ideas about development
Tim Harford’s new book Adapt is essential reading for anyone interested in how to improve development aid. In this TEDTalk, Tim worries about the prevalence of the ‘God complex’ among politicians, doctors and economists in a world where problems and their solutions are multifaceted and complex. Tim is a big fan of adaptation through variation and selection, trial and error, to find solutions to complex problems. His thesis is that in order to get closer [...] Read more »
With so many development policy ideas on the web, it can be difficult to keep up with the latest news. Hopping from one site to another takes time and it’s easy to forget to check in. How can you simplify the information flow? Don’t worry, if you haven’t already, simply set up an RSS feed to your computer. Owen Barder’s blog contains details on how to do this and it’s easy to get started. I [...] Read more »
Donors have been known waste money on classrooms with no teachers, so why not pay for progress on number of children completing primary school? That’s the idea behind Cash On Delivery: a new approach to aid, a new book by Nancy Birdsall and William D. Savedoff. And it’s an idea whose time has come. The book is well worth a read. Here’s a quick summary COD aid taken from the book to whet your appetite. Key features [...] Read more »
Andrew Mitchell’s announcement of a full UK aid transparency guarantee and a new independent watchdog is welcome news. (Audio of speech here.) In this blog, we have argued that recipients need to be able to give better feedback to aid agencies on whether goods and services actually reach the end of the track. Andrew Mitchell’s announcement today addresses another of the information failures – the opacity of aid spending decisions. We often discuss aid in [...] Read more »
Monitoring it happen There is a growing movement among NGOs to use technology to involve communities in the monitoring of projects, so that people can hold donors and governments accountable for the delivery of services. Owen Barder highlights a promising approach by Daraja in Tanzania which is going to use SMS messaging to provide feedback about which water points are working. GlobalGiving is using Ushahidi and working with Map Kibera. They’ve been training volunteers to collect stories [...] Read more »
Andrew Mitchell MP has been appointed as the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development. The Secretary of State said: “I’m delighted to be appointed to spearhead the new government’s campaign to tackle global poverty. “Tackling deprivation around the world is a moral imperative and firmly in Britain’s national interest. I’m proud of the commitments that our new government has made on international development. Our bargain with taxpayers is this: in return for contributing your [...] Read more »
The recent million t-shirts debate has shown the power of crowd-sourcing for appraising projects. Do you have ideas on how to improve project implementation? This photo for an AusAID project to distribute 500,000 textbooks in Papua New Guinea got me thinking. How do we know if the books reach the 3,400 or so schools and the pupils? The containers arrived on two ships, one unloading its precious cargo in Lae and the other in Port [...] Read more »
Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen discuss whether we can know what works and why, and have a great discussion on randomised control trials. On January 21, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings hosted a discussion on these fundamental global development questions with the book’s editors. Their discussion focused on the benefits and challenges of both a smaller grassroots development approach and a traditional big-picture development approach, with the goal of achieving a consensus [...] Read more »
A debate has raged during the last week over a ‘tiny tax on bankers to tackle poverty.’ Surely who could object to such a thing? Well, economists have been quick to point out that the tax isn’t really a tax on bankers, nor is it tiny. Oh, and it might not help the poor as much as advocates claim. Tim Harford and Owen Barder both point out that while the tax rate may be tiny [...] Read more »
Owen Barder has an excellent new paper ‘Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid.’ In it he argues that aid effectiveness has focused too much on planning, rather than tackling the political economy of aid – I can’t help but agree. Owen goes on to propose that a ‘considered combination of market mechanisms, networked collaboration, and collective regulation would be more likely to lead to significant improvements.’ Food for thought … Read more »
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