CGD’s Connie Veillette and John Norris have some proposals for rationalising (and trimming) US AID’s budget. Included in some eminently sensible suggestions was the vignette that Belize apparently receives ~$20k each year from US AID, and, in Norris and Veillete’s opinion, this probably does not justify the overheads involved in managing it, and so it [...]
Posts Tagged ‘aid prioritisation’
14 Aug
The man in the street donor
Caveman Tom reckons I was too kind on donors with my recent post on how many NGOs we might need. To be clear for a moment, normally when I talk about ‘donors’ on this blog I am referring to the big institutions (government aid departments, UN agencies, philanthropic trusts, and the like) who recruit professional [...]
9 Aug
How many NGOs do we need?
Around this time of year one sees lots of ‘Away On Vacation’ signs up on blogs. Alas the reason for my lack of recent posts is just that I’ve been insanely busy. Plus a temporary internet outage for ~5 days interrupted my blog reading, and I’ve been struggling to catch up ever since. But I [...]
21 Apr
Numbering off
Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi lament the tendency to “make up” international development statistics. Though done from the best of intentions the result does rather seem to resemble a counting system that goes: one, two, many … pick a number, any number. Thankfully, I don’t think too much attention is paid to such imaginary numbers [...]
20 Apr
Should the biggest problems get the most money?
Last week Ranil over at Aid Thoughts discussed the new big thing in international aid: fragile states. The powers that be appear to have decided that these are the biggest problem out there in the aid world, and, as such, they deserve to get the biggest slice of the aid pie. I long have noticed [...]
22 Mar
Bad news brings in the wonga
We’re all familiar with the unfortunate fact of life that bad news tends to be much more newsworthy than good news, e.g. this recent example. This is doubly true for NGOs, as Karen Rothmeyer points out. (H/T: Tom Murphy) We depend upon bad news to bring in the money. So, although we do like to [...]
21 Feb
Expectations management (the donor version)
Expectations management is a big part of any community development work; no project will make everyone rich over night, but just like rich world dieters in search of no-effort weight loss, that’s what many poor people will hope for. Donors also need their expectations managed. All donors are ambitious for what they can achieve with [...]
