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NN47 - Value for Money in International Education and Training - Call for articles!
This is an open call to all registered NORRAG members to contribute to the next issue of NORRAG NEWS (NN), number 47.
Theme: VALUE FOR MONEY IN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING. A NEW WORLD OF RESULTS, IMPACTS, AND OUTCOMES?
Deadline: 1st March 2012.
Length: 1 to 1/2 pages of A4 (TNR 12, single spaced. See futher below on article format)
If you would like contribute, please contact the Edtor: Kenneth.King@ed.ac.uk
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More details:
This special issue is about the about the emergence of the discourse about Value for Money (VFM) in all its complexity, as it relates to aid policy. There is a very positive side to its emergence as it is part of a reaction to the popular and media view that much aid has been wasted.
In ordinary parlance, Value for Money means believing that you have got a good deal: ‘Proof of good value for money is in believing or concluding that the goods/services received were worth the price paid.’ In other words, it is the receiver of the goods or services that decides if it is good value. When it comes to VFM in aid or development cooperation, however, it seems to be often the other way round: it is the giver not the receiver who seems to be deciding. There is a paradox here to be explored in this special issue.
If aid or development cooperation is a kind of gift, then perhaps there is something awkward about the giver working out if their gift is good value? In traditional OECD aid, the provision of development cooperation to poorer countries is not expected to be reciprocal, though there may be conditions attached. It may be different in South-South cooperation for non-DAC donors where the expectation is that there is a ‘win-win’ situation and where the understanding is that the outcome is ‘common development’ between the partners, not between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’
But if the giver is in the driver’s seat and is saying, for example, ‘Value for Money in our agency’s programme means: We maximise the impact of each pound/dollar spent to improve poor people’s lives’, this might mean, again, that the giver is decing about the value of the gift.
In the recently past ‘festival of the gift’ at Christmas time, in many countries, there is a huge variety of motives in providing Xmas presents to others; but surely it is not only useful gifts which are good value for money?
Aid gifts are even more varied. Thus an aid gift in the form of general or sector budget support (GBS, SBS) is rather difficult to assess; it is not simple to earmark it so that the British, Danish or German dimension of such aid is visible. In other words, it may be easier to determine the value of the much-maligned tied aid since it is often rather more visible than GBS or SBS. Aid which uses country systems may be harder to disentangle.
So here is a first dilemma in the pursuit of value for money: Are some of the new aid modalities, such as SBS or GBS, more difficult narrowly to assess in terms of identifiable, visible impact? If so, this may mean that VFM has a different connotation for some of the traditional donors versus some of the so-called new or emerging donors.
Aid for trusted receivers versus more aid for fragile states? Here is second challenge in assessing VFM. For aid agencies, the world’s poor continue to be the principal target; yet many of the poor are in what are, awkwardly, called fragile states. If aid money is increasingly to be targeted at fragile states, with weak institutional capacities, does that not raise a particular challenge for VFM?
Measuring VFM? – If VFM is to do with measuring and demonstrating the impact of what has been delivered or achieved, then a third challenge is that some things are easier to measure than others, such as school attendance rather than school quality, bed nets rather than policy influence. Putting this another way, we need to conceptualise Whose value? Whose money? What kind of impact? What kind of indicators?
Assessing rapidly or sustainably? Fourthly, when is it most appropriate to assess VFM in an aided project or programme? Arguably, there are good reasons to analyse the impact during the project’s life; but what about once the project has finished? What if the project only has influence while there is funding? Are there ways to assess the longer term effects of funding?
Other members of the VFM family? As soon as we begin to examine the increasing influence of VFM, we meet other members of the family: such as Results, Impact, Outcomes, and of course Effectiveness. What are the relations amongst these? And then we find that there are a series of institutes and think-tanks associated with the analysis of these, such as the Results for Development Institute (RDI) set up in 2007, and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) in 2009, to mention only two. But there is a rich landscape of such institutions, many of them with excellent capacities.
What is the impact of impact evaluation in the South? With the changes in the aid discourse in the North, what are the effects on projects and programmes in the South? Are there larger ‘transaction’ costs of proposals and final reports as the demand for concrete impacts and real results increases? How does this affect Northern and Southern NGOs, consultancies, researchers and policy people?
What about Value for (Research) Money? Does the discourse of measurement begin to affect research strategies and does this help to explain the rise of interest in randomized control trials (RCTs) and their application to the social sciences including education? Can the discourse help bridge the separate worlds of research and policy?
Finally what does the discourse mean for NORRAG News (NN) and for NORRAG members? Do we not need to pay much more attention to what impact we are having on our 3,600 registered members, 40% of which are based in the South? With our four NORRAG objectives don't we need to know more about the influence of each special issue of NN? But we shall be very interested, in this special issue of NN47, to hear from our members in policy positions (North and South), in NGOs, consultancies and in academia. What do some of our members think who have registered “politics of aid” or “evaluation and impact assessment” as their professional concerns?
ARTICLE FORMAT. In addition to posting NORRAG NEWS on the site, we send an ‘Email Alert’ to all 3600 NORRAG Members in March. For that not to be too long, we should like you also 1) to have a one or two sentence summary of your longer piece. This will act to alert people to what you have said at greater length. 2) Could you include 3-4 keywords for your NORRAG article; and 3) just two or three follow-up resources or references for NORRAG readers wanting to know more about what you have written. These could be webpages, names of books, articles or documents with web-links to them (if online) etc