By Kate Fogelberg
Amongst all of the other news stories about the American election, I wouldn’t be too surprised if you missed the Daily Mail’s piece on UK aid contractors pocketing mountains of cash and under-delivering drinking water and irrigation infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa. My brother is an attorney and he can never enjoy legal thrillers because he’s too focused on the legal minutiae that makes for boring reporting, but it is part and parcel of a legal career. I feel the same when I read the latest juicy water expose. The headlines capture my attention, but I never get to really enjoy the story. The public, however, should be outraged, but at more than just the “fat cats” mentioned in the Daily Mail.
Perverse incentives
While the article is designed to elicit a moral shudder to the image of greedy contractors profiting at the expense of both the British taxpayer and the poor, climate unresilient African farmer, all it does for me is remind me of the larger problem. At its simplest level, UK aid is considered successful if the 0.7% target is met. Thus, there is pressure to spend money, not necessarily contribute to meaningful development. So even though the results on the ground sound rather grim to the Daily Mail reader, the contractors are, in fact, spending the money and contributing to that magical 0.7%. Cancelling the project, as the Daily Mail suggests should have happened, is politically embarrassing for all those who approved it and just puts that target even further away.
A drop in the bucket of waste
Although the piece focuses on the limited results of climate resilience, there is also a substantial component of drinking water infrastructure included. No longer the elephant in the washroom, it is well-known than at least 30% of water infrastructure fails within a few years of investment. In some countries, this is closer to 60%. So what makes me even more distressed than the latest “fat cats” to get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, is that of the £0.7 billion spent by DFID on WASH programmes from 2010-2014, one could project that 1/3 of that, close to £230 million, is likely to be the value of broken infrastructure. But since there is no systematic reporting of investment sustainability, it could be twice as much.
People versus pipes
I wish the answer to the water and climate change crises was just more and smarter infrastructure. But it’s not that simple. As someone who just spent ten years looking at a lot of broken pumps and taps, I know all too well that we can’t engineer our way out of the crises. More donated wells and irrigation schemes without investment into the root causes of why they’re not there in the first place or why services fail prematurely will just lead to more and not-so-smart failure.
The programme was not designed to deliver many infrastructure investments itself, but rather get projects “investment ready.” I have less of a bone to pick with this, in theory, but they’ve neglected the opportunity to address one of the ongoing systemic constraints to expanding and maintaining drinking water and irrigation services: human capacity.
Right idea, wrong solution
The article reports that the programme hired 550 staff. This highlights one of the newer elephants in the room: the human resource gap in the WASH sector. Examples abound from the need to multiply the workforce nine times to reach and sustain universal access in Papua New Guinea; to the lack of 82,000 professionals in the Philippines; to the need to double the workforce in Mozambique. Once this project ends, all of the skilled work that was being done by the 550 people to plan, survey, finance, build, operate, maintain, and more, will leave another gap. There was a missed opportunity to tackle this challenge, but the further a programme is from the photogenic farmer and pump, the less sexy it is to sell to the public or the politicians.
Timing matters….or does it?
One of the main complaints of the article is that only 370 people of an expected 15,000 are now more “resilient,” which is left to the reader to guess what that might mean. The contractors defend only reaching 2% of their targets to timing issues and that many more farmers will soon be resilient. Additional projects are underway, and I’d throw them a bone on this one. Perhaps it’s my own biases showing as I remember many a water and sanitation infrastructure investment financed by households or governments to operate on their timelines, not foreigner reporting deadlines. But I would bet the ranch that even if thousands more were “resilient,” of which they very well might be by now, the outrage over contractor fees would remain.
Mo’ money, mo’ problems
I’m not surprised that reports of private gain for a “feel good” sector like international aid raise the eyebrows of many. Being a cog in the wheel of the development machine, I’m less morally disturbed by the idea of paying people to work towards improving lives and livelihoods than your average Daily Mail reader. But it’s got to be well spent and within reason, which is clearly defined very differently by DFID, contractors, and Daily Mail subscribers. However, putting mo’ money into a system or project that is ultimately concerned with spending mo’ money and expecting more and smarter results, sounds a lot like alternative maths to me.