End Poverty Already
2015, KJS
It was late 2011 when the economic vice first began to turn into development budgets. As a member of the Global Fund to fight AIDs, TB and Malaria board in Accra, Ghana, it was so monumental.that we had to cancel a round of financing, Round 11, billions of dollars of expected financing for fighting diseases over the next three years.
It was then I began to wonder: if programs were having unequivocal success, moving forward as efficiently as possible; and donor aid and overseas investment were each increasing – then why don’t the lines that chart progress remain in upward motion, why do they lag noticeably at all?
Refer to the charts like these and these, which the industry uses to track progress against development goals.
Seeing the charts spread across decades you see the same thing: Two steps forward, One step back. A painful crawl toward ending extreme poverty. How do we explain the lagging lines recurrent across years of upward momentum?
- Is it operational inefficiency; unnecessary development lapses, systems or processes that cost time, money and ultimately lives; if so, where and why?
- Is it the time involved in waiting for science to bear out, waves of performance reporting, fine tuning, pivoting?
- Is it the unpredictability of donor commitments, the wavering and the waiting, the cost of empty promises which don’t make it to budget lines.
- All of the above.
Dear well-heeled Beltway think tank/consulting firm — where’s the efficiency analysis on this one? Why don’t we try and quantify the perpetual cycle of starting and stopping? Is it because it is so multi-modal and cross-silo-ed, making attribution impossible? But maybe also because it exposes real, sophisticated, sometimes chronic, always-human reasons for why progress in development is incremental.
There are indeed program delays from the time it takes to do science and research and the policy implications that come from that, sending slow signals to markets. There is the time it takes to monitor and evaluate (gain feedback on performance). There is that and it shouldn’t change but they can streamline.
There’s the incalculable cost of turnover, attrition, which comes from folks moving jobs, which happens so often with all the appointments, unfixed contracts and political maneuvering, and it leaves pockets or voids and means the loss of intellectual capital. The gaming and politics are notorious: you never really know what an out-of-office reply is going to say. Then you have to start over with someone else at some later time. Invisibly incurred, these are the immeasurable costs of politics.
Then, of course, there are the costs and the conditions of lending; that is, payback and transactional charges which don’t treat the issue directly but feed an industry (Have you seen World Bank or IMF offices?)
But donor variability – lack of full and immediate commitment – is the driving market dynamic in aid and development inefficiencies. That’s the irony: its the donors themselves and the lawmakers who fund the scope of the challenges. Create delay and procrastination, utter progress-killers like: waiting months for grant money to hit bank accounts, the procurement and pricing uncertainty and all inefficiency that follows unreliable delivery. All the starting and stopping creates noise and waste and lazy systems but doesn’t lower expectations. This constipation all stems from volatility – wavering donor commitment.
These barriers create resistance to sustained success. The downward graph lines.
What’s also notable is that all these barriers also equate to industry- creating jobs in well-to-do markets. Meaning, these inefficiencies not only utilize resources designed for the poor, but also perpetuate a growing industry surrounding the delivery of assistance to the poor.
It’s been called humanitarian industrial complex but of course we need intermediaries to do development. Just how much and how far does it takes us away from the mission is the question which, ultimately, is cannibalizing, thus, no one asks.
You worry about this stuff because of times like these…When everything needs to be stretched so thin. When comprehensive programming is no longer possible. Plugging holes. Still waiting longer for less money to hopefully arrive.
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whatever because 