Harnessing learning to improve development outcomes

Every year, millions of dollars pour into the country in the form of development programmes. Various international organisations take on pressing problems and deliver assistance in the form of financial aid, technical support and in-kind assistance, through programmes that promise effective solutions and positive change.

Development challenges abound in Jordan, including unemployment, water shortage and poor municipal services, to name a few.  Challenges owe their metastasis to a unique confluence of structural factors mixed, at times, with years of neglect and a tolerance for mediocrity. Challenges are inextricably intertwined; meaning solutions will often require reforms in multiple sectors. Development assistance organisations on the other hand have money to spend but sometimes, little will and steam to broach intractable challenges with the necessary rigor they deserve.

And yet these organisations continue to roll out solutions to our problems in the form of large scale and multi-year programmes implemented across Jordan. It is a laudable effort, but a challenged one. As anyone working in the sector would attest, the development space is wracked with many of the ills it is so eager to address. Programming is rife with serial redundancies; results are mixed and donor and government coordination, an effort requiring early planning, is often a misnomer for modest exchanges about ongoing programmes. Some programmes achieve what they set out to do while others, after years of doling out resources and engaging thousands, do not.

The problem can be that of design, implementation or coordination. Sometimes overambitious donors are oblivious to prevailing structural impediments that limit their ability to effect change. Stubborn governments and antiquated laws, for example, can stall change and dilute the effect of assistance delivered. A weak appreciation of contextual intricacies and the political mood of the moment can also contribute to out of sync designs that are hard to salvage when the programmes are far into implementation. And sometimes problems boil down to the disjointed efforts of donors unguided by lessons learned from similar efforts. 

Two things for certain: Support provided by aid organisations is indisputably vital to Jordan and the government should be playing a far more proactive role in guiding such programmes to ensure aid money is wisely spent and citizens’ lives are actually improving. 

In these harsh economic times, the government can be doing a lot more to deliver more bang for development bucks! Considering that development is a cumulative endeavour that is also context-specific, the government needs to better orchestrate the efforts of development organisations to ensure higher efficiency and complementarity. This requires close engagement with these donors to communicate priorities and track efforts to capture learning and inform decision making. Not all aid is good or harmless. The government should adopt a more discerning and strategic approach when evaluating incoming assistance to ensure it is sufficiently targeted and aligned with national strategies, and that it consciously builds local capacity across sectors and fields of expertise.

At a minimum, the government should be processing the available body of knowledge generated by these organisations about their work. While traditional monitoring and evaluation is still a fledging practice in our government, thankfully aid organisations insist on regularly gathering data about their running projects and on evaluating interventions to assess results and gain insights about what is and is not working in their sector. This helps them adapt their approaches and determine future actions.

The data and studies are publicly available. What is lacking is the local capacity and inclination to utilise the emerging knowledge to measure progress, assess the health of our sectors and ultimately translate this learning into action. This would contribute to a continual process through which learning is distilled and leveraged for sector development planning.

Whether it is a programme supporting small businesses or education reform, both government and civil society can use programme-generated learning to think through which national or sub national goals these programs are serving, and whether the assistance provided can effectively address sector challenges or only their symptoms. Synthesising knowledge across sectors would then help us determine whether efforts are congruent, build from one another and are moving goals along a locally defined spectrum of change.

What could facilitate this process is access to sector-related resources. Among the valuable repositories out there is the Jordan Development Knowledge Management Portal set up by the USAID to improve the sharing of data and information among development stakeholders. What is good about the portal is that it can be populated by its own users so all stakeholders, including the government, can share information about their work. Ultimately, the more information is uploaded and utilised, the shorter learning curves and better chances for success new programs will have. 

As one of the largest recipients of foreign aid in the world, Jordan needs to see incoming aid enable large-scale turnarounds in performance and mind-sets to the point where it is no longer needed. In the absence of such a strategic outlook aid may only foster dependency and stunt more meaningful reform.

The writer works in the development sector. She contributed this article to The Jordan Times