Development Assistance: Quantity and Quality

By Michele Learner & Charles Uphaus

July 2006

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At Msekeni Primary School in one of the poorest regions of Malawi, students have received free school lunches and vitamin A supplements since 1999. According to the school headmaster, Bernard Kumanda, it had been easy to spot children who were undernourished.

"They were the ones who stared into space and didn't respond when you asked them questions."

Once the free lunch program began, the school's pass rates on national exams rose from 30 percent to 85 percent, even though no additional teachers had been hired and more children from the poorest homes were taking the exams. Improving children's ability to concentrate and learn will also yield benefits in future years -- both for themselves and their communities -- as they become workers and parents.

Cooking is a labor-intensive daily task for many women and girls in Africa. Margaret W. Nea

ONE SPIRIT. ONE WILL. ZERO POVERTY.

Bread for the World's 2006 Offering of Letters, One Spirit. One Will. Zero Poverty., seeks an additional $5 billion in poverty-focused development assistance for 2007. Poverty-focused development assistance funds effective programs that work directly to eliminate poverty. Modest amounts of funding can make huge differences in people's lives – 15 cents for a child's polio vaccination to prevent paralysis and death, $25 for fees and materials for a year of elementary education, or $5,000 to construct a well that provides safe water for an entire village.

President Bush has promised to double U.S. development assistance by 2010. To get on track to keep this commitment, Congress must appropriate an additional $5 billion in fiscal year 2007 for foreign assistance programs whose central focus is reducing poverty.

How Much Do We Give?
Where Does It Go?

People in the United States may wonder whether we can afford to give more foreign aid. Aren't we already giving a lot? The United States does indeed provide nearly 25 percent of the world's total development assistance, money that helps hungry and poor people every day. But this figure is less impressive when we consider that the United States places last among 22 donor countries in aid as a share of national income – about 0.15 percent in 2005, compared to 0.92 for Norway and 0.60 for Belgium.

Surveys still show that most Americans believe the federal government devotes 15 to 20 percent of the country's expenditures to foreign aid, a persistent myth that anti-poverty advocates must continue to correct by putting foreign assistance in context. Of the estimated federal spending of $2.7 trillion for 2006, for example, 20 percent is for the military and another 20 percent for Social Security. Interest on the national debt is 8 percent. But less than 1 percent, or $20 billion, is for foreign assistance programs – and this amount is divided about equally between poverty-focused development assistance and aid that is tied to political or security objectives. So in reality, the United States spends less than one-half of 1 percent of its budget to fight poverty in other parts of the world.

Another key issue: Does foreign aid actually help the people it is intended to help? In an April 2006 poll by the Alliance to End Hunger, 35 percent of the respondents believed that more than half of U.S. foreign aid ends up in the pockets of corrupt dictators. Development experts too have questioned the effectiveness of past foreign assistance. For example, William Easterly's recent book, White Man's Burden, charges that all too often, "Assistance meant for the desperately poor did not reach them."

There is little doubt that many foreign assistance dollars have been wasted in the past, especially money provided for political reasons during the Cold War. Development was not the primary purpose of this aid.

In recent years, donor countries, including the United States, and multilateral institutions, like the World Bank, have stepped up their efforts to combat corruption in development projects. It's essential that everyone involved in development do their part to ensure that aid reaches the people who need it. In fact, every measure taken to make aid more effective also reduces the risk that aid will be lost to corruption.

Effective Development Assistance

How can we tell whether foreign assistance is effective? Success stories have emerged from a wide variety of projects, locales and circumstances. But what they have taught us is remarkably consistent.

Effective assistance:  

Involves local citizens and communities in planning and implementing programs.  Clearly, development assistance is more likely to be helpful when people in the community determine which needs are high priority and participate in planning and implementing projects. Successful programs are often initiated by local people and supported by outside partners. In 2005, for example, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the installation of modern water and sanitation systems in 98 communities in Honduras. The Honduran government provided logistical support, and local people did the construction. Thanks to strong partnerships like these, 70 percent of all Hondurans now have access to potable water.

The U.S. Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) was established to target development assistance to poor countries that demonstrate a commitment to good governance, investment in people and sound economic policies. To be eligible for MCA funding, initiatives must be planned and carried out with the participation of local citizens' groups, including poor people themselves.

Focuses primarily on poverty reduction and has clear markers for success.  It's easier to gauge whether any effort is a success when it's clear what it is supposed to accomplish and how we will know when its goals have been achieved. Recognizing this, the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) specify benchmarks and indicators of success. For example, Goal 1 seeks to cut hunger and extreme poverty in half. Its indicators include how many young children are underweight and the proportion of people living on less than $1 per day. The United States, along with 188 other countries, adopted the MDGs in 2000; U.S. poverty-focused development assistance is targeted to efforts to meet these goals. 

Some measures of success are obvious. Fatuma Nuru and her neighbors in Bati, Ethiopia, gather daily for a coffee ceremony, a time-honored way for women to get together. Taking this as an opportunity, USAID-trained community health educators come to coffee ceremonies to educate local women on prenatal care and mother-to-baby transmission of HIV. Fatuma, for example, had given birth to three children at home with only the help of a neighbor. After attending two coffee presentations, she went to a local clinic while pregnant with her fourth child – her first visit to a health professional. She plans to give birth in a health facility and thanked her community health educator for helping her understand how HIV is transmitted from mother to child. Babies with untreated HIV usually die by the age of three – so one measure of this program's success is literally lives saved.

Farmers in India must often use animals rather than tractors to grow food for their communities. Margaret W. Nea

Fosters self-reliance and promotes sustainable change. The need for proper nutrition, clean water, health care and basic education is ongoing – it doesn't go away if funding ends or a doctor moves away. But development assistance is rarely if ever granted for an indefinite period. Ideally, projects will have a plan from the outset for financial sustainability when participants "graduate" from assistance.

USAID now brings foundations, corporations, and nonprofits together to develop common priorities, joint programs and coordinated funding efforts.

Another crucial ingredient for sustainability is people able to make a project work. The adage "Knowledge is power" drives the entire process of development. Church and nonprofit groups, who administer a significant amount of USAID funding, often focus on training local people and building community skills and confidence.

Sometimes sustained improvements require social change. For example, research shows that lack of nutrition knowledge contributes to malnutrition among children in Mozambique. A USAID-funded initiative identified low-income families in rural areas whose children were well-nourished and trained them as mentors. The work of more than 2,000 mentor families has helped modify gender stereotypes and involve fathers in the care of children. USAID reports, "Fathers attend cooking demonstrations and lead songs about enriching children's porridge with sesame oil, greens, and eggs – something that would have been unheard of a few years ago."

Takes an integrated approach to communities and development.  It's impossible to address complex, multi-faceted development issues with one or two isolated interventions. Interconnected problems cannot be solved if programs do not take into account the big picture. The MDGs are a good example. Cutting hunger in half (MDG #1) is dependent on fighting infectious disease (MDG #6), because many deaths attributed to "hunger" result from an interaction of malnutrition and infection. Reducing hunger is also dependent on educating women and enhancing their participation in society, components of two other MDGs.

In practice, an integrated approach often means following a problem or process from beginning to end. For example, various development agencies now collaborate to provide assistance or training at many steps in the process of producing and selling coffee or cocoa – growing, processing, transporting, marketing and exporting. By taking into account the whole production chain from farm to market, an assistance program focused on food, for example, will not inadvertently complicate the work of market women who sell the product in local markets.

Development assistance that takes an integrated approach to poverty reduction and involves local communities in ways that empower and sustain them can generate lasting improvements in the lives of hungry people. Bread for the World is committed to weighing the evidence about development assistance, advocating for programs that truly help the world's poorest people, and working to see that these programs are adequately funded and smartly administered.