"Look Yonder! A Big Black Cloud Come!"
A prize to anyone who gets this week's titular reference.
Just when we were starting to get worried, the sky opened and the rains fell. Not the biblical deluge I’d been hoping for, but rain nonetheless. Only time will tell if the rainfall this year is enough to produce the bumper crops we desperately need. It’s certainly brightened up Lilongwe a bit – the flowers are a bit more plentiful, grass slightly greener and birds in just slightly better voice.
Or maybe that’s just how things seem to me. The project I’m working on seems to be making enough progress to have a tangible effect on our most important set of IMF targets, and this is no small event. Failure to meet these targets could seriously damage the economy by preventing us from accessing millions of dollars of debt relief.
We’ve been working pretty strenuously these last 48 hours to get our side of the work complete, and now the ball is in the donors’ court. I have to say that since I’ve arrived here, my estimation of most donor agencies has been falling by the day. We’ve been trying to set up a system of obtaining information on donor’s spending projections and the actual amounts they’ve disbursed to us. This is vital information. Almost all of our debt relief targets are dependent on our ability to secure such funding, so obviously having an idea of how much donors are planning to release is pretty useful. I rather naively assumed that donors would be only too willing to provide this sort of information to us. After all, knowing how much money we can access by meeting project conditions is a powerful spur to action for a cash strapped ministry. We recognise that a lot of our projects have stalled due to problems of our own creation. The information we’re after will help us identify where the biggest problems are and hopefully correct them. And surely that’s what the donors want, right?
This project has made me think that maybe they don’t actually want us to make this kind of progress. There is simply no other way of explaining how much effort these donors make to obfuscate the issue. A colleague (from one of the largest donor agencies) gave me a pretty good explanation as to why this might be the case. When a donor government pledges $50 million to Malawi, this gets splashed across the papers (alright, it gets a small article on page 7 of the Guardian – but the point is, they get the kudos for helping out a poor LDC). Once this money has been pledged, however, it isn’t normally just sent out to the Ministry of Finance to distribute via the budget, which is by far the best way of coordinating government activity. Usually, and quite understandably, they release the funds in segments. These segments are normally contingent on specific actions on projects being undertaken, for example, production of a detailed plan of action for setting up a microfinance initiative. If we at the Malawi government don’t hold up our end of the bargain, the money never comes to us, and the same money can then be spent by the donor on another country, generating another positive headline without actually spending any extra money.
I should hasten to add that the most of the donor agency staff in country don’t seem to be this cynical. They want the money to get through to the projects and help people in this country. They are, however, wary of being named and shamed for the poor disbursement records of their own headquarters (be it a government or international organisation). The upshot is that the information that was almost certainly produced last year has been mysteriously misplaced. We’ll have to work with projections for the future and try and build an understanding of how we can improve our own performance over the next year or two.
Ach. I’m turning into a cynic. Hopefully my Christmas trip to Liwonde national park with Snowball will cheer me up.
Just when we were starting to get worried, the sky opened and the rains fell. Not the biblical deluge I’d been hoping for, but rain nonetheless. Only time will tell if the rainfall this year is enough to produce the bumper crops we desperately need. It’s certainly brightened up Lilongwe a bit – the flowers are a bit more plentiful, grass slightly greener and birds in just slightly better voice.
Or maybe that’s just how things seem to me. The project I’m working on seems to be making enough progress to have a tangible effect on our most important set of IMF targets, and this is no small event. Failure to meet these targets could seriously damage the economy by preventing us from accessing millions of dollars of debt relief.
We’ve been working pretty strenuously these last 48 hours to get our side of the work complete, and now the ball is in the donors’ court. I have to say that since I’ve arrived here, my estimation of most donor agencies has been falling by the day. We’ve been trying to set up a system of obtaining information on donor’s spending projections and the actual amounts they’ve disbursed to us. This is vital information. Almost all of our debt relief targets are dependent on our ability to secure such funding, so obviously having an idea of how much donors are planning to release is pretty useful. I rather naively assumed that donors would be only too willing to provide this sort of information to us. After all, knowing how much money we can access by meeting project conditions is a powerful spur to action for a cash strapped ministry. We recognise that a lot of our projects have stalled due to problems of our own creation. The information we’re after will help us identify where the biggest problems are and hopefully correct them. And surely that’s what the donors want, right?
This project has made me think that maybe they don’t actually want us to make this kind of progress. There is simply no other way of explaining how much effort these donors make to obfuscate the issue. A colleague (from one of the largest donor agencies) gave me a pretty good explanation as to why this might be the case. When a donor government pledges $50 million to Malawi, this gets splashed across the papers (alright, it gets a small article on page 7 of the Guardian – but the point is, they get the kudos for helping out a poor LDC). Once this money has been pledged, however, it isn’t normally just sent out to the Ministry of Finance to distribute via the budget, which is by far the best way of coordinating government activity. Usually, and quite understandably, they release the funds in segments. These segments are normally contingent on specific actions on projects being undertaken, for example, production of a detailed plan of action for setting up a microfinance initiative. If we at the Malawi government don’t hold up our end of the bargain, the money never comes to us, and the same money can then be spent by the donor on another country, generating another positive headline without actually spending any extra money.
I should hasten to add that the most of the donor agency staff in country don’t seem to be this cynical. They want the money to get through to the projects and help people in this country. They are, however, wary of being named and shamed for the poor disbursement records of their own headquarters (be it a government or international organisation). The upshot is that the information that was almost certainly produced last year has been mysteriously misplaced. We’ll have to work with projections for the future and try and build an understanding of how we can improve our own performance over the next year or two.
Ach. I’m turning into a cynic. Hopefully my Christmas trip to Liwonde national park with Snowball will cheer me up.
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 6:39 PM
