An aid worker for 30 years, Susan M. Davis expertly sends up the aid industry and pokes fun at the everyday absurdities that seem to happen in the wake of development aid and relief. Being a trained engineer, most of her stories and examples are from the Water and Sanitation (WASH) sector, and the book will have special appeal to former WASH colleagues but it remains a good read for everyone.
Davis mostly writes from the perspective of her work with non-governmental organizations, the “partners" on which UNICEF has come to rely for much of what it does, and which UNICEF increasingly seeks to emulate - if only to conjure up that special grassroots feeling.
Damning Assessments
The assessment by Davis of the performance and impact of NGOs is absolutely damning. In ten chapters, she deals with different aspects of the world of aid. Many of her NGO-infused experiences contrast with our own experiences as UN officials, while others seem to confirm it. In some areas UNICEF is doing considerably better than the international NGOs, but it is also doing worse in others. I thought that her and my experience are like two meandering lines: sometimes they converge, sometimes they diverge, but they move in the same direction and point to the same lack of results and lasting impact.
For example, her hillarious description of field visits travelling in budget, sharing rooms with supervisors to save money while suffering from Pharaoh’s revenge (or was it Delhi belly?), contrast delightfully with the luxury accomodation that equally removes UN officials from the understanding of local conditions.
Institutional Arrogance
Davis tracks a frustratingly long list of failed water projects—many of them repeated over and over again despite the elusiveness of any sustainable result. She homes in on the "we-know-best" hubris of the aid machinery that leaves many helpers entirely out of touch with local and national priorities. UNICEF and the arsenic fiasco get a mention, as does the PlayPump, which Ken Gibbs has been railing against for years, and the LifeStraw, a device UNICEF is still distributing today.
Davis’s critique of institutional arrogance is quite pointed: aid workers mistake institutional authority for competence. We know that UN staff have a generous approach to their own abilities. The critique becomes particularly biting in Chapter 9, where, in Davis’s view, institutional leaders are often found to be misfits whose self-confidence considerably exceeds their talent, and whose vision and leadership skills are in short supply.
Davis is also critical of volunteering when it becomes primarily an opportunity to learn and gain experience that might perhaps better be acquired before one sets out to be helpful. One could ask the same question of UN workers: why travel around the globe to solve other countries’ problems rather than solve the same problems at home?
Chapter 5 is probably the most relevant one for former UNICEF staff. It asks why we never managed to work ourselves out of a job. Many years ago, when I was the guidance focal point for UNICEF, I pointed to the inherent problem of developing a strategy, or a Country Programme Document, as a team: as long as you have a water engineer on the team, you will end up with a water programme.
And therein lies the problem of institutional arrogance in the aid agencies. Because we have a solution, we shape our analysis around it. Because we have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
This, incidentally, also illustrates the impossibility of UN coordination. Every agency believes that it has the solution to the country’s “worst” or “most urgent” problem. For FAO, it is food production; UNFPA will discover the population dimension; and for UN Women, the great evil is discrimination by gender. If you play second fiddle, you are out of business.
Missing the Big Picture
As an antidote to the general ineffectiveness of aid, Davis recommends listening more carefully to communities rather than simply imposing our “tried and tested” solutions on them. This is sound advice, but she gives less weight to the national policy debate. Nobody pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. Every community has its leaders and, one hopes, its parliamentarians, whose voices and votes are ultimately supposed to be heard by regional and central government. Health, education and social protection systems, by their very nature, have to be designed for a nation, not reinvented separately for every community.Davis might be excused for focusing so heavily on the community level. Water supply systems are, after all, necessarily local. Water does not flow uphill. But while communities can help determine what works for them, they cannot, on their own, determine how resources are allocated across an entire country. When generalizing beyond water supply, national policy, politics and the use of national budgets should remain central.
The Big Question
While we can agree with Davis on the general ineffectiveness of many conventional aid programmes, she does not quite ask the obvious question: why have well-meaning governments, UN agencies and NGOs continued, for more than sixty years, to reproduce approaches whose disappointing results have been known for decades? Why does aid carry on much as before, despite so many people pointing out that it does not work as intended? And why do aid agencies continue to confuse delivering programmes, as in Delivering-as-One, with producing lasting change?
This is where Davis could have gone beyond the failings of individual organisations and looked more analytically at the aid system as a whole, particularly at the incentives and disincentives that make the industry remarkably resistant to questioning its own effectiveness - until the donors have begun pulling the plug.
Additional Notes:
- Former UNICEF colleague Vanessa Tobin, Deputy Director for Programmes (WASH) writes on the back page that "..[the book] is teeming with stories that made me nod, wince, and laugh in equal measure."
- Davis added a glossary and an extensive annotated bibliography to her book, which are almost worth the price of the book alone.
- Water engineers, WASH staff and natural scientists are, in my own experience, the only aid workers that question and self-critically discuss the actual effectiveness of aid. It may be so because they deal with hardware, the laws of nature, and measurable and demonstratable facts.
- Order the book through: https://bullshitwithoutborders.org/ . Published August 2026.
More Insights from Outside the Bubble, by Detlef Palm
Comments welcome. Too shy? Write to Detlef: detlefpalm55@gmail.com
Congratulations to Susan for taking on the aid industry with a pinch of humour, and to Detlef for a review that takes things a few steps further. The book seems to be right up my alley.
ReplyDeleteDetlef’s final question goes to the heart of the matter: why have disappointing results, well known for decades, led to so little change? The answer may be that institutional success is measured by a different yardstick: funding secured, money spent and the institution’s continued importance. Whether countries actually develop, become prosperous and are well governed seems to generate less interest.
The observation that we shape our analysis around the solutions we have already decided are the only valid ones is telling. It may explain how an industry devoted to ending dependency can acquire such a strong interest in its own permanence.
Thank you for sharing the review. I look forward to reading the book. I've always been interested in books about development failures. In fact, my MA thesis was about the failure about an irrigation project in Sudan. There have been many books critiquing the aid industry, including The Despairing Developer, People in Glass Houses, Dead Aid. All of us have been part of programmes and experiments that have failed. There is a lot we can learn from development failures and I have appreciated efforts that have been open about what has worked and what hasn't - like the classic Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why. I respect agencies that have independent evaluation offices and that are honest about their failures. Robert Chambers used to encourage development agencies to embrace mistakes and to "fail forward". It is OK ot make mistakes, but not OK not to learn from them and to keep repeating mistakes.
ReplyDeleteAs a head of planning and M&E for many years - I continuously grappled with trying to get colleagues to boil down what was achieved in simple results based terms - but they almost never could. I could only conclude that there was no result and no impact and therefore they could not formulate a result anyone could understand.. They preferred to go on about processes and jargon.
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