as part of a youth fitness program.
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