Sounds like quite a comfortable finding for the aid slammers, sadly.

I look forward to reading this book.
Ernest Sirolli gave a presentation about development at TEDxEQChCh
“Truly Sustainable Economic Development”. His message was the same, “listen” rather than going into poor countries with pre conceived ideas of what will work.
His talk can be seen on Youtube.

Please pass on your review to Oxfam Education and plead with them to trust schools that they can comprehend this level of complexity and that both Oxfam and the UK teachers and students will benefit from it!

You raise a great point about how much people in recipient communities know about the sources (and reasons!) behind some of the “projects” that have materialized in their communities, villages, towns and countries over the years.

Certainly, in all twenty listening exercises we were struck by how savvy many recipients and observers of aid were about the motivations behind donor actions, explicit and implict agendas, and the evolution of aid approaches that they have seen overtime. Of course, we also spoke to a number of people in recipient communities that did not know any details about the “who, why, how much and how” invested in various aid efforts (but many did want to know more about all this). Nevertheless, they still were able to speak from their direct, personal experience about the effects of these efforts on their families, communities and society. They reflected on how aid efforts (even those poorly understood) add up and complement (or not!) with others that came before or after.

In Cambodia, during a listening visit to Mondulkiri province in the East, I heard a number of local people describe in detail how their lives have been affected by new roads and other infrastructure projects which most of them described as “our government built for us” …with Cambodian People’s Party signs displayed along each road and school (along with a few “donor brands” in few places). The Cambodian and expat aid workers who joined me on that listening visit knew that the roads/schools/clinics were funded by multi-lateral and bilateral donors. To us, what mattered in those particular conversations, was NOT if people could name the donor, but what they thought made a difference and how, in that case in particular – how the roads helped other aid projects become more impactful (clinics, livelihoods projects connecting to markets, etc).

And, among the many intangible impacts of aid that the Listening Project heard about, the listening team there clearly heard about enhanced legitimacy of Cambodian government in the eyes of local citizens who saw these aid projects to be national government investments. Needless to say — this led to many interesting discussions and reflections during listening team debriefs each evening!

Isabella / Listening Project
CDA

What was striking was that there often was not a big difference between humanitarian and development programming—in fact most people do not make the distinctions that aid agencies do. And in many cases, INGOs are seen as donors and influenced heavily by the policies, priorities, and practices of their donors. Again, there is a whole chapter on this called “Donor Policies, Donor Agendas.” We did not hear as much about government support however we did hear a lot about working with and through governments (chapter 7).

The evidence behind the book–20 case studies/listening exercise reports–are all on our website and we welcome people to read those too.

Thanks for the reviews and good questions. We want to hear what you think needs to be done to really address the critiques, many of which are not that new, and how we will finally make more progress toward working ourselves out of jobs!