Aid Thoughts

In the spirit of Matt's New Years Resolution 5: Aid Watch has just posted a blog implying that US aid to Egypt is supporting their Government rather than helping the Egyptian people. The evidence? This:

Yet the evidence presented here does nothing to tell us whether or not the Government is being supported, whether the Egyptian people are benefiting from the aid, or both. All it tells us is that aid is largely channeled through the state. It is definitely possible that such aid is supporting the regime, but here are a few alternative suggestions as to why this might be the case:

• The state is more efficient than the NGO community in Egypt. This may or may not be true, but we can't tell from here.
• They are supporting activities that require state sanction, like the building of free primary schools, or provision of free healthcare through the national systems of education or health.
• They are supporting greater transparency of state activities by publishing more state information (again, I've no idea if this is true, but it would be compatible with the above).
• They are supporting better, more rule-based, and more transparent public financial management (USAID do this in a few countries so it wouldn't be a surprise).

Of course it's also possible that all that money going through the state is just spreading patronage. Or that it's both spreading patronage and supporting society at large through valuable projects. We just can't tell from that graph. Laura Freschi is one of the best bloggers around, and Aid Watch does a great job of being skeptics who question bad policy, and reaching a bigger audience than most blogs. That's important. It's precisely because it's so widely read and more influential than most blogs that it needs to hold itself to higher standards of evidence than the people it criticises.