Comments

I dont know why but I come to love this country so much I hope one day I wll be there either for employment or vacation. I am from Tanzania and thru information from internet and youtube PNG is having a very bad reputation by Western media - its like South Africa, Brazil and America just to mention a few are better places than POM, but this is how western media does when it come to third world countries especially Africa or any other place.

Joel, Ryan, Sam and Garth, Thanks all for your comments. Forgive this blanket reply, but it's easier to do it this way: 1. I’m not a proponent of eliminating aid to Indonesia or reducing it to a rump. $230 million per annum, or something like it, is a lot of money. 2. If Australia’s aid allocation policy were to make country allocations broadly proportional to absolute-poverty headcounts or total population levels, a lot of country allocations would have to change dramatically. 3. I'm not a proponent of basing aid allocation on per capita GNI alone. The piece above does not base its recommendation, a step-down in aid to Indonesia, on improvements in Indonesia’s per capita GNI (which currently stands at US$3,580, in the same ball park as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Vanuatu and Mongolia). 4. The recommendation is, rather, based on the observation that aid to Indonesia was ramped up to an extreme degree for purely political reasons post-tsunami, that it remains at an artificially elevated level ten years later, and that Indonesia has meanwhile moved on in several ways. I don't recall anybody arguing that Indonesia was receiving too small a share of the Australian aid budget prior to 2005. 5. It’s possible in principle that Australia is getting such good development returns on this massive investment in Indonesia that we should forget about the origins of its huge aid-share increase and be happy that the money turned out to be so well spent. But it's extremely unlikely that a dollar spent in Indonesia is so superior in impact to a dollar spent somewhere else. 6. It is also extremely unlikely that DFAT could identify a 'bottom billion' dollars' worth of genuinely poor-quality aid projects to axe across the whole aid program. It might find some tens of millions by taking this approach but any further cutting would have to be justified on non-quality grounds. 7. Given the government’s decision to take the aid program down by $1 billion in 2015-16, there are actual, large trade-offs to be made here. If the suggestion is that Indonesia should suffer no greater proportional cut than other countries, it should be acknowledged that many other countries will feel their cuts much more keenly, as they are more reliant on our assistance than is Indonesia.

While I understand, and sympathise with, your argument for larger cuts to the Indonesia program Robin I think that average income per capita is an inadequate criterion by itself to determine aid levels. This is especially so when there is still a very large number of very poor people in the country and the average per capita income at around US$3600 is still less than one third that of the upper bound for ODA eligibility. In addition there are provinces in Indonesia that are poorer and have larger populations than some of countries to which Australia gives aid. In 2011 the Independent Review of Aid Effectiveness concluded that significant increases in aid to Indonesia could be effectively used and that Australian aid had a high capacity to make a difference in the country. Instead I would hope that DFAT would take a more results-oriented approach and determine, in co-operation with partner governments, and across multilateral programs, which activities are failing to meet a benchmark for cost effectiveness in reducing poverty.

Thanks Robin for a thought provoking and well argued piece. The rationale for cuts in Indonesia appears to be pretty similar to the winding down of the aid program in China and India, so there's at least a precedent. The bilateral relationship is deep and broad, so hopefully any major aid cut would be seen as part of a mature evolving relationship. While I'm not privy to the internal deliberations around the cuts, it strikes me that the whole process would be more transparent and credible (not to mention diplomatically paletable) if the analysis was undertaken and communicated to those effected before the actual announcement was made - it's one thing to make big cuts to the aid program (that may or may not be warranted, depending on your ideological perspective and view of economics) - it's quite another to make them on the run, with little pre planning and in a way that hurts the stakeholders involved and, potentially, Australia's national interests.

Thanks Robin, for an interesting and clean post, on an important topic for which I have not yet seen much constructive engagement. Its worth noting that in in 2014 Indonesia's poverty headcount was 28.4 million: well over triple PNG's entire population (poverty in Java alone is over twice PNG's population). Regarding the scale-up (which if mostly disaster aid should probably be wound back when the disaster is over, I agree), many of the important Indonesian programmes have been well-evaluated and I suspect we have a much better idea of what is working better there (here), than we do in just about any of the other programmes. There is a strong case to be made that the aid to Indonesia has been some of the more effective aid delivered (even if we just focus on poverty, and governance broadly speaking, not the other non-development objectives the program no doubt serves), particularly when we contrast it against some of the other countries' in the region. I'd vote Option 2, or an unnamed third one that targets particular themes/types of aid instead of countries, although this would likely make the quantum harder to hit in a simple way.

Thanks Robin for a wonderful piece. As you note, the level of funding to Indonesia is the elephant in the room. Australian cash is insignificant compared to Indonesia's GNI (US$2.3 trillion). And whether it buys us "influence" is very debatable. Australia can engage on policy issues (universal health coverage for example) without needing huge amounts of cash injections. I think grouping all non-Indonesia and non-PNG country programs together is a bit messy as some of the countries including in that - like Indonesia - are wealthy enough to fund their own development programs. Iraq, Fiji and Tonga for example are upper middle income countries (according to World Bank) - so in theory at least should have sufficient funds to drive their own development agenda (perhaps with some small policy support from DFAT). Samoa and Timor-Leste are just on the cusp of upper-middle-income status and Indonesia and Philippines (two large recipients) are not that far behind (see here http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/GNI-per-capita-Atlas-and-PPP-table). Perhaps WB classifications are a bit of a blunt instrument and there of course remain (large) pockets of poverty in those countries. But using the WB classifications as a method for reducing aid would make sense to the Australian public and would - in some ways - return the aid program to a poverty reduction emphasis rather than a model where middle-income Asian countries get the most aid. Joel

Great article - thank you. My multilateral, northern European leaning paradigm says we need a WHO-like entity that is neutral, impartial and independent and is empowered and funded to coordinate and facilitate global health. Unfortunately 'everyone wants to coordinate and nobody wants to be coordinated.' Much of the rhetoric for the recent changes in global health comes from a US / private sector leaning paradigm that 'competition is good'. I agree - often it is and I welcome it. But, with competition for financial and advocacy space comes, paradoxically, increased inefficiency. For example each new entity needs its own experts in communications, advocacy, portfolio management, finance, operations, M+E, gender etc. Competition increases fragmentation at all levels, blurred and overlapping roles, territorialism and decreased collaboration. Competition decreases the likelihood that nutrition, vaccine, MNCH, WASH or noncommunicable disease experts will sit together to collaborate and work together under the umbrella of national health plans. This may be beneficial in the private sector when introducing a new product, but ministries of health struggle to deal with, and coordinate, the increasing numbers of players, indicators to measure and reports to complete. WHO is still (in my opinion) the most trusted partner at country level. In contrast to any of the banks, bilaterals, many NGOs, other UN agencies and foundations. Unfortunately WHO has been undermined by lack of funding beyond specific diseases and many agencies bipass WHO's facilitation role. Without WHO at country level, I believe low and middle income countries would be even more driven by entities with large communications and advocacy budgets; often skewing priorities and budgets away from nationally identified priorities based on local disease burden information and away from holistic approaches to beneficiaries that can be addressed with cost effective interventions and a primary healthcare philosophy.

Thank you Bernard. As it has always been, the grassroots appear to be the ones suffering the most from these socio-economic and political turbulences. Regards Bal

Great Sentiments Mr Kama... Sad to say that majority of the rural folk do get to hear/see the political storm that surround them...2015 is definitely a state of emergency!

Thanks Hutak. I had seen Rudd's new role but very little information was available on it. Good to see that WHO reform is in their remit and interested to see what they come up with. Hopefully they will look at first principles as to what kind of global health organisation the world needs rather than just tinkering with internal WHO processes and office set ups. Will be good to follow it and hopefully someone from the Commission can write a blog for this site to update on plans.

WHO is constrained by the way it is required to work with host governments. Often it cannot act quickly and at times political considerations mean that it does not place public health ahead of other considerations. So it needs to move away from activities that require speedy and relatively independent action. Its core funding is often far too small for the functions it now tries to cover, so like many an NGO it becomes driven by individual donor fixations. It needs to move away from this dependency. Yet WHO does play an important role. It sets policies and standards, and issues good practice guidelines that are internationally recognized and adopted. Its staff provide technical support to ministries of health globally, and the impact of this is often underrated. A good degree of the funding from major donors such as GFATM, GAVI, WB etc. would be ineffective without WHO technical inputs, and in a number of countries essential programs such as immunization and malaria surveillance and control would collapse without WHO technical officers being active in program management. That said, a great failing of WHO at country level is its poor record on local capacity building and transfer of skills. This should be a core WHO function, and one that would have a system-wide impact. That, plus its regulatory and standard-setting functions, need to come to the forefront of WHO's work so that implementation can be left to other agencies. While it is true that its role in relation to data collection has weakened considerably, WHO still plays a key role in surveillance systems and getting up to date information to central decision makers. It should therefore not abandon its data collection role completely, but play to its strengths. In some ways WHO's dilemma is very like that of the ministries of health it supports in developing countries: how to move away from a service delivery role to one that is more focused on policy development, standard setting and health system strengthening through capacity development of health workers.

Interesting and relevant published comments here from @MrKRudd: "The head of a new international commission wants Canada's tough-talking foreign affairs minister to help him reform the United Nations World Health Organization because it responded too slowly to the Ebola crisis. [...] Rudd has also joined other critics who have blasted the WHO for being too slow to respond to the West Africa Ebola outbreak. "In the 21st century, with globalization and mass communication, mass movements of people, we must have a fully competent integrated global health system which can say, 'we have a problem,' and send a red flare up straight away," Rudd said in an interview on Friday. The problem, he said, is not with the leadership of WHO director general Margaret Chan, but with structural problems that give regional federations within the organization a veto over its Geneva headquarters. "That's wrong; that has to change," said Rudd, adding Baird is just the person to help him to "structurally alter the rules" of the WHO. See the article <a href="http://www.cp24.com/world/rudd-asks-baird-to-help-fix-un-bodies-who-in-wake-of-ebola-response-1.2215825" rel="nofollow">here</a>.