UN Development Agencies: Doing good is not enough: Detlef Palm

Since I have been critical of the development aid industry, the most common feedback from those who cared to respond has been along the lines of: “I agree with a lot of what you say, but surely something good must have come from UNICEF and our work”. 

Most of us try to do something good. It is human nature to help one another. But I no longer give to UN development agencies. I hope I can explain why.

1. Charity

Back in 1988, a UNICEF representative shocked his unsuspecting staff by asserting that ‘charity is obscene’. I didn’t buy into this, and I don’t know how many UNICEF staff did. But the message kept some of us thinking ever since: charity does not address the underlying causes of misery and human suffering, such as the prevailing power relations or injustice.

The thinking was not new. For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, an American theologian and Barack Obamas favourite philosopher, suggests that charity often substitutes for true justice. For anyone more left-leaning, you may wish to check out Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism” published a whopping 133 years ago. Whatever your political bias, which doesn’t matter here, such reasoning foreshadowed the debate about the rights-based theory versus the needs-based practice of development aid – and the hypocrisy loop that not only UNICEF finds itself in.

Charity is given by those who feel morally obliged to do good. “There is so much suffering out there, we have to do our part!” Most of us belong to this group. Charity is a humanitarian act. It saves lives and reduces suffering, with little expectations for sustainable results. It is true for all relief and emergency aid programmes. We know that the effects of charity are limited to tinkering with the symptoms or manifestations of larger unaddressed problems that are beyond our  reach.  

The act of giving is good for the giver, even though charity doesn’t solve the problem at its roots and it doesn’t absolve you of all your sins. But if you are like me, you also check from time to time the sum of your donations and perhaps make a few more random contributions until you reach a total you feel is appropriate and tax-deductible. (And just so you know, poor people donate more as a percentage of their income than rich people do.) For many western governments and corporate donors, being perceived as generous is more important than ensuring that their money makes a lasting difference.

Whether or not UN agencies are the appropriate conduit for humanitarian donations shall not be discussed here, as we are talking now about UN Development Agencies and development aid. The task of a development agency is clearly to solve problems and not just to hand out alms.

2. The Altruistic Glow

I was in Hamburg, in the mid-nineties, to give a talk on the radio about the work of UNICEF in Malawi. The radio show went well and I had the chance to explain what Malawi looked like and what UNICEF was trying to do. Towards the end, a lady with a tearful voice was calling in, saying said that she was moved by listening to people like me, who are selflessly doing so much good for the poor. Her tribute must have raised a few thousand Deutsche Mark for UNICEF. 

I left the radio station feeling embarrassed. I was earning good money and living the lifestyle I wanted to live. I didn’t want to be a do-gooder; I wanted to bring about justice and peace and at the same time try to be as professional a development worker as possible.

I don't know any UNICEF colleagues who would like to be called do-gooders. Yet many current and former staff continue to bask in the unwarranted warm glow of altruism, admiring each other for their dedication, even if they cannot draw a straight line between their own contribution and any lasting difference in the life of children.

Most likely, it is the public perception of altruism that allows UNICEF to raise so much more money than most other UN agencies. 

And it is precisely this glow of altruism that befogs any more cogent analysis of the actual impact of often amateurishly delivered development aid.

3. Effectiveness of our Aid

The effectiveness of development aid has been discussed with varying intensity for more than two decades, under different angles and perspectives. 

I fondly remember reading the likes of Paul Collier (The Bottom Billion), William Easterly (The White Man’s Burden), Geoffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty and his failed Millennium Villages) and other authors. I was in New York headquarters, but there was nobody in UNICEF to discuss these matters with. I was mystified why UNICEF leadership did not convene a small forum to discuss the plausibility and relevance of these new arguments when pondering strategic directions. One may agree or disagree with all, some or none of any past or current development economists – but at the minimum their questions must be discussed within the development community and by its practitioners. 

Then and today, UNICEF staff insist that the organization, through its country programmes of cooperation has been trying to address the causes of underdevelopment. And that a lot of good happened here, that UNICEF provided stimuli, that much capacity was built and that UNICEF was the first to do this and that. Rest assured, if you didn't do it, someone else would have done it soon after. There is no shortage of development agencies doing good.

Some say that UNICEF does not only provide the fish, but teaches how to fish. Thirty-five years ago, under Operation Lifeline Sudan, we deployed the nets.  Today, South Sudan is still at the bottom of every development index after having received among the highest amount of aid per capita, year by year. We might have been luckier elsewhere, but that was by chance. 

Not wanting to rehash the larger general debate on aid effectiveness, here are some cues from our own time at UNICEF.

• We pride ourselves of having invented and widely used analytical frameworks to identify the immediate, underlying and fundamental causes of a problem. Such frameworks have been updated, re-tooled and renamed innumerable times, but remained essentially the same.

Analytical framework, 2004 version
(click to enlarge, if you are really interested)

Among the basic causes we identified the unfair distribution of national resources, corruption, the lack of democratic participation, discrimination, uneven power relations and (willful) marginalization. None of these were addressed through development programmes. We never got to the bottom of it, and never tackled the underlying basic causes from which everything else evolves.

• Unintended effects are considered only in the better evaluations of UN development work. Even then, recommendations concern themselves with the fine-tuning of UN activities, not with the bigger picture. Does anyone doubt the existence of uncaring governments? A body of literature exists that points at the importance of good governance as the key determinant for progress, but we never asked the important question: did our development assistance strengthen or detract from the accountability of the country’s government to its own citizens?  

Money is fungible; it must have occurred to you that the combined donor support to a country’s health system allows an uncaring and potentially exploitative government to use its own national resource for consolidation of its own uncaring position.  This is part of the message of Dambisa Moyo (in 2009), Stefan Dercon (2023), and also follows from the works of the recent winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. 

• UNICEF staff remain firmly convinced that everything has to do with a lack of capacity and that UNICEF is an expert in capacity building. Even the UNICEF human rights approach got contorted into building the capacity of rights holders and duty bearers. "We know what they don’t know". "We can help them doing what they cannot do themselves". More than ever, I find this absurd and condescending. In many countries, national experts give UNICEF staff a run for their money – unless, of course, when UNICEF hires them and turns them into pen-pushers filling forms for headquarters or the Resident Coordinator. 

• Even when country offices began advising on social policy, UNICEF staff rarely acknowledged that successful national policies are the result of political processes that seek to compromise between potentially conflicting views of a country's people, including preferences regarding the use of national budgets and other resources. UN staff were routinely advised to stay out of domestic politics and sensitive issues, and then remained stumped why the brilliant "national plans of action" they helped to draft were never funded by the government. Situation analyses remained shallow and distorted until their preparation was stopped altogether.

• Everyone is quick to attribute development successes to their own efforts. Today, UNICEF avoids the conundrum of attribution and contribution by reporting that "UNICEF and partners" achieved something, rarely explaining the significance of UNICEF's contribution. 

Who ever has worked in more than one program country knows that the UN is not a government's first port of call when it comes to dealing with the conflicting interests of its citizens. From a domestic perspective, the UN is a sideshow that allows officials to ignore important responsibilities and focus on their own priorities instead.

• To be fair, I agree that – for example - the popularization of oral rehydration therapy by UNICEF is where "something good came out of it." That was 40 years ago, and the development environment has changed dramatically since then. Knowledge and access to expertise has become ubiquitous. If ORS were something new today, TikTok would reach the Minister of Health faster than any UN Resident Coordinator could convene a meeting of UN officials to allocate potential funds to themselves.

4. The Random Distribution of Development Aid

If UN Development Organizations would be serious about addressing the underlying and basic causes of underdevelopment, they would not randomly scatter their resources just to "do something good, somewhere”.  The Executive Board of UNICEF allocates UNICEF resources according to countries’ size, GDP and child mortality. So that everybody gets something. Given similar levels of poverty and child mortality, it doesn’t matter whether

• the government is trying hard to improve social and economic conditions, has consistently shown concern for the wellbeing of its citizens, and promotes human rights and justice; 

• the government has a track record of being corrupt and authoritarian, is siphoning off the national resources, stifling people’s potential, letting the economy stagnate or is fuelling conflict. 

As a results-based – nowadays called impact-driven - development professional and globalist, which country and government would you prefer to support? And as someone who doesn’t want the marginalized to suffer both from its own government and the lack of aid from the West, would you still directly or indirectly support an uncaring government?

If you find these difficult questions, don’t expect UNICEF to give you an answer. Because UNICEF doesn’t know either. The multilateral aid system works on the evidently erroneous assumption that every government in the world is trying “its level best” to develop their country, to guarantee human rights, and to live in peace with their neighbours. You only need to look around, at the end of 2024, to realize that this is a killer assumption. 

5. Too bad

It is too bad that 

• according to current practice, incompetent and uncaring governments are ending up with the largest amounts of development aid, year after year; and 
• the effectiveness of aid is inverse proportional to the level of corruption and incompetence in the recipient countries; and
• the inscrutable accountability mechanisms and excessive bureaucracy of the UN development system make the administration of multilateral aid painfully inefficient. 

There are many private and bilateral organizations trying to do good, and it is not clear why UN agencies also get involved in what everyone else is doing more efficiently. The reform of the UN Development Group, which has now been going on for 20 years, has been completely beside the point and has not made the slightest difference. 

Within the overall system of international development, the UN Development Group could occupy a special place. So far, the comparative advantage of the UN has not been played out, and no sensible strategic discussion has taken place within the UNDG about its most appropriate role and the best use of development resources.

We should reasonably expect the UN Development Group to evaluate the overall effectiveness of current aid practices, emphasize good governance and transparency as the most important factor for development, be candid about glaring governance failures, and advise on best practices and global consensus.

*****

More Insights from Outside the Bubble, by Detlef Palm

Write to Detlef at  detlefpalm55@gmail.com