Taylor Malia Richards and Dr. Darren Hawkins, Department of Political Science
Foreign aid, and aid effectiveness, has been one of the most heated debates in international relations and US foreign policy in the past several decades. Is aid ever effective? Under what conditions? At stake are billions of dollars and, potentially, millions of lives and livelihoods. The most frequently cited concern is that much aid is “lost” in countries with poor governance; used up in corrupt, inefficient, and unprepared bureaucracies. The governance condition, while empirically contested, has nonetheless become conventional wisdom among donors. To avoid this loss, donors increasingly bypass poor governments by subcontracting projects to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). NGOs are perceived as more efficient and less corrupt, with less bureaucracy and more on-the-ground knowledge than agencies and donor countries. Giving money to NGOs instead of governments or international organizations of states (like the UN or the World Bank) has become an increasingly common practice in the aid community.
Only recently, however, have the impediments to NGO aid delivery begun to receive attention. Our project sought to understand the barriers to NGO aid delivery, beginning with a thorough review of the literature and data involved. Our structure includes seven barriers that we adopted from the research of a foundation, CIVICUS, that studies civil society.1 We then began to conduct preliminary interviews in Uganda to see how these barriers that we understood on paper were manifest on the ground, and how important each of them was to NGOs.
We originally hypothesized that these barriers were of differing importance to NGOs and planned to find the relative importance of each of these barriers to NGOs. Is it more important to have a better legal environment or better financial situation or a better public image? How much better? Which is most important? However, we found that as we began to ask NGOs to rank and rate these barriers, there was surprising diversity among their responses and the ratings of importance fell closely together. Contrary to what we originally believed, the barriers seemed to be roughly of equal importance. Therefore, we changed our plans for further data analysis and decided to continue to understand each of these barriers better through further research and more intensive analysis of past interviews.2 I thoroughly reviewed the somewhat confusing categories of barriers to foreign aid as set forth by CIVICUS and organized and clarified them in prose. I also was able to complement these categories with other research that was relevant, making them more clear and richer.
Then, using the research that we had conducted in Uganda, I was able to illustrate these categories with the experiences of NGOs we had contacted, greatly augmenting the country information that is available through CIVICUS to give a much more full example.
To document our work, I wrote an intensive research report of our work thus far that may be used in future publications or as the foundation for more research. This report includes about 30 pages of literature overview concerning aid effectiveness, conditions of governance, and NGO aid. Another 30 pages describe, in depth, our understanding of each of the barriers we studied and how they are manifest in Uganda. This report will be very valuable for the exciting research on foreign aid which has been a focal point of international relations scholarship at BYU. Four BYU professors (including my mentor, Prof Hawkins) in a team with the University of William and Mary and the NGO Development Gateway oversee the AidData database for cataloging project-level foreign aid. Together, they employ a whole team of research assistants studying foreign aid. Since NGO aid is an underdeveloped, but increasingly important, subject of study in the aid literature, this report will not only help in future research and publications that I may choose to pursue, but also help new research assistants better familiarize themselves with the literature.
A productive area of further research would first be to determine how much aid is actually being given to NGOs. While the literature provides many ballpark figures for this, an extensive amount of coding and research needs to be done to determine exact figures. As BYU houses the AidData database, this may be a large but ultimately attainable goal, though researchers have shied away from it in the past. If we were able to assemble this information, we could disaggregate NGO-led projects and see if they were more effective in countries with fewer barriers to NGO activity, and which barriers mattered the most in impacting returns to aid.