In April was held the first ‘high level meeting of the ‘Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation’, being held in Mexico City. This was a follow-up to the last high level meeting which was on ‘Aid Effectiveness’ held in 2011 in Busan, S, Korea which followed the previous high level meeting of the same name in Ghana in 2008 which followed the previous high level meeting of the same name in Paris in 2005 which followed the previous one in Rome in 2003 which followed what I suppose was the original one in 2002 at which the international donors came up with the ’Monterrey Consensus’.  That adds up I think to 12 years talking about the renewal of development aid. Each meeting has produced an agenda for action and each follow-up meeting (seriously) has reflected on the lessons learned about why the last agenda for action was not seriously achieved.

The Mexico City conference at a cost of many million of dollars focused on how the private sector can be brought into the aid process – not new of course – this has been going on for many years. I am trying to remember why it is that the private sector in general might be interested in a process that reduces its return on investment  (forgetting Bill Gates and the philanthropists who are non-Government rather than private). Perhaps it has found a mechanism through aid to increase its return on investment?  Either way seems problematic – so is this fundamentally a practical, viable or value-adding partnership?  How far could this really be fundamentally about seeking ways to increase growth in poor countries (which as everyone knows has been only weakly if at all connected with aid) and how far is it really just part of the continuous effort to assert the relevance of the enormous official and non-official aid establishment while giving large private firms another way to market their products?  These are of course seriously existential questions – not relevant nor convenient to this moment or other ‘moments’. The problem is that these existential questions tend to rear their heads rather often and the future of aid needs to be (seriously) addressed by people outside the establishment whose personal livelihoods will not be affected by serious decisions about reorganizing it or even seriously cutting it back to something that really adds value.

gates.ly/1mTCrEw the Gates foundation latest annual letter reads inspiringly, but unfortunately a lot of it is simply off base. It sets up a straw man - a quasi-ignorant opponent of foreign aid who lumps together and attacks all types of aid and cannot see how the poor world is getting richer.  It says that many countries that used to be poor are now doing well, including in Africa, if only the doubters and naysayers would open their eyes. The basic problem with this assertion is that it involves a huge non-sequitur. Anyone who knows what’s going on would agree that many of even the poorest countries have been getting richer (at least up until 2009). But the whole point is that the countries that have done the best over time are simply not the countries that got a lot of development aid ! Take Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica , Peru, Thailand,  Mauritius, Singapore, Malaysia – all these countries that are specifically named in the Gates letter as doing well have none of them received significant  development aid in relation to the size of their economies (which is the relevant measure). As for other countries often held up as aid success stories, South Korea had a lot of aid but this was during the war of the early 1950s. The economy did not move for another 20 years so where was the connection? In fact the origin of South Korea’s industrial growth was probably the long term result of return migration of Koreans from Japan. Take Botswana – this is not a story about development aid at all. It is a story about diamonds and sensible governance. Take China -  enormous growth but its aid to GDP ratio has never exceeded one half of one percent, a hardly noticeable proportion even of its annual GDP growth. Take India – now growing but its aid to GDP ratio has been less than one percent. These two countries account for a third of the World population so what has happened to them is significant.  Sorry Melinda, the countries that have suffered from high dependence on aid (over 10% of GDP for a long period of time) are clearly those that have done worst - a few in Asia, Latin America and the Pacific, but mostly in Africa, and it is Africa where the problem is now. Over the first decade of the millennium African countries at last started to do much better. But there is no evidence that this was to do with  development aid and plenty that it was to do with booming Global economic conditions.

But please note – I speak of development aid. This is in any case not exactly the business of the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is rather about global health, global nutrition, and global humanitarian aid. These are different thing because they involve global emergencies, not national development strategies. So  Melinda please stick to global health and global nutrition – you are probably right about it. Meanwhile the only way most poor countries can become wealthy in the end is through developing over time their own governance, institutions, capabilities,  motivations and capital, with development aid as a help on technical issues if it can be done right.

In  foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/23/aid_amnesia

Bill Easterly complains of fatigue in discussing whether aid works with Jeffery Sachs. I agree. Sachs’ ‘Millennium villages Project’ for example  was something that could only have been conceived by someone who had little sense of the history of the failure of these types of projects. Look back to the ‘development villages’ of the 1960s in Africa. Economic Development  comes from people’s capacities, motivations and energy. It simply cannot be done through outside (charitable) cash assistance, and the larger the number of assistance providers the more dysfunctional it becomes. The recent history of Africa shows at last some increase in indigenous capacity and motivation, and the diaspora is investing – eg in Somalia expatriate Somalis are way ahead of the aid agencies in trying to put the economy on the road to recovery.  Diasporans at least have the cultural affinity with the beneficiaries, the motivation to succeed and to the take greater investment risks than aid agencies, (or general foreign investors).