A long time ago, in a Government far, far away…

This week’s Ramble would like to stress that he is not a Star Wars fan (particularly when referring to the spectacularly bad trilogy of the boring that was recently completed).

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Let’s get one thing out of the way first: in many developing countries, the most capable people in the civil service are praiseworthy and dedicated in a way that most people never imagine. One of the vagaries of the donor system is the way it distorts the wage structure in a poor country. Donors and NGOs pay their staff well, and its easy to understand why, when they have resources to burn and poverty is so great. There is usually a two-tiered salary structure in donor organisations, with international salaries significantly higher than the salaries on local conditions. Even these local conditions, however, tend to be more attractive than the terms on offer from the civil service. So, those well-qualified, hard-working, passionate individuals you find scattered through the civil service are not only doing their best to make the lives of other people in the country a little easier, they’re doing this when they could be earning significantly more in the private sector, or among the donor community, where many of the best qualified individuals are to be found.

You do get many people in the civil service who are stuck in their ways or who don’t realise how their work can impact on the wider population, but you also get many people who are dynamic and bent on doing what they can for the country. The problems in effecting reform that my last post touched on are often found because reform can’t be pushed by a few people – there’s a critical mass that needs to be attained, a momentum that needs to be built among the many for reform to be successful. Indeed, a few resistant people can do a lot to derail a process that many are trying to push through, so strong and charismatic leadership is probably one of the more important factors in processes of reform, one that hasn’t really been looked at in enough detail.

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I’m not going to go into that now. It merits a post of its own one day. I’ve previously mentioned, in passing, that one of the great frustrations of many of my colleagues is that not all that long ago, Malawi was considered an exemplar for our neighbours in terms of Governance and organisation of the state machinery. Now, though, we go to Tanzania, to Uganda, to Zambia to try and learn from their systems of governance. Somewhere along the way, we slipped behind. For many, this is as inexplicable as it is frustrating. It isn’t remotely uncommon to hear comments along the lines of: ‘why don’t these meetings still occur? I remember, not fifteen years ago, we had them every month, and they worked very well’.

I’m sure that a great deal of this reminiscing is simply an idealisation of a past that never really existed. But it’s so widespread that it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t have some basis in reality. If that’s the case, what caused the deterioration in our relative position? Was it the rapid improvement of our neighbours, or did we regress? Listening to my colleagues, it seems like the latter was at least as large a factor as the former, and most can’t really put a finger on why. Coordination meetings gradually died out, target monitoring was gradually abandoned, and fewer senior figures stayed in post for a prolonged period of time. I don’t have an answer for why this all happened, but it has put the wind up me. It’s made me realise that everything that I’ve been working on in the last six months is fragile unless I spend the time required to ensure that it is embedded in the way our division is working. No structures in an organisation whose membership is as transient as a civil service should depend on individuals.

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I don’t want to talk about Shevchenko. I just hope that Roman Abramovich goes broke before he can buy him.

Another Promise Sworn and Broken…

This week’s Ramble has been thinking. Those of you who know me will attest that this is something worth reporting. It’s rare that my mouth gives my brain time to catch up.

Much like the Ramble, Governments around the world are very good at talking. We discuss and consult, then make assurances, promises and commitments at will. But as anyone who has ever worked in or with a Government before will know, we don’t tend to act quite as authoritatively as we talk.

This is a problem at the best of times. It reduces the trust citizens have in their Government, and since a lot of governance is based on trust (at least that part that isn’t based on coercion), it reduces the effectiveness of the state. In a country like Malawi, which most certainly isn’t in the best of times, the problems run deeper than this. Since we’re so dependent on donors for the money we use to run the country, anything that reduces the trust they have in us has pretty severe ramifications. In the UK, when the electorate stops trusting Tony-tone, they vote for someone else, or send him a message in the local elections. That’s about the extent of it. Apart from a few pensioners, they don’t normally stop paying taxes and get away with it. The odd strike occurs, but its been a while since a strike has been able to bring a Government down. The electorate here has the power to react pretty much the same way with Bingu wa Mutharika. If he was seen to be failing, which he isn’t, he’d be voted out. However, the donor community doesn’t vote, so it has to send its message using the only real lever they have over Government: money.

When a Government like Malawi sets itself a target or promises to implement a reform and then fails, it not only gets egg on its face, it reduces the confidence that donors have in its systems; as a result they’re less willing to spend their money here as opposed to, say, Ghana. What’s more, each failure increases the cynicism of these donors when we, with good intentions, promise further reforms. Donors constantly tell us not to set our sights too high, to do things little by little, pang’ono pang’ono. One understands where they’re coming from; they’ve seen us write out a lot of ambitious targets for reform and development and fail more often than succeed.

But are they diagnosing the problem correctly? I think they might not be. I’m not certain that the targets we’ve set ourselves, at least as far as reform of Government systems is concerned, have been unachievable. Yes, reform is difficult, and requires careful planning, something that hasn’t always been acknowledged within Government, but for the most part, there aren’t large technical problems that need to be overcome in the reform process.

The difficulty usually isn’t that the target is too hard to achieve. It’s that once the target has been set, the people who set them and the people who are meant to achieve them seem to suffer a collective amnesia or failure of will. This problem isn’t limited to Malawi. It’s found in other countries as well, and not just developing ones. The critical question is how to motivate people to undertake difficult, time-consuming reforms, particularly when their own behaviour is what needs to change. Making the target easier might be part of it, but my experience tells me that when someone is lazy, they’ll only do just enough to keep their job; in fact, an easier target will reduce this level and actually make it harder to make any changes. What I’d like to see is a system where for every reform agreed, there are named individuals who have responsibility for seeing them through, and these people are checked up on at regular intervals. If the reforms don’t move fast enough, they’ve got to have a pretty bloody good reason or they get moved out. I know, I know, civil services don’t tend to be that flexible, but we can dream, right?

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Car’s in Mozambique; local police are lazy and incompetent. Interpol seem to have their act together – I don’t know what that means in terms of when I’ll see the damn thing again, but at least someone seems to be working on it.

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One of my colleagues lost his wife last week. The most depressing thing about living in a country as poor as Malawi is the frequency with which funerals occur. You don’t get used to it, but you do have to think back to living in England to remember how infrequently one was confronted by a death within ones circle of acquaintances.

How to be a Millionaire

Over the last six months, I’ve been immersed in the politics and practicalities of development aid, hardly surprising, given that something like 80% of Malawi’s development budget was financed externally last year. One thing I’ve not really been able to do, amid the fire-fighting and constant negotiation that characterises the aid relationship, is what the role of foreign aid in the development process actually is.

So, now I’m going to say something a little controversial.

Poor countries do not develop because of aid.

Aid can be used to do those things that will help countries develop, like strengthening their government, their private sector and their tax collection mechanisms. But the critical factor is not the aid, though this is important, but the programme of work owned by the Government that the aid supports. That probably doesn’t sound too controversial, so let’s take a practical example.

Foreign aid probably shouldn’t be used to distribute anti-retrovirals, unless there is a short-term and pressing need to do it this week, this month. Because, to quote directly from a friend of mine, the challenge in international development is not to distribute ARVs or buy fertilizer. This isn’t difficult. You just need to spend, spend, spend and you can achieve it. The challenge is to ensure that the domestic Government has the capacity to buy these ARVs from its own domestic revenue, and distribute them effectively. And of course, recognise that this is an important thing, worthy of their spending.

Not too many aid delivery agencies recognise this, though the individuals working in them usually do. One of the fundamental problems is that many aid organisations are political in nature: they are branches of a benevolent Government, or simply so large and so important that they need to play a political game to ensure that they have enough support to continue to operate effectively. This has positive effects (accountability is a good thing), but also negative ones, most obviously, the need to make politically acceptable policy. Development processes across the world have rarely been pleasant. I’m not just talking about recent success stories, like those from East and South-East Asia, but also the first round of developing countries: Britain, America and the like. But aid delivery agencies can’t go to their electorates or audiences and say ‘we’ve had a great year consolidating resources into the hands of an incipient class of capitalist entrepreneurs, which may well help power significant economic growth and increase income across the board, though inequality will treble over the next few years.’

Much easier to say ‘success! We’ve distributed loads of ARVs, stimulated discussion and debate and have given a few farmers small plots of land!’

Most aid agencies are doing a good job, and alleviating poverty with good results, and I don’t mean to criticise the good work they do. But the next step is to grasp the nettle and start funding politically tricky areas and, more importantly, just supporting a country in its efforts to stimulate its incipient economy, despite all of the difficulties and inevitable pain that process will involve.

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I’ve found a couple of blogs which (who?) are running an interesting experiment: for every comment posted on their blog, they will deposit one pound in the coffers of a charity they’ve nominated. I’m not going to do the same here, as I don’t get enough comments to make it worthwhile, but I’d encourage you to visit the Urban Chick, who has a list of participating blogs, and do your best to bankrupt her. (How did I find this blog? Well, once upon a time, I wasn’t quite as overworked as I am now, and had time to browse through thousands of blogs on blogspot.)

Look upon my Works, ye mighty, and Despair…

Once again, I must open with apologies for tardiness. I should rename this blog The Occasional Ramble from Malawi. On Thursday, the day I normally sit down and Ramble, I was working until midnight on our strategy for aligning donor aid to our national development plan. Naturally, at the stroke of midnight, when I had just finished everything to my satisfaction, there was a power surge, wiping my computer clean. Despite the best efforts of one of my few computer-literate friends, I was unable to recover the work, and wound up continuing through the night to redo it.

As a result, this week’s Ramble has enormous bags under its eyes.

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Still, even when I’m in the office on a Saturday, like I was today, I thank my lucky stars for this job. I’m working on something that will change the way the way aid is delivered and utilised in a country whose state expenditure is almost entirely dependent on it. It’s really quite amazing, when you think about it. And since so much of the work is negotiation with our donors, it exposes you to the politics and working practices of the myriad aid delivery agencies. Well, I say ‘myriad’, but actually, there are relatively few Aid delivery agencies active in Malawi at present, with about ten to twelve major ones. This compares to a country like Mozambique, where there are more than fifteen who contribute untied budget support alone.

For the uninitiated, there are three broad modes of aid delivery: budget support, dedicated grants / SWAps and project support. The most common in Malawi is project support, where donors plan or sign up to a plan for a specific activity, i.e. building a road, and provide the funding for it. With project support, donors often administer the funding themselves after setting up Project Implementation Units which operate outside of mainstream Government systems, making this the worst method of aid delivery, from the Government’s point of view, excepting that funding that goes straight to NGOs, ensuring that no Government capacity building occurs at all. Malawi also have one Sector Wide Approach (SWAp), which is where donors provide financial support directly to the Government without any restrictions on how this is spent except that it must be within a specific sector, in our case Health. This is a much better form of support to the Government, as it allows us far more flexibility in our spending, and it also goes through our financial systems, enabling us to develop and strengthen these. It also allows us to fund those important projects that donors can’t sell so well to their employers and electorates at home; it’s easy to boast about how many anti-retrovirals you’ve distributed over a year, much easier than boasting about the consolidation of agricultural holdings or the successful promotion of private sector development. Finally, we also receive budget support from certain donors. This is where the donors provide a large grant to the Government, without any restrictions on how we spend it. We love this.

Now, while everyone accepts that budget support is the best way to provide support to a Government, we can’t expect all of our donors to sign over millions of pounds each year without having some confidence that we’re going to spend it wisely. This means we need a plan for what we want to spend on that is broadly acceptable to all parties, and we must be able to trace how the money we get is actually spent. The project I’m working on now is basically a road map of how to get from where we are to a where we are now to where we want to be. This involves commitments for improving practices from both donors and Government. You really get a good idea of the constraints and limitations of each donor organisation and Government doing something like this. It’s not going to be easy, but if we come out of this process with a document that everyone can sign up to, I’d like to think it will reorient the way donors interact with Malawi.

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Things have been so busy these last few months that I’ve not really had a chance to assess everything I’ve been doing recently; so caught up with work I’ve almost lost track of where it all fits, in the grand scheme of things here. Thoughts on that next week, as soon as I’ve had a chance to think.