Aid efforts must be subject to evaluation

A few days ago, the UAE Office for Coordination of Foreign Aid (OCFA) released the UAE Donor Aid report for the year 2011. According to the report, the UAE disbursed a total of Dh7.74 billion in grants and loans to support development, humanitarian and charitable programmes in 128 countries. These programmes included economic infrastructure and services, health, emergency response and so on.

OCFA, the only body in the UAE with the responsibility to coordinate and track all humanitarian efforts, has so far published three annual reports detailing the activities of UAE-based organisations. The report includes information about the total aid disbursed per year, the activity of each donor organisation, reports on grants and loans, analysis of the way in which UAE donors offer their assistance as well as promotes principles of transparency and accountability.

The UAE has been one of the world’s most generous contributors to foreign aid. In fact, the UAE, according to a report by Global Humanitarian Assistance, is the first non-western country to be included in the global Top 10 Humanitarian Aid donors per head of population. Overall, the UAE’s foreign aid during the last four decades is estimated to have exceeded Dh163 billion.

Despite the great efforts and generosity of UAE’s foreign aid, we seem to know very little about the level of its impact. There are multiple assumptions as to why we do not know what human, economic, social and political impact UAE aid had, partly because most development programmes were never evaluated and because impact assessments are rarely conducted.

Many organisations practice what I call “programme snapshot”, by conducting site visits that provide immediate feedback on the programme. A common example would be monitoring the construction of a hospital until completion and taking a picture next to the plaque to show fund contributors and the public that the objectives had been met.

However, development programmes do not end when you take a picture next to a plaque. Programme evaluations should not be done by government officials, or CEOs. Programme evaluation refers to the process of gathering data and analysing them to produce information that would determine whether your organisation or programme is effective in implementing its activities and the level to which it has achieved its objectives.

Evaluations also requires you to visit the programme, speak to the community, engage on a one-to-one dialogue and understand the needs of the recipients. You would actually be surprised at how different they could be from your assumptions.

If you want to understand the level of impact, dig into the details of the programme and realise the “ground truth”, then an independent, third-party assessment becomes necessary.

Impact studies are almost nonexistent simply because they have not been conducted, especially if the programme falls short of expectations or if it had made no difference at all.

If you are an individual, a company or a government donor, you are entitled to know where every dirham you give goes. More than that, you are entitled to know if your dirham was effective in bringing about change. You must ask if it created impact, if so how? If not, why?

There are hundreds of examples of aid programmes that succeeded in producing the output, but failed in creating the desired impact. For instance, it is easy to build a clinic in a very remote village that lacks proper health services. But what happens when you have women that refuse to visit the clinic because they believe mothers should give birth at home?

What happens when you provide clean water and proper toilet facilities, but people still refuse to use them because they are guided by their cultural beliefs that cleaning your hands with soap is an imposed western practice?

A recurring challenge for most infrastructure programmes is the inability of local governments to provide financial and human resources to sustain them.

In other emergency response programmes, organisations seldom take into account that providing imported food aid can create market imbalances and undercut local farmers.

All these realisations and findings will not be revealed if we do not evaluate and assess our programmes. Evaluating our aid helps us answer crucial questions: Did the project respond to the needs of the target groups? Will the programme be able to sustain itself once aid is suspended and activities concluded? Did it have any effect on the human development indicators? Did it revitalise the local economy? Did it succeed in building the capacity of local skill? Did it create jobs? Or did it result in market imbalances? In volatile environments, how do we ensure that the services are being used to their optimum? How do we ensure they are not occupied by other external bodies?

By now, we all understand that not all programmes have their desired impact and are not effective or sustainable. But that is OK. What is not OK is if we continue repeating the same mistakes.

Evaluation and impact assessments can and should be used as an ongoing learning tool to improve the aid organisations’ effectiveness and share the learning and results with the UAE and global community.

The UAE is internationally recognised as one of the world’s top donors to humanitarian response and sustainable development. Real development occurs when your aid creates positive, efficient, effective and sustainable change. We will not be able to know it unless we place our programmes under the assessment scanner.

Asma I. Abdulmalik is a development specialist. You can follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AsmaIMalik