James5

I was almost run over by a white World Vision SUV today.

It came speeding at me from down a pot-holed, dirt road. My first encounter with the this side of the aid agency world.

Back home in Melbourne, we usually see aid agencies via their marketing machines. Glossy brochures, flashy websites, appeals for donations. In Tanzania, I’ve been able to get a small insight into another perspective – not aid agencies as marketers, but as social welfare agencies.

I haven’t seen any advertisements for sponsorships or donations, or seen any tele-thons, but I have heard one 12 year old boy talk about how great his Canadian sponsors were because it meant he could go to school and maybe study law one day.

I’m not sure that this means much beyond being my anecdotal experience of living outside of a ‘donor country’, and it certainly isn’t enough to change my views, for example, against traditional child sponsorship, but I found it encouraging, especially given how maligned aid agencies are and how easy it is to find fault with them.

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Alex Evans has a provocative post over at Global Dashboard arguing against the sacred cow of the “aspirational target” of aid levels set at 0.7% GNI.

Alex makes some excellent points about the meaningless nature of this target. It was set over three decades ago, wasn’t based on any actual assessment of money needed, and current estimates put the actual required global ODA flows at far lower. And I agree that 0.7 isn’t entirely relevant except as a rhetorical tool for motivating governments to give more.

I think what Alex’s post stands for the strongest is a real need for investigation into how much money is actually needed, and ways to spend the money that actually make a difference. The UN target remains as a powerful burden on our governments who fail to live up to their agreement to convince us why their spending is adequate and well placed.

If the world is ready to move on from 0.7%, and I think clearly we are, then we need to establish what the new benchmark will be and this time actually live up to it.

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I’m on a seasonal clerkship at the moment so posting may be sporadic at best for a few more weeks. But I’ve been meaning to post this link to TEAR’s Climate of Change DVD for awhile.

I like Ben’s conception of the “shared sky” at the start of the video and the way they simply present some of the issues climate change has forced us to confront.

TEAR is one aid agency/development/social justice group that I really like. They’ve done a great job on this climate change resource. It’s especially impressive given the limited resources at their disposal.

(also Room3 have done a great job on their video productions too).

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According to the report of the Commission for Africa, in 2005, $3.2 billion was paid to one hundred thousand “experts” to provide technical assistance to Africa. See Blattman for more.

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This article on the “new colonialists” is a good read. It deals with the rise of NGOs replacing state services in developing countries, and how this leads to dependency and a neo-colonialism in those countries. I like the idea of a global clearinghouse to track and monitor these many projects – though don’t know if yet another bureaucracy is needed.

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