Young Voices for Development: Beyond the Bubble

Every day it is becoming increasingly clear that traditional approaches to development are too slow to keep up with today’s global challenges. To tackle these challenges and build future solutions, we need young changemakers who dare to think outside the box. That is why Disrupt Development and the Advanced Master in International Development (AMID) of the Radboud University Nijmegen have joined hands to amplify the voices of young development professionals. In this Young Voices for Development blog series, young professionals of the AMID Young Professional programme rise to the stage to write about groundbreaking solutions and talk about inspiring innovations. In this blog post, Anke Baselmans and Anne Dorst unravel aid delivery and the impact of public opinion.

Beyond the Bubble: the Aid Delivery Process and the Impact of Public Opinion

Imagine you are a Sub-Saharan developing country, recipient of international development aid. Perhaps you are Ethiopia, which would mean that you received over 2000 million USD in development aid in 2018-2019.

In fact, the amount of ODA you receive has been climbing steadily since the 1990s. This might sound positive, but do you have any influence over how this money is spent? Do the Ethiopian people? Or is it the donor that holds the power? And if so, what is their objective? And who, or what, has the power to influence this?

Image: Miles.C (2017). Opinion: Foreign aid works for us all. Devex. https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-foreign-aid-works-for-us-all-90150

If we want to answer these questions, there is a lot to unpack. We could begin by identifying the various donor objectives of development aid, such as diplomatic and commercial intentions, or security- and humanitarian-driven motives. However, a crucial note to start with is that development cooperation is not merely supply-driven, and recipient

countries are not a powerless object of development aid. On the contrary, recipient countries’ influence over the delivery of aid should not be underestimated.

As soon as a donor country wants to provide development aid for another country, the recipient government begins a process of intensive aid policy bargaining with the donor agency. Due to the fact that both donor and recipient are dependent on each other for successful aid delivery, such bargaining usually ends with a compromise.

In an ideal world, this compromise would be upheld by both parties. In practice, however, that is not always the case. While recipient governments are not always able or willing to uphold their commitments, the same can be said for donor governments. Their ODA-budget may dry up due to a financial crisis, or domestic political priorities change, thereby

putting an unexpected end to aid delivery. For an example of such a commitment issue, we look back to Ethiopia, where 45% of girls in the Amhara-region are married before the age of 18.7

It probably does not come as a surprise that many international donors have sought to address this issue. One of them is DFID, which for five years funded Yegna: an Ethiopian girlband aiming to raise awareness around child marriage, gender-based violence and sexual abuse. The programme was successful, according to the evaluations, and received praise for its emphasis on local ownership. Until a U.K. paper called them a “blood boiling waste of taxpayers’ money'' in 2015.

Following a subsequent drop in public support among the British public, DFID suspended its aid delivery to Yegna in 2016. This example -albeit very brief and arguably lacking in nuance- adds an additional layer to the picture painted above. We have already seen that both donor and recipient governments influence the delivery of aid. Now we know that public opinion has an impact, too. Or, to put it more precisely, public opinion in the donor country. In the development literature, this is also referred to as the “broken feedback loop”. The underlying idea goes as follows: the donor government is often democratically elected, which gives its constituencies a direct say in how, and if, the donor government shapes its development aid. At the same time, however, the public in the recipient country cannot directly influence that same donor government?

In addition to the above, the Yegna-example presents another finding. Something that all of us already inherently know, but that is too important to not explicitly state. Public opinion is influenced by the media, which makes public support for development cooperation equally impressionable. Sometimes disastrously so. If you’re looking for an example, look no further than the Oxfam Haiti-scandal of 2010.

So, what does all this mean? Not just for Ethiopia, but for all recipient and donor governments alike? While academic literature provides ways to deal with “aid policy bargaining”, “commitment problems” and the “broken feedback loop”, we miss concrete conceptualisation and consideration of public opinion in the development aid and aid delivery debate. Sure, we may discuss it when a scandal has erupted, or when a new government is elected. But do we - as the international development community - have an on-going, strategic plan for pro-actively gaining public support? Do we know how to win public support for aid delivery that works for both recipient and donor governments? That may help relieve commitment problems amongst donors? And do we know how public opinion - not just in donor countries, but also in recipient countries - can help shape aid delivery for the better? If the answer to those questions is “no” or “well, uhm...”, isn’t it time we got to it?