Key Reading

1) Results rather than inputs: focus on impact

As was evident in the Canadian Government’s recent report on the progress of our ODA, donors often focus on simple inputs because they are easier to monitor than outputs.
Documenting and celebrating inputs while overlooking the outcomes of our work says nothing of the impact we’ve achieved through our programming. With such an approach, we can’t justifiably say we are contributing to change and development.
This is not to say that inputs, activities, and outputs don’t matter – they do. However, we can tick off all these boxes during program evaluations and still not deliver a good service

2) Promote mutual accountability by creating mechanisms to allow beneficiaries to provide feedback about aid

In the current aid structures, “recipients” are highly accountable to CIDA and the Government of Canada, but CIDA is seldom accountable to the “recipients” for the results of their interventions.
The problem is, while CIDA is accountable to Canadians, the consequences of their actions are felt by recipient governments and their citizens, to whom we are entirely unaccountable.
Many of CIDA’s programming is unresponsive to people and realities at the ground level – where the real impact of aid is felt. A better feedback loop will enable intended beneficiaries of aid to have more influence over what kind of assistance they receive.
This means allowing community members in developing countries the opportunity to share information about their experiences, in ways that are accessible to CIDA and decision-makers back in Canada.

3) The need for risk and innovation

Canadian aid could work more like a market in so far as it creates incentives for CIDA to focus on results and the interests of intended beneficiaries.
There is too little rigorous evaluation, too little testing of new ideas; successes are rarely taken to scale

4) Standards for aid transparency

The Government took a significant step forward when it introduced the ODA Accountability Act. This Act ensures that annual foreign aid progress reports are presented to Parliament, creating an opportunity for accountability and transparency that didn’t exist in the recent past.
Still, if these measures do not produce the right data and information, they are missing the point of strengthening transparency.
Our reporting and transparency mechanisms need to demonstrate not only how our aid is spent, but also document the results achieved and the conditions under which it was provided.

5) Focus on implementation

There is a huge implementation gap in development – the difference between what a project looks like in theory and what it looks like in practice.
This implementation gap is a result of the following cycle: Donors design ambitious projects with hard targets (like water pumps installed) and the requisite soft “capacity building” of local institutions to repair and maintain the system. However, local implementation capacity is burdened by bureaucratic delays in getting the money and writing reports, and so is insufficient to meet the ambitious goals. Teams spend their time trying to hit the hard targets and ignore the soft aspects, which can’t be measured. Evaluation reports are done by a small number of firms that depend on donors for future contracts, so they don’t criticize. The cycle is repeated. The result, in Africa: over 200,000 handpumps have been installed but are no longer functioning (representing 60M people losing coverage).

6) Short-termism and a lack of predictability reduces the effectiveness of aid

Aid remains unpredictable: internationally, only a third of aid is disbursed on schedule, making it impossible for governments to plan appropriately.
According to Owen Barder, Director of Development Initiatives, “The single biggest constraint on the effectiveness of aid is not the corruption or incompetence of the recipients, but lack of predictability by donors. It is shaming (or should be) that aid is the single biggest cause of fiscal volatility in least developed countries (more volatile than commodity prices, economic growth or tax collection). It is shaming that past aid levels are a better predictor of future aid flows than the formal projections and promises made by donors.”
Donors should be more willing to engage in long term partnerships with developing countries, providing reliable, long-term financial support as well as expertise, linked to the country’s long-term progress towards economic growth and poverty reduction.