The aid fish and the public policy whale

This piece is really short and has a picture of a whale so you have no excuse not to read it.

Within recent memory it seemed that ‘aid’ was the key to changing the world. The MDGs were peak aid. Those were heady times… especially if you worked in a donor agency.

Moving to ‘the centre of the action’ was what attracted me to join DFID (I tried hard! third time lucky). But my first day was on 11th September 2001 and from that moment there was a sense that the world was far more complicated than ‘aid’ had imagined.

I am not cynical about the optimism, but I do regret aid-centric arrogance.

Despite aid growing for many years - and being important for many good reasons - it kept being overtaken by other flows and resources - either in actual, countable, reality, or in the strategic imagination. Tax, remittances, trade, private sector growth.

My aid bubble burst when annual UK aid to the state of Bihar in India (and we had a very large programme) was overtaken by the Government’s own revenue from liquor. Bihar had been notorious for poverty, bad governance, and violence, but with a new government and within a couple of years, booze revenue soared from nearly nothing to eclipse UK aid. Making the case for aid needed to be more about quality, and catalysis, than about sheer volumes.

I’ve long corrected people when they conflate ‘development’ (everywhere) with ‘aid’. Or if I say ‘public policy’ and people hear ‘aid’. My interest is in evidence informed, politically feasible, public policy anywhere, and aid is one part of that, not all of that.

Ideas, innovation, lessons, and investment clearly move in all directions. Diverse problems are common, and many straddle borders - toxic masculinity and violence, procurement corruption, rising temperatures, measles, depression. Effective responses may start in the south and move north. That’s why I love ‘public policy’ (for want of a better word) not just aid*.

That is what spurred this cartoon. The little human in the middle still lives inside the aid fish. From there, aid seems super important, and the view is… narrow.

Happy Friday.

Aid has done and can to brilliant things though - that’s for another blog.