Food for thought: International aid

Last week, Time published a story by Laura Blue based upon the findings of Spain's DARA on the Humanitarian Response Index, a new tool for discovering efficiency in international aid.  Time's headline was “U.S. ranked low in HRI” , which gets that American competitiveness going.  On the other hand, it's probably more important to see what it is we want out of our aid packages and see how it fits into performance instead.

The index rates 22 countries, including the European Commission (the U.S. came in 16th, for you competitors out there) and is based upon the “Principles and Good Practices of Humanitarian Donorship” (2003), which include “Alleviating suffering according to need, irrespective of political goals”.

What are these “political goals?”  The UK's Overseas Development Institute (ODI) blog recently discussed differences between kinds of aid, as administered by different government agencies for different purposes:

For a long time, the development aid community has worked to ring-fence aid and ensure that it is used specifically for "poverty reduction'. Historically, this has its roots in the often well-founded fear that "they' would use "our' money to further geo-strategic political or commercial interests that could only loosely be described as developmental , supporting some states, punishing others, using aid money to fund repression, diverting aid money to help rich country companies, and so on.  

Aid flexibility
According to Blue, the top state donors (the Scandinavian states, of course, with Sweden at the top) send cash funds and “follow up predictably as long as projects pass their regular parliamentary reviews”.   Cash is a lot more flexible than say, U.S. agricultural surplus from the farm subsidies, because it covers a lot more contingencies and can be moved electronically.  Yes, you have to move goods and services even with cash–but you can buy the actual service or good that you need instead of “making do” with what's at the warehouse.  Furthermore, using cash may not get you the cheapest article, but it saves on distribution expenses–and with energy costs going up, that's an increasingly serious factor. 

The other way that the U.S. funds is through earmarks, which give a kind of budgetary control but is also not so flexible: for instance, building a kick-butt bridge with good engineering on budget, but having a more limited, time-consuming process for authorizing natural disaster relief–when speed is of the essence.  Reputationally, the U.S. was slow on the tsunami effort and on-the-spot with the Pakistan earthquake–so you have to factor in averages and improvements–and also–who is friends and who isn't, which may be part of the problem.

Cooperation, accountability
Time's Laura Blue writes:

The U.S. scores high grades collaborating with non-profit organizations, and excellent grades promoting accountability ‚ second only to the E.U. 

Accountability is really important: any dollar hitting those hidden ruler bank accounts instead of programs is just plain waste, graft, and encouragement of corruption. 

As for cooperative, pan-agency efforts, the ODI article notes that the U.S. is developing a “Tranformational Diplomacy”, the UK and Canada a more integrated approach, the EU's regional approach:

On the one hand, attempts have been made to map the boundaries between different actors and define better the rules of engagement when they find themselves engaged on the same terrain: such is the case, for example, with the military and humanitarian communities. On the other hand, donors have recognised the need for a more integrated approach, for example by creating special funds which are jointly owned across Government.

On the person-to-person level:
Unlike the DARA HRI index, survey responses were generally more favorable to the U.S. than the hard-data indicators, but Blue's article also stated that the survey ranks U.S. aid lowest in perceptions of “neutrality” and “independence” from political and strategic considerations.

It's this last one which has caused so much trouble for NGOs in Central Asia and Russia, and it forces us to consider goals and dilemmas: how can one structure outcomes if one doesn't have a plan?  Should hte object be “friendship” or should it be democracy?  What are the requirements of friendship and collaboration?  The U.S. public gives its government grief if it funds a dictator. Yet trying to change a dictatorship through NGO activity increasingly backfires in Eurasia. 

Example: Uzbekistan
So let's use the example of a real-life state: one that's not very cooperative with the U.S. or Europe or its neighbors, and is central in geography-ah, Uzbekistan.  They had a dismal human rights record even before the Andijan Massacre, and the U.S. was giving that kleptocracy aid money for democratization, water reform, economic transition, and the use of the Kharsi-Khanabad Air Force Base.  After the Andijan Massacre, the EU and the US sanctioned Uzbekistan and/or were kicked out of the state.  We now have no influence over outcomes over there. 

Uzbekistan's subsequent isolation is a major barrier to the economic health of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the integrated road and power grids of the Asian Development Bank's CAREC plan, and many other great initiatives.  But we’d have to “cosy up to a dictator” to get some part of that through.  It's pretty clear that the elites are going to benefit first, as well.  It's a dilemma on so many fronts:

1. The tight economic environment in Uzbekistan is making it more imperative to use child labor to pick cotton–although, they weren't exactly giving it up before–but there's scarcely a chance to say a word to anyone that counts.  A new European boycott against Uzbekistani cotton products might be effective–but the poor will still be poor.  In fact, they’ll be more poor. 

2. The country is slated for another unfree and unfair election–not that it wasn't unfree, unfair before, but we have no election monitors there this time.   

3. Would untied aid allow us to get a little tied aid in?   These are the questions that citizens of every country need to consider: just how are their countries slating aid and to what purpose?  How are we defining aid goals–and are those goals the right ones? 

Comments would so add to this discussion–

Further reading:
Joseph Nye's Soft Power
USDOS Transformational Diplomacy
Asian Development Bank's CAREC program: a great program for Central Asia
The United Nations on Tied Aid