The criticisms of tied aid seem to carry the suggestion that aid should be
untied. They also seem to suggest that if aid were untied all would be
better. Untied aid is not necessarily better.
We can all find many examples where the economic and political conditions
attached to bilateral and multi-lateral assistance are selfish, bad and
burdensome. However, we can also find examples where untied aid is
subverted, wasted or just used badly. Also, it is very hard to think of a
"gift relationship" (donor giving) where there is no vested interest in the
process and the outcomes on the part of the donor, or a vested interest in
the process and the outcomes on the part of the recipient.
The donor's interests will always play a role.
Another special problem for donor aid, well known to participants on this
list, is the fact that the bilateral and multi-lateral agencies do not
have the administrative capacity to manage donor aid flows. As a result,
many donor agencies turn to national or international NGO's to administer
either the distribution of the aid to recipients, or to administer the aid
funded projects directly. The special problem here is that NGOs become
dependent clients of donor agencies and frequently pay more attention to
keeping the donor happy than to the successful application of donor
assistance to the goals of the aid and the objectives of funded projects.
What looks like an impossible situation looks less impossible if we learn
our lessons from where gifting relationships do work. Some of those lessons
are obvious. For example, I worked with Swedish SEDA's efforts in
South-Asia where the Swedes were looking at assistance agreements that were
to run for a decade or longer. Short term funding is the enemy of
successful projects and programs. While this lesson is obvious, it is hard
to implement without adequate political will. In another area, I helped
create Canada's Habitat for Humanity. Habitat builds housing WITH AND FOR
low income families. The lesson here is that donations of land and
materials reduce the costs to the homeowner, and the house is built as a
community effort, using the donated labor of the donors and the recipient.
The second lesson here is that the gifting relationship works when it is
within a community of shared values.
Is there a lesson here that could be transferred to the area of development
assistance? There is one, that lesson is that the recipients of donor
assistance could try to "twin" or "link" projects, programs and efforts in
the recipient country with similar efforts within similar communities
within the donor countries.
For example, Canada's efforts to "export" its SchoolNet program would have
been more successful, if more modest and certainly less costly, if it had
not used a "top down" model of trying to impose SchoolNet from above. Of
course, that top down model did create demand for Canadian consultants and
(maybe) Canadian technology, but as a program it worked poorly with a low
return on the resources expended by donor and recipient alike.
Had the efforts to export the Canadian SchoolNet experience recognized that
there were two separate issues, the issue of network access and the issue
of how individual schools, teachers, students and communities might benefit
from ICT, it could have viewed the first issue of network access as part or
a larger recipient country problem and could have joined the recipient
country in a strategy to address that issue.
It could have approached the second issue by supporting the linking a
individual schools, or groups of schools in Canada, that were themselves
struggling with what SchoolNet meant to them, with individual schools, or
groups of schools in locations receiving Canadian development assistance.
They could help each other as they tried to figure out what made sense and
what didn't make sense. The groups of schools would represent, in this
case, a bi-national community of interest, or concern. The end product
would not be the export of a Canadian SchoolNet model but the creation,
with that community of interest, of shared knowledge of what works and what
doesn't work with regard to ICTs in various primary and secondary school
settings. It would have given birth to an organic SchoolNet movement.
This approach could be extended to health, youth issues, the elderly, etc.
It would require some creative thought around how funds are administered
but it is possible to design an administrative model that is not also a top
down management model. The core of the model is the linking of partners
within a community of interest, concern or practice, across those in the
recipient country and in the donor country and minimizing the management
role of agencies (and NGOs) from within the donor countries.
This is at least food for thought for those of us who do not expect the
national and international donors to simply distribute funds and walk away.
Sam Lanfranco
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