Why and How the Federal Government Should Fix Foreign Aid

In the coming months, there will be a federal election.  A new or renewed government will have an opportunity to fix Canadian foreign aid.  This is what we recommend:
Introduction

•  The Government of Canada should lead a new non-partisan effort to transform Canada’s foreign-aid policy and the agency that implements it.
• The benefits of this effort will include better poverty-reduction results in poor countries, a boost to Canada’s international reputation, re-energized engagement in global anti-poverty work by Canadians, and a renewed and progressive vision among Canadians of our country’s development role in a complex and volatile world.
• The approach described here is likely to appeal to other political parties, and attract strong support from the many stakeholders in Canada’s development sector, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), CIDA employees, the business community, academia, a growing constituency of concerned, activist young Canadians, diaspora communities and others.  It will also garner strong support from the organizations and countries that benefit (or once benefited) from Canadian development assistance. 

The Changing Context and Nature of Aid

• A new mandate would allow the federal government to engage Canadians in a campaign to re-energize and transform our overseas development assistance (ODA) into a modern policy instrument that effectively projects the vision and values of Canada into the world, and returns Canada to a leadership role as a catalyst of social-justice and human rights.  
• Aid in the 21st century must be re-framed: There must be a decisive shift from old concepts rooted in paternalism, charity and dependence, to new approaches based on mutual social responsibility and structured, sustainable governance involving Southern and Northern citizens operating within more equalized power relations.
• Canada must play a lead role in a broad-based reinvigoration of aid from industrialized countries, which is widely seen as slow, bureaucratic and self-absorbed. It is in danger of eclipse from new donors such as China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose aid has a strong commercial and commodity focus, moves very quickly, and is disdainful of human rights.  
• Changes to the architecture of western aid over the past decade have been entirely focused on state systems, in particular strengthening the centralized power of Finance Ministries across the developing world.  A much stronger role for citizens’ organizations and civil society in general, led by the South, is essential in going forward at all levels: global, regional, national and local. 

The Core Task: Fixing CIDA

• With an annual budget of nearly $3 billion, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is our prime foreign-aid policy instrument.   Its staff is dedicated and skilled, and the agency has in the past been a global innovator in gender equality, evaluation and NGO partnership. However, CIDA has, for far too many years now, underperformed on almost every measure that matters. This chronic underperformance has undermined Canada’s reputation abroad, restricted the effectiveness of CIDA’s partners, and reduced employee morale to alarmingly low levels.  The time for cosmetic reforms is over; the ODA program needs radical change.
• Rather than being a follower of other government departments and a source of budget support for them, the ODA program should become, once again, a global leader, and a pro-active federal foreign policy actor with an independent and protected mandate and budget. 
• We propose a 15-point plan to fix CIDA:
  1. Re-affirm the mandate of the ODA program: sustainable development for poverty reduction in the poorest countries
  2. Ensure that non-ODA foreign-policy objectives related to defence and security, trade and diplomacy are pursued through the Department of National Defence (DND), Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) and other instruments - not through the ODA agency.
  3. Re-commit to achieving the 0.7% target for aid.
  4. Lodge the prioritization of ODA at the highest political level, with the Prime Minister.
  5. Appoint a senior government Minister, with a full seat at the Cabinet table, to oversee the ODA agency.
  6. Create a new Department for International Co-operation, with a legislated mandate, to implement Canadian ODA policy.
  7. Appoint a high-level, multi-sectoral Advisory Board to the Minister and Deputy Minister of the new Department, with representation from the South as well as Canada (see the Canada Revenue Agency’s Board of Management as one model).
  8. Enforce the Better Aid Act that is already on Parliament’s books.
  9. Streamline the implementation of the federal Accountability Act with respect to ODA spending programs.
  10. Establish and maintain stable, long-term relationships with the new Department’s main country partners.
  11. Decentralize, meaningfully, the new Department’s budget, authority and personnel to country-level offices. 
  12. Expand the role of civil society organizations in implementing the ODA program. 
  13. Re-empower the Canadian Partnership Branch of the new Department.
  14. Allocate 5% of the new Department’s budget for robust and dynamic engagement with Canadians.
  15. More effectively integrate ODA policy formulation with research generated by the International Development Research Centre and other bodies. 

• Other management and personnel changes that must be made  include:
  1. Ending the culture and practice of continuous tinkering and micro-management by ministers and senior managers;
  2. Insisting that senior managers must have extensive overseas field experience;
  3. Reducing the inordinate power of contracts officers vis-à-vis program managers; and
  4. Cutting the embarrassingly slow pace (currently nearly four years!) of bringing a bilateral project from the planning stage to operational status. 
     
• At the same time, other federal departments must stop using CIDA as a cash cow, and focus on their own core functions rather than ODA implementation.
• Overall, we endorse the Canadian Council on International Cooperation’s policy paper on strengthening CIDA, which proposes to create a new Department for International Cooperation with a legislated mandate, a Minister with a full seat in Cabinet, a clear focus on poverty reduction in the poorest countries (which are mostly in Africa) and a robust role for civil society, with 5% of CIDA’s budget to be spent on engaging the Canadian public about development.

Achieving Both Focus and Balance Across the Foreign-Policy Portfolio

• Fixing the ODA program is, in our view, a task of the highest priority and urgency, one that will demand focus and sustained support by the government at the highest levels.  The anti-poverty/development agenda must be robust and dynamic.  However, we also recognize that the government must strike a balance across its various foreign-policy objectives and instruments, which include DFAIT, DND, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada.  This balance has been lost in recent years.  By making the ODA implementation agency stronger and emphasizing poverty reduction as a central tenet of Canadian foreign policy, we believe an effective balance can be achieved.

Taking the Conversation Further

A number of issues deserve further consideration, including, for example: planning the legal and organizational transition from CIDA to the new Department for International Cooperation, achieving an appropriate and sustainable balance across foreign-policy files, identifying a role for the private sector in this effort to implement a new approach to aid, and mapping ways and means of mobilizing political support for this effort.