Every year, wealthy nations provide billions of dollars to poorer countries to build better services and infrastructure. Less that 2% of that money goes straight to the communities it is supposed to benefit, according to the British-based tracking organization Development Initiatives Poverty Research. Now more donors want to increase that direct funding to ensure that projects better reflect local priorities and improve accountability. Two new programs in Rwanda and Sierra Leone provide good examples.
Launched at the Education World Forum in London this week, the new approach is targeted at providing better access to early education for rural girls and children with disabilities. Both groups were particularly set back by the recent pandemic. The big experiment is this: The roughly $30 million in new donor money will be conditioned on achieving specific results, rather than fueling the usual practice of largely unaccountable spending based on good intentions.
A local community will need to develop its own strategy, tap its own resources (such as local businesses), and achieve its education goals. If it does, it will be reimbursed. The results must be independently confirmed.
This requires a high level of honesty and selflessness, advocates say, enabling more trust between foreign funders and local actors. “Accountability to the program participants is the most critical part of any results-based funding project,” noted a Center for Effective Philanthropy blog post.
This new model of tying aid to outcomes is partly driven by a strain on international resources as a result of wars and catastrophes. It might even be used for postwar reconstruction in Ukraine as a way to curb corruption.
A year ago, the governments of Ghana and Britain partnered to launch the world’s largest such project. It set aside $30 million to spur communities accounting for 600 primary schools in the West African country to promote teacher excellence and draw back 70,000 primary school students whose educations were disrupted by the pandemic.
The new initiatives in Rwanda and Sierra Leone pool funding from the countries’ governments, the Lego Foundation, and the Education Outcomes Fund. They mark, as Ghana’s education minister, Yaw Osei Adutwum, described the project in his country, a “watershed moment” in the way international partners help poorer countries serve their citizens better through local accountability.