BY ARCHIE LAW

FOREIGN MINISTER, Kevin Rudd, has launched a comprehensive review of the Australian aid program to ensure that the program learns from its experience and becomes as effective and efficient as possible.

I wholeheartedly support the view that the aid program should provide value for money on every Australian taxpayer dollar that is allocated to the aid budget. My question is who determines what value for money is?

The voices of people living in extreme poverty need to be the loudest voices when the government is determining how effectively Australian aid money is being used and each and every aid dollar should maximise the development outcomes for people living in extreme poverty.

Given that we are working in complex political and social environments this is always going to be difficult to explain to the Australian taxpayer and we all need to get much better at doing this.

For example the real drivers of social change in developing countries tend to be social movements who function in their own unique way and such movements rarely, if ever, comply with the traditional modus operandi of the aid community which is “provide resources, implement activity, monitor output and evaluate outcome.”

This AusAID review would be doing international development a huge service if it were able to unpack these issues and suggest new approaches of enabling people living in poverty to have a loud voice in determining what they want from the aid program.

There are further concerns as the review seems to be based on the flawed notion that economic growth is the main driver of poverty alleviation. Whilst economic growth has been one of the main drivers for millions of people in China and India lifting themselves out of poverty, it has recently been noted that the high levels of economic growth haven’t done much for the bottom 20% in both countries who still live in humiliating poverty.

So maybe we shouldn’t gamble too much on economic growth as the main driver of poverty alleviation and instead focus on other issues that seem to be neglected, such as human rights.

The words human rights are missing from the government’s announcement yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a clear framework to guide the aid program. Progressive donors use a human rights based approach to poverty alleviation as a key driver of their programming work so maybe this review should have a good look at this as well as getting stuck into the issue of economic growth.

My single biggest fear is that this review team is not going to hear the voices of people living in poverty. Sure I expect it will be talking to all sorts of wise heads from the World Bank, the UN and NGOs. However I don’t expect that the review team will widely seek the views of the very people that the aid dollars are provided to help.

Archie Law is the CEO of ActionAid Australia. A version of this article was published first here. It also appeared on the blog of the Development Policy Centre, an essential source for anyone interested in development aid