Development aid critique: quick results say little about long-term success

Brigitte Erler’s Tödliche Hilfe (Deadly Aid) was published in 1985 and unleashed a furious public and academic discussion in Germany about the value of development assistance. The book was a forerunner of a debate about aid effectiveness that continues unabated today and has led, among other things, to an emphasis on quick, measureable impacts in the design of development projects. However, quick results say little about the ultimate contribution of such projects. Revisiting some of the projects Erler criticized, now, thirty year later, sheds surprising light on the subject. by Marianne Scholte

In 1983, Erler, then a desk officer in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), returned from a three-week trip to Bangladesh, where she visited projects supported by the ministry. She immediately quit her job and wrote Tödliche Hilfe, in which she maintained that ‘every single component of the projects implemented under my responsibility made the rich richer and the poor, poorer.’

Erler was one of the first to write a scathing bestseller critical of development aid. She would not be the last. In 2009, the Zambian economist, Dambisa Moyo, wrote a book with a title similar to Erler’s: Dead Aid: why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa. Echoing Erler, Moyo claimed that ‘Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased.’

In the more nuanced, but no less strident The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), William Easterly, the former World Bank research economist, argued that aid has been, for the most part, a colossal waste of money because planners had been imposing ‘big ideas’ from above instead of searching out what might work in a concrete situation. 

This fundamental skepticism towards aid has contributed to a questionable trend in international development cooperation: Today, development projects are increasingly required to use relatively short-term results-based monitoring and evaluation frameworks such as DFID’s 3Es ‘Value for Money’ or the BMZ’s Results Matrix to prove that their positive impact justifies the use of development funds. Some agencies are even experimenting with a cash-on-delivery framework, whereby development aid is only disbursed if the planned results have actually been achieved. 

Critics in the tradition of Brigitte Erler have done a disservice to development aid, as they have ignored the fact that one needs patience for development and development aid to be successful. In this context, it is instructive to circle back and examine some of the BMZ-supported projects in Bangladesh that so exasperated Erler 30 years ago. 

From 1982 to 1992, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ)[1] and Bangladeshi government agencies worked in the district of Tangail to increase the production of cash crops by introducing improved varieties of fruit and vegetables and constructing subsoil irrigation systems fed by deep tubewells. 

Because the roads were often impassable in the rainy season and farmers could not get their crops to market, the Tangail Agricultural Development Project began to build all-weather roads, beginning with the Shakipur-Shagardighi road in eastern Tangail. More roads were built by the successor project, the Tangail Infrastructure Development Project, which ran from 1992 to 2004 and was supported by GTZ and also by the KfW Entwicklungsbank. 

When Erler visited Tangail in 1983, her criticism focused on issues surrounding control of the water from the tubewells and other implementation difficulties that the relatively new projects were encountering. Erler seemed completely unaware of the potential significance of road building, concerned only that new roads would lead to deforestation and were otherwise unnecessary, as ‘only foreign experts and the highest ranking government officials travel around in cars.’

She couldn’t have been more wrong in her assessment. Today, a large part of Tangail’s agricultural production is exported to Dhaka and other parts of Bangladesh. Poorer people have also benefited from the roads: they go to the health clinics more frequently and send their children to school more often. Especially women reported increased mobility. Tangail became a pilot district for Bangladesh’s Local Government Engineering Department (LGED), which side-by-side with GTZ consultants in the field developed the LGED Road Maintenance Management System and the road safety campaigns that are now used throughout Bangladesh. 

Erler was sceptical of the benefits of modern transportation infrastructure in Tangail; she was equally sceptical about efforts to introduce modern forms of contraception in the district of Munshiganj, where GTZ was supporting a project to set up mothers’ clubs – something Erler called a ‘trick… which used income generation, employment and loan programmes to emancipate women, coax them out of their houses and motivate them to take birth control pills or be sterilized.’ 

However, the Mother and Child Health Based Family Planning Project Munshiganj was headed by a German sociologist who had no intention of ignoring the needs of women or coercing them to use birth control. Gisela Hayfa took up her assignment in 1979, spent a lot of time talking to women, trying to understand what was going on, and then designed activities that attempted to meet the needs of local women. In 1982, well before Erler’s book, Hayfa wrote a book about the project’s failures and achievements entitled Aufbau von Frauengruppen in Bangladesh (establishing women’s groups in Bangladesh).

Erler concluded that the project only benefitted the rich and influential. BMZ took quite a different tack. The lessons learned in Munshiganj were used in a subsequent project at the National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT). The training program for family planning outreach workers, which ran from 1986 to 1999, explicitly linked family planning to health care, one of the factors that made Bangladesh’s family planning program one of the most successful in the world. Bangladesh’s total fertility rate fell dramatically, from nearly 7 children per woman in the early 1970s to 3.3 in the mid-1990s and 2.2 children per woman in 2012. 

Overall, Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in terms of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. According to UNDP, Bangladesh has already halved the population living below the poverty line, attained gender parity in primary and secondary education, reduced under-five mortality by two-thirds and made remarkable progress in many other areas.[2] The ‘development surprise’ in Bangladesh has only recently begun to attract attention. Many development partners, including the German Government, have been working with Bangladesh to achieve those results – steadily, patiently for over 40 years.

However, if projects like the family planning and infrastructure projects criticized by Erler had been subjected to a rigid cost-benefit analysis, the medium and long-term effects would not have been captured. A focus on short-term logframes, which has been promoted, perhaps unintentionally, by critics like Erler since the publication of Tödliche Hilfe 30 years ago, would have completely obscured their ultimate significance. 

(Originally published online in German in welt-sichten: http://www.welt-sichten.org/brennpunkte/27812/hilfe-kritik-ein-baerendienst)

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[1] In 2011, GTZ changed its name to Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusmannenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH

[2] http://www.bd.undp.org/content/bangladesh/en/home/mdgoverview.html