SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A19

LENGTH: 736 words

HEADLINE: Getting Together On Giving

BYLINE: Sebastian Mallaby

BODY:


American unilateralism is sometimes justified, but wait until you hear this story.

Last July, President Bush headed to the World Bank to explain his theory of development. "The World Bank," he said, should "focus on raising productivity in developing nations, especially through investments in education." During the ensuing months the administration stuck to this line, adding that education aid should flow to a handful of promising countries. In April, when the bank promised to arrange just that, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill pronounced the news "welcome," adding that "donors should be prepared to significantly increase funding for basic education." Well, the World Bank now has a list of 18 countries that have sound education plans, just as the Bush people asked. It has urged rich countries to back these plans, just as O'Neill urged. And it has timed its announcement so as to give the Bush administration a perfect opportunity to yank other donors on board. The leaders of the industrialized world meet at the G-8 summit in Canada this week, and Africa is high on the agenda.

So what does Team Bush do? It refuses -- so far, anyway -- to offer a single dollar for the short-listed education plans. It snipes at the World Bank for listing too many countries, even though it could solve this problem by supporting a select few. Then, to add insult to injury, the Bush folk announce a small expansion of their own budget for education in poor countries. In sum, they stiff the multilateral initiative and do their own unilateral thing -- even though the multilateral initiative is one that Bush encouraged.

This is a double error. The United States misses an opportunity to act as the multilateralist good guy on a popular humanitarian cause -- and so passes up a chance to blunt dumb anti-Americanism. Precisely because unilateralism is sometimes justified on tough issues such as Iraq, it's a mistake to use up unilateralist leeway by snubbing worthy joint initiatives.

At the same time, the Bush education stance is wrong because it underestimates the importance of aid coordination. This second point is particularly important now, because the administration is figuring out how to spend the big increase in foreign aid that the president promised in March. The Bush people rightly insist that they want aid to yield results. But judging from the education decision and from interviews with officials, the administration doesn't fully grasp that results depend on not smothering poor countries with aid bureaucracy.

In some African nations, policymakers can make policy only after 6 p.m.; their days are spent receiving queues of donors. At one point Tanzania was reckoned to receive 1,000 aid missions a year and to file 2,400 reports every three months in order to satisfy donor requirements. In another example, tiny Honduras had 57 projects in its health sector alone, each backed by a proprietorial benefactor anxious to visit. Different donors insist on different procurement policies, performance evaluation criteria and so on, multiplying the administrative load.

Relieving this gridlock is not the only reason to favor coordination among donors. Aid works if it goes to reward good policies, but if donors don't coordinate, they spread money around and blunt incentives to create sound programs. Equally, aid works if it addresses poverty's interlocking causes, but if donors don't coordinate they all throw money at the same thing (say, school textbooks), leaving other needs uncovered (such as the salaries for the teachers who might use the books). If you've ever wondered why machinery in Africa falls into disrepair, it's partly because donors have insisted upon supplying their own tractors or generators or X-ray machines, making it impossible to keep spare parts for all of them.

The administration deserves enormous credit for promising the biggest expansion of aid in memory. It may yet come up with a strategy to spend that money well -- in a way that recognizes coordination's importance. But the administration is not there yet. It is too quick to dismiss the World Bank and other agencies as incompetent and too confident in its own ability to revolutionize aid's effectiveness single-handedly. And so it leans toward development unilateralism, even though this course may undermine the aid effectiveness that it rightly preaches.





LOAD-DATE: June 24, 2002