Strength in numbers: some provisional metrics for the sector

Visualization created by IBM of Wikipedia edits. (Photo: Viegas)

Rumour has it that 2013 is the international year of statistics (and quinoa and water cooperation, but we have less to say about that).

Given the globe’s current obsession with big data  (Wikipedia: a collection of data sets that are so big and complex they are difficult to process) and open data (often associated with big data released by governments) it seems an appropriate choice of year.

Big, open data is exciting a lot of people. Since information is power, handing over giga-bytes of information to people to mash up, manipulate and analyze, feels quite empowering. It popularizes the capacity of people to generate their own original data and evidence, and use it to shape policy.



But frankly, given all the hype, we have to admit we are kind of disappointed.

We were expecting all of this big data to tell us a lot more about what we actually wanted to know (and to get government to do more of what we wanted them to).

Over the past eight months, CCIC has been dabbling with some big data (Canada Revenue Agency data sets  on Canada’s 80,000 plus charitable organizations and CIDA’s historical data sets ) to generate some metrics (a fancy word for “useful numbers”) for the international development sector.

For example, how many organizations are there in Canada working on international development? How much money collectively are they generating from the Federal and Provincial government, and private individuals? How many individuals do these groups employ? And where are these groups working and on what?

It seemed a simple enough task.

We couldn’t have been more wrong.

What they don’t tell you about big data (“data sets that are so big and complex…”) is that they are, in fact, really big and complex (you’ll need a super-advanced database programmer and a Post-Doc statistician on your team). And despite the size and complexity, the data is limited, of course, to the ‘interests’ of whoever produced it. So the data can maybe tell you answers to really big and complex issues, but not necessarily the questions you want answers to. ‘What can the data tell us?’ is perhaps the only reliable question.

(As an aside, Development Initiatives in the UK is trying to develop some reliable and robust aggregate data for private giving for development across all OECD countries. They have met with similar challenges in the data they have tried to generate. And conversations they have had with other national platforms trying to develop their own metrics to feed into this project have echoed many of the challenges we outline here. Comfort in numbers!)

Case in point: all of the above questions.   

How many organizations work on international development? Using in part the CIDA data set, we came up with a figure of approximately 865 organizations.  This is already only a part answer – since it’s only the organizations which get funding from CIDA. The further challenge here was figuring out who we wanted to count and how we would go about counting them. In the end, we established a definition for the sector that included members of CCIC and members of the Provincial and Regional Councils from the past five years (minus overlap) and who had received funding from CIDA as civil society over the past five years (minus any consortia of groups). And in doing so, we also came up with our own new (albeit small) set of data. It likely generates a close, but still approximate, number, since some of the organizations we included may have dissolved since then, or the definition we developed to catch the field of actors may still not be broad enough – for example, we may still need to include organizations who have only gotten provincial funding but may not be members of any Council. Filling some of these gaps will be part of our next step.

How much Federal, Provincial and private money are they generating? From the CRA figures, in 2010, we can generate some very preliminary and approximate estimates: the total aggregrate revenue that organizations generate is about $2.6 billion, of which approximately $450,000 from the Federal Government, $350,000 from CIDA, $180,000 from the Provinces, $175,000 from private foundations and $1 billion from individuals, among other sources. And this is where things get really tricky (and even more approximate).

While the CRA (and the T3010 information they provide) is a mine of information, it is of course only good for registered charities. If we compare the number of organizations defined above, only 430 of them are Federally Registered. Furthermore, of those that are Federally registered, the numbers include 55 Universities and Colleges, whom have got contracts to do various development work, but including their (for example for revenue and employees) completely skews the broader results. The Red Cross and YMCA-YWCA similarly do a lot of development work but also have large domestic programs. And then what about the other 435 organizations that aren’t captured (because they are only registered provincially, are housed within another organization, or simply don’t need to issue charitable receipts?). A second phase of work will help refine these unwieldy figures.

And how many individuals do these organizations employ? Again, we think around 8,000; but some of the same reservations we have identified above also apply here. Equally in terms of where groups work and on what, the CIDA data sets can tell us a lot of information (which, nostra culpa, we still have to extract), but only for those organizations that get CIDA funding. It is a subset, albeit a large one, but of a bigger pie.
Looking forward, CCIC plans to work in collaboration with the Provincial and Regional Councils to fill some of these gaps and get a more comprehensive picture of the sector – check your inboxes soon for a short, but extremely important, survey.

The results to date have been encouraging (albeit generating more questions than answers). But the findings are clearly extremely important. More and more individuals and organizations are asking us for this data. And we are already getting to use some of it.

What better project for the international year of statistics!

This blog was written by Fraser Reilly-King, Policy Analyst (Aid), CCIC, and Al Webb, Volunteer and consultant. The views expressed are their own, and do not necessarily represent the views of CCIC or its members.

Just how are donors engaging with the private sector, and what does this mean for development?

Just over a year ago, the private sector was crowned the new silver bullet for development.

In the years and months preceding Busan’s Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4), members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC)—the forum through which donor countries coordinate their aid efforts—had renewed their interest in economic growth and the private sector as driving forces behind development.

The culmination of this focus came at HLF-4, where bilateral donors envisaged a number of potential roles for the private sector to play: as a funder and innovative source of finance for shared development goals and challenges; as an implementing partner; as a source of public and private income generation and job creation; and as a key constituency to engage in the creation of national development strategies that support an enabling environment for the private sector and, in turn, growth.

Despite this emerging fascination, donor policies for promoting economic growth and the private sector have received very little comparative analysis.

So a year ago, in collaboration with Shannon Kindornay from The North-South Institute, we began a process to address this gap by mapping and assessing bilateral donor strategies on the private sector and economic growth. The objective was to identify emerging themes in donor policies by comparing and contrasting different elements of their strategies.

The final report, “Investing in the Business of Development – Bilateral donor approaches to engaging the private sector” – whose official launch is next week - captures a range of findings relative to the visions and assumptions of donors’ strategies; where the state, private sector actors, and other development actors fit into these visions; and how donors take account in their strategies of development and financial additionality, international aid and development commitments, and cross-cutting issues such as sustainability, gender, and human rights, and principles relating to aid effectiveness.

Each issue might command a blog of its own – Shannon’s provides a good overview of some of the donor’s assumptions and the implications of this.

This blog focuses on an element of our research findings that I think helped clarify my own thinking around (and perhaps adds some value by giving shape to) the current debates around aid, development and the private sector.

For me, to date, the debates have been confusing because the private sector means very different things to very different people. But it has also become confusing because the ways donors are engaging with the private sector are very wide-ranging, yet both proponents and critics of this approach tend to bundle any type of engagement with the private sector into one big pool, missing the different layers of engagement and its implications for different development actors.

What the research has done is create a sort of “typology” in terms of this private sector engagement.

Firstly, it clearly and consistently distinguishes between three types of private sector (national [donor], foreign [multinational], and domestic [recipient country]). Perhaps not broad ranging enough for some, but a start.

Secondly, it organizes donor engagement into two distinct tracks:  promoting private sector development and partnering with the private sector to achieve broader development outcomes.

The promotion angle is the more traditional one: creating the right legal and regulatory environment for the private sector (as much national and foreign as domestic) to flourish and helping markets work better. The thinking is that a thriving private sector contributes to growth, which in turn contributes to poverty reduction.

The partner approach is more recent one that has emerged to help make effective use of declining aid resources, leverage alternative sources of development financing, and identify innovative private sector-managed solutions to development challenges, including the provision of goods and services to poorer populations (bottom of the pyramid approaches, for example).

These approaches are not mutually exclusive.

But joint international statements by donor countries and new funding arrangements being developed at the donor level indicate that there is an increasing emphasis on this partnership approach.

To further distill the promotion and partnership approach, and building on previous NSI research, this report identifies three different levels in which donors are doing this: at the Macro level (by creating an enabling environment for business), at the Meso level (making markets work) and at the Micro level (investing in businesses and people).

And at each of these levels, donors are using a range of different tools and modalities for engaging different private sectors – national, foreign and domestic.

So what does this mean for development, poverty reduction and inequality? And what needs to be done to ensure that whatever it means, it does more for poverty than less?

I may have to save that for another day (and another 800 words).

Or you could beat me to the punch and read the full report (all 92 pages; 52 if you want to skip endnotes and annexes!), draw your own conclusions in your own blog (let us know- freillyking[a]ccic.ca) - or cheat and just read the Coles Notes! 

This blog was written by Fraser Reilly-King, Policy Analyst (Aid), CCIC. The views expressed are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of CCIC or its members.

One year on (PART 2): Come together (Post-2015) – The Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation

Days before civil society came together in Nairobi to launch the CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness (CPDE), the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) had a meeting of its own in London on 5-6 December – bringing together the members of the GPEDC Steering Committee in their first face-to-face meeting. The representatives – including civil society – met to discuss four things: the substantive priorities for the Global Partnership, in particular as they relate to the Post-2015 agenda; plans for the first Ministerial meeting of the Global Partnership in 2013; updates on the monitoring framework, indicators and targets; and the communications and outreach plan for the GPEDC.

Not surprisingly, discussion of a CSO Co-Chair, of a second CSO seat, and of a seat for the trade unions (outside of the CSO seat) and local government was completely shot down. This issue, among others, was a sore point for civil society in June, and caused us to take a step back from the process. Instead the decision to expand has now been left to the Ministers at the first Ministerial – like that is ever going to happen! But despite this major setback, there does seem to be greater efforts to accommodate all the members of the Steering Committee, and so for now, civil society has decided to remain engaged.

But back to the meeting.

In terms of synergies with the Post-2015 agenda, the joint OECD-UNDP secretariat and some members of the Steering Committee are trying to situate the GPEDC within the work of the High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda (HLP) and to carve out a niche for themselves as a successor to MDG 8 and the global partnership for development.  The connection makes some sense and the links won’t be hard to make. British Prime Minister David Cameron is an HLP Co-Chair and British Development Minister Justine Greening is one of the Steering Committee Co-Chairs; the other two GPEDC Co-Chairs, Indonesian National Development Armida Alisjahbana and Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, are also either represented on the Panel (Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is also an HLP Co-Chair) or are HLP members.

In terms of merging the post-2015 process with the agenda of the Busan Partnership for Development Effectiveness (BPd), the secretariat has also made some clear linkages. It draws on a number of elements: the role of the private sector and private flows; the opportunities for knowledge sharing and peer learning in South-South Cooperation; the multi-stakeholder nature of the Partnership in terms of engaging civil society, local, municipal and regional governments, as well as parliamentarians; the “Beyond Aid” focus of the BPd.

In practice, going forward the Steering Committee envisages four work streams leading up to the first GPEDC Ministerial meeting (provisionally set for October). Under the broad umbrella of “What’s changed since Busan,” these include the following: the post-2015 linkages; domestic resource mobilization, including tax evasion, linked to country financing and discussions around global financing for development; the role of the private sector and its ability to leverage aid resources; inclusive development, including a focus on democratic ownership, rights based approaches, gender equality and decent work; and, knowledge sharing and peer learning, as an effort to more readily engage emerging economies.

What remains unclear as the Steering Committee looks to identify synergies between its role and this work, is how this complements – and doesn’t undermine or displace – existing fora, including the HLP, the UN Development Cooperation Forum, the UN Financing for Development process, regional initiatives and the work of the G-20.  For some governments, the GPEDC has yet to establish its legitimacy and credibility (since Busan, India, China and Brazil have remained on the periphery), in particular as it relates to more inclusive and universal fora like the UN. But given the concrete space and voice that civil society has defined for itself within the Steering Committee of the GPEDC, the GPEDC may have some added-value in terms of influencing potential.

Regardless of where you sit, the GPEDC clearly envisages itself as a key player and fora for these discussions and any post-2015 framework, and the intent is to showcase this at the First Ministerial. These Ministerials need to maintain political momentum in the process. Beyond profiling the outcomes of these workstreams, and highlighting synergies with other existing for a, the Ministerials will also need to profile data and evidence gathered that demonstrates progress on the global indicators and Busan commitments.  Again how the secretariat and Steering Committee plan to do this is also unclear. In the paper on the monitoring framework that was prepared for the meeting, only five of the ten global indicators have been finalized, with varying degrees of progress on the other five. Most are not expected to be concluded until March. This leaves barely six months to generate the data and evidence required to feed into the Ministerials.

This will be challenging since the secretariat is still developing operational guidance to enable countries to implement the various methodologies, many of the indicators will still need to be test-piloted, and data gathering at the country level in many cases still requires substantial support. Although some of the indicators may have developed some evidence by then, what may be more feasible – although not necessarily desirable, given the criticism CSOs have placed on the indicators – is establishing how these indicators could complement or inform the future accountability framework that is expected to accompany the post-2015 framework.

Finally, the GPEDC secretariat is also developing a communications and engagement strategy for the Partnership. This includes creating a visible brand around the GPEDC; a multi-lingual web site of key information, publications newsletters and opinion pieces; a web-based knowledge platform; and live web streaming and an archive of past meetings – key to promoting the transparency and accountability of the Partnership to its various constituencies.

2013 will be an important year for the Global Partnership. Will it come together?

 

This blog was written by Fraser Reilly-King, Policy Analyst (Aid), CCIC. The views expressed are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of CCIC or its members.

One year on (PART 1): Come together – The Pamoja/Nairobi Declaration for Development Effectiveness

It has been just over a year since the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4) concluded in Busan, South Korea, and I find myself in another country, and on another continent. This past weekend, around 50 representatives from around the world and from the rural, faith based, feminist sectors and international civil society organizations (CSOs) met on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. We met to plan our future engagement around the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) and our work at the regional and national level, and to potentially launch a new collective CSO Platform for Development Effectiveness (CPDE). But coming together has not been so easy. And as incredible as it sounds, it has taken a year to get to this point, building immediate consensus with around 500 people and generating 20 drafts of the CPDE founding document!

On December 2, 2011, the day after HLF-4, BetterAid and the Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness met to discuss our post-Busan agenda. With a set of global standards in place, including the Istanbul Principles for CSO Development Effectiveness, everyone knew that any new structure needed to evoke the spirit of Busan, “Country Heavy, Global Light”, and to get down to the nitty-gritty of implementation. In practice, this meant that more energy and resources needed to be filtered down to the national and regional levels, to build the capacity of national CSOs to monitor and engage with national development plans and the Busan commitments, to coordinate at a regional level, to promote minimum standards around the enabling environment, and to begin implementing the Istanbul Principles.  At a global level, this meant developing a light global structure that would engage with the new GPEDC, continue to press our CSO Key Asks on the Road to Busan, and hold governments to account for their commitments.

But over the past four years, hundreds of organizations and constituencies have invested huge amounts of time, energy and identity into BetterAid and the Open Forum. While this work, and what we have accomplished, can’t ever been taken away, closing the doors on two organizations still seems quite final. It feels like we are ending two chapters before we know the conclusion of each story.  The past four years has also pitted egos, priorities and competing interests – and sometimes platforms – against one another. In the lead-up to Busan, the two platforms had held it together, but we still needed to come together. Nairobi, therefore, was an important conclusion to the often heated discussions of the last year and an effort at, as they say in Swahili, “pamoja” or “togetherness”. The Pamoja Declaration does this. It unites our collective vision, mission, principles and goals going forward (as well as key decisions reached), and finally launched the new CSO Platform for Development Effectiveness.

And so what does this entail? The Declaration itself can tell the story:

“Our Vision

We envisage a world where respect for human rights, participatory democracy, social and environmental justice and sustainability, gender equality and equity, and decent work and sustainable change are achieved.

Our Mission

To promote development effectiveness in all areas of work, both our own and the work of others, including through active engagement with the GPEDC, we will be guided by a human rights based approach.

In order to develop a strong basis for CSO participation in the creation and realization of our vision, mission and goals for development, the CPDE will work with a strong focus to support country, sub-regional and regional, and sectoral civil society, combining this with the coordinated regional and global work on development effectiveness.  

To achieve this vision, we need to also address exclusion, oppression and removing structures of power that perpetuate injustice.

Therefore, we are committed to social justice approaches and mechanisms, to challenge unequal power structures, especially for women (such as by working towards a feminist approach), in order to achieve emancipation of excluded communities and people.”

“Our Goals

 

To realize our shared vision, we commit to work together in partnership on a global-scale in relation to development effectiveness and the GPEDC to achieve the following goals:

• to pursue and advocate for a transformative agenda for development and development cooperation, informed by our guiding principles and a human rights-based approach to development that prioritizes gender equality, decent work, and environmental sustainability, as well as dignity, justice and improved livelihoods for all people living in poverty, including the most marginalized, victims of violence, and those with disabilities, and the full realization of human rights for all;
• to protect and deepen policy gains made in Paris, Accra and Busan, and reverse any of the harmful provisions that continue to guide those three agendas;
• to continue to advocate for development effectiveness in development cooperation policy and practice, in particular as it relates to the accountability of governments to the broader development effectiveness agenda, the Internationally Agreed Development Goals and to people;
• to continuously work to improve our own effectiveness and the realization of an enabling environment for civil society as independent development actors in our own right.

These goals are informed by our CSO Key Asks on the Road to Busan, including those raised ahead of Busan by women’s organizations, the trade unions, and faith-based organizations; the Istanbul Principles and Siem Reap International Framework; and prior assessments of the Paris, Accra and Busan commitments.”

It is a tall order. But then civil society has never been short on ambition. We now need to focus on putting this into action, and perhaps above all, to truly coming together.

This blog was written by Fraser Reilly-King, Policy Analyst (Aid), CCIC. The views expressed are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of CCIC or its members.