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 »
How can beneficiaries monitor aid projects?
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 »
New UK development minister
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 »
How can donors use the crowd to monitor projects?
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 »
What works in development
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 »
Debating the Robin Hood Tax – who pays?
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 »
