International aid trends from a Belgian perspective

I've been helping get a collaboration off the ground with the goal of fixing the broken feedback loops in international aid and philanthropy. We call ourselves Feedback Labs. It's a longstanding problem that people who receive services funded by foreigners have almost no power to shape those services. Those holding the purse strings have sole control. And while leaders in the halls of power where the money originates want these efforts to succeed, there are simply too many self-interested middle men that filter and reshape feedback from those affected, so that only the good news flows. These middle men need the money to keep flowing at all costs.

The crucial point is that most political, social and economic systems look like the map. Yet the aid business insists on pursuing a linear model of change, either explicitly, or implicitly because a ‘good’ funding application has a clear set of activities, outputs, outcomes and a MEL system that can attribute any change to the project’s activities – a highly linear approach. Other organizations – say forest fire managers, or the military, seem more able to cope with complexity, although I found out from a woman in one seminar who had served in Afghanistan that the power map was actually drawn up by a consultant, who was promptly sacked after showing the slide to General Petraeus, so maybe the soldiers aren’t so comfortable with complexity after all.

Aangezien dit mijn eerste artikel is op de blog van BTC, geloof ik dat een kleine introductie op zijn plaats is. Ik ben van een generatie die is opgegroeid met de fameuze witte olifanten van Douglas De Coninck, een generatie die nauwelijks weet waar ABOS voor staat, die de BTC-infocyclus volgde tijdens de studententijd, en vooral een generatie die gelooft in een andere en betere ontwikkelingssamenwerking. Zelf ben ik, zoals de meesten, door een samenloop van omstandigheden in de sector terechtgekomen. Door toevallige ontmoetingen, gebeurtenissen, en toch ook door een aantal invloedrijke auteurs zoals William Easterly [1], Amartya Sen [2] enz.

Agencies must combine forces to overcome the effects of a trio of food crises in the Sahel, the WFP's regional head tells Celeste Hicks

Brown's interest in better co-ordination has been influenced by watching the creation of Nigeriens Feed Nigeriens, or "Trois Ns" (in French, it is Nigeriens Nourissent Nigeriens). Led by the Nigerien president Mahamadou Issoufou, the initiative aims to tackle Niger's chronic food insecurity using homegrown methods. Trois Ns tries to pull together the work of different government departments, from agriculture to animal husbandry, and is aiming to increase food production and deal with the effects of the shortages at the same time. "In some ways, they're playing a similar role to what OCHA [UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs] does at the international level," says Brown.