Ryan C Briggs

Human Rights Watch recently published a report on aid in Ethiopia entitled Development Without Freedom. They had researchers visit Ethiopia in 2009 and conduct about 200 interviews to examine how the ruling party was distributing foreign aid.

Their central finding is that “donor-funded services, resources, and training opportunities were being used as threats or rewards for citizens to join the ruling party and cease supporting the opposition, and that donor mechanisms for monitoring or controlling the misuse of aid programs were inadequate.” (p. 26)

The range of funds that were at affected ranges from fertilizer and other agricultural inputs (p. 36) to microcredit (p. 38) to food aid (p. 45).

One common theme running throughout the report is that aid was more politicized the more the service was decentralized. Various factors could influence this, but one is that monitoring is more difficult as responsibility for service delivery shifts further from the center.

Coming from someone who is currently writing a prospectus on the politicization of foreign aid before elections, my single largest problem with the report is that I have a hard time interpreting the report’s data. I find it impossible to believe that every person interviewed felt the way that they describe, and yet I can’t find quotes from interviewees who disagree with the report’s finding. Did they only interview people that they knew were upset? Did they cut out all the “boring stuff” after the fact? How did they create their sample? (At this point, everyone should go read what Texas in Africa has to say about the methodological differences between academics and advocacy organizations).

Their question—Is aid being captured by the ruling party?—is crucial and HRW seems to have found a suspicious pattern in the responses of their interviewees. Given the challenges inherent in conducting this kind of research, that finding alone is worthy of attention. Anyone with an interest in the politicization of aid should at least skim the report.

[update — Kate from wrongingrights also has a good post on the way that human rights lawyers and social scientists think about evidence]