This morning, I got up at 5:15 am to drive a friend to the aiport. This is not normally the precursor to a good day: it took three alarm clocks to wake me up and I went straight to the office afterwards. Adding insult to injury, I've been operating without the benefit of caffeine since then.
Despite this, today is a good day. Aid Watch have posted a fantastic piece about planning in development. Read it here.
And if you work in development as a policy-maker, donor officer, Government official or researcher, let me emphasise that. Read it here.
Their guest blogger, Jeffrey Barnes, has articulated some very important points about the process of 'planning' as it pertains to development. Some of the choice sections read as follows:
My experience of development planning leads me to the conclusion that there are, in fact, very few real plans in development. There are a lot of documents that are called plans, but these documents donât really qualify as plans. A real plan describes in specific detail how the human, financial and technological resources that are under your control will be mobilized to produce a measurable result in a given time period.Yet:
Development plans fail to meet this definition of plans, either because the resources described in the plan are not under anyoneâs control, or because the plan lacks specificity... Such non-plans donât serve as a guide to implementationâthey are simply advocacy tools for governments to get donors to make pledges for different parts of the national wish list. Even as one part of the plan starts, other parts of the plan remain inactive awaiting donor support. This is akin to starting a bicycle trip and hoping to find the handlebars and pedals along the way. Little wonder that so few of these plans arrive at their intended destination.And finally:
The second kind of non-plan one sees in the development world is more accurately described as a process statement. While financing may be in place, this kind of plan lacks specifics on who will be doing what, when and where... Eventually, such proposals might lead to some real plans, but this means that a large share of project âimplementationâ time is actually spent making and revising annual plans.Over my career working in development I have read hundreds of plans. The ones that avoid the pitfalls Barnes points out, and achieve what he rightly suggests is the minimum standard in business could be counted on one hand. This has such a big impact on our effectiveness: the lack of clarity about who will do what and with what money, and how much we can afford to do complicates the decision making process and compromises our ability to harmonise the efforts of donors and Government and indeed among donors and within Government.
I want to add a point to what Jeffrey Barnes has spoken about, though. His arguments about planning are strong, and needed to be said, but he hasn't said enough. What I'm concerned with is why our plans are so ill-defined. Why our plans donât plan properly.
My work in development centres on aid effectiveness. The constraints to planning processes are at the centre of this work. There are two broad categories: imprecision of vision and uncertainty of means. Both affect donors and developing country Governments.
Imprecise Visions
Letâs start with imprecision of vision. What does development look like in country X? What do we expect Zanzibar will, or should, look like when itâs developed? Actually, what do we mean by âdevelopedâ? We donât have a rigorously defined end-point to the work weâre doing in each country. This is not a minor matter. Without this, itâs so much easier for all actors in development to pull in different directions or just argue and undo each othersâ work. Whatâs more, if we donât know what weâre looking for, itâs very difficult to draw a map to find it.
Letâs say weâve overcome that problem. Now we need to know how long it will all take. If weâre planning in installments, we need to know what installments are logical. If five year plans are logical (and who decided that?) we need to know how many lots of five year plans weâll need since maintenance of previous gains takes some effort and will need to be planned for. If we donât know how long the whole road is, it's hard to plan the journey.
This problem is particularly acute the bigger your picture is. Small, focused NGOs or tightly defined vertical funds might know exactly what their end-goal is, and what they need to do and how long it will take them. Bigger-picture players, like the Government or major international donors, seek to knit together all the smaller outcomes into a final destination â but none have ever satisfactorily articulated what the outcomes are. And no, the MDGs arenât that articulation. Theyâre useful and important targets, but theyâre specific targets and not a conception of what a developed economy and polity looks like and what its laws of motion are.
Uncertain Funding
The second issue I raised is uncertainty of funding. This issue affects everyone: NGOs, developing country Governments, even the World Bank and DfID. Once out plans have been defined with rigour and given a clear accountability structure, we still need to fund the plan. Yet development actors rarely know how much money theyâll get in a given year with much accuracy, let alone how much theyâll get on a yearly basis for ten years. I did analysis on this in Malawi for three consecutive years. We found that in no year did more than 3 or 4 donors provide within +/-10% of the funds promised to the Government, and the variances were unstable year-to-year: you couldnât plan on getting -10% of what was planned. It was true unpredictability.
This has a different effect on different players. Smaller NGOs may be forced to play a shorter game: they have their issue and they seek to make the most immediate impact because if they plan for ten years and only get funding for 4, theyâll just leave a lot of work unfinished. In many cases, they also need to leave some activities unfunded or with funding âto be determinedâ.
Donorsâ funding is also uncertain. Some multilateral donors secure funding only on a year-on-year basis. Others have three or five year budgets. This determines the life cycle of their projects and activities and in turn impacts on Government plans.
Governments tend to make the grandest plans: five year national development plans, a Vision for 2020. Itâs important to plan well, as Jeffrey Barnes pointed out, but the bigger plan, the harder-hit it will be by uncertainty in funding. In these plans, typically less than half or one third of the activities will be funded at the time of finalization. The remainder will be funded as support becomes available. This exposes Governments to two risks: firstly, that not all of the activities can be funded at all, increasing the need to prioritise actions. Secondly, Governments may find all the new funds available from donors are being ring-fenced for one or two areas of the plan: thus, some elements of vision are realisable and others are not, corrupting the plan in its entirety, since it functions as a whole.
These arenât the only problems with our planning processes. There are many. But these are two major ones we can have an impact on, so long as we work at it and are open about the problems.