Over the past few weeks, much media attention has been focused on Japan, as it deals with the aftermath of a massive earthquake/tsunami. The affected areas are clearly in need of both emergency relief and long-term rebuilding. Of course, Japan is far too rich a country to receive aid in the form of official development assistance. Indeed, a lack of money is rather unlikely to constitute a constraint on Japan's response to the disaster: given Japan's near-zero rate of inflation, the government can print just about all the money it will need.

Instead, the primary constraint, as is often the case with natural disasters, appears to be one of infrastructure, logistics, and coordination: there are only so many vehicles available to drive around the area, only so many officials sufficiently familiar with the area, so many places where relief workers can be housed, etc., and all the activities of domestic and foreign organizations need to be coordinated. For this reason, Japan has been very selective in the aid it has asked for from other nations: it has asked for search-and-rescue help from four or five countries and it just recently requested assistance from a French nuclear reactor manufacturer.

Because financial resources are unlikely to be a constraint in Japan's case, people who are moved by the devastation and wish to help would probably do better to look back at last year's earthquake in Haiti and donate to organizations that continue to do crucial work there, after the world media has largely moved on. Whereas Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, Haiti is one of the poorest, and here money definitely is a constraint. Two organizations that do excellent work in Haiti are Partners in Health (PIH) and Doctors without Borders (MSF).

Haiti is also an interesting case study of the challenges involved in trying to make aid work. One year after the quake, hundreds of thousands of people still live in temporary, make-shift camps, and 95% of the rubble remains uncleared, despite massive pledges of aid. Moreover, the slow reconstruction process has made possible a cholera outbreak which so far has taken the lives of almost 5000 people.


A recent report by Oxfam International highlights some of the problems Haiti faces:

- Aid agencies, trying to give aid as directly and effectively as possible, bypass local and national authorities. This undermines the government, frustrates attempts at improving governance in Haiti, and, of course, makes the coordination of aid efforts nearly impossible.

- Aid agencies, including the central Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, rarely consult with the targets of aid initiatives (local civil society)

- Aid agencies are more interested in building new things, to which they can attach their name, than they are in cleaning up, general maintenance, etc. Thus there are plenty of funds earmarked for new buildings, but almost none for the rubble-clearing that needs to come first

- Not all aid donors live up to their promised commitments. The Oxfam report notes that as of November 2010, only about 40% of the funds pledged to Haiti for 2010 had been disbursed, according to the UN Special Envoy to Haiti. As of today (March 30), the envoy's website shows that about $4.5 billion has been promised, of which 31.1% remains pending, and 38.3% has been committed but not actually disbursed (i.e. made available):


All of these problems are depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied foreign aid in other contexts. Still, moved by the particular urgency of such a massive humanitarian crisis, donors might have been expected to overcome their traditional reluctance to coordinate, listen to their recipient counterparts, and live up to their promises. Unfortunately, long-standing practices are difficult to change, no matter how urgent the impetus.

On an encouraging note, Haiti’s Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE) is now implementing an Aid Management Platform (AMP) (funded by aid donors) to facilitate transparent and effective aid management and tracking. AMP will help the government to monitor the performance and alignment of aid and external private and public investments in the context of the official Action Plan for the Recovery and Development of Haiti (PARDH).

It is to be hoped that this will speed up the conversion of pending and committed aid into actual disbursements to help the rebuilding of Haiti. Still even if all promised aid is disbursed, the need in Haiti will remain great, and (as mentioned above) organizations such as PIH and MSF could definitely use additional private contributions.

Countries that suffer from major natural disasters always receive offers of aid from around the world. As one would expect, neighboring and allied states are particularly likely to offer aid, and the major contributors tend to be those countries that are also large donors of official development assistance (ODA). But the list also includes countries that one does not normally think of as aid donors.

A Wikipedia page which has been tracking international aid offers to Japan shows that Afghanistan (or rather, the city of Kandahar) has donated $50,000, Albania has offered $100,000, as have Cambodia,  Laos and North Korea, which are hardly political allies of Japan (nor, one might think, can they really afford to just give money away like that).

So why might such countries offer disaster relief? It is unlikely that these contributions will make a tangible difference in the relief effort, as money is not the limiting factor in Japan's response. Many of the offers are clearly symbolic, and some donors almost certainly do not expect their offers to be accepted (North Korea, for instance). But there may also be some self-interest involved. It seems plausible that some countries are offering in help in part as a way to express gratitude for receiving Japanese foreign aid in the past and/or in hopes of receiving such aid in the future.

For example, a search of the AidData database (see at the bottom of this posting) shows that Japan has funded about 50 aid projects in East Timor (Timor-Leste) in recent years. Now that country has promised to send 100 people to clear rubble, according to Wikipedia's tally. It seems unlikely that Japan will accept the offer (it would have to house, host, and manage the efforts of 100 people who likely speak no Japanese and have never been to Japan before, at a time when there are almost certainly plenty of local Japanese eager to do the same work). But it will be interesting to see if Japan's aid to Timor-Leste changes at all in coming years.

In fact, there is an earlier natural disaster for which we can look into this a bit more. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, about 100 countries and international organizations offered aid to the United States. As with Japan today, Afghanistan and Albania made offers, but they were more generous to the United States, with Afghanistan donating $100,000 and Albania $308,000. Since the scale of devastation and the death toll are far greater in Japan, it is clear that these donations do not reflect the severity of the disaster.

Certainly the United States is much more involved in Afghanistan than Japan is, so Afghanistan's greater largesse is not surprising. But Albania's case is less clear. In fact, according to AidData, US aid to Albania in 2004 (the year before Katrina) was less than half Japan's aid to Albania in 2008, the most recent year for which we have complete data (search results at the bottom of this post). Not only that: U.S. ODA to Albania had declined considerably from 2003 to 2004. It is possible that Albania thought an aid offer might stem any further decline; if so, it seems to have worked, at least temporarily: 2005 (the year of Katrina) and 2006 aid from the US to Albania remained relatively constant. But in 2007 it fell once more, by quite a bit.

These are just two cases out of dozens of ODA recipients that offered assistance to the United States in 2005 or Japan today. As far as I know, nobody has systematically investigated either the determinants of aid offers by ODA recipients, or the impact of such offers on future aid flows, but it seems like an issue well worth investigating further.



• AidData search results: Japanese aid to Timor-Leste in 2007 and 2008


• AidData search results: U.S. aid to Albania, 2003-2007


• AidData search results: Japanese aid to Albania, 2007-2008

AidData's online data interface allows users to construct precise search specifications to hone in on a particular set of aid projects they are interested in. However, for those whose interests are broader, and might like to conduct a larger number of different searches, the online interface inevitably becomes somewhat cumbersome.

One alternative is to use AidData's research releases. The most current release is 1.9.2.
Unfortunately, this is a very large file, containing information about almost 1 million projects. That
makes it cumbersome, and perhaps impossible, to handle for computers with less than, say, 8GB
of memory (RAM).

Since most computers probably fall into that category, we have now made available a few subsets of
the data that will be more manageable for most computers, and may allow people to perform the
data analysis they wish to do. At the moment, the following subsets are available:

1. United States aid projects only (about 110,000 projects)
2. Aid projects from the European Union and its member states (480,000)
3. Aid projects from non-DAC (i.e. non-OECD) donors (140,000)
4. All aid projects since the year 2000 (670,000)

The files are in comma-separated value (csv) format, and compressed (zipped). They can easily
be converted for use in standard statistics packages using a utility such as Stat/Transfer.

If you have any questions regarding these releases, contact info@aiddata.org!

This week AidData turns one. It’s been an exciting year for the aid transparency movement overall, with the finalization of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data standard, increasing transparency at the country level, lots of new ideas on making development information more accessible, and new research and analysis on transparency and aid quality.

Meanwhile, since the launch of AidData.org last year, the program has made some exciting progress in making information on development assistance more transparent and useful—highlights included working with the World Bank Institute on the Mapping for Results initiative, and creating the Development Loop application as a pilot platform for opening up a dialogue around development projects, with support from Esri. Thanks to all our friends and partners in the fields of aid transparency and information technology for your collaboration, and to the generous donors who make this work possible. Looking forward to a great second year!

For the past few months, the New York Times has featured an excellent series of online articles by Tina Rosenberg looking at solutions to social problems, many of them development-related. Each time she writes a first post presenting an idea, and then a follow-up post a few days later responding to comments.

In January, she wrote about conditional cash transfers to the poor (here and here); a few weeks later she discussed microcredit and microconsignment (here and here); in mid-February she discussed the possibility of drastically improving healthcare in developing countries without needing to train (and retain!) new doctors (here and here). All of these are well worth reading.

Her most recent entries in the series appeared on March 14th and 18th, and address the idea of changing the protocol for foreign aid to a cash-on-delivery model. The articles discuss the promise and some of the potential pitfalls of using aid to pay for past, rather than future, performance. Much of the first article draws on a fine book by Nancy Birdsall and William Savedoff, Cash on Delivery: A New Approach to Foreign Aid, which was just published in a revised edition by the Center for Global Development.

The idea behind cash on delivery is that aid recipients are paid for achieving various development benchmarks (for example, $20 for every child that finishes elementary school), plus bonuses for additional achievements. The book highlights several important features of the COD scheme: it is likely to be more transparent than traditional aid, it requires less heavy handed oversight on the part of donors (who traditionally want a say in how various goals are achieved), and it can make more efficient use of the available aid funds.

Rosenberg highlights another potential contribution: it may increase public support in donor nations for foreign aid. After all, donor state citizens would know precisely what they got for their money, so to speak. Rosenberg suggests that this might contribute to eliminating the persistent misperception among most Americans that the United States gives large amounts of aid and that most of it is wasted.

COD is an intriguing notion, and it will be exciting to see it put into practice (apparently the British government will begin a pilot project soon). However, as Rosenberg hints in her posts, this may be unexpectedly complicated. Birdsall and Savedoff claim in the preface to their book that "the only true preconditions for this new approach are a good measure of progress and a credible way to verify it," suggesting that this is fairly straightforward. But of course it isn't.

Rosenberg cites a similar project by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which learned that they had underestimated the required management skills to implement a COD vaccination scheme and that, moreover, there was a big temptation to exaggerate accomplishments (since remuneration was linked to those accomplishments). There is no reason to think these problems will be any less for more traditional development assistance projects.

At the moment, COD in development assistance is little more than an intriguing notion. It may turn out that it simply will not work in practice. On the other hand, it may turn out that it will work much better than traditional development assistance, as some of its advocates suggest. I suspect, however, that it will work reasonably well under certain conditions and for certain projects, but most of the time will not measurably outperform traditional aid.

For COD to be preferable to traditional forms of aid, reliably measuring progress must be cheaper and/or less invasive than is the case with oversight mechanisms for the latter. There is no reason to believe that this will hold true in practice; at least not as a general rule.

Advocates of COD also emphasize benefits in terms of accountability and transparency, for recipient and donor populations alike. For such benefits to become reality, information about these projects has to be both widely disseminated and easy to understand. Here, too, it is not obvious that this will be easier to achieve for COD than it is for traditional aid.

Traditional aid programs have not been all that transparent or accountable, but that is not inherent in the method. Over the past few years, AidData and others have been changing this, making extensive project information available to anyone who is interested, in donor countries as well as recipient countries. Of course, data availability is not the same as awareness and understanding, and it is possible that COD projects are somehow inherently easier to understand. Rosenberg's account suggests that she believes they are.

Initial tests of COD will probably simply see whether the approach can work at all. A real test, however, ought to compare two projects with the same goals, one set up along traditional
lines, and one along COD lines, each of which invested the same quantity of resources both in the project itself and in disseminating information about it. Only then could we ask:
1. Does the COD project achieve better (or at least the same) outcomes with the same resources?
2. Are donors and recipients better able to understand the COD project than the traditional one?
3. Are donors and recipients more likely to seek information about COD projects than traditional ones?

In fact, it might be possible to investigate the second and third questions before even testing COD in practice. Take a few projects from the AidData database for which post-project evaluations have been done, so we know performance outcomes. Translate the project description into a COD format: for example, instead of saying the project funded the construction of a school, say that it paid the recipient 20$ for each student attending the school for a year. Then conduct a survey (ideally in both donor and recipient countries), and gauge how people interpret and react to these competing descriptions of the same project:
Does one seem easier to understand than the other?
Does the traditional format sound more or less efficient / wasteful?
Do donors and recipients react in the same way to these descriptions?

Rosenberg argues that one benefit of COD aid might be eliminating persistent misperceptions among American citizens about how much aid the United States gives, and how much good it does. A survey along the lines just described might go some way towards telling us whether Rosenberg is correct on this point. Even if she is wrong, COD might still be preferable from the point of view of development outcomes, but it will be valuable to know what its other implications are before investing large sums of money.

By Chris Marcoux, Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow at the College of William and Mary

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke “straight realpolitik” at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week, urging the committee to “put aside the humanitarian, do-good side of what we believe in” and recognize that the United States is “in competition with China.” Clinton argued that proposed budget cuts to U.S. foreign assistance would hinder the ability of the United States to compete for global influence. Reducing aid expenditures would render the U.S. less able to promote its national interests in international relations. By way of example, Clinton noted that the U.S.-based corporation Exxon-Mobil was being forced to fend off challenges from Chinese competitors following its recent energy find in Papua New Guinea. These comments were notable not because they represent a change in course for the Secretary of State. To the contrary, they continue the recent trend of couching foreign assistance in terms of national defense (in February, Clinton suggested that aid cuts would be devastating to U.S. national security).

Many readers of First Tranche told me they liked the cartogram of U.S. aid flows to the rest of the world from 1985-2008. My student, Ashley Ingram, followed up that work with a similar map of Africa for the same time period. I actually like this one better as it allows you to see allocation patterns more clearly.


Observations:

1. For all of the time series Egypt dominates the map. For much of the time series Egypt and South Africa are among the richest countries in Africa and are getting very large sums of aid from the U.S. government.

2. If you want to see what a "donor darling" looks like, watch the size of Uganda change over time.

3. Countries with the "no value" in terms of reported statistics on GNI per capita are usually closed regimes (Libya in the 80s and 90s) or they are failed states (Somalia and the DRC). Speaking of the DRC, notice how large it gets in the 90s. Lots of money for refugees and internally displaced people.

4. Libya does receive U.S. aid from 2004-2008 (mostly money to dismantle nuclear and other WMD programs, to provide employment for Libyan nuclear scientists, to fund NGOs that publicize corruption with Libya, and to support free press projects as displayed below) but the amounts are quite small. I'm guessing Qaddafi is wishing he had a viable nuclear program right now and that he is not all that thrilled about Libyan NGOs and transparency advocates getting support from the U.S. government to publicize corruption within Qaddafi's regime over the past five years. Given this content, it makes any calls for the U.S. to "cut off aid to Libya" pretty nonsensical. The aid currently being provided by the U.S. to Libya is not the kind of aid most struggling dictators want.

All U.S. aid to Libya search is here...