2014 - Riddell - Does Foreign Ais Really Work. An Updated Assessment

Does foreign aid really work?
An updated assessment
Roger C. Riddell
Roger Riddell’s 2008 book Does Foreign Aid Really Work? was the first attempt in
more than 20 years to survey all the evidence around whether aid actually
works. In this new Devpolicy Discussion Paper Roger revisits the evidence and
the question itself.
Discussion Paper 33
MARCH 2014
Electronic copy
Electronic copy available
available at:
at:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2409847
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2409847
Does foreign aid really work? An updated assessment
Roger C. Riddell
Roger C. Riddell is a development and aid specialist with some

40 years’ experience including senior consulting, government,
non-government and think-tank positions. He is currently an
Associate of Oxford Policy Management (OPM) and a Principal of
The Policy Practice, in the UK.
Riddell, RC 2014 “Does foreign aid really work? An updated assessment”,

Development Policy Centre Discussion Paper 33, Crawford School of
Public Policy, The Australian National University, Canberra.
The Development Policy Centre is a think tank for aid and

development serving Australia, the region, and the global
development community. We undertake independent research
and promote practical initiatives to improve the effectiveness of
Australian aid, to support the development of Papua New Guinea
and the Pacific island region, and to contribute to better global
development policy.
The views expressed in discussion papers are those of the

authors and should not be attributed to any organisation with
which the authors might be affiliated.
For more information on the Development Policy Centre, visit

http://devpolicy.anu.edu.au
Electronic copy
Electronic copy available
available at:
at:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2409847
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2409847
Abstract
This paper draws widely from the book Does foreign aid really work?, building on that
discussion to provide an updated answer to the question based on recent evidence and
contemporary debates on aid effectiveness.
It starts with a brief discussion (Section 2) of the question: ‘does emergency aid work?’
This is important to the wider debate for two linked reasons. Firstly, the harshest critics
of development aid are all supportive of emergency aid, with a number calling for its
expansion in spite of evidence of major weaknesses and failures. Secondly, the sharp
historical distinction made between emergency and development aid is becoming
increasingly strained, as more emergency aid is being used a year or more after
emergencies strike to rebuild lives and restore livelihoods, while more development aid
is used to directly save lives.
The rest of the paper focuses exclusively on development aid. Section 3 provides a rapid
overview of the evidence of the impact of individual aid projects, including those of
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The picture is overwhelmingly positive: well
over 75% of projects meet their immediate objectives and impact has improved, even
though sustaining benefits remains a challenge and there continue to be aid failures.
Section 4 reviews the evidence of the wider and long-term impact of aid at the sectoral
and country level, including a brief discussion of academic studies on aid and growth.
Though there are still major gaps in our knowledge, the quality of the data is improving.
However, there is little firm, quantitative evidence to show the specific contribution that
aid has made to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are a
central purpose of many current donor programmes (Section 4.2). More widely, there is
plenty of evidence to suggest that aid has contributed positively to both growth and
wider development at the sector and country level, though some studies suggest aid has
had little or no impact. Overall, the contribution that aid makes to aggregate
development is lower than the public has been led to believe (Sections 4.1, 4.3. and 4.4).
Assessments of the overall impact of the aid provided by NGOs are rare, but a recent
study suggests it has been positive (Section 4.5). More attention is now given to the
issues of corruption in aid. Although there is evidence of aid funds being used for
corrupt purposes and of aid worsening corruption, on balance it remains a minor issue.
Aid has had significant successes in helping the poor affected by corruption (Section
4.6).
The second half of the paper shifts focus to the large gap between what aid has done and
what it might do. Section 5 discusses a range of inefficiencies within and across the aid
system and their costs in terms of reduced impact, including the way aid is allocated, its
growing complexity, and the volatility and unpredictability of aid flows (Section 5.1 and
5.2). These inefficiencies place in a different light the evidence of aid’s overall positive
impact. The paper looks at the different initiatives that have been mounted to begin to
i
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address these weaknesses and failures, including the 2005 Paris Declaration, and
discusses why donors have failed to honour the promises they have made to change the
ways that they give aid.
In Section 5.3, the paper argues that the most critical debate about whether aid works
concerns the assessment of whether the short-term, immediate and extensive benefits
that aid undoubtedly brings are outweighed by the direct and indirect systemic
problems that it risks creating or accentuating. As increasingly over the last decade
donors have channelled more of their aid into short-term, quick-impact projects,
assessing the wider negative systemic effects of aid has become even more important.
Some recent studies suggest that aid’s systemic problems are large and growing,
narrowing the gap between aid’s harshest critics and broader analyses of aid impact.
Against the backdrop of already too many proposals of how to make aid work better,
Section 6 lays out nine concrete proposals for doing this: deepening knowledge of local
contexts; ensuring short-term uses of aid are consistent with and supportive of long-
term development, and that all aid is more closely related to overall recipient
development goals and processes; helping build local capacities for recipients to be able
to coordinate aid better; moving from rhetoric to reality in learning lessons from aid;
using aid to help the poor in middle income countries; reducing volatility in aid at the
country level; encouraging budget support by addressing donor-country political
concerns; and rethinking ways of communicating about aid.
Section 7 concludes. It suggests that, paradoxically, aid’s impact may well have been
harmed by focussing too narrowly on trying to make short-term aid work better, and
that the main focus of attention needs to widen to assess how aid can contribute more
to a recipient’s own development goals. Additionally, donors need to help build the
capacity of developing countries and developing country scholars to enable them to play
a bigger role in helping to answer the question of whether aid works; unsettling though
their assessments may be.
ii

Contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................................................................ i
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 1
2. The place of emergency aid in the discourse about aid’s impact ........................................... 3
2.1 Humanitarian and development aid ........................................................................................... 3
2.2 Does emergency aid work? ............................................................................................................. 4
3. Does aid work? The impact of project and programme aid ...................................................... 5
3.1 Weak and not easily accessible information and databases.............................................. 5
3.2 Project aid: official aid ...................................................................................................................... 7
3.3 Technical assistance and capacity building ............................................................................. 9
3.4 NGO project aid ................................................................................................................................... 9
3.5 Programme aid .................................................................................................................................. 10
4. Does aid work? The wider, overall and long-term impact ...................................................... 12
4.1 Academic studies of the relationship between aid and growth ..................................... 12
4.2 Aid’s overall impact on reducing poverty and achieving the MDGs ............................. 14
4.3 The aggregate impact of official aid at the sectoral level .................................................. 16
4.4 The aggregate impact of official aid at the country level .................................................. 18
4.5 The overall impact of NGO aid at the country level ............................................................ 21
4.6 Aid and corruption ........................................................................................................................... 22
5. Improving the impact of aid: key problems at both the donor and recipient end of the
aid relationship ............................................................................................................................................. 23
5.1 The allocation of aid ........................................................................................................................ 24
5.2 The donor end of the aid system ................................................................................................ 26
5.3 The aid relationship: donor approaches to recipient-country development ........... 29
6. Making aid work better: some suggestions................................................................................... 39
7. Conclusions ................................................................................................................................................ 44
Bibliography................................................................................................................................................... 48

1. Introduction
Foreign aid is provided by three main types of donors: rich country governments, NGOs
and private foundations.1 But why is it given? Aid is provided in the belief – directly or
indirectly – that it will help improve the lives of those who really need it: the extremely
poor; those hit by emergencies with nowhere else to turn; and those on the margins of
survival who are at risk of falling into acute poverty and destitution. As discussed below
(Section 5.1), while the allocation of official aid is still influenced by the short-term
political, security and commercial interests of donor governments, almost all aid is
given to developing countries on the assumption that it will help those most in need;
contributing to their development in a sustainable way. Indeed, what is central to
contemporary discourse about all aid-giving is not merely that it should be effective, but
that the justification for providing aid is intimately linked to its impact.
If aid does work, aid agencies can appeal to its success to legitimise the work they do,
indeed to justify their very existence. On the other hand, if aid clearly does not work,
then – so the argument goes – there is no reason for giving it, and aid should be
withheld and (at the extreme) aid agencies should close down. It is against this
backdrop that the question: ‘does foreign aid really work?’ is considered so important. It
is the subject both of this paper and a book I published a few years ago (Riddell 2008).
After a brief discussion of the place of emergency aid in the discourse about aid’s impact
(Section 2), I will provide an overview of the evidence we have of what aid has achieved
– drawn in part from my book, but also from more recent studies and assessments of
aid’s impact – and end with a brief discussion of aid and corruption (Sections 3 and 4).
Next, I will draw attention to the main factors that have led to, created and continue to
perpetuate the still large gap between what aid has achieved and what it could
potentially achieve. I shall look briefly at the views of those who argue that whatever
good aid has done in the short-term – and aid’s most important critics readily
acknowledge it has brought many benefits – this is outweighed by the systemic harm it
has done by holding back development and reinforcing key constraints to poverty
reduction (Section 5). I will then make nine specific suggestions for improving aid’s
impact (Section 6) and draw the discussion to a close by affirming my belief that aid still
has a role to play, but suggest paradoxically, that aid might well work better if less
attention were focused on trying to answer the narrow question of whether it works
(Section 7).
This discussion raises concerns about the way in which the current discourse on aid’s
impact and effectiveness is conducted; most notably, the widely-held assumption that
1Data on total aid flows vary year by year and, with the exception of aid provided by rich country
governments, are widely known to be inaccurate. Total aid given amounts to around US$190 bn. (Please
note, all dollar amounts given in this paper are USD, unless otherwise specified.) Governments provide
the bulk of aid (nearly 80% of the total). This is called Official Development Assistance (ODA). Although

the determining factor in deciding whether aid should be given is whether it can clearly
be shown to work. It is clearly important that aid should work well and that no effort
should be spared in seeking to improve its impact. However, the complex context in
which aid operates needs to be inserted more centrally into the debate about aid, to the
extent of readjusting our expectations of what success might mean: the failure of aid to
“work”, especially in the short-term, does not provide a sufficient basis for not giving it.
Though it continues to change and evolve, the overall aid system as we know it has been
around for at least 60 years. For most of this period, discussions about aid have been
extremely polarised: those in favour of aid have been reluctant to draw attention to its
problems and inadequacies, those against aid have been reluctant to acknowledge that
it has done any good. The last 15 or so years have seen the beginnings of a change, with
some supporters of aid – even some aid agencies – admitting there are problems with
aid, some systemic and far-reaching. In my view, this is both a refreshing and major
change in the discourse about aid, even if there is still a long way to go on the journey
towards a more honest discussion of impact. In much of the work that I have done on
aid in the last 20 to 30 years, I have tried to engage as a “critical friend” of aid, and in so
doing have drawn fire from both aid’s supporters and its critics.
I will summarise my answer to the question of whether foreign aid really works by
saying that it does not work as well as it could, nor as well as it should. Against often far
too high expectations of what it might achieve, much aid has had a positive impact;
though sustaining its benefits has often proved challenging. Over time we have
accumulated a large and growing body of knowledge to help us understand how to
make aid work better. Most importantly, we have learned that aid’s potentially-
beneficial impact depends most critically on understanding the usually complex context
within which it is inserted – though many aid decisions remain insufficiently informed
by this knowledge. More recently, we have begun to understand far more about the
systemic problems that aid risks creating or perpetuating. I believe there is still an
important role for aid to play, though donors need to apply more of this knowledge, as
well as learn more about how best to address some of the more systemic challenges of
giving, receiving and using aid. Donors also need to encourage and give more space to
developing country assessments of aid’s impact.
2. The place of emergency aid in the discourse about aid’s impact
2.1 Humanitarian and development aid
Traditionally, a distinction has always been made between humanitarian aid and
development aid, the former being a response to emergencies and short-term in nature,

the latter being the contribution of aid to support longer-term development processes.
Historically, the humanitarian element has accounted for only a small share of aid –
between 5% and 10% of the total – although in the last 30 years humanitarian aid has
increased at a far faster annual rate than total official aid.2
The most prominent public debates around the question of whether aid works have
been focused almost entirely on development aid. Indeed, aid’s most vehement critics,
such as Peter Bauer in the 1970s and 1980s and Dambisa Moyo more recently, have
gone out of their way to say that their criticisms of aid are not aimed at emergency aid,
which (at least in some forms) they appear to support (even its expansion). It is the
weaknesses, failures and inappropriateness of development aid that is the sole focus of
their attention.3
There is, however, a growing problem with the sharp distinction made between
emergency (or humanitarian) aid and development aid. In recent years, on the one
hand, a growing amount of emergency aid has regularly been deployed not to save lives
and respond to the immediate aftermath of a disaster, but to help rebuild the lives and
restore the livelihoods of those affected by emergencies; and in doing so it has been
used to fund projects identical to those supported with development aid funds.4 For
instance, UK humanitarian agencies only planned to spend 50% of the public funds they
raised in the first year following the Asian Tsunami, committing themselves to spending
all the funds within a five year period on longer-term projects (Riddell 2008, pp. 332-6).
On the other hand, a growing number of “development aid” projects have been
channelled into immediate-life-saving initiatives; billions of dollars of “development
aid” is now routinely spent on immunising children against deadly killer diseases,
providing anti-retroviral drugs to keep alive those with HIV and supplying bed-nets to
reduce malaria deaths. In 2013, the United States alone committed to spending $8
billion on HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria programmes.5
2.2 Does emergency aid work?
Does emergency aid work? Surprisingly, given the high levels of support for it among
the general public (as well as among aid’s strongest critics), there is still a paucity of
robust evidence on the overall impact of emergency aid: too few evaluations with too
2 In the 30 years to 2005, in real terms, ODA increased two and half times, whereas there was a
seventeen-fold increase in humanitarian aid (Riddell 2009a).
3 For example, Bauer writes “Relief of need, especially humanitarian relief of poverty in the Third World,
should be left to non-politicized charities. They are already active in this field. They could do much more.”
(Bauer and Yamey 1982) For her part, Dambisa Moyo acknowledges that “there are obvious and
fundamental merits to emergency aid” (Moyo 2009c, p. 7). Likewise in interviews, she has voiced her
support for emergency aid. See for example, Moyo 2009 a 2009b.
4 When I was International Director of Christian Aid, our office in Burundi received emergency aid funds
for “seeds and tools” projects that had earlier been funded by development aid.
5 See ‘The United States President’s emergency plan for AIDS relief’,
<http://www.pepfar.gov/funding/index.htm>.

many of poor quality (Riddell 2008, p. 445 n 5).6 However, there is broad agreement
about some key failures and weaknesses. While lives have certainly been saved and
livelihoods rebuilt with emergency aid, major failures and weaknesses remain all too
common. A key problem is the still large gap between the emergency funds needed and
the amounts provided: in the past five years, only around 64% of total emergency needs
have been met.7 This problem is made worse because of the continuing mis-match
between the sorts of aid provided and the needs people have, in part because
systematic, overall needs assessments remain the exception: most overall responses to
emergencies are the result of aggregating the assessments made by individual agencies.
For instance, UN data for 2013 show that 57% of overall needs had been met by early
December, but only 50% of health needs, 41% of housing needs, and only a third of
water and sanitation and education needs – similar to shortfalls over the past 10 years.8
These problems are both caused and exacerbated by a lack of coordination between
agencies, which though improved, continues to be a major problem.9 Related to this,
although agencies have pledged to meet minimum standards when delivering
humanitarian aid, the evidence suggests continuing and significant gaps between agreed
standards and what is provided on the ground, due in part to the low level of relevant
skills among emergency aid workers (ALNAP 2010, p. 36).
A further problem with emergency aid (when trying to disburse it quickly in

inhospitable and difficult environments) is that the risk is heightened that it will not
reach the intended beneficiaries. Though information on corruption is difficult to find –
perhaps unsurprisingly given that such a significant proportion of aid is delivered when
law and order has broken down – some concrete examples of the misappropriation of
emergency aid in academic studies of aid have surfaced. In one instance in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), up to 85% of the aid provided failed to reach
those in need; other evidence has suggested that both humanitarian and development
aid has, inadvertently, extended and deepened corruption in societies in which it has
been provided (Riddell 2008, pp. 343-5; ALNAP 2010, p. 43; Kolstad et al. 2008).
However, major misappropriations of emergency aid funds are not only found in the
developing world. For example, a 2006 United States government report analysing the
use of public funds provided to the survivors of hurricanes Rita and Katrina in New
Orleans the previous year estimated that some 16% of funds had been lost to fraud,
amounting to up to $1.4bn (US GAO 2006).10
6 For a more recent overview of the quality of humanitarian assistance, see Clark and Darcy 2014.
7 See UN Financial Tracking Service, ‘Consolidated appeal process in 2013’. For earlier years, see Riddell
2008, pp. 318-9.
8 See UN Financial Tracking Service, ‘Consolidation and flash appeals: 2013’; and ALNAP 2010, p. 36.
9 See the most recent overall survey of the humanitarian system by the semi-official ALNAP (ALNAP 2010,
pp. 32-3).
10 Statement of Gregory D. Kutz, Managing Director Forensic Audits and Special Investigations; and John J.
Ryan, Assistant Director Forensic Audits and Special Investigations: testimony before Subcommittee on
Investigations; Committee on Homeland Security, House of Representatives.

Surprisingly, neither examples of misappropriation nor the cumulative effects of the
different weaknesses of emergency aid that significantly reduce its overall impact
appear to have made a major difference to the continued, high levels of public support
for it. When the next large-scale “television” emergency occurs, as happened when
Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines late last year, the felt-need to help and provide
aid continued to trump awareness of the past ineffectiveness of and inefficiencies in the
allocation and distribution of humanitarian aid. Generous public and official
humanitarian aid donations are raised, spurred on by the mainstream media, which
repeatedly focus on the suffering and needs of those affected (and the aid they need)
and not on stories of such aid not working. Especially when large emergencies strike,
there is little sign of any wish to engage in rigorous debate about whether emergency
aid works. How different it is when the discourse turns to development aid.
3. Does aid work? The impact of project and programme aid
3.1 Weak and not easily accessible information and databases
Development aid in most countries is still predominantly provided in the form of

discrete projects.11 In spite of a steady expansion in the numbers of projects assessed
and an increase in analytic rigour, most projects are still not evaluated and only a small
proportion (considerably less than 1%) are the focus of any in-depth evaluation. Few
official agencies and no NGOs undertake aid impact assessment in a systematic way. For
most, only a selection of projects and programmes are assessed and the choice of what
to assess is not based on selecting a representative sample of all projects implemented.
Besides the dearth and lack of commitment to evaluate aid projects and programmes,
assessments of their impact are typically hampered by a number of common problems.
These include data inadequacies (insufficient or non-existent baseline and monitoring
data); problems of attribution (not knowing what specific contribution aid inputs make
to outputs, and especially to wider outcomes); and problems of the counterfactual (not
knowing what would have happened to those assisted if the aid inputs had not been
provided).
For example, a 2008 review of the quality of evaluations commissioned by the Swedish
International Development Agency (Sida) tried to answer the question: “Do Sida
evaluations provide valid and reliable information on efficiency, effectiveness, impact,
relevance and sustainability?” The answer was that “fewer than half … contain an
adequate analysis of impact (and) … between 30% and 80% of Sida’s evaluations failed
to deliver plausible statements for each of the five criteria.” (Forss et al. 2008, p. 72) As
11Over the past 10 to 15 years, programme aid provided through the “new aid modalities” –
predominantly sectoral aid, often provided as Sector-Wide Approaches (SWAps) and sector and budget
support – have risen to prominence, but more recently general budget support (GBS), in particular, has
declined as an overall share of total official aid. Recent estimates suggest that to 2010, total programme
aid accounted for less than 50% of total ODA. See Maxwell 2011.

Sida is grouped among the most professional of official aid agencies, these sorts of
weaknesses are likely to be present in others, as well as among non-official agencies.
Recent evidence confirms this. For instance, the major finding of a 2013 review of the
development impact of the World Health Organisation (WHO) from 2007 to 2010 was
that there was “not enough information to draw conclusions about the WHO’s
development effectiveness”(Freeman 2013, p. viii).12 Likewise, a 2013 study that looked
at the evaluation reports of six of the largest Norwegian NGOs raised questions about
the methodologies used and concluded that the evaluations did not say much that was
reliable about impact; in large measure because of incomplete baseline and monitoring
data.13
A further problem is that it is often challenging to track down the aid impact
information that does exist. Notwithstanding improvements in the transparency of most
donor agencies in recent years,14 it still remains difficult to first locate and then to
access data and information on aid impact that official aid agencies have, especially
assessments of aid that are particularly critical.15 Even those agencies considered
progressive have been criticised for their defensive attitude to evaluation.16 Beyond the
official aid sector, only a handful of NGOs (almost certainly the largest) give prominence
to evaluations on their websites, and exceptionally few place any critical evaluations in
the public domain.
12 The Review judged that 56% of reported findings on the effectiveness of evaluation systems and
processes were unsatisfactory and 56% of monitoring systems (p. ix).
13 “Our analysis suggests that the reports are weak in terms of the methodologies used: … the methods of
data collection and analysis are at times neither described nor are the strengths and weaknesses of the
approach selected discussed against possible alternatives. Analysis of causal relationships is usually
weak. In terms of coverage, while the analysis of results invariably focuses on relevance and
effectiveness; impact, sustainability and efficiency are not covered as often. The analysis of
implementation focuses mostly on planning, coordination and networks; coverage of financial
management, governance and leadership is far weaker.” (Forss et al. 2013, p. xv).
14 For example, the OECD/DAC has a database of all evaluations of the major official agencies (OECD/DAC
DAC Evaluation Resource Centre). However, the list remains incomplete. For example, in 2012 an
evaluation was made of the Research Portfolio of the International Institute for Educational Planning
(IIEP) of the United Nations Educational and Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), but by early
2014 the (somewhat critical) evaluation was still not available on either the DAC or UNESCO websites.
15 The 2013 annual report on aid transparency records that 46 of the 146 largest official aid agencies
(31%) were still failing to publish reports on agency performance and impact appraisals (Publish What
you Fund 2013, p. 24).
16 For example, a 2009 study of the quality of evaluations undertaken by the Independent Aid Advisory
Committee on Development Impact (IACDI) concluded that in the UK’s Department of International
Development (DFID) – widely considered to be among the most professional of aid agencies – “DFID
senior managers have tended to take an overly defensive attitude to evaluations and to any critical
comments made in reports. Indeed, DFID’s sensitivity to criticism seems to have led them, on occasions,
to try, with some success, to “manage” the conclusions of evaluations” (Riddell 2009a, p. 12). Since that
report was published, the UK Government has set up an Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI),
which in December 2013 published a report on a DFID programme in South Africa that it judged a failure.
DFID has now closed down this programme, see <http://icai.independent.gov.uk/2013/12/06/dfids-
trade-development-work-southern-africa/>. However, in recent years, it has become difficult to obtain
access to DFID aid projects and programmes and almost impossible to access historical data.

The upshot is that we are still far from having reliable, consistent and robust aid project
information to answer the question of whether aid works. This helps, in part, to explain
why we are still asking the question. Against this backdrop, we can consider what the
evidence tells us about the impact of development aid.
3.2 Project aid: official aid
In total, tens of thousands of project completion (and far fewer) evaluation reports of
the results of aid projects have been written that record the results achieved. Though
not all agencies aggregate the results of these studies and place them in the public
domain, the larger agencies do, including multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank,
the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank and the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), as well as bilateral agencies, such as the United
Kingdom and Australia.17 In the mid-2000s I spent many months trawling through these
data and found that they revealed a consistent and extremely positive picture of aid
“working”, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of the aid inputs provided had
achieved their intended outputs.18 The most common way of judging success is still
probably whether aid projects achieve their immediate objectives. Most donors record
such “success” rates in excess of 75% for their projects. Even allowing for an upward
bias in these results (many if not most are based on internal assessments) the results
indicate that most aid projects “work”.
At one level this is an important and positive finding. Each year millions of children are
immunised and receive basic health care or go to school as a direct result of aid used to
fund schools and school places; aid does indeed build clinics, supply drugs and
distribute vaccines; it successfully trains teachers and nurses and pays their salaries; it
does fund the successful distribution of anti-retroviral drugs and bed-nets to millions of
those who need them. Tens of millions of people have been provided with clean water
and sanitation; hundreds of thousands of classrooms and roads have been built.19 There
are some truly amazing individual success stories, such as the global eradication of
smallpox, which aid played a crucial part in achieving.20
17 However, in recent years, it has become difficult to obtain access to any more detailed information on
DFID aid projects and programmes beyond two-page briefs and access to large amounts of detailed
historical data on line is near impossible.
18 For more details on project impact, see Riddell 2008, especially chapters 11 and 16.
19 In 2010, the Australian Government aid agency’s (AusAID) programme provided 27,000 new water and
sanitation connections to poor households in Indonesia; in Vietnam, an additional 2.5 million people had
access to “hygienic” water and 756,000 households have access to latrines; in East Timor, Australian
Government support to the GAVI Alliance has contributed to the immunisation of over 257 million
children and the prevention of 5.4 million deaths; in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, AusAID’s Pacific
Malaria Initiative has effectively complemented Global Fund support and helped increase the coverage of
malaria control interventions, such as insecticide-treated bed nets. The number of malaria cases was
halved from 199 to 77 per 100,000 in Solomon Islands between 2003 and 2009, and fell by 80% in
Vanuatu in the same period (AusAID (various years)).
20 For aid successes in the health sector, see Levine 2007. For the most recent evidence across different
sectors, see Ramalingam 2013, and Barder 2013.

Furthermore, both historical and more recent data indicate that the reported rate of
success of projects across the leading agencies has continued to improve over time.
There has been a steady rise in the proportion of aid projects that have succeeded in
meeting their immediate objectives, even though data from some agencies, including the
World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, indicate that in the period from the mid-
1970s to the mid-1980s overall success rates for particular groups of projects fell.21
In recent years these largely ‘end-of-project’ reports have been complemented both by
more in-depth evaluations of discrete development interventions, in part boosted by the
popularity of the randomised control trial (RCT), and other in-depth approaches. The
evidence of impact of most of these studies is also predominantly positive, though no
overall scoring seems yet to have been undertaken.22 Indeed – somewhat surprisingly to
many who have heralded in-depth evaluations as the answer to aid’s most radical critics
– even proponents of the use of RCTs have cautioned against using their approaches to
assess whether aid works or not.23
There have also been failures. Overall donor data suggest that between 10% and 25% of
projects have failed to meet their immediate objectives, or have had extremely limited
success or the data on the projects have been so poor that it has not been possible to
form a judgement. Importantly, some types of aid have been less successful than others.
For example, transport projects have been less successful, as have agricultural aid
projects implemented in particular regions or countries, notably within sub-Saharan
Africa.24
Additionally, immediate project success (the most common focus of such studies) does
not necessarily mean permanent success. The evidence shows that the numbers of
positive project assessments tend to drop markedly when projects are examined over
time: there are clearly problems in sustaining success. The good news is that most
evidence suggests that a rising proportion of projects are achieving positive scores in
relation to their sustainability. The bad news is that the numbers of projects that are not
sustainable still remain stubbornly high: mid-2000 data suggested that when looked at
over time, project success rates could fall below 60% (Riddell 2008, p. 186).
3.3 Technical assistance and capacity building
21 See Riddell 2008, p. 180ff for further details.

22 For example, Banerjee 2007.
23 For instance, Esther Duflo (Parker 2011). See also Angus Deaton, who says that, “In ideal
circumstances, randomised evaluations of projects are useful for obtaining a convincing estimate of the
average effects of a programme or project. However, the price for this success is a focus that is too narrow
to tell us “what works” in development…” (Ramalingam 2011, p. 2)
24 For a summary of recent evidence on aid to agriculture, see Chimhowu 2013.

A major component of aid is provided as “technical assistance” (TA). This is aid in the
form of trained personnel deploying their skills to achieve specific tasks and,
increasingly, sharing their skills by training recipient-country nationals to replace them,
as well as activities aimed at helping to strengthen institutions and enhance local
capacities. Assessments of the impact of these forms of assistance suggest two main
outcomes.25 Firstly and positively, most TA has succeeded in filling knowledge gaps and
in training local personnel and imparting knowledge, though usually the costs have
been high.26 Secondly, successive evaluations suggest that although there have been
exceptions, aid has generally not been at all successful in its efforts to build capacities,
encourage the retention of high level skills and strengthen public institutions in a
sustainable manner.27 Among others, the World Bank has been honest enough to
acknowledge that its efforts in this area, especially in Africa, have been extremely
disappointing (World Bank 2005).
3.4 NGO project aid
Do aid projects implemented by NGOs and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) work?
This is a difficult question to answer, not only because of the methodological, data and
attribution problems already highlighted, but because of the variety of NGO projects in
terms of area of activity, scale and size, as well as the sheer numbers: tens of thousands
of different NGOs and CSOs implementing hundreds of thousands of different projects
from the minute (worth less than $30) to the massive (in excess of $10 m). Additionally,
assessment is made more challenging as most NGOs view the aid they give in terms of
the tangible outputs they seek to deliver – health services and schooling, rural
development, income generation, and micro-credit projects and programmes – as only
comprising part of a wider and more long-term purpose of seeking to empower
beneficiaries to be better able to shape their own lives. In such instances, focusing solely
on whether these more immediate goals have been met only provides a partial answer
to the more complex and, in their terms, more important hierarchy of questions that
they would ask when determining whether their aid has “worked”.28
Assessments of the impact of NGO aid projects have been conducted since the late
1970s, but for many years they were dominated by studies commissioned by official
donors and the questions tended to focus on more short-term and concrete outputs.29
By the end of the 1990s they had commissioned more than 20 major studies and the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had produced a
25 For more details of this discussion and the conclusions drawn, see Riddell 2008, chapter 12.
26 The annual cost of paying and housing a foreign TA worker, transporting them to the country in which
they work and educating their children is commonly in excess of $250,000 a year, and can be far higher.
27 For a synthesis of recent evidence for the education sector, see Riddell A 2012. One often-cited
exception in Africa has been the successful training of a cadre of African economists. For a recent
discussion of this, see Adams 2013 pp. 15-16.
28 For an early discussion of these methodological issues, see Roche 1999.
29 The first ones by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were undertaken as
far back as the 1970s. See for instance, Barclay et al. 1979.

synthesis of the results (Riddell et al. 1997). There is now a rapidly growing and far
larger data bank of studies, evaluations and assessments of NGO project impact than
there was even five to 10 years ago. This has been fuelled both by the acceptance by
most medium to large NGOs and CSOs of the need to report on the impact of their
activities, and a willingness to attempt to experiment and develop new methods and
approaches to do so.30 However, access remains a significant problem: exceptionally
few NGOs display prominently substantial evidence of the impact of their work on their
websites.31
Although there are still no global, national (to my knowledge) nor donor databases of
studies on the impact of NGO aid projects, the current evidence is broadly consistent
with the early donor-based surveys of impact. These have continued to report fairly
high levels of project success, not too dissimilar to official aid projects: most are
successful, some reporting major successes,32 though the studies suggest a broader
spread of successful projects than for official aid projects – from a low of 60% to highs
of 90% (Riddell 2008, p. 269 and ff). For example, a recent study of the impact of NGO
projects in east Africa suggested success rates in the range of 73-85%, based largely on
qualitative assessments because most projects examined lacked the data needed for
accurate result measurement (Ternstrom Consulting AB 2011, p. xvii). In-depth
evaluations of NGO projects are now regularly carried out, with most confirming the
positive results of the less rigorous studies.33
As with official aid projects sustainability is also a problem also for NGOs. Indeed, most
NGO service delivery projects for the poorest recipients would appear only to be
sustainable with continued external financial support. However, NGO aid projects have
been successful in other ways, for example, in introducing new technologies or bringing
in and adapting approaches to new communities and piloting approaches that have
been scaled up and replicated elsewhere.34
3.5 Programme aid
Beyond the world of discrete projects, significant amounts of aid are provided as
“programme aid” through a number of different approaches. For instance, aid can be
channelled directly to different sectors of the economy under “Sector-Wide Approaches”
(SWAps), often, but not always, involving the pooling together of funds from different
donors to support the overall activities of different line ministries (health, education,
30 See, for instance, Gohl et al. 2010.

31 Exceptions include Oxfam (UK) and Care (US). For Concern Universal, see <http://www.concern-
universal.org/home>. One of the first NGOs to publish evaluations of the impact of its work – more than
30 years ago – was BRAC in Bangladesh, see <http://research.brac.net/>.
32 For examples see Riddell 2008, pp. 272-4.
33 One example would be a recent assessment of an antipoverty programme run by BRAC in Bangladesh,
which reported a 25% improvement in well-being. See Islam and Ziliak 2010.
34 See Riddell 2008, pp. 276-8, and more recently, for example, Wateraid’s stated approach to delivering
services, at <http://www.wateraid.org/uk/what-we-do/our-approach/delivering-services>.
10

housing, etc.). Alternatively, aid can be given directly to a central government – usually
to finance ministries – to fund overall recurrent or capital expenditure and sometimes
as “general budget support” (GBS), or to boost overall spending levels of line ministries,
sometimes through sectoral budget support.
How successful has this use of aid been? Does it work any better – or worse – than
project aid? Theoretically, it has long been argued that programme aid is a more cost-
effective way of giving aid, providing the line ministry or central government
institutions are able to manage the funds efficiently.35 However, studies of programme
aid have not generally examined whether aid outputs are better achieved with
programme rather than project aid; rather, they have tended to examine whether such
aid has been provided effectively and efficiently.
Most assessments of sectoral support, including SWAps, have focussed on the

performance of aid given by particular donors or groups of donors, rather than its
overall impact. Those that have attempted an overall assessment have suggested that
these “new aid modalities” have usually worked “reasonably effectively”, especially after
some initial teething problems, resulting in both a significant extension of activities
funded, as well as greater recipient abilities to manage funds and more complex
programmes.36 However, the evidence also suggests that significant problems remain
and thus, that the gap between what programme aid could achieve and what happens in
practice is still quite large.37 The expectation that transaction costs would fall as more
aid is provided as programme aid does not seem to have been met.38 Assessments of
budget support as an aid modality have also been mixed. One early, large, cross-country
study, though reluctant to make an overall judgement, reported more successes than
failures (Lister 2006); other studies have been more positive.39 A common finding
across many studies is that the success of both sectoral aid initiatives and budget
support has tended to be influenced quite critically by what is happening in the wider
economy and by donor attitudes, which have sometimes been assessed as too cautious
(Booth and Fritz 2008, pp. 5-10).
In spite of a commitment by donors to increase programme aid (after initially rising in

popularity in the early 2000s), recent years have witnessed a fall in the share of aid
channelled to budget support.40 Whether programme aid as currently given is more
effective than project aid remains a question that many believe has been answered (it
generally is), though the evidence to support this has yet to be provided conclusively.
35 See, for instance, Jelovac and Vandeninden 2008.

36 For further discussion of these issues see Riddell 2008, chapter 12.
37 See, for instance, Williamson and Dom 2010 and McNee 2012.
38 See Riddell 2008, pp. 197-8 and, more recently, Vandeninden 2012.
39 These are discussed and referenced in Section 4.2.
40 See Maxwell 2011 and UN 2011.
11

4. Does aid work? The wider, overall and long-term impact
Some people appear quite happy to accept the argument that if most aid projects and
programmes work, then the overall contribution aid makes must also be positive. Yet
this has never satisfied aid’s critics. What is more, because there is so little general
awareness that “most aid projects work”, media coverage of the failure of individual aid
projects still has a powerful effect on general attitudes to aid, fuelling the false
perception that “if this project does not work then most aid projects do not work
either”.
However, the more substantial problem with examining the immediate impact of
discrete aid projects and programmes, even if (as the evidence quite forcefully suggests)
most aid works, is that it does not answer the question about impact that a growing
number of people – most notably those involved in the professional world of
development – believe to be the most crucial: what difference does aid make to the lives,
well-being and living standards of those being assisted? What people are most
interested in are outcomes, which overwhelmingly eclipses concerns with whether the
aid inputs provided result in the expected outputs achieved. It is these sorts of questions
for which answers are sought: are recipients clearly better off as a consequence of aid;
and does aid help those living in extreme poverty to emerge from it – not just in the
short-term, but permanently? In aggregate, does aid make a significant contribution to
reducing the numbers of people in developing countries living in extreme poverty; and
does it make a significant contribution to a country’s economic growth and
development? Does aid work in this sense? What does the evidence tell us?
There are two broad ways that the answers to these questions have been sought: by
examining the contribution that aid has made to overall economic growth over time;
and by conducting studies and assessments of aid at the sectoral and country level.
Interest in these issues, in turn, has been boosted by research findings that have looked
both at aid projects and at the overall impact of aid and concluded that there has been a
micro-macro paradox – that aid worked at the project level but that it did not seem to at
the country level.41
4.1 Academic studies of the relationship between aid and growth
There is a long tradition of academic studies that have analysed the aggregate
relationship between official aid and economic growth that continues to this day, fuelled
in part by aid funds that donors have been willing to provide in the hope of finding
conclusive evidence to show that aid makes a significant difference to recipient-country
growth paths. These have produced quite different assessments: some suggest that aid
has had little to no effect on growth; others that aid has had a positive effect, especially
41 See Mosley 1986, pp. 22-27 and Mosley 1987.
12

in countries that have pursued a particular set of policies; and a final group of studies
has concluded that either the positive or negative contribution remains unproven.
At first sight this mix of conclusions might suggest that these studies have shed very
little light on the issue, but this would be incorrect to assume because most studies –
especially those that have isolated those types of aid most likely to contribute to growth
and those that have encompassed sufficiently long time horizons – have suggested that
aid has made a positive contribution to growth.42 This positive result has been broadly
confirmed by a number of recent studies. However, these studies have also suggested
that, though overwhelmingly positive, the impact of aid on growth has been
comparatively small: a sustained contribution of aid of about 10% of recipient-country
gross domestic product (GDP) raises GDP levels by about 1%.43 One recent study
concluded that while the effect of aid on growth has been marginal, and sometimes
negative in the short-term (five years or less), over the longer-term (30 years) it has –
with almost no exceptions – been larger (than the 1%) and positive (Arndt et al. 2013b).
While the results and conclusions of these studies are clearly important, the robustness
of the methods used in order to draw the (different) conclusions about the causal
relationship between aid and aggregate growth has often been disputed. Growth
theoreticians acknowledge, even when using highly sophisticated models, that a high
proportion of growth still remains unexplained, suggesting that the comparatively small
influence that aid might have on growth – positive or negative – could easily be eclipsed
by other (larger) influences (Rodrik et al. 2002). What is more, as it has not been
uncommon for some large donors to give more aid when countries experience both
short-term as well as sustained economic problems, an association between rising aid
levels and stagnant, or even falling growth rates, in no way “proves” that aid impedes or
holds back growth.
A further problem with most of the studies that have been conducted is that the
relationship between aid and growth that is commonly analysed has examined the
interaction between Official Development Assistance (ODA) and economic growth; this
is a crude (and often very inaccurate) proxy for what types and quantities of aid need to
be measured. For instance, a significant component of official assistance – especially in
conflict and post-conflict countries and those vulnerable to natural disasters – is
provided as humanitarian and not development aid.44 Likewise, a significant share of
42 Studies to the year 2008 are discussed in Riddell 2008. For a more recent review, see Temple 2010.
Clearly, as Temple points out, counting the numbers of studies tells us very little if, as is certainly the case
here, the quality (and hence reliability) of some studies is in doubt. However, as Temple goes on to argue,
there may be a counter bias at work as journals may be more interested in publishing studies that suggest
aid doesn’t work (Temple 2010, pp. 4506-7).
43 See, for example, Clemens et al. 2011 and Arndt et al. 2013a.
44 The 2004 CGD study, updated in 2011 (Clemens et al. 2011), which did distinguish between different
types of aid, found that aid that was likely to stimulate growth in the short-term (thus excluding
emergency aid and aid to health and education) had a positive causal relationship with economic growth;
at least two to three times greater than studies using overall ODA. The overall conclusions of this study
are strikingly similar to those of Arndt et al. (2013a). For as Clemens et al. write, “These results do not in
13

total ODA (probably over 20%) is spent on goods and services that never reach the
recipient-country, and a rising share of aid is provided by NGOs and other non-official
donors.45
It is partly for these reasons that a growing number of academic voices (joined recently
by some aid agencies) have suggested that less attention should be given to studies that
examine cross-country relationships between aid and growth, and especially those that
try to draw firm conclusions about the contribution that aid makes to changes in
aggregate growth.46
4.2 Aid’s overall impact on reducing poverty and achieving the MDGs
There is plenty of evidence of aid’s contribution to reducing poverty at the project level.
Here we are concerned with the overall contribution aid makes to poverty reduction.
What does the evidence tell us?
Compared with aid and economic growth analyses, far fewer studies have been
conducted that examine the aggregate relationship across countries between aid and
poverty reduction, either to argue that aid does effectively contribute to poverty
reduction or that it does not. This is surprising, not least because in its 25 year review of
the official aid system from 1960 to 1985, the Development Assistance Committee
(DAC) of the OECD stated boldly that “the most troubling shortcoming of development
aid has been its limited measurable contribution to the reduction – as distinguished
from the relief – of extreme poverty, especially in the rural areas.” (OECD 1985, p. 18)
In contrast, three recent cross-country studies, reflecting the earlier (and still rather
thin) literature, suggest that aid does “work”. The first concluded that inflows of aid per
any way suggest that aid always ‘works’ or that large amounts of aid can be the central pillar of any given
country's growth strategy. The results do suggest that the effect of aid on growth is positive on average
across all countries, but is limited and quite modest in comparison with other determinants of growth,
and is negative in some countries” (Clemens et al. 2011, p. 2).
45 In many countries, the OECD figures for ODA differ sharply from nationally-generated data on aid
levels, and both suffer from serious gaps and inaccuracies. For instance, according to Ugandan national
statistics, total ODA disbursements in the year 2005 amounted to $775mn, whereas the OECD records
disbursements of $1,198mn, more than 50% higher. The difference is particularly marked for the US,
which records as “aid to Uganda” funds paid to US consultants and businesses undertaking work on and
for Uganda. For instance, according to the OECD/DAC database, the United States was the single largest
donor to Uganda in 2005, providing $229 m in ODA. But according to Uganda, ODA from the US amounted
to only $72mn in 2005 (MoFPED 2005, p. 22; MoFPED 2006, pp. 22-3; and OECD QWIDS).
46 “On balance, it seems that the macro research has attracted attention out of proportion to its value.
Even the optimists caution against taking the results too literally and recognize how limited is the insight
they can give policymakers” (Roodman 2007, p. 21).
The former World Bank chief economist, Nicholas Stern, has publicly acknowledged that cross-country
regressions of the impact of aid are now “running into sharply diminishing returns”, as “one cannot really
disentangle with any confidence the direction of causality: aid to growth or poverty/decline to aid”
(Financial Times, London, 2 July, 2005, p. 10). The former head of evaluation at the World Bank, likewise
commented that the “limits of cross-country regressions have become clear: they do not throw much light
on the reality of aid” (Picciotto 2006). However, this view is not universally shared. For a more positive
assessment, see the recent review of the aid-growth literature in JRW Temple 2010, pp. 4446-8.
14

capita of $25 will, over time, reduce poverty by about 6% (Arndt et al. 2011); the second
showed that aid inflows result in poverty reduction, even in cases where aid does not
seem to contribute to growth (Alvi and Senbeta 2012, pp. 955-76); and the third
suggested that aid had helped to enhance the income of all, but that those in middle and
higher income groups benefitted more than the poorest (McGillivray et al. 2011).
Additionally, a recent study of the long-term impact of Swedish aid on poverty in three
Asian countries concluded that it had been positive in Laos and Vietnam, but
inconclusive in relation to Sri Lanka (McGillivray et al. 2012). A recent study of Tanzania
concluded that the recent, sharp fall in poverty was due in part to the contribution made
by aid funds (Lawson and Kipokoa et al. 2013, p. xii and pp. 83-95).
The aid-poverty relationship is particularly important in contemporary aid discourse

because of the number of large donors that have linked their recent and current aid-
giving to help achieve the MDGs, the first of which is to halve the proportion of people
whose income is less than $1 a day; with most of the other MDGs addressing different
manifestations of poverty. Has aid “worked” in helping to deliver the MDGs?
A number of early studies discussing this issue were critical of any attempt to draw a
clear causal link between aid inputs and the achievement of the MDGs because aid was
only one variable among many that influence development outcomes; not least to
counter an anticipated argument from aid’s strongest critics that if the MDG targets are
not achieved this would prove that aid does not work.47 Beside the general issue of
complexity, analysing the impact of aid on the MDGs is challenging because of a series of
more specific problems. One cluster relates to a lack of conceptual clarity about the
relationship between the MDGs as a whole and the individual goals, targets and
indicators. Another relates to how few attempts have been made to assess with
accuracy how much aid would be needed for the poverty target to be met or for the
other MDG targets to be met, either in aggregate or at the country level.48 One reason for
this is that some MDGs do not have (any) quantitative targets against which to assess
progress. By far the greatest problem lies in the fact that for many countries and many
indicators there is no baseline data (1990 is the baseline year) or reliable data against
which to monitor progress. In March 2007, the Director of the United Nations Statistics
Division acknowledged the seriousness of these problems, noting that only 17 out of
163 developing countries had trend data to assess progress for less than half the MDG
indicators. All else was effectively based on guess-work (Cheung 2007).
Numerous reports have been written commenting on progress towards the MDGs and
there is broad agreement that the core poverty goal – halving the proportion of those
living in poverty – will be met. Yet what is by no means clear is to what extent this will
47See, for example, Clemens et al. 2004.

48Recent costing studies have focused on the additional aid that would be needed to achieve the MDGs –
between $40 and $70 billion – but many other factors were involved, and it was never seriously
suggested that all that was needed was to provide this aid and poverty would automatically be reduced (
Clemens et al. 2004).
15

be due to the (increased) aid provided. It is also unclear what impact aid has had on
those MDGs towards which greater progress has been made, or the influence of aid on
those where progress has been far slower. What we do know is that perhaps the most
important reason why the (overall) poverty target will be met is due to changes that
have occurred in China, where aid inflows as a proportion of GDP have been exceedingly
small.
Excluding China, has aid helped to achieve the MDGs and further reduce poverty? The
short answer is by now a familiar refrain: based on the best available evidence, we do
not have sufficient data and information with which to draw any firm assessment. This
was the conclusion of one of the most rigorous, recent surveys undertaken, which drew
on all the other major studies conducted.49 As the authors felt there was insufficient
evidence to enable them to say whether the MDGs had contributed to poverty reduction,
it is not surprising that they were even more cautious in the conclusions they drew
about the role of aid in helping to achieve the MDGs; suggesting merely that “aid may
have had some role in improving outcomes” (p. 24). While their cross-country analyses
showed that poverty rates fell faster in the last 10 years than in earlier periods – a time
when aid levels were rising – they warned against necessarily attributing this fall to the
increased aid provided (Kenny and Sumner 2011, pp. 11-14). Slightly more upbeat,
another synthesis of studies looking at the impact of aid provided in the framework of
the MDGs suggested that, at best, aid has only made a minimal contribution to
development outcomes.50
4.3 The aggregate impact of official aid at the sectoral level
Besides the more academic studies on aid and growth, and aid and poverty, what does
the wider evidence tell us about the aggregate contribution that aid makes to
development outcomes?
Firm evidence of the contribution that programme aid makes to development outcomes
is not easy to come by, in large measure because of the paucity of rigorous studies
undertaken that examine the relationship between programme aid inputs and wider
outcomes: they focus mostly on the mechanics of aid delivery. The authors of in-depth
studies of the workings of the new aid modalities have usually been reluctant to draw
firm conclusions on how the aid provided within these (new) frameworks has
contributed to development outcomes, notwithstanding pressures put on them to do so.
49 It concluded that there was insufficient data to say whether the MDGs have contributed to poverty
reduction and if so by how much (Kenny and Sumner 2011).
50 “… given the increase in aid which flowed disproportionately towards social sectors, and was of a scale
commensurate with MDG ‘costing studies’ which attempted to calculate how much it would cost to meet
the Goals, the evidence of only somewhat more rapid progress is a concern. On the positive side, aid may
well have played a role. On the cautionary side, and as suggested by the more cautious of costing studies
in the beginning, that role was partial, and had to involve changes in developing country policies as well.”
(Kenny and Sumner 2011, p. 24)
16

This is because of the difficulties of singling out the effects of aid when a complex range
of other factors clearly influence outcomes. For example, the synthesis report of the
substantial cross-country evaluation of budget support concluded that even if the data
were better, it would still have been exceedingly difficult to trace the causal links
between the provision of aid in the form of GBS and changes in the poverty status of
poor people, especially their income levels (Lister 2006).51 This general conclusion was
confirmed in a more recent review of budget support (Jorritsma 2012, pp. 169-78);
though (as mentioned above) an in-depth study of Tanzania was more firm in its
conclusions that budget support did have a positive effect (Lawson et al. 2013, pp. 83-
95).
General reviews of sectoral aid have pointed to positive outcomes, especially in relation
to an expansion in access to services (health, education, agricultural extension, credit),
which it is then often simply assumed will lead to improvements in well-being. Where
sectoral studies have delved a little deeper, the assessments have tended to be more
critical. For example, a recent review of the education sector highlighted the effects that
educational aid had on school enrolments, but raised questions both about the quality of
that education and the rigour with which educational quality is assessed (Riddell 2012).
Likewise, health sector studies have suggested that to the mid-2000s aggregate aid to
the sector did not seem to have a significant effect on mortality rates (Wilson 2011, pp.
2032-43).
Looking particularly at the education and health sectors, the 2011 Global Monitoring
Report made some overarching comments on the outcomes of aid interventions (World
Bank 2011, p. 71). It not only judged that the recent unprecedented increases in aid had
not led to the expected improvement in outcomes, but concluded that the quality of
outcomes remained “a grave concern” (World Bank 2011, pp. 71-3). A particular
problem that was identified was the failure of human development spending to reach
the poor. This conclusion is similar to that drawn by some of the more rigorous
assessments of micro-finance programmes, a number of which have highlighted the
difficulties of reaching the poorest (Riddell 2008, pp. 274-6).
Most studies of the impact of micro-finance projects suggest a mix of outcomes, some
successful others not, and some harmful (encouraging greater indebtedness), with the
overall context profoundly influencing the likely outcome. In most cases, any additional
income generated is not likely to be sufficient to enable the poor to “escape” from
poverty (Copestake and Williams 2011). A recent review of the literature concludes that
there is very little evidence that micro-credit interventions result in long-term increases
51Ofrelevance to this discussion are some of the very broad comments made about GBS and poverty
reduction. In particular, the study raises questions about the appropriateness of donors pushing
recipients hard (or harder than they would wish to be pushed) to adopt policies with such a strong focus
on addressing immediate and short-term poverty problems. In some places (pp. 86-9), the report
suggests that the aid provided might have been better spent helping to address the underlying structural
problems causing and perpetuating poverty.
17

in either consumption of income, or in their ability to transform the lives of the poor
(Banerjee 2013, pp. 508-12).
4.4 The aggregate impact of official aid at the country level
Compared with programme aid assessments, considerably more attention has been
focused on trying to assess the overall contribution of aid at the country level. For more
than 30 years studies have been conducted to examine and try to assess the overall
contribution that official aid has made to economic growth, development and poverty
reduction across a range of recipient countries. What do these tell us about whether aid
works?
For more than two decades donors have also conducted or commissioned studies to
assess the impact of their aid interventions at the country-wide level. A rough tally
suggests that between 1994 and 2005 at least 300 were produced. However, these
studies were not commissioned to answer the overarching question of whether the aid
provided in its entirety “worked”, but rather to examine the different projects and
programmes and to draw lessons, especially about aid delivery issues. To this day,
individual bilateral donors, in particular, are still unable to produce robust and
unambiguous evidence to document the direct contribution their own aid is making to
aggregate growth and poverty reduction, still less of all aid provided. Indeed, a common
thread running through the most rigorous of these country evaluations has been the
reluctance of evaluators to be drawn into making firm conclusions about the direct link
between the aid provided and wider outcomes. Two – by now, all too familiar – reasons
are most commonly cited: the lack of information and hard data upon which to track the
narrow impact of the aid provided; and the knowledge that a range of influences, other
than the aid provided, was also contributing to outcomes at the sectoral or national
level.52
Surprisingly, exceptionally few studies of the overall impact of all aid to particular
countries have been undertaken jointly or commissioned by either all donors or the
leading donors to a particular country.53 It was only in 2004 that the idea of undertaking
a first pilot study to assess the development effectiveness of total ODA at the country
level was formally discussed by the OECD/DAC’s network on development evaluation,
as a prelude to more systemic assessments. But not even the proposed pilot study has
commenced, in part because of an acknowledgement of the formidable methodological
problems involved in being able to draw robust conclusions when all the work had been
done (Bigsten et al. 2006).
A number of studies have been undertaken by individual donors whose own aid
dominates total official aid flows. Of particular relevance to Australian readers of this
52For a recent example of this reluctance, in this case Dutch aid, see Spitz et al. 2013, pp. 20-6.
53In 1986, the World Bank commissioned a global independent assessment of all (official) aid. This
contained seven country studies, discussed later in this paper (Cassen and Associates 1986 and 1994).
18

paper are the studies of Australian aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG). A major study of the
impact of Australian aid to PNG from 1975 to 2000 was published in 2003 (Fallon et al.
2003). Although in terms of per capita income growth PNG would be judged a
development failure, according to the authors this did not mean that Australian aid
should be judged as having failed: tangible gains in terms of life expectancy, literacy
rates and infant mortality have been achieved, though the study was clear that aid had
only been one factor among many influencing these beneficial outcomes. In some
instances, aid’s contribution was judged more to have been one of helping to arrest
further deterioration than adding to tangible improvements. The report unequivocally
argued that many of the early discrete aid projects were ineffective. Indeed, aid’s wider
impact was judged merely to have added to the burdens of already weak administrative
structures. In the view of the authors, it was only from the 1990s onwards that Australia
began to realise that the key to PNG’s long-term development lay in helping to
strengthen institutions and build capacity, as well as to encourage greater public debate
and scrutiny of development performance. The study suggested that it would take a
long time for the impact of this form of assistance to be felt, and that assessing the
contribution that aid will make will be difficult because of the complex influence of
factors external to the aid relationship.
Ten years later, a major independent review deliberately refrained from making an
overall judgement on the impact of all Australian aid to PNG in the subsequent decade,
though it did comment on the perceived lack of impact, while pointing to some
successes in what it termed “a difficult environment” (Kwa et al. 2010, pp. 1-2).
More widely, a number of aid studies at the country level have been carried out, often by
researchers and independent scholars. An important, early batch of seven was produced
as background studies for the mid-1980s, donor-funded, International Task Force
(Cassen 1986). One characteristic of all of these studies is that they each have analysed
different aspects of aid – some growth, some poverty, a few both. More recent studies
have looked at the contribution aid makes to capacity building and institutional
strengthening, with most focusing on different problems perceived as reducing the
overall impact and effectiveness of aid. This “pick-and-mix” way of approaching the
assessment of aid at the country level indicates that there never has been, nor is there
today, an overall agreed method of assessing the impact of aid to answer the question of
whether – at the country level – it has worked. The different “in-depth” studies at best
provide some (key) pointers that help, but do not provide an overall and definitive
answer to the question.
As indicated, many of these country studies examine the different ways in which aid has
had a positive impact at the sectoral level, with aid boosting resources to expand the
ability of governments to increase recurrent and capital expenditure. In relation to the
wider impact of aid on poverty and growth, the early country studies are quite
circumspect, and they provide differing assessments. For instance, the study of
Bangladesh suggests that the impact of aid on poverty was disappointing; the study of
19

Colombia, suggests that aid contributed to poverty reduction for long periods of time;
and the study of India, that the evidence was mixed. Did aid contribute to growth? The
studies again come to different conclusions, both between countries and over time,
though the methods used also vary, making it even more difficult to undertake a
rigorous comparison between different countries. Thus in Colombia, Uganda and
Nicaragua (at particular times) it did; in Malawi, the combination of financial aid, TA
and institution building contributed to growth in the 1970s; the case study of Kenya
concluded that it was not possible to say (Cassen and Associates 2008, various
chapters).
Subsequent studies have made similar sorts of points. For instance, a 1990 study of
Tanzania commented that it is “hard to argue that aid has had a very positive effect on
economic growth”, adding that growth mainly depended on factors other than aid, but
then concluded that the overall impact of the resource transfers was positive (Adam et
al. 1994, p. 162). Trends in poverty and economic growth have been largely downwards
in Zambia, even in times of rising aid inflows, while a more recent study of Mozambique
suggests that over time aid has had a positive effect on growth or poverty reduction
(Arndt, et al. 2006).
Most recent country studies of aid have not attempted to answer the “big questions”
about aid’s overall impact, although a recent discussion of Botswana unequivocally
deemed aid to have been a success (Maipose 2009, pp. 108-30). Rather, they have
examined some of the sorts of problems that are now commonly agreed to reduce aid’s
impact and effectiveness, such as the volatility and unpredictability of aid and the
administration of aid, sometimes using a sectoral focus, such as health, to draw wider
conclusions about what is deemed to be impeding aid’s greater impact.54 What this
suggests is that more recent studies have tended to shift their focus even further away
from trying to assess whether aid in general “works”, to try to identify those factors
impeding its greater impact.
In terms of overall aid impact, the conclusions emerging from these country case studies
are a mixed bag: in most countries aid frequently has had a positive overall impact in
some time periods, but in some countries it has had a negative impact. In short, aid at
the country level has sometimes “worked” and sometimes it has not, in some countries
and at different periods of time. Recent research suggests that although aid projects
tend to work better in countries with a supportive policy and institutional environment,
project success seems to vary more within than between countries (Denizer et al. 2013,
pp. 288-302).
What is the success rate? It is difficult to say. In part this is because even for the
independent reviews and assessments, the judgements on which aspect of aid’s impact
is highlighted seem to be influenced, partially, by the overall perspectives on aid of
54 See, for example, Mwega 2009, Chanboreth and Hach 2008, and Aminjanov et al. 2009.
20

those undertaking the assessments and the specific questions raised by those
commissioning such studies. In no country has the record of aid been unproblematic:
those undertaking these studies who seem to have been more critical of aid, have
tended to emphasise the problems; those more favourably inclined, have tended to
emphasise aid’s strengths and successes. Importantly, no rigorous study has ever
suggested that aid has never, ever worked in any aid-recipient-country. What is more,
aid’s strongest critics have never published rigorous long-term assessments of aid at the
country level.
A further point of interest is that it was also only in 2008 that an aid-recipient-country,
in this instance Uganda, first commissioned a comprehensive evaluation of its overall
development efforts that focused explicitly on the contribution that aid had played in
helping to achieve its poverty-reducing targets. Against the backdrop of a significant
overall decline in poverty in the country, the study concluded that Uganda’s
development partners had contributed to the significant fall in the numbers of people
living in poverty, though acknowledged that it was difficult to quantify the specific
contribution that aid funds had made (Matheson et al. 2008, pp. 22-33).
4.5 The overall impact of NGO aid at the country level
In recent years greater attention has been focused on the role of NGOs in aid-giving and
thus, inevitably, the “overarching impact” question is now being asked of aid provided
by NGOs: what is its overall impact at the country level? Although what are often called
“country evaluations” of the impact of NGO activities have been undertaken and
published for some 20 years, these have almost entirely consisted of the summation of
the evidence of NGO projects. In contrast to official aid, formal evaluations and overall
assessments of CSOs at the country level have not yet been undertaken.55 As a result,
little is known about the wider and longer-term contribution that aid channelled to and
through CSOs makes to development and poverty reduction. Some analysts have
suggested that the overall impact of NGO activities to global poverty reduction has been
small and unproven, others that that is too harsh a judgement.56 To begin to try to
address this knowledge gap, the Norwegian aid agency (Norad) set-up a Civil Society
Panel in 2012 to undertake a pilot study to assess the overall impact of CSO/NGO
activities in four countries: Malawi, Nepal, Ethiopia and Vietnam – all of which were
funded by public and private aid money (Abuom et al. 2012).57
55 The narrowness of NGO impact assessments is not widely nor sufficiently understood. This is in part
because the titles of many of the larger evaluations suggest that overall assessments are increasingly of
NGO interventions, providing the reader with information on impact well beyond the level of discrete
projects. For example, the widely-referenced 1999 Danish evaluation, which was commissioned in order
to examine the impact of Danish NGOs in developing countries, argued that it was not possible to
undertake an overall assessment because of a “lack of any common understanding or framework around
which we could engage with different actors on these issues” (Oakley 1999, p. 17).
56 For a more in-depth discussion, see Riddell 2008, chapter 17.
57 For a summary, see RC Riddell 2013, pp. 371-96.
21

The panel’s assessment is unequivocal: in all four countries, aid channelled to and
through CSOs/NGOs works. This aid makes a significant contribution to development in
a number of different ways, the most important being through the combined
contribution that different CSOs make to the national provision of education and health
services. Even in inhospitable contexts, where states impose severe limitations on them,
CSOs have played an important role in poverty reduction. This occurred not only
directly, by working with poor and marginalised groups, but also indirectly, by helping
to empower them and strengthen their voice, as well as through advocacy, lobbying and
“campaigning” activities (some of which were judged as having succeeded, even if it is
difficult to assess the contribution made by NGO activities to the beneficial outcomes
achieved). Interestingly, the study argued that the wider and longer-term impact of
CSOs on development and poverty reduction could be far greater if agencies approached
their work more strategically, instead of focusing narrowly, as most do, on merely
trying to ensure that their discrete projects “work”.
The panel’s report argues that there are few general insights on impact and
development approaches that either can or ought to be applied and transferred from
one setting to another. Its work led it to confirm the view of the wider literature: that
context matters greatly. But it adds that history and culture matter too, and suggests
that, perhaps even more than for discrete projects, the wider development impact of
civil society is crucially dependent on external factors and influences: what has
happened in one country at one point in time is not necessarily a good guide to what
will happen in another country, or even in the same country in the years ahead.
4.6 Aid and corruption
Overall, the very act of giving and receiving aid is said to extend and deepen corruption
in recipient countries and, of more direct relevance to aid effectiveness debates, aid is
said not to work because so much aid is misappropriated and never reaches those that
it is intended to help. What does the evidence tell us?
Unsurprisingly perhaps, there is a general lack of concrete and specific evidence on the
misappropriation of funds (though some specific cases have been brought to light), and
few overall studies examine the issue rigorously and in depth, in part because donors
have only recently begun to examine the issue in any systematic fashion (Kolstad et al.
2008, pp. 62-3). However, there is no firm evidence to enable one to conclude that aid in
general contributes to corruption or, perhaps as important, no evidence to suggest that
when aid has been withdrawn from countries, this results in less corruption (Devarajan
2009, pp. 4460-2). Indeed, one recent cross-country study found a strong relationship
between countries that received high levels of aid and lower levels of overall corruption,
another found that donors tend over time to give aid to the same set of countries
regardless of whether they are assessed as being more or less corrupt (Kangoye 2011,
and Easterly and Pfutze 2008, p. 14).
22

This discussion, in turn, needs to be placed in its proper, wider context. Withholding aid
and encouraging private sector development is of course no answer to solving, and
probably not even reducing, the extensive problems of corruption that poor people face
on a daily basis. Petty corruption exists within small-scale business, and evidence
continues to be produced of the involvement of larger corporations in incidents of grand
corruption in both poor and rich countries (Cockcroft 2012). In particular, there is no
evidence to suggest that aid fuels corruption more than private sector engagement in
poor countries; indeed some studies suggest the opposite (Ndikumana 2013 and
Cockcroft 2012).
Importantly, too, as our understanding of the significance of corruption to poor people

has grown, more aid has been channelled into projects and programmes aimed both at
highlighting the systemic problems of corruption and helping to strengthen poor people
in their fight against it at the local level. Some have been remarkably successful. For
example, a recent evaluation in south India reported benefits of $11 per person in terms
of accrued benefits for every $1 invested in anti-corruption programmes (Clark 2013, p.
5).
5. Improving the impact of aid: key problems at both the donor and
recipient end of the aid relationship
One conclusion we can draw from this overview of the evidence of aid’s impact is that
the data and information we have today to enable us to judge whether aid works remain
incomplete, with notable gaps and uncertainties in relation to the wider and long-term
contribution that both official and non-official aid makes to the achievement of key
development outcomes. The paucity and poor quality of information has certainly
provided the impetus for donors in general, and aid agencies in particular (and
especially), to try to improve the coverage and enrich the quality of data on aid’s impact.
There is, however, an issue of far greater concern to donors and agencies than
developing new ways to improve the data and information on what aid does and has
done, and this is the attention they give to trying to improve aid’s impact – to enhance
its impact – to make aid “work better”. This, in turn, suggests that it is not only aid’s
detractors who are critical of aid’s past and current impact. In seeking to understand
better the problems that impede aid’s greater impact, donors themselves – at least
implicitly – seem willing to acknowledge that aid is not working as well as it could.
Might this gap between what aid could do and what it actually does do be substantially
narrowed? Could aid work substantially better? Aid’s supporters and those providing
aid argue that it can, and what is needed is to understand the major problems that
reduce aid’s impact and address them. As we have seen, there is evidence to show that
this has happened.
23

In sharp contrast, aid’s strongest critics maintain that the most substantial problems
impeding the effectiveness of aid are not minor ones that can be addressed by
marginally improving the way aid is given or by “learning lessons” from past projects
and programmes and feeding these into the next round of aid interventions. Rather,
most argue that aid’s main problems are largely systemic in nature, some rooted in
politics, which cannot be solved by making marginal changes to the way aid is given or
used. For aid’s harshest critics, these problems are intractable and create outcomes of
such magnitude that the “harm” done outweighs and eclipses any evidence we might
have of aid “working”. An early proponent of these sorts of arguments was Peter Bauer,
for many years professor of development economics at the London School of
Economics.58 Here is the more recent view, on similar lines, of an even more respected
development economist, Angus Deaton (2013, pp. 305-6, 312) in his book entitled The
great escape, published late last year:
Aid and aid-funded projects have undoubtedly done much good: the roads, dams
and clinics exist and would not have existed otherwise. But the negative forces
are always present: even in good environments, aid compromises institutions; it
contaminates local politics; it undermines democracy. In spite of the direct
effects of aid that are often positive, the record of aid shows no evidence of any
overall beneficial effects … Negative unintended consequences are pretty much
guaranteed when we try. (emphasis in original)
These views form one part of a larger group of arguments made about the systemic
problems with aid. There are, broadly, four sorts of ways – it has been argued – that the
impact of humanitarian and development aid has been held back or undermined: firstly,
by the way aid is allocated; secondly, by the manner in which aid is given; thirdly, by the
aid relationship within recipient countries; and, fourthly, by the wider context within
which the aid relationship exists and operates. I will discuss each in turn, though space
does not permit more than a rapid look at these arguments and the evidence we have to
support or refute them.
5.1 The allocation of aid
The largest (OECD/DAC) donors are responsible for over 80% of all official aid, of which
some 70% is provided as bilateral aid. Historically, the decisions that the largest donor-
countries make about how their aid is allocated has always been influenced by their
own national and short-term political interests. For some donors, commercial interests,
for example through aid-tying, have also played an important role in determining aid
flows. These factors influence which country will receive aid, the amounts provided and
the period for which aid is given. They are important because, historically, donors have
regularly switched the countries to which they provide aid as well as varied (annually)
the amounts of aid they provide, influencing in turn the predictability of official aid
58See, for example, Bauer 1971. Bauer was made a peer by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his
views on aid and development.
24

flows. For instance, in the year 2000, between them, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan
received just over 1% of total ODA. Five years later, in 2005, these three countries
accounted for 23% of all ODA.59 By 2005, Iraq and Afghanistan were among the top 15
largest recipients for 17 of the largest 19 bilateral aid donors; 10 years earlier neither of
these countries was in the top 15 recipients of any major donor-country.
What effect does the prevailing allocation process have on the ability of aid to “work”
effectively in terms of its humanitarian and development impact? This is a difficult
question to answer unequivocally because there is still no agreement on what the
“ideal” or best allocation of aid would look like. For instance, should aid be allocated
solely on the basis of need? If so, should aid go to the poorest countries or to the
countries where most of the poorest live? This is a critical question, as less than a
quarter of the world’s poorest people now live in low income countries, compared with
over 90% 15-20 years ago – largely because countries with sizeable numbers of very
poor people, such as India and Nigeria, are now classified as middle income countries
(Sumner 2013). Or should aid allocations be determined, in part, on an assessment of
the likelihood of aid being used effectively, as well as on the criterion of need? The
literature suggests widespread support for such a view, though precisely what factors
should be used to determine the potential for aid to be deployed well remains an area of
deep-seated disagreement.60
In spite of these uncertainties, we do know that the overall impact of aid allocations
being shaped and influenced by non-developmental factors, and their knock-on effects
in terms of increasing aid’s volatility and unpredictability, is to reduce sharply the
effectiveness of aid as the following examples clearly illustrate.
 A recent study of European Union (EU) aid judged that if poverty were the
criterion for the allocation of aid, then 70% of aid should be reallocated, the
result of which would be equivalent to a net gain of almost €8 bn in aid funds, or
one-quarter of all EU programmable aid currently provided (Bigsten et al. 2011,
p. 12 and 139).
 In 2003/04, less than half of all ODA went to the 65 poorest countries (Riddell
2008, p. 104). If aid allocations were determined by development/poverty
criteria, then studies have suggested that aid would have the potential to almost
double the current numbers of people lifted out of poverty as a result of aid
(Collier and Dollar 2002, pp. 1475-1500).61
59 Figures from OECD/DAC QWIDS, at

<http://stats.oecd.org/qwids/#?x=2&y=6&f=3:51,4:1,1:2,5:3,7:1&q=3:51+4:1+1:2+5:3+7:1+2:1,2,82,132+6:20
00,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010,2011,2012>.
60 Influential in this debate was a study published and promoted by the World Bank, see Collier and Dollar
1999.
61 Collier and Dollar argue that the re-allocation of aid would have the same impact on poverty as trebling
prevailing aid volumes and leaving allocations as they were.
25

 The volatility and unpredictability of aid flows reduces the ability of recipients to
incorporate aid funds into spending plans and budgets, and this can severely
reduce the efficiency of aid funds. (Recipients often do not know how much a
donor is going to provide even over the subsequent six to nine months.)
According to a recent review, the effects of the volatility and unpredictability of
aid “are large and significant” (Pycroft and Martins 2009, p. 33). Analyses have
suggested that the combined effect of the volatility and lack of predictability of
aid inflows result in an effective reduction in the total value of foreign aid of
between 8 and 20%, and that the benefits of reducing volatility alone would be
equivalent to about a 15% rise in all programmable aid (Kharas 2008 and
Bigsten et al. 2011, p. 10).
 As much as 50% of all ODA (including TA) is tied in some form. Aid-tying
increases the cost of aid by between 15-30% (Riddell 2008, pp. 99-102).62
It is, however, one thing to point out how the current system of providing aid severely
reduces its development impact, quite another to change the system. Besides there still
being no consensus as to what the best allocation system is or should be (Temple 2010,
pp. 4478-9), the reality is that official aid is and always has been a system of voluntary
giving. Each government decides for itself how the balance between national self-
interest, recipient need, the importance of trying to ensure aid has an impact and the
pledges it has made at international conferences should interact to shape the way
donors allocate and give aid, responding, as they deem appropriate, to the views and
lobbying efforts of different national interest-groups. The overall allocation of all aid is
the (unplanned and unpredictable) outcome of the cumulative voluntary decisions
made by all individual donors.
Inefficiencies in terms of impact and effectiveness are thus “built into” the current way
that aid is allocated, and will continue to contribute to the wide gap between how aid
works for development and how it might work, unless or until the present system of
aid-giving based on the individual decisions of donors were ever to change.
5.2 The donor end of the aid system
The way aid is allocated is but the first step in the wider process of official aid-giving
that has developed over the past 60 years. Although it is widely referred to as an aid-
giving “system,” the way official aid is given has never been formally determined nor
deliberately designed. Rather, it has evolved as a result of a succession of discrete and
piece-meal decisions made over time by governments and official donor agencies based
on how they think their aid should best be given, though in recent decades these
62 For a more recent assessment, see Clay et al. 2008 and Bigsten et al. 2011, pp. 75-85.
26

decisions have been increasingly informed by discussions with and knowledge of how
other donors act.
Official aid-giving is thus characterised by an ever-increasing number of donors

overseeing a growing number of discrete projects, creating an ever-more complex web
of transactions and parallel management systems, many replicating and duplicating
each other. Almost 10 years ago, in 2005, the main donors signed the Paris Declaration
on Aid Effectiveness: ownership, harmonisation, alignment, results and mutual
accountability. In so doing, they not only committed themselves to working more closely
together in a number of specific areas to change the ways they gave aid – in itself a giant
step forward – but in signing the declaration they were also implicitly acknowledging
that the way they were currently giving aid was characterised by a succession of
practices and processes that were already highly inefficient and becoming increasingly
unworkable (OECD 2005). They were, in effect, saying that they were in part
responsible for aid not working as well as it might. Although, the declaration has been
criticised by some as not going far enough, seen in the historical context of official aid-
giving, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this.
The main trends in donor growth, fragmentation and proliferation are illustrated by the
following examples:63
 Twenty years ago there were fewer than 100 official aid donors; today there are
over 70 bilateral and more than 230 multilateral aid agencies. In the mid-1960s,
the 22 largest (OECD/DAC) donors each provided aid to fewer than 40 countries;
by the late 2000s the figure had risen to over 120 countries each.
 The number of donors each recipient-country has to interact with has also
increased dramatically, rising from an average of 12 major donors in the 1960s
to 33 by 2005.
 When sectoral aid or budget support is provided, it is not uncommon for 10

different donors to be around the table actively involved in ongoing discussions
on spending priorities and participating in regular monitoring activities.
 In 1996, 17,000 separate donor-led aid activities (mostly aid projects) were
recorded; 10 years later this had risen fivefold to 81,000, their average size
falling from over $2.5mn to $1.5mn. By that time, Ghana had 44 different donors,
and Tanzania had over 700 different aid projects. Some 10 years ago, Tanzania
had to host more than 540 donor missions, and in 2005, 752 donor missions
were reported to have visited Vietnam. It is not only senior government officials
who have to allocate large chunks of time to the administration of aid:
administrative overload stretches right down to the project level. For example in
63These figures are drawn from the following sources: Riddell 2008, chapter 20; Carlsson et al. 2009;
Bigsten et al. 2011; Sagasti et al. 2005; IDA2007; and Lawson 2013.
27

some districts of Tanzania, health workers have had to spend 20 days a quarter –
almost 25% of their working time – writing reports for different donor agencies
(Deutscher and Fyson 2008, p. 16).
 Less than half of all aid “received” passes through recipient government financial
systems. Most is packaged up into discrete projects that are overseen and often
managed by donors, even when project implementation units are located within
sectoral ministries.
 In recent years, donors have been creating a succession of new mechanisms and
funds to channel aid to recipient countries to help address specific needs – to
increase food production, to expand primary school enrolments, to extend
immunisation programmes that address HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, and to
address environmental and climate change problems. These often run in parallel
with, and are at best usually only loosely linked to, other mainstream sectoral aid
programmes. The allocation of monies from these funds is controlled by donors,
the reverse of what was agreed in the Paris Declaration, and often skews the
budget and sectoral priorities of recipient countries.
A number of studies have tried to quantify the overall costs of these inefficiencies. For
instance, a report for the EU, which accounts for about 65% of all ODA, suggests that the
inefficiencies in terms of donor proliferation and the fragmentation of aid add between
€2 billion and €5 billion to the costs of providing aid, adding to the evidence of the
current inefficiencies of official aid (Carlsson et al. 2009, pp. v-vii; and Bigsten et al.
2011, p. 11). If the costs to recipient countries are added, the overall figures would be
far higher.
Although, in general, in signing the Paris Declaration donors pledged to work more
closely together and to bring their activities more in line with the plans and
programmes of developing countries in order to make their aid more effective, they
went further than this. More concretely, they committed themselves to: reducing the
numbers of donors each recipient had to work with; minimising overlap in their
programmes and a duplication of their parallel aid efforts; harmonising their different
aid initiatives more closely; providing more aid through recipient government channels;
aligning their aid more closely to recipient priorities; working together to help and
strengthen recipient government institutions (in part so that developing countries
rather than donors would lead in the coordination of all aid efforts); and they agreed on
targets to achieve specific goals. In all, the Paris Declaration comprised 13 indicators to
monitor performance and 12 quantitative targets were set and agreed to, though many
were not particularly ambitious. Donors pledged to meet these targets by the year 2010,
and to increase significantly the total amounts of aid they provide to meet estimated
funding gaps.
28

What happened? Although some donors have made progress in some areas,64 in
aggregate they failed to meet all but one of the targets set (OECD 2011, p. 19)65 while
only half the increases in aid they said they would give was forthcoming.66 The gap
between rhetoric and reality remained large, continuing to reduce the potential impact
of the aid provided.
5.3 The aid relationship: donor approaches to recipient-country development
Whatever the weaknesses and inefficiencies at the donor end, whether aid works or not
ultimately depends upon what happens at the “recipient end” of the aid relationship. In
giving aid, all donors, be they official agencies or NGOs, face a fundamental dilemma: aid
is likely to work best in countries, communities and contexts where it is needed least,
while the risks of its working least effectively tend to be highest in those countries that
need it most.
If the over-riding objective is to make as much aid as possible work as well as it can,
then aid would be given to countries characterised by good governance; with
democratically elected, accountable governments and strong parliamentary systems
capable of scrutinising public finances and officials; a free press and a vibrant civil
society; where the rights of minorities are protected and the rule of law is respected;
where there is a vibrant private sector, paying minimum wages and championing core
labour and employment rights; and where strong regulatory agencies are able
effectively to address the market abuses of the rich and powerful. If “making aid work”
were the sole basis for giving it, then aid would best be channelled to the sorts of
countries and governments, like Norway, the United States, Japan or Australia, which
share most of these attributes – those that clearly are not in need of development aid.
In contrast, those countries and communities most in need of aid will be those most
likely to be deficient in many, if not most, of the core characteristics that are likely to be
quite crucial in ensuring the delivery of effective aid. The implication of working
through this dilemma ought to be central to any discussion of aid effectiveness, though
this is seldom the case. If aid is to be channelled predominantly to those who need it,
then a degree of “failure” must be expected.67
How have donors sought to resolve this dilemma? One approach has been to attach
conditions to the aid given, in the general manner of “we will give you aid if you will do
64 For some examples, see Kharas 2007, p. 20ff.

65 The target that was met was the fourth, “To strengthen capacity by co-ordinated support” (percent of
technical cooperation implemented through co-ordinated programmes consistent with national
development strategies). The target figure was 50%, and by the year 2010 the actual figure reached was
57%. However, when the target was set in 2005 the figure was already 49%. It reached 60% in 2007,
falling back to 57% three years later. See p. 62.
66 In 2005, donors agreed to increase ODA by $50 billion between 2004 and 2010, but only $25 billion
was provided. See World Bank 2013, pp. 69-70.

67 “… if aid is sometimes a failure, it is a necessary failure. Donors must ‘fail again, fail better’ ” (Temple
2010, p. 4454).
29

such-and-such”. As is well known, some conditions have been overtly political and have
had little bearing on the development impact of aid. Indeed, a common criticism has
been that too great a focus has been placed on political conditionality – “we will give
you aid if you support our foreign policy”. This perspective was important during the
cold war but has returned to aid-giving in today’s post 9/11 world, raising concerns that
less attention will be paid to ensuring that aid provided is used for its intended
development purposes.68 The problem here is that if the political support of the
recipient is so important as to completely dominate the relationship, then the issue of
whether aid “works” in a development sense would become very much a secondary
consideration. In practice, however, this rarely happens. Far more common in recent
years has been for the donor’s political interests increasingly to influence the decisions
of who to give aid to, the amount given and the broad form in which it is given (military
and/or development aid). It has then largely been up to the donor development aid
agency to try to ensure that the aid is as effective as possible from a development
viewpoint.69
In practice, the aid-giving community (both official donors and NGOs) have always
sought to ensure that the aid provided is used for the purpose intended, first by
ensuring that aid expenditure is accounted for in an open and transparent manner.
Official donors, especially, have often gone further than merely monitoring the
development impact of their aid, and have attached additional conditions to their aid-
giving. Most controversially, donors have required that recipients pursue development
that they believe should be pursued, rather than enabling recipients to develop and
implement their own (home-grown) policies. The record tends to suggest that this type
of conditionality has been relatively ineffective: even if recipients have agreed to such
conditions in the short-term, they have usually been less rigorous in deploying policies
that they have seen as damaging over time. In general, because donors have continued
to provide aid even when such conditions have been breached, recipients have
frequently paid lip-service to them. Some independent studies have suggested that such
recipient-country approaches may well have been correct, as a number of key donor
68 The immediate impact and the influence of 9/11 on development aid is discussed in Woods 2005, pp.
395-409.
69 That said; it is not always easy to distinguish clearly between military aid and development aid.
According to the OECD, what is critical to the classification of different sorts of aid is the purpose for
which it is given: development aid is defined, inter alia, as financial flows that are “administered with the
promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries as their main objective”
(OECD b).
In recent (especially post 9/11) years, this distinction has been particularly strained as a result of
growing amounts of “development” and humanitarian aid being distributed by the military, which,
according to the military, is provided for development purposes and to help “keep the peace”. A 2007
study reported that one in every five dollars that the US spent on development assistance was being
handled by the Department of Defense (DoD), and the Pentagon’s share of US development spending had
increased three-fold in the previous five years to a total of some $5.5 billion annually (Patrick and Brown
2007, p. 1).
30

conditions have turned out not to have been beneficial to the recipient’s growth and
development.70
Beyond the general issue of conditionality, another seemingly attractive way of trying to
“make aid work” better in difficult environments would be for donors to seek to ensure
that it is they, not the recipients, who control and manage the aid. This is easiest to
achieve if aid is packaged into discrete projects that are run or closely monitored by the
donor agencies: in other words by not giving aid to others, but in effect by holding on to
it for as long as possible.
One donor approach to making aid “work better” has been to channel aid into initiatives
that link aid inputs to simple, clear and tangible outcomes that materially and directly
improve the lives of the maximum number of poor people as quickly as possible –
distributing bed-nets and anti-retroviral drugs, immunising children and at risk
populations etc. – and by spreading initiatives that work in one place to others through
rapid replication. This approach involves donors providing aid in discrete projects or
providing sectoral aid to those activities whose benefits can be immediately seen, such
as expanding school places, immunisation programmes and access to clean water, and
giving high priority to learning what works and using that knowledge to develop
manuals of “how aid works in this sector” and applying them to new countries and new
communities to spread aid’s successes to even more poor people.71
As will be discussed in more detail below, this is the sort of approach that donors have
been adopting increasingly in recent years, in part spurred on by the way they have
sought to interpret their commitment to help “deliver” the MDGs: provide more aid
targeted directly at poor people, which will quickly produce tangible results.
The problem with this type of approach to aid-giving and aid effectiveness is that it
ignores a number of fundamental features of our (evolving) understanding of
sustainable development, and risks not merely holding back, but possibly undermining,
the very development process that aid is supposed to assist. In brief, current thinking
suggests the following:
 That development and poverty reduction is best understood not as a simple set
of linear processes whose future path is relatively easy to foresee and quite
predictable, but, in part at least, as including non-linear patterns and processes,
some unpredictable, with the overall process emerging from the complex
interaction of cultural, economic, social, institutional and political forces
internally and by an array of external factors.
70The issue of conditionality is discussed in more detail in Riddell 2008, chapter 14, pp. 231-51.
71The use of “best practice” manuals has risen in part as a result of donor agencies, in particular, reducing
their cadre of technical specialists in an effort to manage expanding aid budgets while attempting to trim
their overhead costs, sometimes replacing specialists with generalist personnel.
31

 That for development processes to be durable they need to be nationally-owned
and thus built on approaches resulting from internal discourse to produce
domestically-rooted policies and processes rather than external or imposed
ones.
 That additionally, as the outcome of the interplay of market-driven development

and prevailing political processes are likely to result in widening inequalities, if
faster poverty reduction is the goal, then explicit policies will be needed to
narrow inequalities,72 as will the judicious application of interventions involving
the engagement and participation of representatives of poor and more
marginalised groups, and the introduction of policies that directly target those at
risk of being excluded from broad-brush national strategies.
From this perspective, making aid work would require a way of thinking about aid and
impact that is quite different from the more protective and sanitised ones just outlined.
It suggests a deliberate move away from an approach that is dominated by
conditionality and which focuses on quick-wins and narrow concerns of how aid might
work better as an end in itself. In its place, a more all-encompassing approach would be
promoted that would seek first to understand the context and then provide aid in a
manner that would not only help to address short-term problems, but would also aim to
facilitate, support, strengthen and help to accelerate a domestically-owned and
domestically-driven, sustainable development process. Especially in countries
characterised by widespread and growing inequalities, this would often also suggest
using aid to encourage debate and help to facilitate a shift in the balance of internal
forces that sustain and worsen such inequalities. In other words aid would have an
explicit medium to long-term transformational role to play, complementing its role in
addressing more immediate problems, and encompassing an explicit political
dimension in addition to its more technical approach.73
This all sounds quite abstract. Fortunately, and quite significantly, the main donors
began to develop just such ways of addressing some of these issues in the studies that
led to the Paris Declaration commitments, developing ideas for working more closely
together and with aid recipients. They include the following:
72 The importance of narrowing inequalities has been confirmed in a recent study, though quite how to
do this remains a challenge (Yoshida et al. 2014).
73 In this context, one scholar refers to the need to “disrupt” the prevailing “political equilibrium”,
assessed to be a key factor constraining the development of domestically-driven policies that will more
effectively address the problems of poverty and underdevelopment (Devarajan 2013). The following
provides a similar sort of viewpoint: “To be effective in helping to advance development, aid actors need
to operate from a genuine understanding of the political realities of the local context, engage with a
diverse array of relevant actors both inside and outside the government and insert aid strategically and
subtly as a facilitating element in local processes of change” (Carothers and de Gramont 2013, p. 11).
32

 Using aid to help deepen country ownership of development policies
 Using aid to help to support and strengthen institutions
 Aligning aid more closely to national priorities
 Channelling aid to and through local institutions and agencies, and
 Using aid to help to strengthen the country’s ability to oversee, manage and
coordinate incoming aid and donor activities.
In relation to the key issue of inequality, the Paris Declaration is unequivocal in stating
that “addressing inequalities of income and opportunity within countries and between
states is essential to global progress” (Para 3). Aid could help in a number of different
and complementary ways, from assisting countries to address problems of widening
inequalities at a general level, to helping more directly to facilitate and support
opportunities for poorer people from minorities and marginalised groups to increase
their engagement and participation in decisions about their development, and to ensure
their equal access to basic services and jobs etc. However, the Paris Declaration
provides no guidance for donors on how they might assist the process, or how their
increased involvement in this critical issue might be monitored.
This perspective also provides a different way of approaching the issue of aid
conditionality. Realistically, some sort of donor conditionality will continue to be a core
component of the aid relationship. The evidence suggests that the type of donor
conditionality most likely to contribute to aid working better is one that is rooted in,
and attempts explicitly to build, the confidence and capacity of recipient countries to
develop their own policies and, where necessary, to apply their own policy conditions to
all expenditures, be they with aid funds or their own funds.74
However, as noted above, donors have not lived up to these commitments. There are a
number of linked reasons for this. Firstly, donors have never warmed to an approach to
aid-giving that leads to the loss of control of “their aid”. Channelling more aid into joint
activities with other donors, or to activities whose benefits are less easy to identify, or
whose outcomes are uncertain, makes it more difficult for donors to attribute specific
outcomes to their own aid inputs. This in turn makes it difficult to convince the public in
donor-countries either that their own aid works, or that it is worth providing aid that is
merely going to be added to a pool of funds over which others decide its use. Secondly,
the recession has simply aggravated these problems. When deep public spending cuts
are being made across the board in many donor-countries, it is challenging enough to
convince a sceptical public that aid budgets should be maintained, and even more
74 See Riddell 2008, pp. 241-52, and more recently, Temple 2010.
33

difficult to sustain support for rising aid budgets at the same time as channelling aid
into activities whose benefits cannot be seen quickly or easily.
The core problem is not so much that donors have failed to honour their commitments
of working more closely together and with recipients, and have perpetuated historic
inefficiencies in the aid system, though this is clearly serious. Of potentially far greater
importance are the knock-on effects of restructuring aid programmes. Such
restructuring has been characterised by funding even more aid interventions that bring
immediate tangible benefits, which can then be attributed to their own aid inputs, as
well as by failing to use aid to help address growing inequalities. This creates a risk of
donor aid interventions contributing to a growing range and number of systemic
problems. Indeed – and this is perhaps the most critical issue for contemporary aid
discussions – we seem to be moving beyond risks to reality. More and more evidence is
accumulating that suggests that the immediate benefits of short-term aid are gradually
being undermined by the aggregate costs of such interventions, which both directly and
indirectly result in holding back the long-term development prospects of recipient
economies. For example, short-term approaches to aid-giving tend to downplay or, at
the extreme, ignore evidence to indicate that some development processes – that
produce tangible medium and longer-term benefits – may not show any short-term
benefits and can even involve things getting worse before they get better.75 Where such
knowledge is set aside – due to the ‘short-termism’, that politics so often seems to
demand – long-term development success is impeded.
A succession of recent studies – many commissioned by the donor community and

emerging from the aid research community – point to the different types of problem
that have been occurring:
 A recent World Bank study argues that when donors rely on their own systems
to deliver aid, the effect is often to undermine recipient-country systems (Knack
and Eubank 2009).
 Research from the Overseas Development Institute suggests that, unless and
until recipient countries have acquired development leadership, aid tends to
have “fairly powerful perverse effects” (Booth 2011). One deleterious effect
relates to institution building, whose overall progress, it concludes, has been
hampered by donors adopting a “silo” approach and by widespread evidence of
donors continuing to recruit public servants to implement their projects, which
undermines national capacities, especially in contexts where they are
particularly weak (OECD 2011, p. 33 and 38).
 Relatedly, where donors have focused their aid on addressing problems

impeding long-term development, the results have been disappointing:
75 These notions are discussed more fully in Woolcock 2009, pp. 104.
34

institutional reform initiatives have usually not solved the problems and have
often made them worse.76
 Even more clearly, an evaluation of 20 years of Dutch aid to Africa (1998 to

2006) praised the switch that had taken place from project to programme aid,
which contributed to an expansion in public services. However, it concluded that
this resulted in the productive focus of Dutch aid disappearing, in spite of pleas
by recipients for this to continue, resulting in a reduction in the Dutch
contribution to poverty eradication.” (van der Kraaij and Kampuis 2008, p. 2 and
pp. 102-12).
 A recent study of “crisis states” argues that if development assistance

programmes are undertaken without understanding “the political settlement on
which a state rests (they) can lead to unintended consequences of all sorts”
(Putzel and Di John 2012, p. iv). And an OECD report study of international
support for state-building in fragile states based on this study argues that donors
risk doing harm by failing to provide support for the “creation of capacity to
expand productive activities” (Putzel et al. 2010, p. 21).
These sorts of conclusions are particularly worrying when placed alongside the evident
lack of progress in achieving the goals of the Paris Declaration discussed above. But
there is more to add. Evidence of the failure of the aid relationship to shift very far in the
direction of using aid to support recipient-led development processes and initiatives is
seen, perhaps at its clearest, in relation to the issue of country ownership, which some
believe to embody the core of the Paris Declaration (de Renzio et al. 2008). By the year
2010, fewer than two (5%) aid-recipient countries were reported to have in place their
own sustainable development strategies – up from zero in the year 2005. In 30% of
countries there was no local ownership and nothing had happened in the interim period
to encourage and support local ownership (OECD 2011, pp. 29-31).
Relatedly, the Paris Declaration states that aid-recipient countries should “take the lead
in co-ordinating aid at all levels in conjunction with other development resources in
dialogue with donors and encouraging the participation of civil society and the private
sector”, and partner countries should “commit to help strengthen their capacity to
exercise it” (OECD 2005, para 14 and 15, p. 3). However, no indicator was agreed to
monitor this (core) dimension of the aid relationship,77 and there is little evidence of
donors actively working together to enhance the ability of recipients to effectively
coordinate donor aid efforts.78
76 For a recent overview and assessment, see Andrews 2014.

77 Similarly, although the Paris Declaration speaks of the need “to support partner country efforts to
strengthen governance and improve development performance” (para 1), no indicator was established to
monitor progress in this crucial area.
78 This point was made even more strongly at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan,
South Korea in 2011. “Partnerships for development can only succeed if they are led by developing
35

The overall problems that prevailing aid practices have had on wider development
processes have been well captured and summarised in an extended essay by a former
head of the largest bilateral agency, the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), Andrew Natsios. Though written after he had stepped down
from this role, he has gone further than most to argue that the focus on short-term,
measurable and quick results actually undermines the transformational potential of aid
(Natsios 2010, pp. 2-3).
One of the little understood, but most powerful and disruptive tensions in
established aid agencies lies in the clash between the compliance side of aid
programs and the technical side. The essential balance between these two
tensions in development programs – accountability and control versus good
development practice – has now been skewed to such a degree in the US aid
system (and in the World Bank as well) that the imbalance threatens program
integrity.
... the international aid system is now focused on implementing the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), which measure service delivery or service
standards, not the institutional development needed to carry them out... The
MDGs’ heavy emphasis on the delivery of public services by whatever means
necessary has overwhelmed the building of those local institutions that will be
needed to deliver those services when the MDGs are long forgotten. The
institutional viability of developing country education ministries is far more
important than the number of schools constructed, textbooks printed or even
children in the classroom. Outside contractors, NGOs, and UN agencies could
ensure that these tasks get done on their own, but that would have a much more
limited developmental benefit. If a country‘s Ministry of Education were to
achieve half of what was required under the MDGs, but took the leadership itself
to accomplish this more modest objective, it would be of far greater significance
than if western aid agencies or international organizations fully achieved the
actual quantitative calculation (pp. 62-63).
This sort of assessment from within the aid industry adds support to the even harsher
view of Angus Deaton that, notwithstanding the benefits that aid funds clearly achieve,
from the viewpoint of aid’s transformational role, on balance it does not work.
In my view, this assessment goes too far for three main reasons. Firstly, the conclusion
drawn is based on what probably is a too partial and selective reading of the evidence,
and not based on an overall and rigorous assessment of all aid. 79 As with earlier
debates on whether aid works, this new wave of criticisms is based on partial and often
countries, implementing approaches that are tailored to country-specific situations and needs.” (OECD
DAC 2011, para 11b)
79 As Temple (2010, p. 4499) puts it, “The arguments that aid can weaken accountability and institutional
development are potentially fundamental, but much of the supporting evidence remains impressionistic
and anecdotal.”
36

poor data. Stating that countries will always be better off without aid remains what it
has always been - an unproven assertion. Donors may well have failed, at times
undermined recipient-country ownership and (unintentionally) held back long-term
development prospects, but they are now more aware of their shortcomings, as well as
more knowledgeable about how they need to change current practices to give greater
priority to transformational aid to make aid work better overall. Indeed, proposals for
working in new and different ways are not only being put forward, but there is evidence
that a number of key donors are willing to adopt approaches that are more in line with
the transformational approach. Indeed, after a recent visit to the UK, Deaton said that
both Oxfam and Department for International Development (DFID) were pursuing
approaches to aid with which he agreed.80
Secondly, the distinction made between short-term, quick-impact aid, aimed at achieving
immediate results, and transformational aid, is not as clear-cut as some of the
discussions suggest. For example, using aid to expand the number of girl pupils in
school has both an immediate effect (more girls in school) and a potentially
transformative effect (changing attitudes to the status and traditional role of women).
Importantly too, and thirdly, there is evidence emerging of significant national
development successes occurring because, notwithstanding the lurch towards the
short-term, donors have by no means abandoned a long-term time horizon approach to
aid, and are participating with governments in initiatives that blend service delivery
and capacity support – as a recent study of maternal health care in Nepal clearly
illustrates (Engel et al. 2013).
The challenge is to increase awareness of the importance – indeed the centrality of

these issues – and to encourage more debate on extending and deepening such
approaches to aid-giving to transform the current aid relationship, still so dominated by
short-termism. What we certainly do know is that there is often a conflict between
donors using aid to achieve short-term and long-term objectives, and more and more
studies are drawing attention to this.81
Changes to make aid work better are evolving, notably by addressing some of the
problems that the short-term, narrow approaches that frustrate aid’s transformational
role have created. The emphasis being given to accelerated economic growth, job
creation and poverty initiatives targeted specifically at the poorest in the discussions
about post-2015 approaches to development are seen by some as heralding a new era in
which aid priorities are shifted to focus on economic transformation. Indeed, the report
80 See remarks at the end of a public lecture given at Princeton in November 2013, at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwLNqDbPNBw>.
81 “…budget support was given a dual objective: both poverty reduction and improved governance. But
previous research had already shown that attempts by donors to change the administrative and political
system were largely ineffective. Moreover, the great deal of attention being paid to the second objective
weakened budget support’s capacity to fight poverty. Experience shows that these two objectives are
sometimes incompatible.” (Jorritsma 2012, p. 20)
37

of the UN’s High Level Panel is entitled A new global partnership: eradicate poverty and
transform economies through sustainable development (United Nations 2013).
Already some donors have begun to signal a change in their priorities in giving aid. For
example, in January the UK announced a “radical shift” in its approach to aid involving a
restructuring of DFID “to focus on jobs and growth” because “economic development is
without question the only way countries can leave behind enduring and chronic
poverty”.82
However, it is too early to know whether other donors intend to change their policies
and priorities in aid-giving. If they do, what difference will this make in practice to the
current dominance of, and preference for, aid that is able to show immediate and
tangible results? Will assistance aimed at helping to transform recipient economies not
merely channel aid funds into initiatives to boost private sector growth and job
creation, but ensure that the problems that short-term, quick-win aid interventions can
bring are also addressed?83 Will aid be used to help create a pattern of economic growth
and development that begins to address inequalities in wealth and power? And above
all, will donors use their aid funds to help build recipient ownership of development
strategies and local capacities to enable recipients to outline their priorities for where
aid should be channelled and coordinate the aid provided, as they agreed to do in the
Paris Declaration?
There is little in the initial outline of the UK’s new approaches to aid to suggest that
these issues will form the main thrust of its aid-giving. Indeed, a key message of the UK
Secretary of State has been to highlight the benefits the new emphasis on economic
development would bring to British firms and interests through the development of
new partnerships and opportunities for them.84
The final point to make on this issue is that today’s dominant focus on using aid to
achieve tangible and quick results – the term “quick-wins” is now a constituent part of
contemporary “aid-speak” – is comparatively new. Aid has continually been subject to
fads and fashions and there is no reason why the recent radical shifts to short-termism
82 “DFID is on a dramatic journey. We are changing our people, our training, our programmes, our
resourcing, our partners. We’re making DFID pro-entrepreneur, pro-business because that’s how we
ultimately defeat poverty.” (Greening2014). See also DFID 2014.
83 “What we think of as ‘traditional aid’ continues to play a critical role … helping more children into
school, beating killer diseases like polio and malaria, supporting countries like the Philippines when
disaster hits. These are life-changing, life-saving programmes, and we’re going to keep doing them.”
(Greening 2014).
84 “Of course smart aid isn’t just good for the countries we’re helping, it’s good for Britain too. If we get
development right we are market making and creating new investment opportunities ... We all recognise
the importance of the world’s new emerging powers – the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China
and South Africa. And we’re also improving our relationships with the world’s next tier of emerging
economies … fast growing markets in Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. The MINT countries as they’ve
been coined. But what about tomorrow’s BRICS and MINT countries? … we could wait until these markets
have grown, until they are less risky and the opportunities are more obvious. But how much better to
start our relationships with these countries sooner rather than later.” (Greening 2014).
38

cannot be reversed. In the past, indeed for most of the 70 year history of aid-giving, aid
has been used to support longer-term and transformational development processes. As
Natsios (2010, p. 64) himself acknowledges, even quite recently the approaches were
very different.
Before the 1990s, aid programs were typically 10 years in length, with a review
after the first 5 years to make adjustments if needed. Right now the time horizon
for these programs is 1 year instead of 10 years ... many traditional aid practices
are now simply unacceptable because of the regulatory demands of the system.
USAID has historically been first among bilateral and multilateral agencies in
funding local NGOs, indigenous think-tanks, and developing country colleges and
universities to build local institutions and local capacity, but has reduced its
funding to these local institutions because of the demands of the counter-
bureaucracy.
6. Making aid work better: some suggestions
The aid business is not short of suggestions for what needs to be done to make aid work
better. Indeed, it could be argued that it is already faced with too many and any further
suggestions will be self-defeating.85 At the aid project and programme level, it is usually
a requirement of evaluations to make recommendations for improving aid effectiveness
while, as we have seen, both the Paris Declaration and the different studies undertaken
to analyse inefficiencies within and across the aid system explicitly and implicitly
propose changes which, if carried out, would make aid work better.
Although aid-giving faces some key unresolved issues, such as determining the best way
to allocate aid more efficiently to maximise its poverty-reducing impact, it is not
technical solutions that are predominantly lacking. Thus, we know that aid-giving needs
fewer official donors managing fewer projects and providing a more streamlined
delivery system, reducing the sheer numbers who run so many similar aid
bureaucracies. We know aid-giving needs to be better harmonised and more aligned to
recipient-country systems and processes, and that more priority should be given to
strengthening local institutions to enable recipient countries to be better able to
determine aid priorities and coordinate aid spending.
As the earlier discussion suggests, perhaps the key problem lies in the political will of
donors to change current practices, and the unwillingness of individual donors to
sacrifice more than they already have of the freedom they enjoy to decide how to
allocate and deploy their own aid funds. What is lacking above all lies within the realm
of political economy and real politick: not so much getting donors to decide on what to
do, but to understand the complexities of the context in which they give aid and to work
together to contribute to effective change.
For an overview of many of the different suggestions for reforming aid to improve aid effectiveness, see
85
Morris and Pryke 2011.
39

Against this backdrop, I present nine suggestions for making aid work better. Most have
not featured prominently in the literature, though few are original.
1. Deepening knowledge of local contexts
A key ingredient to providing effective aid is in-depth local knowledge, an issue of

fundamental importance if aid is to make an effective contribution to building local
expertise and ownership.86 However, the recruitment policies of most official donors
(and some NGOs) have increasingly relied on short-term assignments of staff, many of
whose work is focused on aid management and administration issues.87 To enhance,
deepen and extend their knowledge into complex areas, donors need to revisit their
approach to recruitment, replacing or supplementing the current norm of short-term,
in-country contracts dominated by aid administrators and project managers with more
long-term contracts of skilled technical personnel – viewing contracts of three to five
years or more as the norm. Such contracts need to apply to country aid managers and
(local as well as external) short-term technical personnel, including those who
understand what country ownership and coordination by recipients might look like, and
who appreciate what the transformational approach to aid is trying to do.
2. Ensuring short-term uses of aid are supportive of long-term development goals
Relatedly, the performance and assessment of the activities of donor aid personnel
needs to focus less on the current methods of managing the project cycle and delivering
aid outputs. It needs to be linked far more to progress in delivering sustainable
development outcomes, and to focus more on developing (with other donors and based
on discussions with key recipient-country stakeholders) ways of using aid in more
transformational ways. For the foreseeable future, discrete projects aimed at delivering
short-term benefits will continue to be part of overall donor portfolios. The methods of
project appraisal, monitoring and evaluation of these projects need explicitly to include
two linked elements:
 Firstly, both initial project development and project appraisals need, explicitly, to
be undertaken within the framework of the Paris Declaration, ensuring, in
particular, that new projects are consistent and aligned with long-term,
recipient-country development goals and sufficiently harmonised with other
donor initiatives, and that they do not undermine the development of local
capacities. Currently they are not.88
86 According to Deutscher (2010, p. 3) “… donors must develop a sophisticated understanding of political

processes, patterns of state-society relations and sources of legitimacy in the countries in which they are
operating” (emphasis added).
87 According to the recent survey of Australian aid, over 80% of AusAID Managers are in post for less than
two years, over half for a year or less (Howes and Pryke 2013, pp. 40-1 and 53-6).
88 According to the 2009 study of evaluation quality in the UK’s DFID there is “a significant gap between
the positive and supportive statements made about the Paris Declaration, confirmed in the Accra Agenda
40

 Secondly, these wider factors need to form a constituent part of regular
monitoring and evaluation. Additionally, at the level of project support,
especially in the poorest (low income) countries, a growing body of evidence89
suggests the need for donors to give (greater) priority to beneficiary
involvement in both designing and monitoring and evaluating the
implementation of poverty-focused projects, and ensuring that this includes
more marginal groups, and to encourage the development of networks (often
seen as important contributors to more sustainable development impact)
(Ramalingam 2013, chapter 16).
As the Paris Declaration has now been signed by a growing number of NGOs and private
foundations, these changes would apply equally to official and non-official aid donors
(OECD).
3. Linking all aid more closely to overall developing country goals and processes
The aid programmes of individual donors need to be developed not in isolation, but as
part of the overall aid effort at the country level. This, in turn, needs to be focused far
more on, and indeed increasingly shaped by, trying to work out how aid might best
contribute to extending and building country ownership of a poverty-focused and
sustainable development strategy that enables recipients to become the effective
coordinators of donors and their aid programmes. Clearly, this will require in-depth
local knowledge (see # 1 above), including knowledge of the nature of political power
and the way political and economic processes interact, which in turn provides the
context for discussions of how to engage in institutional support and capacity
building.90 As part of this process, donors need to prioritise support to initiatives that
will help encourage the local and more widespread ownership of development plans
and policies. What this will mean in practice will clearly differ from country to country
for Action, and the way that DFID is approaching evaluation. In its view, too little has changed in practice,
especially in relation to the alignment dimension of the Paris Declaration. For instance, although DFID has
extended its consultation process to include stakeholders outside the Department, the final decision of
what the Evaluation Department chooses to evaluate, and when, is still made by DFID and IACDI.
Similarly, developing country stakeholders are rarely, if ever, involved in decisions of what to evaluate
and when; the results of centralised evaluations are rarely shared with them in any systematic way, and
though DFID is a leader among agencies committed to and undertaking more joint evaluations, there are
still very few joint evaluations conducted with and especially led by developing country governments or
institutions. Additionally, far too little is being done to help build the capacity of aid-recipient countries to
enable them to undertake evaluations, especially to take more of a leadership role” (Riddell et al. 2009,
para 48).
89 See for example, the speech given by the Chief Commissioner of the UK’s Independent Commission for
Aid Impact in November 2013 on improving aid impact (Ward 2013).

90 There is a growing awareness that past efforts at institutional building have failed, in part, because
donors were trying to introduce and impose inappropriate (external) models and approaches. For a
recent critique of more traditional approaches, Pritchett et al. (2012) argue that what is required is better
understanding of the conditions under which political space is created for nurturing the endogenous
learning and indigenous debate necessary to create context-specific institutions and incremental reform
processes. For development agencies, particularly external agencies, the key questions should focus on
how they can facilitate such processes (Pritchett et al. 2012, p. 19).
41

and will, in part, need to be based on donors themselves developing a deeper and more
extensive knowledge of the political economy of the countries to which they provide aid
than is currently common. One way to do this would be to provide long-term funding to
assist the development of strong, independent and locally-rooted think-tanks, especially
in the areas of governance and political economy. Besides helping to develop and
expand national debate on central development policy issues, this will reduce the need
to rely on the use either of externally-recruited political economists or local expertise
(most commonly recruited for short-term assignments who, quite understandably, tend
to confirm or ‘ventriloquise’ what donors want to hear).
4. Prioritising help to build local capacities for recipients to coordinate aid better
As discussed above, while it confirmed its importance, the Paris Declaration failed to
develop any indicators to encourage efforts to build and expand local capacities to
enable recipient countries to effectively oversee and coordinate overall aid efforts, and
to ensure the plans of different donors are supportive of, and sufficiently integrated
into, national processes. One way donors could begin to do this would be to (jointly)
fund studies that would work out a plan and timetable for what needs to be done on
both sides, seeking input from both the donor and recipient side (including NGOs and
civil society more widely). A course of action could then be agreed with the assurance
that sufficient funds are forthcoming to implement the agreed approach.
5. Learning lessons – moving from rhetoric to reality
Potentially, evaluations are an important way not only of assessing the impact of aid
interventions, but of learning lessons to make aid work better. While it is widely
recognised that good quality evaluations need to include specific recommendations and
lessons learned, only recently has it been formally agreed within the OECD/DAC donor
community that the quality of evaluations should be determined not only in terms of a
written report, but also in relation to whether and how such reports are used (OECD
2010, p. 15). Many, if not most of the larger official development agencies, incorporate
“lessons learned” into both evaluations and project appraisal documents, but it is often
the implementation that is lacking, and there remains a significant gap between theory
and practice. Across many agencies, insights from research and evaluation are not
incorporated into the development of future aid projects and programmes, and many
recommendations are regularly ignored or not implemented. To make aid work better,
these failures and weaknesses need to be addressed by each donor agency. As a matter
of course, donors should establish a (formalised) system to implement the findings of
evaluations and linked research, explaining clearly how they intend to respond to the
recommendations made (or in cases where they disagree, explaining why) and
providing an agreed action plan that can be monitored, and which they will implement
and formally report back on.
6. Rethinking how to help the poor in middle income countries
42

A new challenge has arisen as a result of the upgrading of countries containing large
numbers of very poor people from the low income to middle income group: almost
three-quarters of the world’s poorest people are now located in middle income
countries (Sumner 2013). To date, however, this has made very little difference to the
way donors deploy their aid (predominantly through projects); the approaches remain
almost identical to the projects they promote in the poorest countries. The crucial
difference between the poorest and middle income countries is that the latter do not
suffer from a shortage of funds: they have the resources to address the needs of the
poorest. It is, rather, the manner in which they allocate funds and human resources and
the choices they make that result in the perpetuation of extreme poverty. What donors
need to do – and thus far have failed in – is to facilitate in each of these countries an
understanding of how and why extreme poverty persists, so that decision-making
processes and priorities can shift to give poor and marginalised groups a greater voice
to participate in these processes and enable them to access the services and
opportunities from which their non-poor, fellow citizens are clearly able to benefit.91
7. Reducing volatility in aid at the country level
We know that aid needs to be provided within a longer and more assured timeframe to
reduce its unpredictability and volatility. Relatedly, donors need to meet their
commitments to provide aid and to honour their repeated pledges (which many
repeatedly break) to provide more aid. In the short-term, especially in countries
(usually the majority) not facing any immediate political problems, one way that the gap
between donor rhetoric and the reality of aid-giving might be narrowed would be for
the largest six or seven donors in recipient countries to agree with the recipient on the
total combined aggregate amount of aid that the recipient would be able to spend, and
that donors agree they would be able to provide over, initially say, a three to five year
period. Once agreed, these donors would commit to providing this amount of aid, if
necessary putting peer pressure on any recalcitrant donor threatening to reduce it, and
ultimately each donor would commit to help make up any shortfall if one of them
reneges on the initial promise. As European donors have recently agreed to provide aid
through a system of joint programming under a common framework, they could be the
vanguard in adopting such an approach (European Commission 2011).
8. Encouraging budget support by addressing donor-country political concerns
In spite of evidence indicating their benefits in recent years, some of the new aid
modalities, and especially GBS, have lost favour with many official aid donors even in
environments where their impact has and is likely to continue to be favourable. This
91The wording here is important: donors should facilitate analysis of rather than do it themselves. Recent
work has criticised some of the political economy work undertaken by donors or commissioned by
external consultants as it has not been sufficiently understood in the local context (Booth 2013). For
successes in using aid funds to strengthen the voice of poor communities, see Clark 2013, pp. 4-6 and
Booth 2013. Of course, these issues also apply with similar force in many, if not most, of the world’s
poorest countries as well.
43

decline in support has often been due to human rights violations and wider political
concerns. At the extreme, donors have withdrawn completely from providing GBS
funds, but in many cases the effectiveness of budget support is severely hampered by
erratic, volatile and unpredictable funding (Dom and Gordon 2011, p. 78). One way to
address both the problems of decline in donor interest in budget support and funding
volatility would be for donors providing GBS to commit themselves to a range of
possible funding options dependent upon their assessment of recipient behaviour. If
donors are generally happy with recipient performance, they would provide funds at
the level agreed. If things proceed better than expected and they gain confidence with
the use to which the funds are put and the wider context, then they would increase their
funds by, say 20%. If, on the other hand, their view is that the support programme or
the wider context has become especially problematic, then they would be free to reduce
their commitments by a fixed amount, say 20%. A fixed-floor approach would create a
“cushion” for the donor to address concerns at home about providing aid when difficult
political problems arise, and for the recipient to provide a greater guarantee against aid
volatility and unpredictability. Only in rare and exceptional circumstances would
donors withdraw completely from an agreed funding support mechanism.
9. Rethinking ways of communicating about aid
Finally, donors need to rethink the way in which they communicate with the wider
public on the role and purpose of aid and about the expectations created. Especially as
they work more closely with other donors and recipients, they need to develop
different, more systematic and pro-active ways of communicating to key public
audiences why they are now working in these new ways and the findings of evaluations
about what they can be expected to say about the specific contribution that the aid of
different donors makes to development outcomes. They need to explain why aid needs
to be channelled to initiatives whose outcomes might take time to emerge and which
might even be uncertain, and provide evidence of when this works and examples of how
lessons are learned when outcomes differ from those expected. To do this they will need
to encourage the use of different theories-of-change models, as well as to examine ways
in which to focus on intermediate outcomes to which both they and donors are
contributing in order to assess and explain the contribution that each has been making
to development outcomes and processes.92
7. Conclusions
In many countries aid has made important contributions to development and poverty
reduction, but in different sorts of ways. For example, in countries such as Taiwan,
South Korea and Botswana in the past, and Malaysia and Indonesia more recently,
significant amounts of aid have provided an important platform for future growth and
92For a discussion of contribution analysis and theories of change, Mayne 2011, pp. 53-96, and Treasury
Board of Canada Secretariat 2012.
44

development. In most countries where it has made a contribution in recent years, aid
has helped some of the poorest countries to expand basic services, enabling millions to
go to school and receive basic health care, opportunities that, without aid funds, they
would not have had. Some aid has filled crucial gaps in recipient economies, preventing
economic development from stalling because of key shortages, providing catalysts to
boost further growth or to expand access to basic services to those who, because of a
shortage of funds and skills, would not otherwise access them (Pronk 2004). In the
1950s and 1960s especially, but also again in the 1980s, aid made crucial contributions
to the expansion of the physical infrastructure of developing countries. In all of these
cases, aid has enabled growth, development or poverty reduction to occur faster than
would have happened without it.
However, aid’s potential contribution has been consistently over-played. The fact that
there are still hundreds of millions of extremely poor people in the world, and dozens of
poor countries whose needs can be met, in part, by rich “outsiders”, has been used to
argue that aid is necessary for development and fuelled the false notion that without aid
there will be no development.93 In contrast, development can and does occur without
aid. Indeed, some of the most rapid decreases in poverty in recent decades have
occurred in two countries which have received very little aid and where the
contribution of aid to development has been fairly marginal: China and Vietnam.94 What
is more, to the extent that donor-countries continue to deploy broader economic and
financial policies (for example, in the areas of trade, immigration, taxation and financial
regulation) that hold back or undermine the pace of aid-recipient-country development,
the aggregate effect of these policies can easily outweigh the benefits that aid brings.
Aid has also failed and done harm, as its critics have repeatedly pointed out. The
evidence clearly shows that aid’s harshest critics have been wrong to suggest that most
aid projects established to meet immediate needs or fill short-term gaps fail, though this
has not stopped the media from giving publicity to examples of aid’s failures, and to
incorrectly suggest or imply that these are typical of all such projects
However, beyond this rather sterile exchange, a far more important debate has begun to
take place about the systemic effects of providing aid. Until recently, it was
predominantly aid’s harshest critics who suggested that any short-term benefits that aid
might achieve would be eclipsed by the indirect harm it could bring in its wake, or the
delay it could cause to a more rapid growth or the development path it could frustrate.
Today, the main aid donors are ready to acknowledge that aid-giving has become so
complex and fragmented that a series of systemic problems have developed that are
now seriously undermining aid’s potential impact. But a growing body of recent
93 Deaton suggests that if the West can “cure itself of its addiction to aid ... There is real hope for locally-
driven development” (Deaton 2013, p. 328).
94 Between 1990 and 2008, the proportion of the population in China living in poverty fell from 60% to
13%; in Vietnam, from 73% to 17%. However, a recent long-term assessment of Swedish aid to Vietnam
suggests it has had a significant impact on poverty reduction (McGillivray et al. 2012, p. 33).
45

scholarship on aid suggests that the recent emphasis given to short-term results, and
the channelling of more aid into projects and programmes aimed at “making a tangible
difference” and doing so quickly, is not only adding significantly to aid’s systemic
problems, but risks eclipsing those benefits. The gap between aid’s strongest critics and
an important cluster of studies analysing aid’s wider impact has narrowed
considerably.95
The priority given to short-term, tangible and measurable results means that less aid is
available to support more complex initiatives, the intended results of which take longer
to achieve and the outcomes of which are more difficult to predict. This is based, in part,
on the notion that what matters most is the impact of aid per se, and it underplays the
transformational approach to aid-giving: assisting a country to build and promote its
own development path and accelerating the sustained elimination of extreme poverty.
Equally, to the extent that donors focus narrowly on the short-term impact of their aid,
they will pay less attention to the more important issue of ensuring that the outcome of
their wider trade, economic, financial, immigration and taxation policies and practices
are consistent with the poverty and development objectives of their aid policies. Taken
together, the more these factors drive policies, the more severe and extensive are likely
to be the systemic problems that a short-term approach will foster.
Aid’s strongest critics argue that the systemic problems caused directly and indirectly
by aid and aid donors are so significant that they drown out all the immediate and
tangible benefits that aid undoubtedly brings, so that on balance aid does not work. This
paper argues that this judgement is premature, non-proven and too sweeping – based
on too crude and polarised a characterisation of all aid interventions. There are
significant systemic problems with aid; these have almost certainly grown in recent
years and far more attention needs to be given to them than is currently the case. But
calling for the ending of all aid is not the answer, not least because this is not going to
happen soon.
Does aid work? For 40 years or more, a great deal of knowledge has been accumulated
to understand why aid projects fail. For the past 10 to 15 years, knowledge has begun to
accumulate about aid’s systemic failures and the often limited role it can play in
contributing to a country’s development and the eradication of poverty. Whether we
like it or not, foreign aid is not going to disappear soon. The political and moral drivers
that have created and preserve the official aid system and the compassion and sense of
injustice that drives individuals to support NGO and CSO aid projects and programmes
means that aid as a form of “helping” will be with us for many years, possibly many
decades to come.
95Severino (2011, p. 122) asks, “In recent years, how many conferences, how many meetings have been
held, how many memoranda written on aid effectiveness? Reading them, aid critics feel justified and
comfortable: why would you support a policy whose inefficiency is denounced by its own stakeholders?
Aid professionals have proven to be the best undertakers of their own business.”
46

The challenge for professionals and practitioners concerned with the scandal of over
one billion people living in extreme poverty alongside affluence and growing
inequalities within and across countries is not to build or hide behind academic
constructs, but to engage with the real problems and hardships that poor, marginalised
and disempowered people face. This will mean not merely deploying their analytic and
practical skills to expose the damage that aid does and can do, including especially the
systemic harm it risks doing, but to continually examine new and creative ways in
which aid might be used more effectively at the village, local, national and international
levels to address the immediate and underlying problems that poor people (especially
poor women and girls) face, to ease hardships and especially to give more of a voice to
poor and marginalised groups.
Paradoxically, aid is likely to work better if less attention is given to trying to answer the
immediate question of whether it works, and if more attention is focused on trying to
understand the contribution that aid can best make to a recipient’s development, and
the inevitable tensions that will continue to arise when trying to address both short-
term and long-term needs. Paradoxically too, the greater the contribution of aid in
helping to strengthen and accelerate a recipient-led and sustainable development path,
the less easy it will be to assess the precise contribution that aid has made to this
process.
Finally, more encouragement needs to be given to, and more aid funds channelled
towards, programmes aimed at expanding the cadre of independent evaluators and
assessors across aid-recipient countries, whose livelihood and opinions are not
dependent on the work they do from within the comfort-zone of the donor community.
A far greater understanding of whether aid works, and new insights into how it could
work better, is likely to arise when scholars in recipient countries and institutions are
able, as a matter of course, to analyse the impact and workings of aid and not feel afraid
of voicing their views.
Does aid work? To obtain a more rounded assessment, those involved in aid-giving need
far more aid recipients and far more recipient scholars and analysts to give us their
answers, and we need to be ready to listen to the challenging and perhaps
uncomfortable assessments that they are likely to present.
47

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Does foreign aid really work?

Roger C. Riddell is a development and aid specialist with some

Riddell, RC 2014 “Does foreign aid really work? An updated assessment”,

The Development Policy Centre is a think tank for aid and

The views expressed in discussion papers are those of the

For more information on the Development Policy Centre, visit

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2409847

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2409847

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2. The place of emergency aid in the discourse about aid’s impact

2.1 Humanitarian and development aid

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2.2 Does emergency aid work?

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A further problem with emergency aid (when trying to disburse it quickly in

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3. Does aid work? The impact of project and programme aid

3.1 Weak and not easily accessible information and databases

Development aid in most countries is still predominantly provided in the form of

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3.2 Project aid: official aid

sectors, see Ramalingam 2013, and Barder 2013.

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3.3 Technical assistance and capacity building

21 See Riddell 2008, p. 180ff for further details.

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3.4 NGO project aid

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3.5 Programme aid

30 See, for instance, Gohl et al. 2010.

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Most assessments of sectoral support, including SWAps, have focussed on the

In spite of a commitment by donors to increase programme aid (after initially rising in

35 See, for instance, Jelovac and Vandeninden 2008.

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4.1 Academic studies of the relationship between aid and growth

41 See Mosley 1986, pp. 22-27 and Mosley 1987.

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The aid-poverty relationship is particularly important in contemporary aid discourse

47See, for example, Clemens et al. 2004.

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4.3 The aggregate impact of official aid at the sectoral level

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4.4 The aggregate impact of official aid at the country level

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4.5 The overall impact of NGO aid at the country level

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4.6 Aid and corruption

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Importantly, too, as our understanding of the significance of corruption to poor people

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5.1 The allocation of aid