How to make foreign aid more effective

Thyolo, Malawi - In all the blizzard of ideological attacks on foreign aid, by critics such as Dambisa Moyo who oppose any form of aid to Africa, people often lose sight of a more urgent and practical question: how to make aid more effective.

Foreign aid won't disappear, no matter how much Ms. Moyo campaigns against it. So the real issue is how to improve it, to make more helpful to the people who truly need it.

I came up against this question in the hills of southern Malawi, one of the poorest places on earth. As I wrote in a story last weekend , a Canadian-funded water project in the Thyolo district is helping to save lives by providing clean water to thousands of people who were previously falling prey to cholera because their water source was a dirty stream.

But while the Canadian project is saving lives, it's not as effective as it should be. More lives could be saved if it was working better.

It's always valuable to take a close look at an aid project in the years after it's finished. In the past, I've found some real boondoggles in China and Russia, where a number of Canadian aid projects were badly conceived and poorly executed, wasting millions of dollars.

In the Thyolo district of Malawi, the picture is more mixed. Yes, the project is hugely beneficial to many people, and they are grateful for it. Yet for its $13-million price tag, the project is not as effective as it could be. A better-designed project would have helped thousands more people.

The exact numbers depend on which official you are talking to, but everyone agrees that hundreds of new water taps are not working. When the bulk of the project was finished in late 2007, an estimated 75 to 85 per cent of the new water taps were working. Today, less than two years later, anywhere from 35 to 65 per cent of the taps are functioning, depending on which official you talk to.

There are several reasons for these failures. Some water pipes were destroyed in floods. Some were choked with mud as a result of deforestation on the hillsides - the farmers were so poor that they were cutting down trees even in a protected forest reserve. Some taps had stopped working because of a lack of maintenance by volunteer committees, which often have trouble collecting water fees from the impoverished local farmers. And some pipes are not getting enough maintenance because of the high vacancy rate in the district government, plagued by deaths and illnesses as a result of the AIDS pandemic.

George Roter, co-founder of the highly respected aid agency Engineers Without Borders, took a close look at the CIDA water project in Thyolo last month. He believes the CIDA headquarters in Gatineau, Que., is too disconnected from its workers in the field. The CIDA officials in Malawi knew that the water project was having problems, but they lacked the flexibility to solve the problems because they had to wait for slow decisions at their head office in far-away Gatineau. "There's just not enough decision-making on the ground," Mr. Roter told me.

A different viewpoint is offered by Gary Holm, a senior manager at Cowater International Inc., the Ottawa-based company that supervised the Malawi water project. He says the project should have included more training of the villagers to help them maintain and manage the water pipes and taps for at least two years after the completion of the project.

"What we learned was that the best time for the intensive training would be once the schemes were operational, when most of the maintenance problems would occur," he said.

"CIDA was able to provide funds to extend the project for a one-year mentoring phase, but we know now that two years would have been preferable."

There are plenty of lessons to be drawn from the Malawi water project. But will those lessons be learned? Already CIDA has a new set of marching orders from the Harper government in Ottawa, and as a result it is shifting resources from Africa to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The new list of priority countries is causing turmoil and confusion in CIDA's operations around the world. The constant shifts in priority will make it hard for CIDA to focus on any one country or region. And the necessary improvements might never be made.