The Future of Western Assistance: Getting Back to Basics*

*From William Easterly's excellent book, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. p. 382-383

The basic principles are much easier to state than to make happen. Agents of assistance have to have incentives to search for what works to help the poor. If you want to aid the poor, then:

1. Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help people lift themselves up.
2. Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience in their area.
3. Experiment, based on the results of the search.
4. Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
5. Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working and take money away from interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
6. Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.**

It's so obvious, I'm embarrassed to even lay it out. But it's worth laying out only because it is the opposite of the present Western effort to transform the Rest. (The global poor don't vote in the West. The poor have no effective way to provide feedback. Since there is no system of independent evaluation of measurable results, there is no accountability for the Aid agencies. There is, therefore, no incentive for efficient work toward unfashionable, yet practical, projects, but plenty for those that provide political returns at home, regardless of their feasibility. The global push for AIDS treatment rather than prevention is just such an issue.) Aid wont make poverty history, which Western aid efforts cannot possibly do. Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so. But aid that concentrates on feasible tasks will alleviate the sufferings of many desperate people in the meantime. (The easiest way to avoid accountability is to have wonderful sounding goals that are so far beyond the scope of present possibility that one cannot be responsible for failing to reach or even make any definable movement toward them.) Isn't that enough?
Think about the great potential for good if aid agencies probed and experimented their way toward effective interventions--such as saving the life of a child with malaria, building a road for a poor farmer to get his crops to market and support his family, or getting food and dietary supplements to people who would otherwise be stunted from malnutrition. Think of the positive feedback loop that could get started as success was rewarded with more resources and expanded further. Think of the increased support for foreign aid if rich people knew that an additional dollar of aid was an additional dollar to meet the desperate needs of the poorest people in the world. (Not bloated and corrupt third-world regimes and first-world aid agencies bureaucracies.)

www.globalgiving.com --- an example of accountable direct aid.
www.kiva.org <----direct micro-lending.


**akin to Duggan, Art of What Works.

(The Rational's personal comments in parentheses.)