Redefining how aid works

Redefining How AID works – A community Led Approach, the Experience of Spark Microgrants Emmanuel Kivanyuma Waiswa It appears problematic and by large embarrassing that the world becomes more unequal, even under times of such great innovation, creativity and productivity. The income of the world’s 500 richest billionaires exceeds that of its poorest 416 million people. Every three minutes, somewhere in the developing world, two women die needlessly in childbirth or pregnancy, and over 40 children are killed by avoidable diseases such as diarrhea or malaria. African rural poor remain defenseless against preventable illness, millions of under-fives – malnourished. Governments spend least on health care where the need is the greatest. Majority of sub Saharan Africa continues to be associated unending episodes of diseases, corruption and lack of rule of law. Since 1970. On the other hand, Africa has attained more than 300 billion dollars in development assistance inform of bi- lateral and multi-lateral investments targeting poor countries in Africa, despite a multitude of projects and programmes, significant and long-lasting social change in the south seems elusive.

In 2001, speaking at the Labor conference, the then UK prime minister, Tony Blair remarked that “the state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world”, extending a formal invitation to the developed world to increase on AID provisions targeting African states. These well intentioned thoughts expressed through a well-chosen ally of words reminded the west of their role in driving development in mainly Africa through AID. Blair’s words testify to; a fundamental mindset of AID as the panacea to Africa’s problems and the self-imposed savior complex of the west, that even with much AID flowing already, Africa is far from “better”. The fact the call was made by a UK prime minster plays well with Niall Fergusons’ remarks that “It has long seemed to me problematic, and even a little embarrassing, that so much of the public debate about Africa's economic

problems should be conducted by non-African white men. From the economists (Paul Collier, William Easterly, Jeffrey Sachs) to the rock stars (Bono, Bob Geldof), the African discussion has been colonized as surely as the African continent was a century ago”. The role of Africans in driving their own development remains elusive and merely recipient based. The west continues to exercise charity prudently and for many years now, the developed world has responded to social political and economic woes in Africa through large AID inflows ranging from humanitarian to systematic aid provisions. While as there exists obvious merits that come with aid no matter the form, there is a growing awareness among western citizenry and African scholars that various forms of AID targeting Africa have not resulted in substantial rural poverty alleviation.

This relates to observations by William Easterly and others have argued that aid can often distort incentives in poor countries in various harmful ways. Aid can also involve inflows of money to poor countries that have some similarities to inflows of money from natural resources that provoke the resource curse.

The African continent faces the worst forms of social upward immobility as well as the ever widening gaps between the rich and the poor. Even subsequent efforts made in some home countries such as rural works, concessional credit, rural employment programmes have failed to improve the plight of the poor on a sustained basis. Economic growth is insufficiently combined with equity or just distribution of benefits.

Peter Singer argues that over the last three decades, “aid has added around one percentage point to the annual growth rate of the bottom billion.” He argues that this has made the difference between “stagnation and severe cumulative decline. Aid

can make progress

towards

reducing poverty

worldwide, or at least help prevent cumulative decline. Despite the intense criticism on aid, there are some promising numbers. In 1990, approximately 43

percent of the world’s population was living on less than $1.25 a day and has dropped to about 16 percent in 2008. Maternal deaths have dropped from 543,000 in 1990 to 287,000 in 2010. Under-five mortality rates have also dropped, from 12 million in 1990 to 6.9 million in 2011. Although these numbers alone sound promising, there is a gray overcast: many of these numbers actually are falling short of the Millennium Development Goals. There are only a few goals that have already been met or projected to be met by the 2015 deadline.

Just like Burke once said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men (women) should do nothing and that for evil men (women) to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing.”, I personally feel that the “us against the them” commonly known as a blame game won’t get us anywhere and hence with this paper, I intend to share a more sustainable and scalable approach to donor aid – a strategy on how aid should function to better fit the needs of the poor majority.

Understanding how AID Works Until recently, not a day goes by without some sort of debate, article or blog post referencing AID, how to increase it, count it and among the western countries, governments are evaluated by their citizenry based aid provisions and or priority recipients. The trend of events around aid discussions has attracted potential befitting brand names from Dambisa Moyo calling it “aid culture”. In her book “Dead Aid” she remarks; “We live in a culture in which those who are better off subscribe - both mentally and financially - to the notion that giving alms to the poor is the right thing to do.

In the past fifty years, over US$ 1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. In the past decade alone, on the back

of Live 8, Make Poverty History, the Millennium Development Goals, the Millennium Challenge Account, the Africa Commission, and the 2005 G7 meeting (to name a few), millions of dollars each year have been raised in richer countries to support charities working for Africa.

It is increasingly being recognized that aid is an important agent of development alongside the magic hands of the market and the state.

While as this is the case, more aid is not translating into poverty reduction in Africa where much of the aid goes and continuously advocated to go. The way that conventional functionality of aid, lacks the organizing potential to meaningfully engage all actors in a sustainable and effective way whether at policy, program or project levels. At least for the beneficiaries, less is gained due to the representative project design that follows donor aid. This has created an inflexible set of rules that work in concert to limit opportunities for the poor to redefine their destinies. Robert Chambers, the academic has argued that “it’s impossible for people who are not poor nor rural to understand the interlocking forms of social deprivation suffered by those who are both”. It’s embarrassing that much of the debate about the realities of poor people are shaped, demanded and controlled by people whose understanding poverty is as close as their ignorance of the victims of severe poverty, mainly rural.

Aid and Development Intervention as a destroyer of values Interventions

aimed

at

addressing

development

challenges

commonly

captured under the term “Rural development” have for many years and still continues to be championed by civil society organisations backed with aid, however a set of conditions - often inter-related – have negatively impacted on the capacity of citizens, donors and civil society organizations to meaningfully engage in development processes in a sustained and effective manner,

whether at the policy, program or project level. Some of these are legal, regulatory and policy frameworks, political, socio-cultural and economic factors take different forms as below; One such common practice is victimologies – which relates to a view of low income communities as problematic. Many communities have been and continue to be viewed through a narrow lens of deficiencies and needs. This false paradigm is widely accepted by most agencies and development agents on a global scale. It’s therefore not surprising that large multinational funding and most rural development interventions often target and perpetuate programs that mentor people to identify and be branded as victims. The selffulfilling prophecy of which is a popular expectation of a savior with a white hat often an outsider to save the day. Most low income environments have become ardent believers in the savior complex based on a dependent client relationship. This parasitic relationship qualifies the recipient as one with needs that can be met by an outsider and gradually, the recipient becomes unproductive for as long as the outsider still lives. Well this approach fits well with the intentions of the outsiders, it at many times robs the targeted communities of the opportunity to define what best meets their needs. One popular saying among the basoga in Uganda goes “You can never expect your neighbor to breast feed your child better than you could”. People who are not poor nor rural can never understand what it feels like to be both.

Positional power; this comes with occupying a certain position and often enjoyed by those that work in organisations that capitalize on the client approach. The unfettered positional power creates room for release and control of resources which most organisations hold true to their work. As opposed to business etiquette, in this particular case, the community which is the client gets to listen and play according to the rules only determined by the donor. The knowledge, perspective and authority of the outsider forces the community to

agree with whatever is requested of them, lest they lose out on the services.

Most government programs and initiatives have for long been founded on this principle hence creating an inflexible set of failures top of which is a gap in accountability and its not a surprise that such initiatives are always marred with corruption, misappropriation of funds as well as low beneficiary participation.

The other unpopular belief would be that these arrangements often do not lead to any changes in household power dynamics and their potential to create and or accelerate gender equity and equality is highly doubted. From the inside such programs are often designed from an elitist perspective by people who identify as experts and assume a lot more power and responsibility of changing others who are believed to be destitute and desperately in need.

The power of exclusion; Power is a limited resource and cannot be shared equally. Power then goes beyond just the position and extends towards information and often is relationship based. The possibility is always that the one with more power calls the shots and those who have less or no power at all listen and act accordingly. From a development perspective, this unbalanced power dynamic allows organisations to limit what their target populace would most benefit. This is achieved through setting rigid focus areas or priorities of intervention based on the organization’s strategic plan. Such a process creates an automatic win – lose situation in which the community becomes the one to agree to limit their needs to what the organisation does or at most timers constitutes a funding priority even when such has no connection to what is truly needed. What would happen if the playground was open to have different talents exhibited without rules that favor a small majority? Why should rural people’s priorities be determined from air conditioned rooms often in developed countries and by individuals whose interaction with poverty is and continues to be theoretical, in media and or even academically acquired.

Rural development is not failing but not yet working either. What is missing is the realisation that rural people have ideas and all they require is a dedicated

supporter to spark these ideas into action – to have communities chart their coarse of a positive destiny coupled to this is facilitating communities to identify and organize resources and leveraging such assets for their own development – by them and for them.

Framing the Debate What however has for many years remained unresolved and yet problematic is the understanding and practice of how to constantly enhance the potential of foreign aid in building and sustaining self-development, through self-reliance.

Initiatives implemented by donor aid have registered less local client engagement and most time lack ownership that critically leads to low sustainability as evidenced in community led initiatives.

International, government and non-governmental agencies have realized more and more that the main reason of many unsuccessful development projects was (and still is) the lack of active, effective and lasting participation of the intended beneficiaries. Consequently, several agencies started to promote the participation of people, in particular disadvantaged women and men, in development through various programmes, mostly on a pilot basis.

Organisations that put rural people at the centre reap the benefits of addressing the right priorities, additionally initiatives bred from such inclusive environments come with unlimited passion, commitment and desire for investment of time and resources on the side of the beneficiary.

A community led approach to

development planning has proved sustainable, easy to replicate and yet carry empowerment potential that is often found lacking in the top to bottom approaches to development. The Spark community led process, has supported more than 64 communities to plan, implement and monitor their communal initiatives, it’s not surprising that 95% of all community led projects are sustaining in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

There is a demonstrated awareness that the common top – bottom approaches to rural development often targeting needs don’t represent the real needs of the rural dwellers, lack a potential to empower poor people nor result in substantial rural poverty alleviation. It should be accepted and acknowledged that development is and should not be imposed, rural people have a choice and their choices should override any outsiders’ interest and knowledge. The main reason for failing development continues to be the absence of active, effective and lasting participation of the intended beneficiaries. Top to bottom approaches are increasingly becoming irrelevant. Organisations, state actors and other development players including aid agencies need to re-focus their approaches to better reflect the interests of the intended beneficiaries more than anyone else. A community led approach remains unrivaled in its potential to build self-reliance and self-development which are and should be end to any development process.

Participation as motivation A community led approach to development requires motivation on the side of the community to fully immerse themselves in their development. This kind of motivation is not easy to come by without having to invest resources in terms of meeting allowances which are common with most development approaches engineered by outsiders. A community led approach to development planning / programming suggests an ethical dimension that considers both what should be done -a desired outcome and how it should be done, call it a process.

In addition, the approach signifies why an action should be taken. Community participation and ownership cannot be built nor provoked, they must be based on solidarity and a desire for development built on strong ties of partnership and not benevolence.

The role of an outsider in a community led development approach is merely being a facilitator and this establishes a facilitation process whose life time must be planned well before hand and plans to exit have to be communicated and shared early enough in the process. The desired outcome of such engagement should be empowerment.

In top to bottom approaches, the relationship between the outsider and the beneficiary becomes hard to terminate with the outsider being concerned about the outcome and not the capacities of the beneficiary which if enhanced could take care of the former. Community led approaches to development programming on the other hand, treasure empowerment. With empowerment, rural people take a leadership role substituting external players who transition faster into a coach status with less physical presence and reduction in financial investment.

A Community Led Approach to aid making – An experience of Spark MicroGrants What is a community led approach to aid making? While looking for a suitable alternative to donor top – down approach, the funders of Spark Microgrants explored the reasons and in an effort tried to understand why more money was not leading into more social benefits and upward social mobility of the rural poor. Even with very long historic revelations of NGO work in the south, the beneficiaries have remained the silent listener and conversions about their lives lay and were dominated by the donors and NGOs in non-state arrangements and elite frameworks of program design dominated the state approaches to local development. Rural poor communities became silent listeners to every conversion and never called upon to participate.

So they thought to themselves, “Why can’t we bring the three together to see what happens?” This is really what the Spark MicroGrant process came to be all about, a synergistic win win partnership in which the donor and NGO get to listen and facilitate a community led process to the planning, design, implementation and evaluation of initiatives by the local rural poor.

Since 2012, Spark MicroGrants has worked with more than 60 local communities in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi recently. Spark has expanded its reach to specific community groups—women’s groups and youth groups.

So how does it work? To catalyze change, Spark employs and trains local university graduates through an in-country facilitator fellowship program.

Facilitators reach out to infrastructure-poor villages and engage them in a fivemonth planning process, leading them through a structured series of weekly meetings. Village members come together to decide on a common goal and then identify a project that will allow them to reach that goal. Village members develop the project implementation plan, budget, and democratically elect a leadership team. After each community develops their own project proposal, the Spark leadership team works with experts who are able to provide project

specific feedback to each community. Community members integrate this expert feedback and finalize their proposal. Spark then awards a one-time MicroGrant of up to $10,000 for project implementation, providing six months of management support and two years of follow-up support.

Communities have launched projects including schools, health centers, social enterprises and more.

Towards Empowerment: Shifting project design approaches Many external development actors already share ethical and development values and commitment, but those who have not yet internalized these values, will need to change. The need for such change has important programmatic implications. This represents an important programmatic challenge which if addressed, meets both the objective and strategy of increasing community participation in decision making about their social and economic priorities.

The realisation of the untapped potential of rural people to drive their own development requires an intentional shift to have the community at the centre of project design as this is the only way every one in the community is going to feel motivated and obliged to invest resources including time into any effort aimed at building strong communities. This section explains the different project design approaches. By pitching the community led approach of project design against other approaches enables the analysis of the benefits of each approach and informs program shifts in more realistic ways.

Project Design Matrix Development Model

Role of the Outsider

Role of the

Results

beneficiary Externally led-aid

Chooses the project

Short term

Designs

impact

Implements the project Participatory

Chooses

Co-designs

Increased

Design

Project

implementation

sustainability

Co-designs

strategy

Implementation Strategy

Co-builds

Co-builds

project

project Community led

Facilitation Asset transfer

Chooses

Empowerment

project Designs Implementation Strategy Builds project

However, even with greater potential to accelerate empowerment, a critical challenge for all organisations employing a community led development approach to project design is to cater for evolving capacities of communities.

Community capacity needs have to be properly taken into account while determining their ability to drive their own development. The process towards community development leadership is often slow and communities should not

be forced to assume overly demanding responsibilities at the earliest point of engagement with external groups.

External groups employing community led approaches should accept the slow nature of this transition. Community development facilitators need to be trained individuals with the patience and flexibility to respond to the varied nature of community capacities. Facilitators can start by taking a leadership role and later transition into facilitation after determining and addressing any capacity gaps that could hamper participation and engagement of community members, since the entire process depends upon the communities being engaged and open to share knowledge and conduct resource inventories.

In conclusion, its beyond asking how to recover the benefits from development aid, it’s time for transformation towards an inclusive approach in which potential aid recipients shape the way the aid works and their priorities should over ride those of the donor and implementing organisation. Before taking on this shift however, first you have to prove that what you are doing is scalable and that it is replicable. If you can’t go out and prove it, as Spark has done in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, you don’t have much of a case to fight. You still look like this little niche organization. The second thing, and most important, is to start engaging with all stakeholders involved, ranging from bi lateral and multi-lateral donors as well as mainstream private sector. You have to show them the shift makes more sense than conventional ways of doing business as usual. This largely revolves around the data- You have to have and show clear numbers: social, environmental, and economic indicators; financial operation parameter as well as changes in attitudes, capacities and also ways to track sustainability of outcomes, in all these, numerical and non-numerical assessments matter equally.

With more demonstrated impact, donors will see the viability of the model and will start listening to you a lot more carefully.

REFERENCES 

"Aid to developing countries rebounds in 2013 to reach an all-time high".

OECD. 8 April 2014. Retrieved 18 October 2014.



http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ALLD.CD



Securing Tyrants or Fostering Reform?: U.S. Internal Security Assistance to Repressive and Transitioning Regimes. The RAND Corporation. 2006



Defining humanitarian assistance. Global Humanitarian Assistance. 2014.



Bush brings faith to foreign aid. The Boston Globe. October 8, 2006.



"Migration and development: The aid workers who really help". Economist .com. 2009-10-08.