Minister Ploumen moet durven vertrouwen

Minister Ploumen moet durven vertrouwen

Vice Versa

In 2015 komt er een einde aan het subsidiestelsel voor het maatschappelijk middenveld zoals we dat nu kennen. Negen vooraanstaande vrouwen uit de ontwikkelingssector nodigen minister Ploumen uit om te kiezen voor een radicale koerswijziging en een systeem in te richten dat gestoeld is op een onmisbaar basiselement: vertrouwen. 

In 2015 komt er een einde aan veel van de bestaande Nederlandse subsidieregelingen voor ontwikkelingsorganisaties. En dat is goed. Want het huidige subsidiesysteem is eigenlijk een mislukking. Omdat het is gebouwd op gestold wantrouwen en boekhoudersdenken. De papieren werkelijkheid regeert. Dat er ondanks dit subsidiesysteem dag in dag uit ook goede resultaten worden behaald in de strijd tegen armoede is eigenlijk een wonder. Wij, negen betrokken deskundigen uit de ontwikkelingssector dagen minister Ploumen uit om nu te kiezen voor een radicale koerswijziging. Zodat ze haar belofte om méér armoede te bestrijden met minder geld ook werkelijk waar kan maken.

Het is geen gemakkelijke opgave om meisjes naar school te krijgen in Zuid-Sudan. De regering van dit nieuwe land is fragiel, en onrust ligt op de loer. De meeste mensen durven er nog nauwelijks te denken aan het opbouwen van een nieuw leven. Toch zijn er organisaties die zich juist daar willen inzetten voor een groep kinderen waarvan de kans dat zij een goede toekomst tegemoet gaan het kleinst is. Meisjes. Maar wat als al doende blijkt dat niet alleen het gebrek aan leraren het probleem is, maar tegelijkertijd de onveilige route naar school? Mag je je strategie dan aanpassen, zonder dat je een deel van je inkomsten verliest? Dat kan alleen als je die inkomsten op basis van vertrouwen hebt gekregen. Vertrouwen dat een organisatie op basis van jarenlang opgebouwde kennis en ervaring steeds opnieuw de best mogelijke keuzes maakt.

Miljoenen Nederlandse donateurs en vrijwilligers vertrouwen de organisaties die zij steunen. Ook de bijdragen van de Nationale Postcode Loterij aan goede doelen zijn gebaseerd op vertrouwen. Met 5 medewerkers verdelen zij jaarlijks bijna 300 miljoen euro over 89 streng geselecteerde goede doelen. Dat doen ze bewust zonder dwingende formats, strakke subsidiekaders en gedetailleerde monitoringsprotocollen. En biedt daarmee volop de ruimte aan hun gepassioneerde, professionele partners om datgene te doen wat ze het beste kunnen. Dat vertrouwen zou minister Ploumen voor Buitenlandse Handel en Ontwikkelingssamenwerking ook moeten geven aan ontwikkelingsorganisaties.

Karrenvracht papier

In het huidige medefinancieringsstelsel (MFSII), opgesteld onder verantwoordelijkheid van toenmalig minister Koenders, is de regeldruk wanstaltig. Dat begon al bij de aanvraag die in sommige gevallen zo omvangrijk was, dat ze letterlijk als karrenvracht papier het ministerie in werd gereden. Omdat er gedetailleerde resultaten per jaar tot aan 2015 moesten worden vastgelegd. Ook moet daar jaarlijks op worden gerapporteerd. Het Adviescollege Toetsing Administratieve lasten heeft in mei 2011 geprobeerd te berekenen hoeveel de ontwikkelingsorganisaties hebben geïnvesteerd in alleen al het schrijven van hun aanvragen: twaalf miljoen euro. Er is dus twaalf miljoen euro ontwikkelingsgeld niet besteed aan schoon drinkwater, scholing en goede gezondheidszorg.

Toen de subsidieaanvragen in Nederland werden geschreven, zag de politieke en praktische werkelijkheid in Zuid-Sudan er compleet anders uit dan vandaag, én dan in 2015. Maar organisaties die MFSII-subsidie krijgen moeten vasthouden aan de in hun aanvraag gemaakte keuzes. Simpelweg omdat die nu eenmaal zo zijn vastgelegd. Door op zo'n gedetailleerd niveau subsidies toe te kennen, en te monitoren, geeft  Buitenlandse Zaken weinig blijk van vertrouwen in de ontwikkelingsorganisaties.

Er zijn overheidsinstanties die dit beter doen. Al in 2009 presenteerde toenmalig minister Bos van Financiën het Rijksbrede Subsidiekader. Het uitgangspunt hierbij is verantwoord vertrouwen en risicoacceptatie. Dat wil zeggen dat de subsidieontvanger rapporteert op kosten en prestaties, en dat de overheid accepteert dat er fouten gemaakt worden. Mits daarvan wordt geleerd. Bij MFSII werd dit rijksbrede subsidiekader volledig genegeerd.

Verantwoord vertrouwen

De hoogte van het subsidiebedrag dat voor ontwikkelingsorganisaties ná 2015 beschikbaar wordt gesteld, wordt deze dagen in de Tweede Kamer uitgebreid bediscussieerd. Maar hoe, en onder welke voorwaarden, deze subsidies verdeeld zullen gaan worden zal minister Ploumen pas na de zomer duidelijk maken. De minister heeft gekozen om de inhoudelijke lijn van haar voorganger te volgen. Daardoor ontstaat er rust en ruimte om op vorm een radicale andere koers te varen. Er is nog genoeg tijd om een dergelijk nieuwe koers echt goed uit te werken.

Wij roepen minister Ploumen op om de subsidies voortaan te verdelen op basis van vertrouwen. Niet blind, maar verantwoord vertrouwen. Vanzelfsprekend gaat daar een uitgebreide selectieronde aan vooraf. Vertrouwen moet je ook verdienen. Door aannemelijk te maken dat je goede resultaten haalt op de doelen die de minister heeft gesteld. En beschikt over de cruciale succesfactoren: een bewezen strategie, omgevingssensitiviteit en aanpassingsvermogen. We bieden de minister binnenkort graag een uitgewerkt plan aan waar in staat hóe dat dan kan.

Kiezen voor vertrouwen als uitgangspunt voor het subsidiestelsel voor ontwikkelingsorganisaties vergt een radicale koerswijziging. Maar het komt de slagkracht van ontwikkelingsorganisaties zeer ten goede, omdat zij zich kunnen zich gaan richten op hun core-business. En dat zou goed nieuws zijn, voor de meisjes in Zuid-Sudan. En voor al die anderen op al die andere plekken waar de strijd tegen armoede nog niet is gestreden.

Marjolein de Rooij, Evelijne Bruning, Femke Rotteveel, Ingrid Plag, Marieke de Wal, Tabitha Gerrets, Wilma Roozenboom, Anke Tijtsma en Hilke Jansen.  

 

 

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Henk J.Th. Van Stokkom

Will the Post-2015 report make a difference? Depends what happens next

Will the Post-2015 report make a difference? Depends what happens next

From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green

An edited version of this piece, written with Stephen Hale, appeared on the Guardian Poverty Matters site on Friday

Reading the report of the High Level Panel induces a sense of giddy optimism. It is a manifesto for a (much) better world, taking the best of the Millennium Development Goals, and adding what we have learned in the intervening years – the importance of social protection, sustainability, ending conflict, tackling the deepest pockets of poverty, even obesity (rapidly rising in many poor countries). It has a big idea (consigning absolute poverty to the history books) and is on occasion brave (in the Sir Humphrey sense) for example in its commitment to women's rights, including ending child marriage and violence against women, and guaranteeing universal sexual and reproductive health rights.

The ambition and optimism is all the more welcome for its contrast with the daily grind of austerity, recession and international paralysis (Syria, Climate Change, the torments of the European Union). In response, the report is clearly designed for a no/low cost environment, downplaying the importance of aid, talking up access to data, and revenue raisers like cracking down on tax evasion.

But then the doubts start to creep in. What's missing is always harder to spot than what is in the text, but three gaps are already clear: The emerging global concern over inequality is relegated to national politics, and otherwise dealt with through the 'data default' of requiring any target to be met amongst the poorest fifth of a population, not just the population as a whole. The concept of poverty is pretty old school – income, health, education, and fails to recognize the considerable progress made in measuring 'well-being' – the level of life satisfaction people feel. Finally there is too little recognition that the earth is a finite ecosystem, and that we need to make a reality of the concept of planetary boundaries if we are to sustain progress in tackling poverty.

But the elephant in the room is not the text, but how this text will or will not connect to the struggles to achieve the many very laudable aims set out in the report.

Five or 10 years down the line, will the High Level Panel report be food for termites, or a watershed in human development? The shelves of international bodies are piled high with forgotten reports by distinguished panels. Do any readers remember the 2012 High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability or the UN High Level Advisory Group on Climate Financing? Thought not.

These reports sank because they failed to connect with more permanent international processes and did not tackle the critical underlying issues of power and politics that determine what good ideas make it into policy, and what are ignored.

thanks guys, now what?

Here the HLP report risks going the same way. It is written in the name of an imaginary 'we' (as in 'it is crucial that we ensure basic safety and justice for all'), ignoring the reality that 'we' may not all want the same thing (which is why we need politics, after all).

The post2015 process could have lasting influence in four main ways: Firstly, making the case for improving the quality or quantity of aid (the major achievement of the MDGs). The HLP report does pretty well on that, as you would expect.

Second, international agreements can be effective in triggering long-term, under-the-radar changes in public norms and values. This is more subtle, but very important – research is piling up to show that international conventions to end discrimination against women, or on the rights of children, have permeated people's heads (and national laws) in many countries, changing in fundamental ways, perceptions of what it is to be a woman or a child. It is very unlikely indeed that this report will have that effect, but it's still possible if there is sufficient pressure.

That brings us to a third pathway to impact: directly exerting traction on national governments. Will the post2015 process persuade national governments to do things differently, for example by creating a 'race to the top' between governments, highlighting the heroes and zeroes (like the World Bank's Doing Business rankings). Promisingly, the report urges regional reports and peer reviews – nothing annoys a leader (or wins press coverage) like being trounced by a neighbour in a league table.

Finally, the post2015 process could create stronger and broader alliances of civil society organizations, trade unions, faith institutions and others who take whatever comes out of the process and use it to put pressure on their governments, as they have done with some of the ILO conventions, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The report now enters the treacherous waters of a 'UN Open Working Group'. With two and a half years before the MDGs deadline, the task of those concerned with development should now be to defend the good stuff in the HLP report from dilution, while focussing far more strongly on how a new set of global goals can lead to lasting change at national level.

The report's publication inevitably triggered an avalanche of opinion pieces. The ones I liked included Charles Kenny, a round up of reactions by Global Dashboard and (of course) Claire Melamed. Any others stand out?

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Henk J.Th. Van Stokkom

Soil atlas of Africa

Soil atlas of Africa

Africa Unchained

From the European Commission:

What is special about soil in Africa?

The first ever SOIL ATLAS OF AFRICA uses striking maps, informative texts and stunning photographs to answer and explain these and other questions. Leading soil scientists from Europe and Africa have collaborated to produce this unique document. Using state-of-the-art computer mapping techniques, the Soil Atlas of Africa shows the changing nature of soil across the continent. It explains the origin and functions of soil, describes the different soil types that can be found in Africa and their relevance to both local and global issues. The atlas also discusses the principal threats to soil and the steps being taken to protect soil resources. The Soil Atlas of Africa is more than just a normal atlas. It presents a new and comprehensive interpretation of an often neglected natural resource. The Soil Atlas of Africa is an essential reference to a non-renewable resource that is fundamental for life on this planet.

More here

via Boing Boing

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Why all the attention to cash transfers now?

Why all the attention to cash transfers now?

Chris Blattman

That's the question Jennifer Lentfer asked on the Oxfam blog following my post and paper last week on the amazing impacts of cash transfers in Uganda.

Cash transfers are nothing new, though there's a lot of hub-bub about them this week in the popular media. One researcher and blogger publishes a paper and, voilà, the next development trend is born!

She points to a wealth of evidence on conditional cash transfer programs–CCTs in the acronym-laden world of development. These programs give regular payments to poor families (sort of like a welfare check) but only if they send their kid to school, get them vaccinated, and so forth.

She is right, and you should see her post and links if you want more details. There is also a recent book (free to download) from some great World Bank researchers, summarizing all the evidence so far.

I also disagree in two ways, though. Here's what I posted on her blog:

One is that… my sense is that people like Jennifer are the exception and not the rule.

Most of all, governments and NGOs want to give away cash on condition, or with lots of hands-on follow up or accountability, some of which is not very cost effective. We really don't have much evidence at all on unconditional transfers. Here I expect a lot of skepticism from the aid community–well-deserved skepticism, at least until we have more studies.

An aside: we actually do have at least one study on the value added by NGO giving conditions and otherwise holding the poor "accountable" for cash: here is a post on an experiment we recently finished in Uganda, where we randomized this cost-laden accountability and hands-on advice, alongside cash. It helped, but not so much that it passed reasonable cost-benefit tests. NGOs will need to learn to streamine here.

But I digress.

My second counter-argument is this: everything we have on CCTs show they go directly into current spending, precautionary savings, or investments in children. This is terrific, but this doesn't raise the short or medium-run earning potential of households. It doesn't necessarily change the lifetime income stream of the people receiving the transfers (except to the extent their kids earn more 20 years down the road). It doesn't help shift economies from agriculture into cottage industry.

What's striking is that almost none of these CCT studies look to see whether the windfalls were invested in productive enterprise. At root are some of the deepest questions in development: What constrains entrepreneurship? What holds back "occupational choice"–the decision to be self-employed and in what sector? What prompts structural change from agriculture to industry? This is the basic process of development that CCTs haven't illuminated.

This point comes across more clearly in our paper than my blog post. We try to frame what we've learned relative not only to CCT programs but also to studies of asset transfers, training programs, and business grants.

But the basic point–that any paper stands on the shoulders of giants–is still correct, and ours is just one contribution to a literature that tells us the power of cash to transform lives. It ought to make us skeptical of the cost-effectiveness of the alternatives, enough to test which services actually "add value" in the sense that they make at least as large a difference in the lives of the poor as the cash grant alternative. Otherwise we ought to get out of the way.

Comment below or here.

The post Why all the attention to cash transfers now? appeared first on Chris Blattman.

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Measuring without measuring

Measuring without measuring

Seth's Blog

As an organization grows and industrializes, it's tempting to simplify things for the troops. Find a goal, make it a number and measure it until it gets better. In most organizations, the thing you measure is the thing that will improve.

Colleges decided that the SAT were a useful shortcut, a way to measure future performance in college. And nervous parents and competitive kids everywhere embraced the metric, and stick with it, even after seeing (again and again) that all the SAT measures is how well you do on the SAT. It's easier to focus on one number than it is to focus on a life.

Paypal and Chase and countless other organizations do precisely this: they figure out a metric, decide it's important and then create a department to improve that metric.

Consider the Chase Fraud Prevention department. It costs a credit card company (and especially their merchants) a lot of money when fraudulent charges are made, because they often have to eat the cost. So this department of thousands of people works to make the number of fraudulent charges go down at the same time they keep expenses low. Which sounds great until you realize that the easiest way to do this is to flag false positives, annoy honest customers and provide little or no fallback when a mistake is made.

Simple example: I regularly get an automated phone call from the bank with an urgent warning. But even when I answer the phone, the system doesn't let me ring through to an operator. Instead, I have to write every detail down, then call, wait on hold, prove it's me, type in all the information, and THEN explain to them that in fact, the charge was mine.

And this department has no incentive to fix this interaction, because 'annoying' is not a metric that the bosses have decided to measure. Someone is busy watching one number, but it's the wrong one.

Or consider the similar problem at Paypal. Stories of good (or great) customers being totally shut down, sometimes to the point of bankruptcy, are legion. There may be people at Paypal who care about this, but the security people don't. That's because they're not measuring the right thing.

Measurement is fabulous. Unless you're busy measuring what's easy to measure as opposed to what's important.

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Henk J.Th. Van Stokkom

Gates v. Moyo: Are Aid Critics Getting Trolled?

Gates v. Moyo: Are Aid Critics Getting Trolled?

Open The Echo Chamber

I'm late to this show – I was traveling last week when the whole Gates/Moyo throwdown happened. I was going to let it go, but I have received enough prodding from others to offer my thoughts – probably because I have offered extended critiques of Moyo's Dead Aid (links below), while also noting that Gates' understandings of the problems of aid and development are a bit myopic. So, here we go…

Bill Gates finally voiced what has been implicit in much of his approach to development – he sees aid and development critics as highly problematic people who slow down progress (or whatever Bill thinks passes for progress).  Honestly, this is thoroughly unsurprising to anyone who has paid any attention to what Bill has said all along, or indeed anything the Gates Foundation does.  There just isn't much room for meta-criticism at the foundation or its work – sure, they evaluate their programs, but there isn't much evaluation/consideration of whether or not the guiding principals behind those programs make much sense.  There is an assumption that Gates' goals are somehow self-evident, and therefore critics are just problems to be solved.

Let's just start with this part of what Gates said. To me, his comments represent a profound misunderstanding of the place of aid and development criticism – his comments represent critics as annoyances to be brushed away, implying that criticism is an end unto itself. I do not know a single aid/development critic for whom criticism is the end. Critical thinking, and any resultant criticism, is a means to the end of changing the world. Simply put, without critical thinkers to constantly evaluate, challenge, and push the thinking of those in the world of development policy and implementation, where would we be? Take gender, for example. Today, nobody questions the need to consider the gender of the beneficiary when we think about policies or programs, but in the late 1960s those who first raised this issue were critics, often viewed as "annoyances" who slowed down the process of designing and implementing projects with their silly concerns about the needs of women. Gates does his foundation, and the entire enterprise/discipline of development a disservice in this rather sad misrepresentation of the aid critic.

Had Gates simply said what he did about aid critics in the abstract, I think it would have passed without much comment. But he didn't. Instead, he singled out Dambisa Moyo as an archetype of aid criticism. As a result, he gave a platform to someone who clearly loves the attention. I fear he also somehow made her the archetype for the aid critic, validating a writer whose "critical" arguments are rife with errors and problems (I detailed these in an extended review of her book here, here, here, here, and here). In short, Gates was rather clever here: he picked the contemporary aid critic with the greatest conceptual shortcomings and held her up as the problem, as if the rest of the critical thinkers shared her thinking, shallow arguments, and factual problems. Further, he (apparently rightly, given the reaction of twitter and the blogosphere) seems to have assumed that such critics should and would rally to her support.

Well, not me.

I am without question a critical thinker when it comes to development and aid. I have a hell of a paper trail to prove it. But I do not see myself as a colleague or contemporary of Dambisa Moyo. I'd prefer to be a colleague of Bill Easterly, Arturo Escobar, James Ferguson, James Scott, and Timothy Mitchell (all more senior than me), and I see myself as a colleague of Katharine McKinnon, Kat O'Reilly, Mara Goldman, and Farhana Sultana (all friends or colleagues of my generation).  All of these scholars have conducted extensive scholarly work on the problems of development, and backed up their work with evidence. I don't think any of these scholars is perfect, and some have produced pieces of work that I see as deeply flawed, but all hold their work to a much higher standard than that I saw in Dead Aid.

The fact is that Gates was right: Moyo doesn't know much about aid and what it is doing – Dead Aid made this rather clear (seriously, read my review of the book). On her webpage, she argues that she "dedicated many years to economic study up to the Ph.D. level, to analyze and understand the inherent weaknesses of aid, and why aid policies have consistently failed to deliver on economic growth and poverty alleviation." First, a Ph.D. is no guarantee of knowing anything – and I say that as someone who holds two Ph.D.s! I have seen absolutely no scholarly output from Moyo's Ph.D. work that supports any sense that she developed a rigorous understanding of aid at all. Indeed, her very phrasing – she sought to analyze and understand the inherent weakness of aid – suggests that her work is not analytical, but political. And after two years in D.C., one thing I have learned is that the political has very little to do with facts or evidence. In that regard, I can safely say that Dead Aid is a political book.

Second, being born and raised in a poor country does not mean that one understands the experiences of everyone in that country. Zambia is a culturally, economically, and environmentally diverse country, home to many different experiences.  Just as I cannot make any claim to understand the experiences of all Americans just because I was born here, majored in American Studies, and have lived in five states and a federal colony (D.C.), Moyo's implicit claim that being born in Zambia allows her to speak for all those living in countries that receive aid, let alone all Zambians, is absurd.

Finally, she argues that she has served as a consultant at the World Bank, implicitly suggesting this gives her great purchase on development thought. It does not. As I have argued elsewhere, working as a consultant for a donor is not the same thing as working as an employee of a donor. I too have been a consultant at the World Bank. Technically, I am currently a consultant for USAID. These are very different roles from those I occupied while employed at USAID. Consultants are not privy to the internal conversations and machinations of development donors, and have at best partial understandings of what drives decisions about development policy and implementation.  Moyo has no practical experience at all with the realities of development donors, a fact that comes through in Dead Aid.

So let's divorce the two things that Bill Gates did in his comments. He completely misrepresented aid critics in two ways: first, in failing to recognize the contributions of aid criticism to the improvement of aid and development programs, and second in lumping aid critics into the same basket as Dambisa Moyo.  This lumping is pretty egregious, and the overall characterization represents a significant flaw in Gates' thinking about development that is likely to come back to bite his foundation in the ass in the near future – without criticism of the overall ideas behind the foundation, it's programs will wither and die.  We can separate this first problem from Gates critique of Dambisa Moyo, which aside from characterizing her as doing evil (which is just going too far, really), pretty much got the assessment of her thinking right.

In short, let's push back against Bill's thinking on development criticism, but not valorize Moyo's crap arguments in the process.

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Best regards,

Henk J.Th. Van Stokkom