As part of the PAISA project that tracks expenditure in elementary education in India, we collect information from state and district offices, over and above our school-level surveys. While we do face roadblocks when collecting this information, headmasters, as well as block and district and state-level officials, are usually forthcoming with their opinions and open about sharing their documents with us. I would attribute this to the assumption one makes, that if the government is spending public money to provide a public good, one can ask questions about how and when this money was spent and what the outcome was.

During a field-visit to Rajasthan, a district official from Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), who spent a significant amount of his time liaising with civil-society representatives, felt that the same questions could not be asked of these representatives. The official spoke of the proliferation of aid agencies in the state and shared that he often found himself questioning whether their initiative to work in Rajasthan was influenced by the picturesque sights it had to offer.

This post highlights three initiatives that have attempted to bring about a more transparent system of aid delivery. It attempts to address the lacunae of information on the outcomes and efficiency of aid projects.

Internal reflection on projects

In this video called ‘Learning from Failure’  David Damberger speaks of his experience with Engineers Without Borders (EWB), and draws from an example in Malawi, where they found broken water taps that were funded by a Canadian government initiative. Of the 131 taps built, 81 did not work. Many of the taps remained broken because to fix it, communities required money for maintenance and spare parts that weren’t easily available. Next to those taps were another set of taps – which were broken too. The second set of taps was funded by an initiative by the American government, and the same mistake had been made not once, but twice. A step towards correcting such failures is the annual Failure Reports, an initiative spearheaded by EWB in 2008. These Failure Reports, as the name suggests, documents development projects that have not worked. This further led to another initiative called “Admitting Failure”, which invites civil society organisations to discuss what didn’t work for them, and what they learned from their mistakes

Feedback from beneficiaries

In another example, the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) attempts to involve beneficiaries in the development planning process. The council began an SMS programme in Somalia in 2011, through which recipients of aid from DRC projects can send an SMS to the organisation with their feedback and complaints. Complaints are forwarded to the relevant department in the Council, a response is sent to the complainant and these anonymous SMS reports are then translated and put up on their website.

At a larger scale, International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) aims to make information about aid spending public and accessible to donor governments, recipient governments and civil society organisations. Through the IATI standard, the initiative urges donors to publish data on aid budgets, financial flows, project activity, timelines and results, amongst other indicators. The campaign ‘Publish What You Find’ launched in 2008, rates donors on an ‘Aid Transparency Index’ based on these parameters.

Dennis Whittle recommends creating a consumer report for aid projects; a publicly available scorecard that assesses the efficacy of donor/civil-society driven projects. The examples in this post are an attempt to close the feedback loop for aid projects, thereby making the deliverers of aid more accountable to those who receive it.