Why I write what I write

Happy birthday to me! Or, more accurately, happy birthday to this blog, which started with an opinionated post entitled Sustainability 3 years ago today. The blog has proved at least as sustainable as your average aid project, with 240 odd posts written since then, about 80 per year. Combined verbiage is over 110,000 words, and page views cruised over 30,000 some time ago (including email and RSS subscribers roughly doubles that). I reckon the average post is read by a modest crowd of about 250 people. As to why you read it, only you can say, but I can tell you why I write it, or more particularly, why I choose to write about the things I do.

Two dominant themes have emerged and slightly surprised even me with the frequency that I have chosen to write about them:

1. I blog rather more about general development issues than I do about conservation specific ones.
2. I spend an awful lot of time complaining about donors.

Both are outcomes of this blog’s basic premise: to put across the view from the coal face of implementing an actual community-based conservation programme on the ground in the tropics. Working in this context it is impossible to escape the critical fact that just about every single other stakeholder that one deals with is far more interested in economic development than they are in conservation. If you do not learn to sing to this tune pretty quickly your project will be one long and probably unsuccessful struggle.

It is also the context in which you live your life; when the electricity cuts out it affects you. When a government official is not interested in joining you in the field because they would prefer to be back in the office collecting bribes it affects your work, quite apart from all the direct impacts of poor governance on biodiversity conservation (elephant poaching, illegal logging etc). It becomes apparent pretty quickly that most solutions to conservation problems in the tropics have precious little to do with biology, and a lot more to do with basic economics and governance issues.

But in many ways, when it comes to implementing any actual conservation programme, all of that is of secondary importance. For if you have a well designed programme (admittedly a big if), then your principle constraint will be how much money donors give to you and under what conditions. So whilst moaning about arcane details of ever-changing reporting requirements issued by your (least) favourite donor might not seem quite as inspiring as all that glorious biodiversity, if you want to have any chance of saving that biodiversity then dealing with such things becomes critical. And if, by extension, you want to improve the rather disappointingly poor success rate of conservation projects in the tropics, then persuading donors to mend their ways might just be one of the most important jobs you could do.

As it is, most of my time I spend focused on more immediate issues, but occasionally I write a piece for this blog in the hope that someone, somewhere with the actual power to change some of these things is paying attention. The not-so-glamorous life of a conservationist in the tropics.

REDD: a good idea donorised and projectised to death?

Chewing the fat with a colleague recently we were musing upon what has happened to REDD. Clearly the biggest problem is the lack of any global agreement to mitigate climate change, and the consequent collapse in the price of carbon on many markets. But even if this were fixed would there be a long queue of sellers about to push carbon credits from REDD on to the marketplace? We didn’t think so.

The problem is that, as I have remarked before, REDD is far from easy. In fact it contains multiple challenges on so many different levels that, we thought, these difficulties had obscured the strategic focus on the hardest problem of all: actually delivering carbon savings.

Firstly there are the technical and technological challenges around MRV (Measuring, Reporting and Verifying the carbon fluxes) and defining appropriate reference points (the business-as-usual scenario) against which to measure progress. Secondly there are the social justice issues: who will benefit from REDD, elites or local forest dwellers? There were genuine fears that REDD could initiate another land grab by governments, reversing the trend in recent decades towards decentralised and community-based forest management. Finally there were fears that mono-specific plantations might prove more efficient at carbon sequestration than existing natural forests, and that biodiversity might therefore take another beating.

All three sets of issues posed serious challenges which urgently needed addressing. Without the capacity to monitor their own forest carbon stocks developing countries would be effectively barred from participating, or, at best, find themselves dictated to by others who had the necessary technological nous. And there is no doubt that, in some countries at least, the technical and institutional gaps were, and largely still are, quite substantial. Similarly, there is a huge amount to be said for getting the social justice issues properly incorporated from the start, because, like the proverbial oil gusher, once the money starts to flow, it might be very hard to bolt on the relevant safeguards later.

To donors and other big aid sector players these multiple technical and social challenges must have appeared rather like stumbling upon a car crash scene for an ambulance-chasing lawyer. “Aha!” they said, “Here is a role for us.” Projects were created left, right and centre, the dollars flowed, and the consultants came and feasted. People were trained in analysing satellite imagery, whilst gender and indigenous peoples experts galore advised on how to ensure REDD delivered benefits to all. I expect there were even strategies drawn up for dealing with HIV/AIDS in REDD.

But where are the carbon savings that all of this work would support? Here we meet what is both the great strength and the great weakness of REDD: it is almost impervious to fudged or sticking-plaster type solutions. In order to succeed in REDD one must not just conserve a patch of forest, but reduce the drivers of deforestation, so that another forest loss (and hence carbon emissions) are not simply displaced elsewhere. This is hard. Seriously hard. Most of the time someone will lose out, whether it is big business intent on industrial-scale logging or adding another oil palm plantation, or poor farmers pushing further into the bush in order to find more fertile soils.

Such challenges are not susceptible to ‘projectisation’ in the standard aid model that works with mid-level managers plus advisers. Instead they require tough political decisions, probably at cabinet level. It is clear that in some countries (Brazil, Indonesia and Guyana come to mind) REDD has reached this level of serious political engagement, even if (in the case of Indonesia) the desired outcomes are not yet secured. However, elsewhere REDD appears stuck a rung or two lower on the government bureaucratic ladder, and thus the actual mechanism by which forest carbon savings will be generated remains either theoretical or entirely undefined. In such a context all the investment in MRV and social justice seems like the football team that plays very pretty football, with lots of neat passing, but too often fails in its primary goal: to get the ball in the actual net.

All is not yet lost, every country’s situation is different, and if the fundamental carbon markets issues do get worked out I expect a decent price should start to act as a pretty big incentive for countries to get serious about REDD. But it will all, no doubt, take considerable time, which, given the urgency of addressing the problems of climate change is worrying. Certainly it is all a far cry from the hope that major forested countries could all start selling REDD-based carbon credits from the beginning of 2013 when the successor to the Kyoto protocol was originally expected to kick in. Donors might like to consider what all good football managers know: all the pretty passing patterns in the world count for nowt if the team still gets relegated at the end of the season; REDD countries will each need a big-name striker to lead the line if they are to succeed.

ps. All this also makes me wonder what other big development initiatives might similarly have been donorised and projectised into ineffectiveness. Anti-corruption efforts seem a good candidate. Suggestions welcomed in the comments.

Wherefore art thou Aid?

Nancy Birdsall and William Savedoff have an excellent piece over at CGD about one of the hidden pitfalls that lie in wait putting into practice a Cash on Delivery aid programme. In it they describe how targets, often a good thing for benchmarking performance, can fatally undermine implementation of COD. The problem boils down to this: if the donor government expects to disburse $2m through a COD programme and the recipient government expects to receive $2m through said programme, then it can be very difficult to deviate from that even though in practice one would expect variance either positive or negative, with negative deviation being the trickier but more likely scenario.

One can understand the recipient government’s situation; they would surely always want to get the full $2m even when, according to the agreed formula, their performance only merits $600k. But, what I find particularly disappointing is the tendency for the donor to want to disburse the cash any way. There are explanations of a sort: the donor has budgeted that amount, so returning it to their home treasury can mean reduced budgets in future, and maybe the desk officer find themselves in a tricky situation in their relationship with the beneficiary government, which is most easily resolved by giving in, and handing over the full amount. But none of these are very satisfactory. Pressure to disburse can be resisted with a little bit of backbone, and donor governments seem able to cope with varying budgets for things like unemployment benefit, so surely ought to be able to cope with aid budgets that fluctuate?

In my opinion the real issue, and one which fatally undermines so much of official development aid, is that the whole international aid system is constructed around the needs of the donors, not the recipients. Hence the desire to push out the $2m regardless. If we can agree that COD aid is at least an idea good enough to be worth trying, why are we trying to shoe-horn it into a rigid budgeting framework that will not support it?

The problem is that it is the act of giving which has come to be celebrated, not the outcomes of that giving. Politicians get the media coverage they crave when they announce the donation, not when (if?!?) the programme delivers on its promises. Why else the ridiculous focus on aid budgets reaching 0.7% of GDP?

If we wanted to design a system to actually deliver useful benefits to poor people world wide, rather than to reward donors, we would never come up with the system we have now. Cash on Delivery seems like an eminently sensible step in the right direction, but I fear that the required wholesale reform of the aid system is unlikely to occur before market forces and economic conversion over time remove it much of its original raison d’être, as has happened recently with the cessation of British government aid to India.

But in the meantime, if the mainstream media, in developing as well as developed countries, could learn a little self-restraint, and refuse to report any announcements of aid, just maybe we might start to have a chance …

M&E – a top-down imposition

Yesterday I promised you some reflections on Prichett et al.’s working paper on improving monitoring and evaluation. They correctly identify that rigorous impact evaluation works too slowly for most management purposes, costs a lot (putting it beyond many project implementers), and is often highly context specific so not readily generalizable (the standard critique of randomized control trials).

Their proposed solution is to insert a second (lower case) ‘e’ that stands for experiential learning: MeE. In particular they propose that project managers should have considerable freedom to adaptively manage their project, and moreover should be encouraged to try different approaches to see what works best, thus avoiding the problem of over-specificity that I highlighted in the quotes I pulled out in yesterday’s post. They suggest that this will give much more like the real-time information that project managers need, as well as exploring more cost-effectively different project designs, than establishing a separate RCT for each one. (Which may not be sufficient any way, as which design is optimal may be context-specific.)

It is an excellent paper, and their proposal has a lot to recommend itself if you work for a big development agency. But, I cannot see it working very well at the small NGO end of the market where I operate. The problem is not really specific to experiential learning as to the whole gamut of impact evaluation as it applies to project design and management amongst small NGOs. If I think about the best small NGOs I know and have worked with, several features are often apparent that reduce the incentives for impact evaluation:

• Small NGO types tend to be ‘doers’ rather than ‘thinkers’ – given the choice we will nearly always invest more money in implementation than M&E.
• Many small NGOs have fairly modest aims which do not need sophisticated M&E to assess.
• Other small NGOS are of the nimble innovator types. They may be iterating too rapidly for it to be easily captured in M&E, and do not have resources to iterate in such a systematic manner.
• Such NGOs have the capacity to learn very rapidly internally for relatively little investment of time and effort; there is no big institutional ship to turn around. Instead, for these small NGOs new learning leads rapidly to more impact and the potential for more learning.
• In contrast clearly analysing and communicating these lessons can involve a significant investment of effort that does little (except perhaps to support fund-raising) to deliver better results on the NGO’s chosen impact bottom line.
• Thus generating new learning and achieving greater immediate impact can be much cheaper for such NGOs than disseminating lessons already learned.

Donors and small NGO partners obviously have a role to play in helping offset this tendency (which is not always 100% healthy), but, as I have remarked before, there seems to me to be an inherent contradiction in the calls both for bigger/better M&E and nimbler project implementation in an attempt to mimic the rapid success of internet-era start-ups.

The contradiction becomes more apparent when one realises that while business may regularly monitor all manner of variables that are relevant to their business (e.g. page hits as well as sales), they always have an instant answer when you ask about their ‘impact’: it’s the size of their profits. No construction of the counter-factual required there!

I also suspect that few aid beneficiaries care much about what any impact evaluation may or may not say so long as they are getting good results out of the project itself. Thus it becomes clear that much M&E, and certainly impact evaluations, are essentially a top-down imposition by donors understandably keen to know the results of their funding, and at odds with the bottom up approach many people in development advocate.

So the real question is: does the donor and wider-development community get value for money from the impact evaluations they demand? This is a question that Prichett et al. raise several times. The answer seems to be related to the challenge of scaling up, a relentless pressure in a lot of conservation and development work that I have repeatedly queried (e.g. see here and here.) I.e. impact evaluation and Prichett et al.’s experiential learning is all about learning how to move from a successful pilot to national programmes and similar projects in other countries.

Here I return to the internet start-up analogy. Did Google get where it is as a result of an impact evaluation? No it grew organically! If you want more bottom up development, which this blogger does, maybe the solution is less evaluation and more of a market-based approach in which successful implementers are simply invited to replicate their successes along the lines that I suggested yesterday?

Now before I chuck the whole M&E set overboard, a few basic points need to be made in return. Firstly, and most obviously, claiming ‘success’ is easy when all you need to do is check your bank balance. Determining which pilot projects are successful is not always so straightforward – although not always as difficult as might be supposed – and essentially requires some kind of impact evaluation. Indeed the converse problem often arises of a new fad rapidly gaining popularity far faster than evidence of its efficacy: the micro-lending boom comes to mind. And as those classic RCTs around improving educational attainment in Kenya show, sometimes it’s not so much about what is successful, but what gives the most success for your money. Indeed, Pritchett et al. lament the demise of project ‘valuation’ and computation of value-for-money metrics by large development agencies.

I conclude that idealists who want all their development to be 100% bottom up are living in cloud cuckoo land. Even if we dismantled the whole international aid industry, governments still regularly engage in this sort of thing within their own countries, often under pressure from their own electorates. So if the people want development aid then the paymasters are going to need to some evidence on which to base their decisions. Most of all, what this humble blogger would really like to see, is donors actually paying attention to these things, instead of continuing to commit large chunks of funding to projects and programmes they know are doomed. Better to over-fund something that has a decent chance of success than flush your money down the plughole of the utterly unfeasible.

Are donors getting value for money from the impact evaluations they demand? Only if they act on the results!

Aid project selection & implementation

Some great quotes in a new working paper proposing a different approach to M&E by Lant Prichett et al. My eye was particularly caught by these two from the conclusion.

“The reality of the project selection process, inside government organizations and between government organizations, tends to be an adversarial process of choosing among projects, which puts project advocates in the position of making much stronger claims for project benefits than can be supported, and being more specific than they would like to be.”

I’m relatively relaxed about the tendency to make over-ambitious claims of expected project impact since everyone does it, and is thus likely to fairly well factored into how projects are viewed. The problem of over-specificity in design is, I think, a bigger problem since it leads to significant wasted effort during the project proposal stage developing ridiculously over-detailed action plans and budgets. Most donors like to think they are flexible when it comes to plan and budget changes mid-grant, but the simple requirement to obtain approval is a deterrent to project managers and a source of risk: what if they do not approve the changes?

The issue of over-specified designs has other implications for implementation too:

“Organizations like the World Bank perpetually over-emphasize, over-reward, and over-fund ex ante project design over implementation. This is because in the standard model, implementation is just faithful execution of what has already been designed, whereby the thinking is done up front and the implementation is just legwork. However, de facto many successful project designs are discovered when project implementers are given the flexibility to learn, explore and experiment.”

As I wrote before: good strategies need good implementation. If the implication – that big donors like the World Bank already know this basic fact – is correct then it really makes me question the whole competitive grant awarding process that dominates NGO involvement in conservation and development. Donors could save everyone a lot of trouble by awarding grants on much shorter project outlines combined with a good track record of delivery (which needs to be much more robustly assessed). Good NGOs would be strongly incentivised to deliver good outcomes since otherwise they would lose their future funding. An entry level system would still allow new players to prove themselves, and also those fallen stars to re-establish themselves.

I will blog again tomorrow on the core proposal of the paper when I’ve had longer to digest it.

Hat tip: the Blattman

The importance of choosing the right tool for the job

Duh! I mean obvious or what? Except, as is well known, people equipped with only hammers often see too many problems as solvable purely by use of a hammer. International donor engagement with Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) has long struck me a case in point.

The international donors come armed with their hammer, which is money to support the government in the recipient country. This is primarily what big international donors do. They work often through diplomatic or pseudo-diplomatic channels. Aid should be channelled to the host government; anything else could be construed as meddling in someone else’s country. This is a pretty good hammer for things that the host country government is already good at, e.g. building new schools all over the country: the more money you pour in, the more new schools get built.

CBNRM has been just one of the sexiest concepts in conservation for about 30 years now. Even Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), including REDD, hasn’t fully displaced it, just been added to the mix, since rich folk much prefer to pay those poster children of poverty porn – poor rural communities of farmers – for protecting their local environment than a bunch of shapeless bureaucrats. So plenty of donor investment in conservation in recent decades has focused on CBNRM. Except that, as I pointed out previously, the same government officials who are charged with enforcing local environmental laws do not really make the most sensible agents of change when it comes to facilitating the development of CBNRM projects.

Now along comes a World Bank report critiquing participatory approaches to development. It includes a substantial section on CBNRM, which is certainly pleasing to see. The main conclusion is that the majority of CBNRM projects do not appear very successful; depending on how they interact with existing policies and laws they may even be counter-productive, helping the rich at the expense of the poor. Now I am familiar to some extent with some of the CBNRM projects they are talking about (or citing others talking about), and I noticed one thing in common: they were all classic international donor funded efforts, working through local government.

So yeah, I’m not particularly surprised by Messrs Mansuri and Rao’s findings, but I’m not convinced that it greatly undermines the theory of CBNRM so much as the practice in the context of international development aid. (Which one presumes was very much Mansuri and Rao’s starting point, given their employer, and is supported by their associated blog post. All of which is not to say the report is not worth a read.) Major donors, of course, employ some very bright people, some of whom have come to realise the same thing. Alas, while they would choose to fund us – a small NGO – if they could, the only thing their employer ever gives them is a metaphorical hammer.

The future of Big Aid

A friend and colleague has challenged me to respond to this post on IIED’s blog that reported on a debate asking whether “development aid has a future”?

Much as I might be up for a bit of blogosphere wonk-warring, I find it hard to disagree with the main points made in the post. In fact, if I wanted to be facetious for a moment, I might suggest that maybe the panellists had been reading this blog:

• Alex Scrivener is dead right when decrying the pointlessness of the focus on countries giving 0.7% of GDP … which is not so very far away from my views on whether we need more aid.
• David Satterthwaite’s point on Aid’s lack of accountability to beneficiaries is a familiar refrain, e.g. see here.
• Thirdly, Andrew Simm’s query as to how Aid can help in climate-constrained world has echoes of my recent musings that in future Aid may turn into guilt-inspired climate reparations.

Of course that would be facetious since none of those posts of mine were particularly original thinking, and you will find many similar thoughts expressed by others both in and outside the blogosphere. And, yes, many of us find it hard to contemplate throwing the (development) baby out with the (aid) bathwater, because most of us are swimming in that same bath water!

But I do find it ironic that just when big Aid is enjoying some of the highest levels of political support it has ever received, the entire model is under question perhaps as never before. Many countries classified by the World Bank as low income are expected to follow Ghana and graduate to middle income status in the next decade. Aid is believed to have played only a very small part, if any, in this success, but may well have made many millions of lives better in the mean time.

“What is aid for?” asked Scrivener. Apparently it’s not to help the giver win big commercial contracts. My guess is that most private donations for development are motivated out of compassion and simple altruism, and yet when our governments give money often politicians seek to justify it in terms of self-interest. Are they just responding to a right-wing vocal minority or is this what we expect of our leaders?

In light of the above points I would recast Scrivener’s question into three parts:

• Why do people/institutions/governments give money?
• What can we reasonably expect to achieve with that?
• How will these motivations and ambitions change in a rapidly changing world?

Big, awkward questions all, tailor-made for ducking by politicians. Like all such challenges, I suspect we won’t really get a chance to find out the answers till a big (climate-driven?) crisis comes along and yanks us out of the status quo. So actually it may well be the third question which ends up driving answers to the first two.

Ease of doing business is not the same as poverty alleviation

I am a little bit puzzled about the complaints listed in a Guardian piece last week criticising the World Bank’s rankings of the easiest countries in the world for doing business. Surely if such a ranking is to be meaningful it has to see the world substantially from the point of view of business people? I.e. fewer environmental rules, and lower levels of unionization will be just as much of interest to a businessman considering where to invest as the amount of red tape that s/he will have to deal with. Conversely s/he is unlikely to take much account of inequality and poverty indicators except where they may directly affect their intended workforce, so why should they feature in the rankings?

If the World Bank were not putting out these ratings, I imagine someone else would be by now. So, rather than shooting the messenger, complainants might want to focus on or more of the following solutions:

1. Raising minimum standards worldwide so there can be less labour rights arbitrage.
2. Simplifying regulations to focus on the important stuff.
3. Improving consistency of implementation / enforcement.

Long rulebooks filled with obscure stipulations are a corrupt official’s paradise! (And civil society organisations are just as much affected by barmy employment law as businesses.) Furthermore, if implementation is uneconomic or enforcement uneven you can actually have a negative affect on workers’ rights and the environment since the more honest employers are put off from investing, leaving the field free for those who never have any intention of playing fair.

That aside, I can guess at one underlying cause of the complaints which is completely skated over in the article. Maybe the problem is not so much the rankings (which by increasing information flow can only be a good thing), but the emphasis put upon them by Western donors as a proxy for supporting the concerns of their own multinational firms, at the expense of broader development issues. E.g. the complaint from Zambian civil society that credit is only available to big businesses. Now it might be that national governments in places like Zambia are misinterpreting donor concerns (à la isomorphic mimicry), but it wouldn’t surprise me if, on this point, many donors were guilty as charged. Don’t expect too much altruism from Official Development Assistance aid.

Cooperation UN-style

“(The Evaluation Team) believes that the One UN approach is basically a good idea. However, the team has become aware that the management and transaction costs under a joint UN Agency Programme are significant. Therefore the team suggests that, for the future, in particular for: (a) managing funds … and (b) a possible follow-up phase, the UN Agencies should consider the idea of a programme led by one agency alone”

That is from a recent evaluation of UN environment-focused project that came my way. It doesn’t really matter which one. Elsewhere the report provided a bit more detail:

“The institutional, partnership, and coordination arrangements actually provided additional challenges to reach the intended objectives. It required three UN agencies with different setups/rules/regulations to collaborate”

Just about every grant we’ve ever been involved in has involved partnership and collaboration. Sure sometimes a bit of politics gets in the way – that’s human nature – but you push past it. It certainly should not get in the way of basic organisation effectiveness. If things get really bad then someone senior will arrive to knock heads together, and if that doesn’t work, then a few arses should be fired.

The UN is supposed to stand for international cooperation, not institutional fiefdoms. Some bilateral donors are known to behave similarly. I have a simple message for them all: please grow up or just get out of the game. Development is a challenging enough business without having to deal with squabbling donors.

Fat cats make good accountants

Amidst all the kerfuffle arising from the  revelations last month about supposed ‘fat cats’ of Aid gobbling up too big a portion of DFID’s budget (and that led to the line by line review of DFID’s budget I blogged about yesterday), I have yet to read any analysis of why this has happened. Those stony hearts on the right want simply to reduce the aid budget, whilst those on the left lament that more money should go to the intended recipient countries.

I’ll give you the answer in one sentence: many would be contractors from developing countries do not generate reports to high enough standards nor keep good enough accounts to keep busy aid bureaucrats confident that money is being well spent. This, of course, is a sweeping generalization, and ignores elements of culture (sharing a common culture can greatly increase ones sense of confidence in a contractor). I have no doubt that many people and organisations in developing countries are capable of this, and the fact that at least one Indian company apparently got a big contract is testament to that. However, in the least developed countries (often the biggest aid recipients) this capacity is likely to be lowest.

The Daily Fail may well rage at these ‘fat cats’ of Aid, but imagine their scorn if they were to read reports written in mangled English by people for whom this is not their first language, and/or who just did not get good enough schooling in writing proper English. (A skill which is quite distinct from analytical thinking and empathy with poor people that are two of the most important abilities in doing practical development work.) And this whole storm in a teacup would quickly be recognised as such if it were instead discovered that significant corruption had occurred in DFID-funded programmes. If there is one person the Daily Fail hates more than a fat cat it is a corrupt foreign official!

If, as seems apparent, the proportion of DFID funds spent on UK-based consultants is going up, then I would suggest one simple reason: DFID’s own budget is rising quickly while staffing levels have been reduced. In such a situation DFID’s remaining staff will naturally look for good ways to get rid of big chunks of money at once. As I have previously noted, I think this is a false economy: at some point larger transaction overheads (as a proportion of funds disbursed) will have to be incurred if you are going to achieve high quality results in countries where government capacity is low.

For this reason, although I disagree with their reasoning (e.g. see Terence Wood’s demolition of Lord Ashcroft’s ill-informed ‘golden taps’ diatribe), I actually agree to some extent with the aid critics. DIFD should drop its misguided focus on the entirely artificial target of spending 0.7% of GDP on international aid and development, and instead simply seek to generate the best development outcomes that it can. If DFID can demonstrate that a budget increase will effectively deliver more good and the British Treasury can afford it, then it should spend more, but if not then it should not spend money just because it has it in the department budget (the standard donor failing). If development aid is a ‘race’ then it is not a sprint to 0.7% of GDP; it is a marathon, and the finish line is elimination of widespread poverty, which despite significant progress in recent years regrettably remains a distant target.

My conclusion from two years ago still stands:

“Few people would disagree that the aid system needs serious reform. Many say we need both more and better aid. I think that’s too much to deal with at one time. First make it better, much better, then add more if the absorptive capacity really is there.”