Tag Archives: accountability

One

14 Nov

This weeks it’s the Tales From the Hood rock ‘n’ roll marathon.

Here’s the first tune in the playlist:

U2’s “One” sounds to me like a conversation between aid workers and beneficiaries about the issues in the aid system…

Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
You got someone to blame

Sometimes aid is broken. Sometimes, no matter how badly aid donors or aid workers wish otherwise, change just doesn’t happen. We do our best and it’s not enough. Or maybe we’re just tired and can’t get it together.

Sometimes, no matter how abject things are “on the ground” or “in the field”, and no matter how well-planned the intervention is, it fails. Sometimes there is local resistance to aid. Sometimes it’s overt, “get the hell out!” Sometimes you can’t put your finger on it.

Everyone in the aid equation is culpable at one point or another.

Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without? 

Everyone – aid workers, beneficiaries – comes to the conversation with expectations that, in the end are not met. We expected each other to think differently, to act differently, to value and prioritize different things. And we were all disappointed, disillusioned at some point.


Well it’s…

Too late
Tonight
To drag the past out into the light

Sometimes it’s good to analyze what’s happened before in order to clarify the way forward.. Sometimes, though, the past is just that: the past. Sometimes you just need to start from where you are right now and move on.

We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other

Indeed.

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?

Every aid worker on the planet comes to this line of work, in addition to whatever else, for personal reasons. Maybe we have a Jesus complex – we are going to save the poor from their poverty. Maybe we seek absolution from a dark past. Maybe it’s both of these and more.

Did I ask too much?
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it’s all I got

What do the poor deserve from us?

We’re one
But we’re not the same
Will we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again

Indeed.

We’ll continue doing humanitarian work. We’ll get it wrong. And sometimes we’ll get it right. And one day – who knows? – we’ll find ourselves as beneficiaries of aid programs run by those we once purported to help.

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Ménage à trois

8 Nov

Here’s how aid works:

1) Someone pays for it. We call this person or entity a “donor.”

2) Someone else implements it. We call this person or entity an “aid provider” – usually, but not necessarily and NGO.

3) And someone else receives what the first one pays for and the second one implements. We call this person the “beneficiary”, usually for lack of a better term.

Some of us go on about the different kinds of donors, the extent to which their level of understanding and their motivations matter, what their rights are or should be in the grand scheme of things, or the extent to which they should be allowed to meddle in the workings of aid providers.

Some of us go on stridently about the different kinds of aid providers: Who should or shouldn’t be allowed to be one, what it takes to be a good one, the extent to which aid providers are or aren’t unduly influenced by the motivations of their donors, or the extent to which they should be required to share certain kinds of information.

Some of us go on passionately about the beneficiaries. What their rights are, what they can reasonably expect from donors and aid providers, what their capacities are, and the extent to which they have a role to play in the overall picture of aid.

These are vigorous, often vehement debates. And rightly so, as they all touch on important issues.

But just so that we’re all clear, none – not one – of these debates challenges the basic aid formula. None of these debates address in any substantial way the global reality of aid: that it is a giant ménage à trois between donors, aid providers and beneficiaries, each of whom approaches relationship with diverse needs and expectations, and where the aid providers’ role is primarily brokering the relationship between donors and beneficiaries.

And so you’ll forgive me, gentle reader, when I come off as more than just a tiny bit jaded with the rhetoric coming out of, say, the Cannes G20 summit. Or statements from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about their “innovative financing.” Or when I juxtapose what comes up when I click “draft agenda” for this year’s HLF-4 in Busan against the stated purpose of the forum “…review global progress in improving the impact and value for money of development aid and make new commitments to further ensure that aid helps reduce poverty…”

I get jaded because none of these forums or discussions addresses the basic nature of the aid formula. The ménage à trois. What the Gates Foundation calls “innovative financing”, isn’t. It’s simply the latest attempt to modify the parameters of how traditional donors work and maybe change up the kinds of strings attached to donor funding. It’s also the basis for a lot of HRI-style workshops and meetings and junkets. If you want truly innovative financing for foreign aid, find a way to pay for it that doesn’t involve donors. Simple as that.

Or bringing together 2,000 representatives from around the world to review the Paris and Accra declarations for the purpose of making development aid more effective.  Am I the only one who reads “High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness” as an oxymoron on multiple levels? For one, 2,000… coming together… to make progress on aid effectiveness… wait.. what? For another, the key to aid effectiveness is not something about the legal frameworks of a bunch of developed countries. This is focus on but one of the members of the torrid little aid ménage à trois. You want aid effectiveness on some kind of global scale, you have to deal with all three.

If you want to truly change the way aid works, you need to find a way to change the ménage à trois formula. PPP and CSR are just new kinds of donors. Mixing bilateral aid with traditional development aid, government to government capacity-building, and all of that simply adds complexity around who is a donor, who is a provider, and who is a beneficiary at the ground level. Technological and programmatic innovations (awesome as they might be) simply re-tool the ways in which aid providers continue business as usual. Humanitarian accountability and basic good process are “musts” (and I sincerely believe that they make aid better). But let’s not delude ourselves into believing that they confer any real change in status to the benefiaries of aid.

You want to be “game changing”? Find a way to change up the ménage à trois. Otherwise, you’re simply using new words to describe the same ol’.

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The 2nd Aid Blog Forum: Admitting Aid Failure?

14 Oct

Welcome to the Second Aid Blog Forum.

The topic for internet-wide discussion: Admitting Aid Failure?

I perceive a growing wave of sentiment in the general public that humanitarian relief and development agencies are, well, less than honest with their donors and constituents. Up to now that suspicion has been focused primarily on financial things: the disclosure of financial information such as the amount raised, the amount spent on a relief response over a certain period, aid worker salaries, etc. In the United States, at least, the primary requirements for qualification as a humanitarian or “charitable” organization have to do with financial things. As aid workers and as NGOs, we’ve grown accustomed to a certain level of scrutiny and compulsory disclosure of specifically financial information. And our in-house systems, policies and procedures reflect this reality.

Over the past two years particularly, however, I also sense that the general suspicion of aid workers and NGOs has grown to encompass a great deal more than just what we do with income from donors and how. There are increasing demands for us all to talk in meaningful, less simplistic and less universally rosy terms about what we accomplish. Increasingly we’re being asked to talk about our failures. There’s even an organization devoted to the concept of assertively admitting failure, named – as one might guess – Admitting Failure.

Admitting failure is a scary thing for NGOs and aid workers. It raises the possibility of loss of funding and livelihood. It raises the possibility of being misunderstood. And it raises the possibility of  deeper suspicion and more intense, uncomfortable scrutiny coming from an increasingly unsympathetic public.

On the other hand, few people inside the aid industry right now would argue categorically against being open and honest about anything less than success as a non-negotiable part of organizational and individual learning. Simply put, you can’t learn from your mistakes if you don’t acknowledge – admit – your mistakes.

So, what do you think? What is or would be the value of aid agencies admitting failure? What about individual aid workers? What are the downsides? What would you decide if you were in charge and could make the decision what would be required, what would be strongly recommended, and what would be optional? Should there be some kind of regulation about how we talk about successes? What if results are just marginal, but not outright failure? Some kind of required balance between discussion of success versus failure in our publications? Should just any random taxpayer be able to walk in off the street and on demand see any document in (for US citizens) the HQ or field office of a 501(c)3 NGO? Where would you draw the lines between what international relief and development NGOs should be required to disclose, and what they can choose to keep in-house? Once it becomes common practice to admit failure, what then? Should there be a limit on how many times the same agency can fail at the same thing and/or in the same place before some kind of sanction happens? Once failure has been admitted, then what?

This Aid Blog Forum will work the same as the first one (read the Rules of Engagement). To participate, you simply:

  1. Write a post with your thoughts on admitting failure on your own blog.
  2. Come back here, click the dorky blue lizard, and follow the prompts.
  3. You’re done!

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