Owen Barder

Owen is CEO of Precision Agriculture for Development. He has worked in the office of the UK Prime Minister, the British Treasury, the Department for International Development; and at the Center for Global Development.

Too much of a good thing?

Surprisingly many people prefer to receive this blog by email than to visit the website or use the RSS feed.  (You can sign up for the email on the blog page or here.) For the last two bog posts there has been a glitch with my website software which sent Read more…

By Owen Barder, ago

How to spend $1m reducing climate change

We would get three or four times as much bang for our buck – in terms of climate change benefits – from population policies and girls’ education as we would from the most cost-effective investments in forest management, and in addition we’d get the broader economic and social benefits for the people of developing countries.

By Owen Barder, ago
The RAF dropping food from the back of a British Hercules

The BBC sexed up a report about aid to Ethiopia

The BBC has today apologised for giving the false impression that a substantial part of aid given to Ethiopia in the 1980s was diverted for military use.  This impression was given by a programme in March by Martin Plaut, and compounded by the BBC’s publicity for the programme on television and radio and online.   It isn’t just Band Aid to whom the BBC owes an apology, but to the British Government, other donors, a vast number of charities, and the public who gave so generously.  There is no evidence that any of the aid effort in the government-held areas of Ethiopia – the vast majority of the aid to Ethiopia – was diverted. The BBC report was about a completely distinct, and very much smaller, relief effort in rebel-held areas. Either deliberately or accidentally the BBC sexed up their report in a way that smeared an extremely successful effort to save lives and an operation of which those involved are rightly proud.   As Mark Twain remarked, “a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on”.
By Owen Barder, ago

Incentives, results and bureaucracy in aid

If better measurement of results is used by aid agencies to simplify the way they manage aid programmes, rather than just adding new reporting, it creates the opportunity to reduce bureaucracy, decentralise decision-making, increase country ownership, increase the focus on outcomes that really matter, step away from linear, deterministic thinking about how results are achieved, focus more on relationships and institutions, and really liberate development workers to work on what really motivates them – delivering change on the ground – and less on managing the bureaucracy at home.

By Owen Barder, ago