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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
As a result, this week’s Ramble has enormous bags under its eyes.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 3:32 PM
