Bangladesh is a country with thousands of development
organizations, each with hundreds of concurrent projects. For some perspective,
in 2003 there were 6,559 development
NGOs
operating in the country, almost one for every village. The proliferation
of aid actors in every conceivable sector--from social welfare to governance
and the environment--raises a fundamental question: What is actually happening
on the ground? For all these projects, many of which share similar goals and
locations, there is limited available information on how the aid
actually
assists impoverished peoples.
Last year, I worked for the World Food Programme in
Bangladesh, and observed firsthand how a lack of information sharing on-the-ground
can hinder effective targeting of aid projects. Since development organizations
have limited resources, they generally attempt to target their projects to
areas of greatest need. I assisted with the initial implementation of a flood
Emergency Response
Operation in Satkhira, Bangladesh, a program targeting individuals
displaced by the flood as well as pregnant women and young children.
One of our tasks was to cross-check the beneficiaries selected by our
NGO partner to ensure they were being chosen according to the proper
needs-based criteria. As we drove along broken roads lined with makeshift
shelters constructed from bamboo, jute, cloth, and plastic tarps, I anticipated
meeting people in extremely dire conditions. But when we arrived at the first
household on our list, a fully intact bamboo and mud house, I had a feeling
that something was not quite right. As it turned out, the family had been
economically hurt by the flood, but they had not been displaced. Other
villagers who we talked to mentioned the same phenomenon: that certain people always
seem to get selected for aid projects while others who are worse off do not. After
checking a total of ten households, we found that four of them had been selected
incorrectly, and reported to the WFP office immediately.
As much as development organizations try to closely monitor
project implementation, it is impossible to account for every detail of on-the-ground
activity. NGOs sometimes find it advantageous to
select
their existing beneficiaries, or those who are not severely affected, in order
to report significant improvements to their donors. Therefore, even if an NGO
does not completely follow the implementation guidelines by targeting the intended
beneficiaries, donors will have the false satisfaction of believing their
project had its intended outcome. In order to identify projects where the same
well-off households are repeatedly included on the beneficiary list, villagers
need to be able to report on the aid they are receiving and who is being left
out. Such a system would impose a check on NGO activity, pressuring them to target
households with greatest need.
Increased transparency can also encourage
better
coordination between all of the different agencies working in a single
location. In the case of the Satkhira flooding, numerous aid organizations had a
presence, each with their own objectives. Everywhere I went I saw an assortment
of development organization logos on shelters, latrines, and food rations. It
was difficult to discern if there was any overarching coordination strategy.
Indeed, as we talked to more people, they explained that some groups came in
for a few days to give away bags of rice, while others had longer-term plans
for building up the infrastructure and embankments. Wouldn’t it be more useful
if the recipients of the development assistance could report on what aid they
were receiving and what aid they still needed?
Then, other donors could get a better picture of the situation and allocate
funding for future projects accordingly.
In addition to improving aid coordination, transparency can
enable development organizations to tailor projects to the specific needs of
communities. For example, I am currently working with
Innovations for Poverty Action on a
randomized control trial (RCT) that is implementing demand and supply side
treatments to bolster use of latrines and sanitation practices in Bangladeshi villages.
As I monitored the baseline survey, I discussed the current sanitation
situation with enumerators. Surprisingly, they discovered that not only was
there a shortage of latrines in village households, but many village schools—built
by a local NGO—also lacked latrine access. This could be for a variety of
reasons. Perhaps the NGO had to build a certain number of schools and the
budget did not allow for latrine construction, or perhaps they used the extra
money for another project. But if the enumerators and villagers had a platform
to report their observations on their latrines, donors could focus on funding the
crucial sanitation component for the existing and future schools.
Crowdsourcing
may be one way to address these sorts of coordination and targeting issues. Through
the rapid diffusion of mobile technologies, people living and working in
developing communities now have a mechanism to deliver real-time information on
local conditions and project performance to donors. However, a common platform to
aggregate, share, and make sense of monitoring and evaluation data does not yet
exist.
AidData has recently overseen an RCT in Uganda to help develop
a workable crowdsourcing model, and I hope this work expands to other areas
soon. My experiences in Bangladesh have given me a new appreciation for the importance
of repairing the broken feedback loop gap between donors and their intended
beneficiaries. Identifying whether and how projects are functioning in
impoverished communities is the central to designing effective poverty alleviation
projects.
Ishita Ahmed is a former AidData Research Assistant at the
College of William and Mary (’11).
