Measuring success

Matt takes issue with my praise of the Millenium Challenge Corporation, noting this article complaining about the slow pace of aid.

Actually, as I understand it, this is a feature, not a bug. The idea of the MCC was to change the traditional "Don't just stand there: do something!" approach to disbursing aid. The MCC projects are large and very carefully designed, which is taking a lot of time. This may not turn out to make a difference. But the general approach of measuring aid by the amount of cash you managed to pump out, rather than the results generated thereby, was a very bad idea that the MCC was designed to challenge. It makes little sense to declare the project a failure on the ground that it's not spraying dollars over Africa like a firehose.

Comments

It's spent $144M in four years. Given the number of people whom this program is supposed to benefit, that's basically zero.

You can argue that the Millenium Challenge wouldn't be a success if it spent more, but there's no way it's been a success if it hasn't actually done anything. You called it a "great thing". It can't be, if it's done essentially nothing in four years.

Posted by DivGuy | January 29, 2008 5:30 PM

DivGuy-

Comparatively speaking, the Millenium Challenge has been a 'great thing'. It is, after all, a Bush administration initiative, and doing nothing is a helluva lot better than the effects of their other policies.

Posted by RICKM | January 29, 2008 5:40 PM

Megan,

I am confused by the statement that the projects are "large and very carefully designed." Is the $144m over four years large in the context of this challenge? Or are you saying that are a bunch of good projects in the works?

Tom

Posted by Tom G. | January 29, 2008 6:56 PM

I take issue with your spelling.

"Millennium" comes from the Latin words for thousand (mille) and year (annum), and means "a thousand years".

"Millenium" comes from the Latin words for thousand (mille) and asshole (anum), and means "a thousand assholes".

Also with your referring to it as "the Millenium Project". I'd never heard of the Millennium Challenge Corp, and googling for "Millenium Project" (or even "Millennium Project") didn't turn up anything useful. There seem to be more things named "Millennium" than there are years in a millennium.

Posted by Avram | January 29, 2008 7:34 PM

The Millennium Challenge funds aren't giving out money in large measure because no decent development-aid organization wants to take those funds. Monitoring and evaluation is an important element in the aid world, but at this stage it has run amok: aid organizations spend so much time and money complying with monitoring and evaluation requirements that they are unable to execute the devlopment-aid projects that are their ostensible raisons d'etre. The Americans are universally recognized to be the worst offenders. Bush's global AIDS project, PEPFAR, is one of the worst sinners in this regard, requiring monthly reporting on 64 different categories of program targets. This requires full-time employment of precious high-educated English-speaking local staff, in third world countries, exclusively to fill out and file forms. The reporting schedule for the American grants is usually different from the reporting schedule for European and Japanese grants, meaning more staff time is expended; categories of reporting are different, so projects must describe themselves one way to one funder, a different way to a different funder; while if you rely exclusively on American funding, you're an idiot, because every shift in American political or bureaucratic priorities exposes you to the risk of losing all your funding and leaving your beneficiaries suddenly in the lurch with their half-finished fish ponds or their unmet prescriptions for this month's AIDS drugs.

US development aid should be decentralized: programs should be funded by local USAID offices in country who understand each country's priorities and government systems, not centralized bureaucrats in Washington trying to push the same programs on Indonesia and Mali. USAID program officers should be sent for long terms of duty. Increasing reliance should be placed on officers and NGOs in country, and less on DC-based consultants flown in at absurd expense to spend two weeks in country and write "evaluation" reports which often fail to acknowledge identical "evaluation" reports made by earlier consultants. (The consultancy industry in development aid, as in the mercenary business, is a vampiric drain of government money.)

The idea that before the Millennium Challenge aid was being strewn about willy-nilly is false. That may have been true during the Cold War; it isn't now. If monitoring and evaluation is a good idea, it should be a good idea for every USAID project, not just Millennium Challenge. The reason the Bush Administration established Millennium Challenge was the same reason it established PEPFAR: it wanted a program it could call its own, even if that program actually did the same thing earlier bureaucracies had done. It created another useless parallel bureaucracy with extra and different reporting requirements. Development organizations are increasingly saying to such initiatives: the hell with that. That's why Millennium Challenge can't spend its money.

Posted by brooksfoe | January 29, 2008 9:21 PM

The program has been pretty much neglected, often stuck with either bad leadership, decent leadership receiving little or not direction or support from the Oval Office, etc.

Posted by Reality Man | January 29, 2008 10:00 PM

All that said, there are some good things about Millennium Challenge. It gives lots of autonomy to recipient countries to determine their own priorities and decide which projects they want to fund, not which ones Washington wants to fund. And, in principle, it sets aside in advance the full budget to fund approved projects throughout their timelines, rather than making recipients dependent on the whims of Congress and USAID from year to year. In principle. In fact, Congress is monkeying with that formula and refusing to set aside the full budgets needed. That's a shame, and the normally unimpeachable Pat Leahy should be lambasted for it.

Posted by brooksfoe | January 29, 2008 10:26 PM

Monitoring and evaluation is an important element in the aid world, but at this stage it has run amok: aid organizations spend so much time and money complying with monitoring and evaluation requirements that they are unable to execute the devlopment-aid projects that are their ostensible raisons d'etre.

Who'da thunk it? I wonder if this applies to regulations on businesses and such.

Posted by Brandon Berg | January 29, 2008 10:45 PM

Brooksfoe - MCC doesn't give money to "development organizations." MCC is a development agency. MCC gives money to the governments of countries with which it signs compacts, based on those countries' proposals, and those governments implement the projects. More actual facts about MCC can be found at the Center for Global Development "MCA Monitor" blog, http://blogs.cgdev.org/mca-monitor/ , and of course at the MCC website, mcc.gov.

Posted by Rachel | January 30, 2008 9:58 AM