International Assistance Organizations Research Articles

The program and policy change framework: A new tool to measure research use in low- and middle-income countries

AbstractOrganizations that fund research to address global development challenges are increasingly interested in measuring the social and economic outcomes of research. However, traditional metrics for measuring research outputs are often insufficient for capturing the outcomes targeted by international assistance organizations. To address this, the Center for Development Research (CDR), part of the U.S. Global Development Lab at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has designed a new tool: the Program and Policy Change (PPC) framework for tracking and quantifying the influence of research on program and policy change in international development. The framework draws on existing conceptual frameworks of evidence uptake and the literature on policy change. This article describes the design of the PPC framework and presents the results of applying the framework to two USAID research programs. The benefits of the framework include applicability across research sectors, focus on evidence-informed policy at various levels of geographical influence, and inclusion of a numeric scoring system that enables quantification of outcomes.

Crisis and Consumption: ‘Saving’ the Poor and the Seductions of Capitalism

This article examines the crisis of capitalist seduction through the lens of online shopping platforms that raise funds for international assistance organizations and development celebrity advertising. Consumer-based giving has altered the commodity fetish into cliche, subsequently masking the capitalist produced crisis of endemic poverty and global inequality. Celebrity supported consumer-based giving and product advertising are used to illustrate the seductions of capitalism. This article argues that international assistance organizations are embedded in the substance and lifeblood of capitalisms’ dependence on inequality and poverty to generate profits/wealth. Consumer driven assistance remains a pervasive crisis hidden by seductive shopping platforms camouflaged as compassion.

Does Foreign Aid Promote Privatization? Empirical Evidence from Developing Countries

International assistance organizations use foreign aid to encourage governments in developing countries to enact market reform and privatization policies aimed at accelerating economic growth. Recent research findings, however, question the assumption that foreign aid has a positive impact on governments’ decisions to adopt economic reforms or that it accelerates economic growth. What is foreign aid’s impact, then, on the decisions of governments in developing countries to privatize state-owned enterprises? In an analysis of factors influencing the decision to privatize with respect to pace, timing and intensity of the process in 35 developing countries, we find that foreign aid has no systematic impact on the privatization process. Aid, especially technical assistance, can positively affect the pace and intensity of privatization and the findings point toward increasing the technical assistance component in aid. We find strong evidence of foreign aid being a facilitating factor in privatization in the presence of complementary institutional capacity. Ultimately, privatization is driven by domestic political and economic factors, and foreign aid can facilitate implementation only when developing countries have, or are able to create, market-supporting institutions.

ARSENIC CRISIS IN BANGLADESH

No country has been down and out with such depressing regularity as poor Bangladesh. Situated east of India on the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh supports, within a space the size of Wisconsin, about 125 million largely impoverished but resilient people. Floods, disease, and malnutrition combine to buffet the society from crisis to crisis. And now it has as yet another problem: the poisoning of potentially 70 million people from arsenic present in the water drawn from millions of wells originally installed to solve shortages of drinking water. Quite likely, nowhere near that estimated 70 million will fall ill, certainly not die of the cancer that eventually results after several years of untreated chronic arsenic poisoning. Enough help should be on the way. International assistance organizations, though deplorably late, are beginning to respond in a coordinated way. But thousands of villagers already are affected, and across the border in West Bengal, India, where cases began ...

Contingency Planning for Innovative Projects

Abstract The projects for educational reform and human resources development sponsored by international assistance organizations and governments in less developed countries have become more complex and innovative in recent years than they were in the past, and officials must implement them in uncertain and often unstable environments. Although planners give much attention to assessing the financial, economic, and technical aspects of those projects in the planning and design stages, they pay little attention to assessing the ability of public and private organizations in developing countries to manage reforms and implement innovations. Planners must be able to assess the appropriateness of management strategies in terms of the level of innovation the project requires, degree of uncertainty in the environment, and the cultural values of participants. A contingency approach to planning that analyzes management requirements of projects and management capacity of implementing agencies can reduce the gaps that...

Linking Decentralization and Regional Development Planning: The IRD Project in Peru

Abstract Planners in international assistance organizations and in developing countries have tried many approaches to regional development during the past two decades; the most recent is integrated regional development (IRD). The IRD project implemented in Peru during the early 1980s sought to combine regional spatial planning with decentralized administration in an experiment that was ultimately undermined by political obstacles and central government controls. The experience in Peru suggests that if regional development planning projects in developing countries with centralized governments are to be more successful, planners must pay much more attention in their design and implementation to decentralizing political control and building local administrative capacity prior to, or in conjunction with, efforts to improve technical planning capabilities.

The Dilemma of Development Administration: Complexity and Uncertainty in Control-Oriented Bureaucracies

While development strategies of international assistance organizations and governments of less developed states have become more complex over the past decade, the methods of planning and management used during the 1960s and 1970s to formulate and implement policies have become less effective. Synoptic planning and scientific management techniques are used to control development activities rather than to facilitate and encourage the flexibility, experimentation, and social learning that are essential. The prospects of improving control-oriented administration are constrained by difficulties in defining objectives; lack of appropriate data; inadequate understanding of local social and cultural conditions; ineffective means of controlling behavior; the dynamics of political interaction; and low levels of administrative capacity in developing countries. Changes that must be made include: recognizing explicitly the uncertainty and complexity of development problems; managing development activities as policy experiments; building widespread administrative capacity; relying on adjunctive and strategic planning; simplifying analytical techniques; creating incentives for error detection and for innovation; and viewing effective program and project management in new ways.

The impact of international assistance organizations on the development of education

Seth Spaulding (United States). Professor of Education, specialist in social and economic development problems at the University of Pittsbw'gh. Former official at Unesco. Author of numerous works on educational development in an international context. The literature of comparative, international and development education during the past several years abounds with material suggesting that education reflects society and that if meaningful reform is to occur, there must first be profound societal changes. At the same time, the literature reports on numerous attempts to 'democratize' education and to improve the quantity, quality and relevance of education through various programmes, projects and activities, many financed heavily by bilateral and multilateral assistance organizations. In essence, while we are awaiting the ideal social revolutions in the various countries, the professionals in the field continue to try to find ways in which education can be improved in existing economic and social contexts. Some of the more operationally oriented educators would even venture to posit the notion that social change is inevitable in either a revolutionary or evolutionary mode and that appropriate mass education carries with it the seeds of change. Whatever one's ideological bias, however, it is an established fact that educational opportunity is expanding dramatically in all countries of the Third World. And no one can dispute the fact that assistance organizations have been and are influencing the direction of this expansion, both in terms of the kind of educational programmes receiving priority and in terms of how these programmes are implemented once adopted. This is done through the various policies adopted by the various assistance organizations (which guide the financing and assistance priorities) and through the way such agencies manage technical-assistance activities, capital loans and other grants, once they agree to assist a government.