I’ve been moonlighting on other blogs this week. First up was round two on results – I posted here on GD a few weeks ago about what a results agenda could do for development, and I had round two of this debate with Ros Eyben from IDS on Duncan Green’s blog this week.
My argument is that the right information, in the right hands, can be revolutionary. The push to results shouldn’t be resisted, but instead used to put power in the hands of poor people. If donors have to define what they are trying to do, and why, then they are more accountable. And if we know what results people want, then it’s easier to judge if donors, governments and NGOs are actually delivering them.
Without a commitment to do what poor people want, and the information to know what this is, the result, in the worst case, can be a development agenda driven by fashions and fads and not by evidence. Take the example of HIV funding – even though there was, and is, a need for substantial funds to tackle the epidemic, even some HIV activists are now saying privately that perhaps their sector has been overfunded compared to others where the need is as pressing but the cause just not so fashionable.
There are grounds to be optimistic that the ‘value for money’ agenda could be used to find out what poor people themselves value. Then the cost of different policies and programmes that might deliver this can be compared to to produce an idea of the ‘value for money’ of different development interventions. I’ve just published this paper at ODI on methods for finding out what poor people want and translating that into policy. There are precedents: in the UK’s National Health Service, information on what health outcomes people value, and how much they value them, is used to measure the effect of different treatments, and to allocate resources.
If we could use this methodology, or something like it, to measure how poor people themselves (or, more likely, different groups of poor people – men and women, rural and urban etc) define ‘value’ in development, then we’d really be on to something.
