Canada’s feminist international assistance policy is not the most effective way to reduce poverty

In the early 2000s, a director of a Moldovan women’s nongovernmental organization (NGO) told me that she would never publicly associate herself with feminism. I found this statement quite curious as I had just asked her to submit an article on gender issues for the Moldovan family planning association’s website. My goal of promoting gender equality and reproductive health awareness with local voices was clearly a feminist one, wasn’t it? Not really, she explained. If she were to declare publicly that she’s a feminist, her colleagues and friends would stop shaking her hand, she told me. She would lose all credibility, and she needed credibility to run an NGO dealing with gender-based violence.

She then referred to an obscure instance of Western feminists publicly berating Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, as a reason why feminism had lost its appeal for her. They were not respectful, she argued. This scandalous event might not even have been real, but the story was influential nonetheless. It led this local leader in women’s issues to say that not only is she not a feminist but she would be ashamed of being considered one.

Fifteen years later, Canada has adopted a feminist international assistance policy to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls as “the most effective way to reduce poverty and build a more inclusive, peaceful and prosperous world.”

Canada means well. The fact that women often bear the costs in development stands out: women and girls are more likely to be among the poor, the least educated and the ones experiencing violence. There clearly is a need to help women and girls.

Effective aid is locally owned

However, the first principle of effective foreign aid is that development needs to be locally owned. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, adopted in 2005, clearly states that developing countries are supposed to set their own strategies for poverty reduction, and the donor countries are expected to align behind these objectives and to use local systems. It’s difficult to imagine that the countries with the gravest conditions for women will “own” feminism, a Western concept.

Evaluators assessing foreign aid programming for relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability – the criteria set by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, know that the projects that are implemented with low levels of local ownership are less likely to be sustainable after the donor funding is withdrawn. Feminism has to be relevant to Canada’s development partners, and it would need to be reflected in their governments’ poverty reduction strategies. Additionally, achieving outcomes that are in serious disagreement with local traditions ends up being less efficient economically than running projects that enjoy strong local ownership. Potentially low relevance, high inefficiency, and low long-term sustainability mean that development interventions cannot be considered effective.

The second set of problems related to feminist development initiatives is associated with impact and attribution. In the near future, can Canada truly credibly claim that any success in the partner countries was due to our feminist development interventions, and not caused by other favourable trends beyond Canada’s control?

The truth is, social norms guiding the behaviour of men and women have evolved across centuries, following a local logic, and they relate to people’s innate mindset. They are “sticky”: outsiders’ efforts to change ways of life by rearranging power relationships are doomed to fail if they do not follow the local logic. Tinkering with gender relations is not viewed universally as bringing benefits to everyone. Some high-powered men might perceive Canada’s well-meaning efforts as threatening, and they are not likely to support feminist policies that come from abroad. And yet they are also stakeholders in development, interested in maintaining or increasing their prestige or status in their respective societies.

Sticky cultures

In his book The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich of Harvard University writes that when politicians design new policies, they inevitably import their own assumptions about human nature, often rooted in Enlightenment philosophies. He points out that as we have seen from the sad experience of transplanting Western institutions to countries that have different incentives and standards for judging and punishing people, the new norms need to fit in with people’s social norms, informal institutions and cultural psychology.

People are selective social learners, Henrich warns, which means that they do not change their habits purely based on “the facts” or “education”; rather, they copy the behaviour of influential people in their social circles. People are more likely to learn from those whose prestige, success, sex, dialect and ethnicity they consider important, especially on issues related to food, sex, danger and norm violations. It seems as if the best way to alter gender relations is to work with influential local men, allowing them to lead by example. It’s true that Canada has increased its profile internationally, but its high prestige is probably not strong enough to contribute to change in distinctly different societies. 

Cultures are long-lasting; they have evolved over centuries and they change slowly. That is especially true when influential religious organizations work to maintain the status quo in relations between the sexes and have strong views about sexual minorities. Change in social policies depends on the entire society. Or, as Henrich puts it, change depends on the expansion of the collective brain, which in turn depends on openness to discuss issues and ideas. Instead of artificially transplanting copies of Western institutions to other countries, Henrich recommends designing a “variation and selection system” allowing alternative institutions and organizational forms to compete. Locals then decide which form wins and will be adopted.

Win-win for all?

Canada’s new feminist international assistance policy argues that the feminist approach to development “leads to better development results and benefits everyone, including men and boys.” How this claim works out in practice needs to be substantiated in the program monitoring phase and in evaluations. When men perceive that their traditional social status is threatened, a backlash may follow. Evaluators, therefore, need to be attuned to the unintended consequences.

Another risk of the explicitly feminist approach is that it may ignore cases where men, especially gay men, and boys are disadvantaged and vulnerable. Canadian feminist international development policy sees men and boys predominantly as a target group that should be lectured, educated and engaged but not as direct beneficiaries of assistance.

At yet, as Sean Stevens of New York University points out in an article on gender differences, boys seem to be hurt more than girls by living in deprived neighbourhoods. The cycle of poverty seems to be more persistent for the poorest boys than for girls. Even in Canada, as the Canadian economist Miles Corak found, boys born into the poorest families (the bottom 5 percent) were less likely to escape poverty than girls born into the same conditions.

An article by Diane Halpern, professor emerita at Claremont McKenna College and her coauthors discussing sex differences in science and mathematics adds that male development is more sensitive to environmental conditions, which can explain why there is more variability among males in their academic performance. It seems that in the most deprived conditions, it is boys who would benefit from additional help.

That is why a successful development policy would be an inclusive one that would engage men, women, boys, and girls equally depending on their needs and within the social systems where they live. A development policy designed around Paris Declaration principles, evaluative recommendations on program effectiveness and – most importantly - equal opportunities for all would be more effective than an explicitly feminist one.

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Marje Aksli is an independent evaluation consultant based in Washington, DC, focusing on international development and security programming. Her thematic interests include the impact of global governance on policy-making.

Infusing Project Management techniques into a Results-based Management approach leads to better accountability

Infusing Project Management techniques into a Results-based Management approach leads to better accountability

Marje Aksli 

Two Canadian projects, G-8 Summit in 2002 and resettlement of Syrian Refugees in 2016, exemplify how international development or public policy objectives can be met more effectively and efficiently when a results-based-management (RBM) approach is supported by using project management (PM) tools.  

In short, could government programs, currently running on RBM, be made more effective and efficient if they were managed using PM principles, as well?

The Development Assistance Committee at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD DAC) has outlined five criteria for evaluating projects and programs: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, and impact. Setting the latter two aside, for now, we discuss the multiple sets of tools to adequately meet the relevance, effectiveness and efficiency criteria. 

RBM and PM 

The most widely used management tool in international development, and in public service, is Results-Based-Management, or RBM, which connects the project outputs to desired outcomes in a measurable way. For example, we assume that if a country accepts and resettles tens of thousands of refugees from the Middle East - a project output in the Operation Syrian Refugees - suffering is alleviated, which is the desired outcome. Similarly, coordinating G-8 Summits – project output – would, in theory, lead to an increased global visibility and influence for Canada – the desired outcome. Project relevance is thus established with the logical and causal connection from outputs to outcomes through RBM. 

Setting relevance aside, the managers also need to ensure projects are implemented effectively and efficiently as per OECD requirements. This entails achieving project outputs effectively (within the project scope) with scarce inputs or tax dollars (efficiently). Though RBM is focused on achieving higher level results (outcomes), it provides no tools to manage project outputs in a cost-effective and timely manner. In effect, RBM is not designed to provide the guidance required for achieving effectiveness and financial efficiency – two of the main DAC evaluation criteria.

The systemic managerial approach, specified in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) does provide a logical normative system for managing projects effectively and efficiently. Several lessons learned sections of evaluation reports indicate that using PM tools would help to control project scope, which relates to effectiveness, and cost, which explains the efficiency of a project. PMBoK principles could also assist with stakeholder management, a crucial aspect in a project’s success. Still, the public sector and organizations involved in program development seem to overlook these obvious benefits because they have yet to practice PM tools to the same extent as RBM and deliverology.

For better effectiveness and efficiency in tax payer funded programming, results-based management and project management tools should be used in combination because they are complementary by design. RBM ensures that project outputs are connected to project outcomes through logical and causal connections (relevance) and PM tools ensure the management of projects is focused on scope and budget (effectiveness and efficiency).  

Public servants and NGO programming personnel would benefit from extensive training in PM techniques and they should be encouraged to use them. A change in management styles through PM training would also provide a more business-oriented approach to development or to public sector programming, one that mitigates risks through a judicious use of resources. 

By breaking down project components into a 2D Matrix relating knowledge areas, such as project cost, essential human resources, project duration, scope, risk, stakeholders, and quality, with project phases or life cycles, PM tools lay out a set of manageable tasks in a coherent process. In the project initiation phase, the PM tools instruct managers to work on two knowledge areas only: to specify a project goal and to identify stakeholders based on an assessment of needs. In the proceeding planning phase, managers have to engage with many additional project knowledge areas. The project description is explicitly stated in the planning phase and it becomes the project scope. The work needed to achieve this scope, and only this scope, is then broken down into manageable work packages or activities to which cost is assigned, human resources allocated, duration stipulated; risk level mitigated and quality identified. Only then can the manager know the total cost, the duration, and risks of the project. Similarly, PM tools offer guidance for three consequent phases: execution, monitoring and controlling, and for the closing phases. 

Lessons to be learned 

Comparing project closure or evaluation reports to the PMBoK norms reveals several short comings. The biggest deviations between PM theory (the norm) and management practice in Canadian government departments result from omitting, or shortening, the initiation phase and from blending the planning phase with the execution phase. This leads to confusion in many knowledge areas and severely impacts both project scope and cost management. The final report of Kananaskis Summit from 2002, for example, did not distinguish between words such as ‘planning’ and ‘managing’. The two words were used interchangeably in the meaning ‘organizing’, which seems to indicate that the implementation team did not understand how to sequence or prioritize activities in distinct project phases. This became acutely apparent in the time and scope management areas. Additions to the project scope expanded until late in the project execution phase, which led to ballooning budget and unmet commitments. 

The merged planning and execution phases resulted in several planning documents not being completed, which consequently hindered the controlling of project scope and led to difficulties in estimating the exact costs and necessary human resources. For example, the report regrets that environmental impacts were not addressed at the Summit and suggests, correctly, that these requirements should have been included with the scope requirements in the planning phase. Promises were made about the, so called, legacy projects to First Nations – the most important stakeholders, and event co-hosts, yet these add-on projects were not included in the original project scope and were therefore not part of the plan and were consequently not delivered because of insufficient funds. 

Similarly, the Operation Syrian Refugees (OSR) in 2016, which aimed to resettle 25.000 refugees between November 2015 and February 2016, suffered under the lack of interdepartmental coordination during the initiation and planning phases. This led to significant consultation gaps between the government departments, resulting in unclear responsibilities and competing priorities between different government departments. For example, the planning model used by the lead department IRCC did not sufficiently address the significant efforts required to set up operations abroad during the operation’s earlier phases. The activities abroad were not well planned, consequently not assigned costs, durations, human resources, or risk ratings for and were thus managed poorly. Managers cannot execute activities, which are not planned. The recently published IRCC Rapid Impact Evaluation Report of the Syrian Refugee Initiative adds that there was also a lack of sufficient planning and forward-looking preparations regarding the resettlement and early integration phases in the first few weeks post arrival in Canada. The report admits that ‘the expedited nature of the initiative made it challenging for the settlement sector to effectively plan for the delivery of in-Canada services’, and that ‘the quick pace was difficult on refugees’. 

In short – both projects suffered under the lack of proper planning. 

But the largest disparity between project management norms and actual practice relates to efficiency, i.e. how the total cost of projects is estimated in the Canadian public service. Both, the OSR and the G-8 Summit reports reveal that cost planning is conducted through “guess-estimations” by a budget office as opposed to rigorous activity-based costing by a project team. Budgets are often division-based instead of activity-based. Projects with budgets estimated in this manner cannot be as efficient as those projects which total cost has been assessed based on individual activities. 

Although the cited managerial aim in organizing a G-8 Summit in 2002 was to ‘deliver the best possible value from the available mix of resources’, the project closure report was not able to critically assess whether the over 100M$ for a 2-day event is indeed an efficient way to advance Canada’s policy goals in G-8. Canadian experience of hosting four G-8 meetings previously would offer enough material to draft a blueprint Work Breakdown Structure for the next occasion, which would allow controlling scope, durations, costs and necessary human resources. As the closure report revealed, the lack of proper planning indeed led to inadequately composed project scope, late scope additions, overlapping and conflicting requirements, which were poorly communicated to the main stakeholders. One project goal - to make ‘Canadians proud’ – was not measurable or actionable. 

These examples demonstrate how faulty project planning makes it near impossible to assess whether the project was indeed a success. Despite that, the Summit was considered ‘unprecedently successful’ based on only one concern of cohosts – to be ‘conflict-free’. 

In the case of OSR, the Government of Canada’s aim to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees between November 2015 and February 2016, was a political commitment made during the election campaign in response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis facing the Middle East and Europe. It became a major issue during the federal election season in 2015 after it was revealed that the family of a drowned Syrian toddler had hoped to come to Canada. All parties presented their competing visions several months before the election about how they would respond to the crisis. The Liberal leader Justin Trudeau presented the most ambitious plan in terms of volumes and timelines, saying that a Liberal government would bring in up to 25,000 refugees from Syria by January 2016, as CBC reported. His vision did not specify the expected cost, government’s capacity to deliver on the commitment or the experience of impacted refugees. The management of this project was thus not thought out and no clear criteria were provided for estimating project’s success rate. 

Accordingly, the IRCC Rapid Impact Evaluation report[1] on OSR concluded that one major area which should be taken into account to help ensure successful resettlement and settlement results includes “the need for end-to-end planning”. Yet, despite these shortcomings, the lessons learned portion of the report declares that “the whole of government initiative was a great success in many regards”. 

Conclusion 

As illustrated above in the two distinct projects, undertaken a decade apart, by following PM managerial logic in initiating, planning, executing and monitoring these unique and temporary endeavors with a goal to achieve a specific deliverable would have avoided several problems with effectiveness and efficiency. Both projects suffered under poorly stated and communicated project scopes, under scope creep through add-ons, which led to poor effectiveness, and poorly managed costs (inefficiency), and partially unsatisfied stakeholders. 

The Kananaskis report reveals that the main stakeholders the G-8 Summit who the project intended to make proud were cooperating reluctantly because the stakeholder identification and outreach were not conducted properly in the initiation and planning phase, respectively. OSR, which was meant to alleviate refugees’ fate was suffering under unrealistic timelines and overwhelming scope and led to at times frustrated refugees. 

The PMBoK offers a systemic approach to managing endeavors that are temporary, unique and have a clear beginning and an end, including measurable guidelines for creating progress reports and closing all tasks. PM tools can thus offer increased efficiency and effectiveness in delivering outputs. 

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