I’ve been gratified by the number of people who have contacted me (by email, twitter and on facebook) to say how much they liked one of the slides in my recent presentation on aid effectiveness.
The slide borrows a format from Wired Magazine – it shows what I think is expired, tired and wired in foreign aid.
Of course, some of this is a bit exaggerated but I think it makes the point. As I argue in the presentation (you can click it then jump forward to slide 20), the items in the Wired column aim to put power in the hands of citizens in developing countries, and to enable them to put pressure to improve the services they get and the way that the aid system works.
Further suggestions please in the comments below, preferably in the Wired | Tired | Expired format.
7 Comments
luispedro · May 24, 2010 at 4:39 pm
There seems to be a pattern to almost all of them:
expired: old school left-wing dirigisme
tired: enlightened third-way liberalism
wired: libertarian welfarism.
Savina · May 24, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Expired: rigid evolutionary unidirectional progessive thinking aid models (eg expired-tired-wired) and solutions
Tired: chaotic atomistic and autistic overlap and replication of interventions
Wired: flexible recognition of pre-eminence of contex and avoidance of search for silver bullets
Jeff Barnes · May 24, 2010 at 9:04 pm
Glad you did a repeat of the slide… I just wish some of the expired concepts (project aid, money to NGO’s, imported food aid, etc.) were truly expired as practices.
Savina · May 24, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Wanted to add, I just watched the slides and really appreciated them… My issue was with the idea that cash transfers are always an improvement on locally sourced food, which is not the case when transfers are not price-indexed over time and/or local markets are unviable.
Matt Morris · May 25, 2010 at 1:39 am
Best summary yet of the new aid agenda.
Heather Marquette · July 13, 2010 at 12:58 pm
This is a really interesting presentation. One of my PhD students is looking at elite attitudes to pro-poor policy in Malawi and she found that cash transfer programmes are very popular with donors but very unpopular with elites (including NGOs). What it seemed to come down to was concern that cash transfers discourage the Malawian tradition of pride in work, and do not differentiate between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor (although few respondents would categorise along those lines). Unless there is broad-based support for cash transfer programmes, then they are unlikely to survive, certainly politically speaking, beyond donor funding. If you’re interested, I can put you in touch with her. She presented some findings at WIDER last year.
Rob Denny · February 18, 2011 at 8:36 am
I suspect that the interest shown in the slide reflects the wish of aid practitioners to be up to date with latest aid fashions. Which is, when you think about it, rather depressing. There are things which worked then, work now and will work in the future. Not all is fashion, I hope.
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