I decided to take advantage of the long Easter weekend – not as long as it might be because while DFID has a holiday today, the Government of Ethiopia does not – and embark on a Journey to the East, to Harar, a city about 500km from Addis Ababa towards Djibouti, Somalia and Somaliland.
Interesting post, as usual – even though I sometimes disagree – from Owen Barder about transparency. I’ve stuck my oar in – again again – making the point that – CATCHPHRASE ALERT – “transparency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for securing effective accountability”.
There are lots of problems with development assistance. One of them is that people like me don’t really know what we’re doing, but pretend that we do. Or more specifically, that we rarely make explicit why we think that what we are doing will lead to the results that are hoped for.
My thinking on this has been stimulated by David Roodman of the Center for Global Development. David is in the process of writing a book about micro-finance and posed a question about definitions of development.
I’m not going to comment on the recent stories about the possible diversion of aid to Ethiopia in the 1980s to buy arms, but readers might want to have a listen to three recent pieces about the country, and the UK’s aid relationship with the country, on the BBC’s World Tonight over the last couple of weeks.
Amanda’s now back in the UK, recovering from our adventures in Ethiopia. For her first week, I was working but we managed to see quite a bit of Addis together, and then she was ably escorted by my taxi-driver-cum-friend Teddy.
I’ll blog about our adventures soon, but for the moment the pictures are available here
Provoked or stimulated by a piece on migration on Owen Barder’s blog, referencing a piece on the AidWatchers blog, I’ve stuck my oar in. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while.
Challenging the borders-up mentality prevalent in many developed countries certainly gets my vote (although the benefits of immigration in the rich world do tend to go to rich people, which complicates matters). And it’s good to question the conventional wisdom that the out-migration of skilled people is always bad for developing countries. But …. continue reading…
