DevBalls

Reasons for the 0.7% myth

Nothing quite illustrates the lost state of the aid industry as the UK Government’s headless, self-satisfied and largely unchallenged rush to reach the UN’s 0.7% spending target. Although the sixth country to join the 0.7% club, the UK is by far the biggest to do so and now is the second largest bilateral donor. But what is seen by most in the aid industry as a cause of celebration, in practice illustrates its inability to honestly consider its efficacy, motives and role.

The 0.7% target emerged in 1970 as a UN Resolution after a decade of assorted commissions and studies. Today, four sets of reasons are cited to justify its relevance.

Technical/developmental: the target’s original rationale was that this was the finance gap that should be filled for countries to achieve acceptable levels of growth. However, in an era of more private sector investment and remittances and as the importance of more qualitative factors such as institutional capacity is recognised, the basic technical rationale of five decades ago is now widely dismissed. Few seriously believe that there is any legitimate technical reason pointing to 0.7% as the “right” amount of aid.

Moral: given that 0.7% is an arbitrary figure emerging from political haggling, and that believers in the omnipotence of the UN are now thin on the ground, the moral arguments stem from the general impulse that ‘more is better’. And that those who give most are also ‘better’. This essentially is a charity/whip-round/rattle-the-collecting-cans/welfare state view of international development. Not ‘evidence-based’ but responding to unalloyed instinct. And it fails to take account of a reality known to any experienced project manager that, counter-intuitively perhaps, more aid often makes things worse. As the ex-DFID Chief Economist, Adrian Wood noted recently: “If you give a country too much aid for too long you damage its basic governance structure because the politicians pay more attention to the donors than they do to their citizens”.

Commercial/pecuniary: the UK’s aid industry has ballooned in recent years. The largest commercial contractors have trebled their income (and profits) in the course of this Parliament. ODI, the UK’s largest research organisation, has doubled. Most NGOs are larger and more reliant on DFID – ironic given their non-government status – than ever before (Oxfam, for example, one of the more independent NGOs, is still around 40% DFID-dependent). To this must be added the burgeoning ‘service provider’ sector, especially the army of value-for-money, research and evaluation specialists required to make sense of/dress up the spending splurge in dispassionate tones of measured progress. And the (paid) communication and exchange platforms required to shovel information around. Together it all contributes to a disparate band united by a singular realisation; they know on which side their bread is buttered; they all need DFID’s bloated budget.

Political: increasing the aid budget has been one of the pillars of the UK Government’s – and the Conservative Party’s – rebranding efforts. No longer the “nasty party”, but ‘international’, ‘outward-looking’ and ‘concerned’ – all also qualities that appeal to their liberal coalition partners. The 0.7% aid target fits a political purpose now. Whether this still applies after May’s general election – when the country’s political landscape may have moved further Right – is more doubtful.

The 0.7% target is a convenient cause that serves the alignment of pecuniary and political vested interests shaping the UK’s aid industry. Without valid technical or moral basis, it is a dangerous myth that distorts development endeavours, focusing attention on quantity and inputs and not on quality and genuine achievement. Adorned in the self-righteous language of international solidarity and concern, it is a lazy rallying cry for a self-serving, sprawling bandwagon. Far from being an indicator of aid's responsiveness to the poor, it is primarily about aid as a vanity project for the rich.

And where are development agencies on these issues? It is to the enduring shame of the development sector as a whole that no mainstream organisation has publicly questioned the worth of the 0.7% policy. On the contrary, the various umbrella lobby groups, such as the Turn Up Save Lives campaign, spout consciously-misleading ‘facts’ on aid money’s ‘deliverables’ – children in school, children ‘saved’ – that say nothing about whether aid is addressing the underlying causes of poverty. Or about the more obvious beneficiaries of aid spending – themselves.