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There is an airgap between the ecosystem where donor funds circulate and the ecosystem that is the engine of informal rural & urban value flows.
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I first noticed this when commissioned to discover the bottlenecks in aligning intent and strategy with actions and impacts within the internal programme funding process for the Dutch MFA & Min/Economy back in Sept - Nov 2012. Third party experts were giving voice on behalf.
Because the "last mile" of a successful donor funded programme is after implementation, and after donor support ends. Does the programme sustain itself? Did it have impact? Any positive beneficial transformation at all?
As a professional, it would have been difficult to miss this problem after conducting interviews with various civil servants involved in the decision making and funding process along the entire pipeline of how international devt programmes came to life, particularly PPPs.
Two factors were felt to be influencing this challenge of aligning goals with outcomes, as a structured coherent process of crafting a portfolio of investments (choosing funding proposals based on their relative ability to support the stated policy goal).
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3rd Party "Experts"
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3rd Party "Experts"
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And, the burning desire to shift all uncertainty and risks down to the beneficiary side of the equation. Even though their voices were not being heard.
This was a recipe for failure coupled with a lack of viable exit strategies for funded programmes.
And, the burning desire to shift all uncertainty and risks down to the beneficiary side of the equation. Even though their voices were not being heard.
This was a recipe for failure coupled with a lack of viable exit strategies for funded programmes.
Long feedback loops, 3 to 4 years before M&E results came in; and inflexibility in the program design, thus lack of adaptability to real world conditions on the ground meant the system itself was a barrier to the success of its stated goals.
We proposed to redesign the process from inception of a policy objective through funding selections and then incorporate a feedback system for multimillion euro programmes to shorten duration and improve the systems capacity to respond to real world conditions by iterating plans.
We recommended that the donor funding system in major donor govts, like the Netherlands, invest in an up to date understanding of the contemporary socio-technical landscape of their demographic of interest. A living repository of personas reflecting the on the ground reality.
And, if communication loop between beneficiaries & donors could be collapsed by ubiquitous tech such as mobile telephony, then the barriers to successful intervention design raised by intermediaries giving voice on behalf of end users could be mitigated, boosting chances success
The driver for the Dutch govt's desire to ponder all of this, as framed by the civil servant team members from both ministries, was the ongoing transformation of the development aid funding complex from "Aid" to "Trade".
I wrote internal paper in Feb 2013 whose gist I can share
I wrote internal paper in Feb 2013 whose gist I can share
