Foreign Aid Agencies Research Articles

Higher local Ebola incidence causes lower child vaccination rates

Ebola is a highly infectious and often fatal zoonotic disease endemic to West and Central Africa. Local outbreaks of the disease are common, but the largest recorded Ebola epidemic originated in Guinea in December 2013, spreading to Liberia, and Sierra Leone in the following year and lasting until April 2016. The epidemic presented a serious challenge to local healthcare systems and foreign aid agencies: it degraded services, caused the loss of healthcare professionals, disrupted the economy, and reduced trust in modern healthcare. This study aims to estimate the extent to which variation in one long-term measure of the quality of local healthcare (the child vaccination rate) is a consequence of local variation in the intensity of the epidemic. Applying a “difference-in-differences” model to household survey data from before and after the epidemic, we show that in 2018–2019, overall rates of vaccination for BCG, DPT, measles, and polio are lower in Guinean and Sierra Leonean districts that had a relatively high incidence of Ebola; statistical analysis indicates that this is a causal effect. The effects of the epidemic on access to healthcare have been local effects, at least in part.

United Nations peacekeeping operations and multilateral foreign aid: Credibility of good governance

Does hosting UN Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKOs) increase multilateral foreign aid inflows into civil war-affected countries? Under what conditions do UN PKOs make multilateral foreign aid effective, enhancing governance quality? Multilateral foreign aid agencies increasingly focus on good governance as an allocation criterion. However, multilateral aid assistance faces dilemmas when allocating aid since it undermines the credibility of government commitments to good governance. This study argues that UN PKOs mitigate such uncertainty by initiating democratization, capacity-building, and political participation while mitigating political violence, thereby increasing the multilateral aid inflows. In missions involving these initiations, multilateral aid effectively enhances governance quality. These arguments are tested using a sample of countries that have experienced civil wars between 1991 and 2009. The findings suggest that UN PKOs increase the multilateral aid inflows. Moreover, increasing multilateral aid is more effective in improving the governance quality when missions have capacity-building or electoral tasks.

The Limits of Governmentality: Call-in Radio and the Subversion of Neoliberal Evangelism in Zambia

ABSTRACT The spread of mobile telephones in Africa has enabled a broad range of citizens to join live conversations on call-in radio shows. Both African governments and foreign aid agencies claim that broadcasting such debates can raise awareness, amplify the voices of the poor, and facilitate development and better governance; they now fund a large share of interactive shows in some countries. Critics of such participatory initiatives typically accept that they have powerful effects but worry that debates among citizens are deployed as a technology of “governmentality”, producing forms of popular subjectivity compatible with elitist economic systems and technocratic political regimes. This article argues that instrumentalising political debate is harder than either side assumes, and that the consequences of these shows are mainly unintended. It develops an in-depth case of a Zambian call-in radio programme, “Let’s Be Responsible Citizens”, emphasising the ability of the show’s audience, and its host, to subvert the programme’s surveillance and governmentality agenda, and to insist that the key responsibilities of citizens are to criticise, rather than adapt to, policies and systems of governance that do not meet their needs.

Using foreign aid contracts to pursue participatory approaches to development within large foreign aid agencies

AbstractParticipatory development has become, ‘development orthodoxy’, receiving widespread proclamations of support from foreign aid agencies. Participatory development engages international development beneficiaries in making decisions about project activity selection and design. Yet, many foreign aid donors deliver project assistance through top‐down, highly controlled systems that may constrain the flexibility needed to delegate decision‐making power to project beneficiaries. This paper explores whether and under which conditions these foreign aid agencies delegate decision‐making power to project beneficiaries, focusing on the key mechanism for delivering foreign aid: government contracts. The analysis relies on a novel dataset of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) projects that incorporates contract specifications for beneficiary decision‐making during project implementation. Despite an expectation that delivery system constraints would prohibitively exclude contract specifications for beneficiary decision‐making, donors are found to commonly use contracts to delegate decision‐making power to beneficiaries, but within pre‐determined parameters. The results suggest that USAID is using contract specifications to engage in bounded delegation, providing some decision‐making power to beneficiaries, but using boundaries to ensure the right ‘fit’ with institutional goals and constraints. By focusing on contract specifications and variation within these specifications, this study identifies widespread use of a ‘middle ground’ in how donors motivate participatory development.

Deliberation and decisionism in educational policymaking: How Nepali educational policymakers negotiate with foreign aid agencies

ABSTRACT In the countries that receive aid from donor agencies, the educational policymaking process is not straightforward because the power and interest of donors contradict with national contexts. This qualitative study aims to investigate how educational policy decisions in Nepal, a country that receives foreign aid for its educational projects, are made. Drawing on the Habermasian conceptualisation of deliberative democracy, I theorise that educational policy decisions are made either through deliberation or decisionism. An analysis of interviews conducted with educational policymakers of Nepal found that policymaking in Nepal follows decisionism in which the representatives of foreign aid agencies are more dominant than national bureaucrats. Even though Nepali bureaucrats and political leaders are involved in the decision-making process, rational interactions do not happen because they want to fulfil their personal interests by endorsing the decisions determined by the donors. This study concludes that because of decisionism, neocolonialism, and dysfunctional policy sphere, teachers, students, parents, and community people are excluded in the decision-making process. The findings are significant not only for understanding the lack of deliberation in the policymaking process but also for improving the educational praxis of aid-recipient countries like Nepal.

Transculturally rural: challenging convivial imaginations of ‘bettering’ life

ABSTRACT During the 1960s–1970s in Ecuador, Indigenous and peasant movements challenged the descriptions of rural life in government education programmes while offering a space of transculture. As Sylvia Wynter [2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.’ CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.] proposes it, such space allows to narrate human life with sensibilities non-aligned with normalised cultural particularities of the ideal tacit ‘we’ in national(ised) stories. This text engages with the convivial movements between narratives and counternarratives about rural lives and ways of living. It argues that rural can be thought as a genre and ruralness as a practice of existence, which disrupt overdetermining notions of what counts as dignified life, valid political demands, and possible futures. That disruption is an exercise of conviviality where Indigenous and racialised peoples challenge a living together under rules and practices that demand their assimilation or erasure. Their luchas (fights) are proposals for coexistence through social change. Particularly the article looks at how the poem The Bread of Life, published in the bilingual Kichwa/Spanish newspaper Jatari Campesino, pushed back against the logics of ‘bettering’ lives offered by Fundamental Education and Community Development projects. These were projects espoused by the Ecuadorian Government and UNESCO and funded by the Alliance for Progress, among other foreign aid agencies.

Behavioral Challenges of Humanitarian Supply Chain in the Context of Natural Calamities in India

When natural occurrences affect populated areas and destroy local infrastructure and population, they are referred to as natural disasters and cause pain and deprivation. India is one of the world's regions that experiences disasters the most frequently because of its physiographic and meteorological circumstances. Natural disasters have been more frequent during the past ten years or more, notably in India. Increased population, urbanization, industrialization, development in high-risk areas, environmental degradation, and climate change may all contribute to increased vulnerability to catastrophe risks. Humanitarian operations are started as soon as a disaster occurs with the goal of assisting victims quickly in a variety of ways, such as rescuing those who are affected or stranded, gathering and disposing of corpses, allocating resources, providing food aid, shelter, and medical care, and reopening access to remote areas. Delays in delivery or relief during humanitarian efforts can result in lives lost. Therefore, as it guarantees the seamless flow of products and services in a convoluted supply chain, logistical efficiency is a crucial component of humanitarian success. Logistics is essential to the effectiveness and responsiveness of major humanitarian initiatives like health, food, shelter, water, and sanitation. It acts as a link between catastrophe preparedness and response as well as between procurement and distribution. Calamities, crises, plagues, and destructive actions can all be categorized as disasters depending on the logistical effort needed. Different sorts of disasters require different approaches to management: Running refugee camps is considerably different from giving the kind of aid needed after a sudden natural disaster or a nuclear accident. Aid offered to help a place develop is different from aid given to deal with famine and drought. The humanitarian supply chain (HSC) is an organization that specializes in planning the distribution and storage of supplies to impacted areas and individuals during emergencies and natural disasters. The complex environments involved in a disaster, quick design, new or unfamiliar intermediaries or participants, and thus, it faces many possible obstacles, make it highly unpredictable and tumultuous. The humanitarian supply chain is made up of many different players, each with a unique attitude, way of acting, and cultural background. In a situation involving India, the humanitarian supply chain involves foreign aid agencies, host governments, the military, local self-governments, regional aid agencies, etc., all of whom have competing interests, mandates, capacities, and logistics expertise. Due to the complexity, it is imperative to analyze key variables in order to create a humanitarian supply chain that meets the needs of donors, beneficiaries, and service providers alike. The history of India demonstrates how a lack of professionalism, cooperation between many parties, and several other cultural variables have turned the field of humanitarian logistics into one with a lot of difficulties and important considerations. When building a supply chain, from sourcing to production, storage, distribution, and all transportation links in between, a sustainable supply chain (SSC) tries to take the environment, the economy, and social and human issues into consideration. The humanitarian supply chain should be integrated with sustainable practices while it is being designed or developed. In order to handle the most difficult situations in the context of natural calamities, a sustainable humanitarian supply chain that has been optimized is necessary. With the aid of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchains, and machine learning, the domain of sustainable humanitarian supply chains in India is experiencing difficulties and obstacles with plenty of room for improvement. In the context of the natural disasters in India, the article's main focus is on the significance of an effective sustainable humanitarian supply chain. The goal of this article is to identify the obstacles and variables that affect the efficient development of a humanitarian supply chain in India that is flexible enough to fulfill the unique needs of an HSC that are completely different from those of a commercial supply chain.

Externally funded trade policy reforms and firm productivity: Evidence from a world database of reforms funded by foreign aid agencies

AbstractThis paper examines the impact of externally funded trade policy reforms on firm productivity by combining data from the International Aid Transparency Initiative and World Bank Enterprise Surveys. By specifying baseline and end‐line surveys based on the 2006 to 2020 World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we find that 70 of 83 countries received external funds for trade policy reforms, and primarily use records based on 45,886 firms with data on productivity across these countries. Applying difference‐in‐differences and triple‐difference techniques, this paper finds that the impact of externally funded trade policy reforms is significant, accounting for 12% of firms' average productivity growth in the recipient countries relative to firms in non‐recipient countries. We also show that externally funded trade policy reforms improve firms' international‐trade‐climate in the recipient countries by 0.17 standard deviations, which translates into a 27% increase in the average productivity of firms with a good international‐trade‐climate in recipient countries over that of firms in non‐recipient countries and firms with poor international trade climate in recipient countries. These results suggest that interventions should focus on financing trade policy reforms that are more likely to improve the international‐trade‐climate of firms in the recipient countries.

Peran USAID Melalui Program IUWASH-PLUS dalam Penyediaan Sanitasi dan Air Bersih di Kota Bogor Tahun 2020-2021

Climate crisis is a phenomenon that effecting human’s life whether in environmental sector, social sector, and even human health. That’s why a lot of people get effected especially for water and sanitation sector. IUWASH-PLUS or Indonesia Urban Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Penyehatan Lingkungan Untuk Semua is a program created by United States Agency of International Development or also known as USAID which oriented in water and sanitation hygiene sectors. This research aims to describes what are the roles of USAID in IUWASH-PLUS program especially in Bogor City in order to help The City of Bogor government to provide access of proper water and sanitation hygiene. This research uses the concept of the role of foreign aid agency to analyze the study case of this research. The research methods use in this research is descriptive qualitative with secondary data analysis method that retrieved from official websites, journals, online articles, and the previous researches. The output of this research is to analyze what are the roles of USAID in IUWASH-PLUS program to help The City of Bogor government to provide access of proper water and sanitation hygiene.
 
 Keywords : Foreign Aid Agency, USAID, Foreign Aid, IUWASH-PLUS.

Agencies of the present: landscape-making and the herders of lower Mustang, Nepal

ABSTRACT Within the vast temporal and spatial footprints of the rangelands of Nepal’s lower Mustang district, herder landscape-making practice and agency unfold. Herders in Mustang today are at the forefront of radical change. They negotiate the complexities of declining fodder, erratic precipitation and shifting demographics through actions in the field. Yet the agencies of these herders—largely transient labourers from marginalised communities—are ignored. Through the lens of herder practices in situ, this article examines the intra-active nature of their agency and the conditions through which it is ignored and obstructed, emergent and critical to the present and possible futures. This research is part of a larger effort to demonstrate that agencies emerging from land-based practice and relations on the ground have profound importance, particularly in a development context dominated by foreign aid agencies.

Grading foreign aid agencies: Best practices across traditional and emerging donors

AbstractDespite the rapid growth of non–Development Assistance Committee (DAC) emerging donors, these non‐traditional donors are historically left out of the discussion on aid effectiveness. In this paper, we provide the first full evaluation of aid agency best practices across multiple agency categories. We rank and compare DAC donors, emerging non‐DAC donors, and multilateral and UN agencies in the following five best practice categories: transparency, overhead costs, aid specialization, selective allocation, and effective delivery channels. Contrary to public impressions that emerging donors engage in worse practices, we find that non‐DAC agencies rank similarly to DAC donors: Both groups are equally poor performers. Emerging donors engage in less aid fragmentation across countries and use fewer ineffective delivery channels. Traditional DAC donors, however, provide more transparent reporting. Overall, we find that multilateral agencies and UN donors outperform both DAC and non‐DAC bilateral agencies. Collectively, our results suggest that most aid donors do not meet their own standards for best practices, and this finding is not unique to emerging donors. We highlight how our results reflect the broader political economy of aid allocation.

Pengaruh Politik Domestik terhadap Dinamika Bantuan Luar Negeri Chile

One of the most significant changes in foreign aid issues has been the emerging of several non-tradional donors as providers of foreign aid. One of these new emerging donor countries is Chile, the top five economies (GDP) in Latin America, one of the two of OECD Latin America members, and one of upper-middle income countries. Chile government started designing the foreign aid agency in 1990 through AGCI (The Chilean International Co-operation Agency), in a democracy transition era from Pinochet to Aylwin. This research attempts to analyze how Chile domestic political factors influence changes in the dynamics of Chile’s ODA (Official Development Assistance), from aid-recipient to aid-provider. By using a theory from Lancester, the results are the domestic political factors namely ideas, institutions, interests (interest groups), and organizations influence the dynamic of Chile’s foreign aid. However, the major obstacle in early phase of developing the agendas was coming from the military.

Judicial Efficiency and Firm Productivity: Evidence from a World Database of Judicial Reforms

I assemble and classify a database of judicial reforms funded by foreign aid agencies as either comprehensive (targeting all characteristics of quality, speed, access) or limited reform. A triple difference is used to compare firms in countries with or without judicial reforms, before and after reforms, and in sectors more or less reliant on contract enforcement mechanisms, due to their need for relationship-specific investments. I find that externally financed comprehensive judicial reforms improve perceptions of judiciary efficiency (for all firms) and firm productivity (for sectors relying on relationship-specific investments) by 0.15 and 0.09 (22%) standard deviation, respectively.

Ideology, Expertise, and Industrial Transformations with Mutual Gains: Developmental Professionals in Nicaragua’s Cheese Industry

How might industrial transformations with mutual gains unfold in late-developer contexts devoid of the state’s helping hand or the pedagogical guidance of multinational buyers in global value chains? This article addresses this question through the study of a deviant case focused on a set of seven cheese-processing cooperatives in Nicaragua. It traces the cooperatives’ adoption of a new, upgraded “Gebhardian” organizational model—incorporating improvements in primary production and export-oriented processing—to the actions of a team of “developmental professionals” employed by foreign aid agencies. Drawing on ideational accounts in political science and sociology, the article then suggests that two explanatory factors set these professionals apart from other comparable actors: their adherence to a social democratic ideology and their base of expert knowledge. It also highlights the prerevolutionary collective experience of targeted rancher communities, which is reminiscent of Hirschman’s conserved “social energy,” as an indispensable background condition for the transformation.

Donors dealing with ‘aid effectiveness’ inconsistencies: national staff in foreign aid agencies in Tanzania

ABSTRACTIn the name of ‘aid effectiveness,’ public foreign aid is meant to be an equal partnership between donors and recipients of aid, while at the same time proving its efficiency to taxpayers in donor countries. Moreover, as state institutions, public aid agencies are required to follow their own bureaucratic regulations, and increasingly so also those of their partner institutions, while simultaneously managing aid in the most cost-efficient way. This article turns the spotlight on a category of aid workers who help foreign aid agencies manoeuvre through these conflicting objectives: the desk officers employed locally by donor agencies in aid-recipient countries. The article centres on Tanzania, a country at the forefront of the aid effectiveness agenda, illustrating well the tensions it embodies. Tanzanian desk officers advance donor conditionality and circumvent heavy bureaucratic regulation by tapping into their resources as locals. Such resources involve their identity as citizens with a right to hold the Tanzanian government accountable for how it spends development money. They also involve desk officers’ personal networks in the Tanzanian development industry, which help agencies expedite aid interventions – a resource important enough to be assessed by some foreign managers in the recruitment of national staff.

Perceptions of educational leaders regarding contemporary reform initiatives in Egypt

ABSTRACTMany educational reform initiatives worldwide do not result in deep and sustainable change. Limited studies have looked at reform initiatives in countries like Egypt. The purpose of this mixed methods study is to examine educational reform initiatives in Egypt throughout modern history using a transformative leadership lens, and to explore the perceptions of educational leaders regarding the more contemporary reform initiatives. The findings show that historically, large-scale reform initiatives in Egypt, which had transformative and sustainable results, were typically associated with a more comprehensive ideological inclination. More contemporary educational reform attempts were not transformative because these were perceived to be top-down reforms that were driven by foreign-aid agencies, and had no support from stakeholders.

Building Trust, Gaining Truth

Building Trust, Gaining Truth : The Relational Work of National Staff in Foreign Aid Agencies

National Staff in Public Foreign Aid: Aid Localization in Practice

This article spotlights national desk officers working in technical positions in public foreign aid agencies. These locally recruited employees share with their posted colleagues the same qualifications, formal rank, and job descriptions. As such, they actualize the concept of aid localization, which is used in donor discourse and scholarly research to describe practices of employing host country staff in partner countries. However, while donors portray localization as an investment in and empowerment of “local” expertise, scholars have primarily used the concept to describe the diffusion of corporate or “international” expertise through the recruitment of locally based professionals to international jobs. Research of aid workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, suggests that national desk officers reflect this second definition of localization. They exemplify an anthropological critique of the parochialism yet universalizing ambitions of international aid, which are tied to processes of technicalization and professionalization of aid work. The article also investigates the link between aid localization and professional authority. Findings indicate that national desk officers enjoy less professional authority than their posted colleagues. An important explanation concerns the formal terms on which donor staff are employed, which distinguish between national and posted employees as mutually exclusive and hierarchically stratified categories.

Re-framing utilization focused evaluation: lessons for the Australian Aid programme?

ABSTRACT This paper examines Patton’s (2008) model of Utilization-Focused Evaluation (UFE) in international development, and considers its efficacy in the evaluation of Australia’s Australian Aid programme. A growth in fiscal constraint within governments of many Western countries has placed greater emphasis on accountability and policy results (Rossi et al 2004, p. 8). This has been especially so for foreign aid agencies, with governments facing pressure to enhance the scrutiny of their programmes (Commonwealth of Australia 2011; Syal & Jones 2015). This trend is evident in the recently restructured Australian Aid programme (Bruere & Hill 2016), which incorporates a shift in focus to the Asia-Pacific region. The utility of programme evaluation has thus assumed heightened significance for policy makers, implementing agencies, aid beneficiaries, taxpayers and evaluation practitioners. This paper reviews barriers to implementing the UFE model within Australian Aid and other aid agencies, for example costs and taxpayer accountability, and proposes an adapted UFE model for ‘foreign aid’ programme evaluation (FAUFE). By incorporating elements of cost-benefit analyses and performance measures, our FAUFE model reconciles many of the obstacles to effective evaluation by creating an environment conducive to policy and organizational learning, while allowing for the practical and fiscal requirements of aid agencies.

Planting virtual lemons: performing forest protection in the context of political performativity

ABSTRACTThe socialist People’s Democratic Republic of Laos (Lao PDR) has some of the largest intact forests in Southeast Asia, yet these are being quickly depleted by illegal logging, slash-and-burn farming, increasing population pressures, monocrop plantations, mining and dam building. Foreign government and nongovernmental organizations stage “infotainment” theatre plays to educate and inform the Lao public of its role in protecting the forests even though government projects and concessions are the primary causes of forest destruction. Because all the nationally subsidized performing arts troupes are government mouthpieces they cannot critique the government’s role. Foreign aid agencies funding the dramas are also made complicit in the hypocrisy of promoting forest protection to those with the least power to do so, while both performers and spectators know who is profiting the most from the sale of forest products. This article examines theatrical performances regarding forest protection presented in this context of performativity in which the state manipulates socialist rhetoric to conceal its actions that enrich its officials and capitalist partners at the expense of the rest of the Lao public.