House of Commons - Department for International Development: Aid to Malawi

Department for International Development: Aid to Malawi - Public Accounts Committee Contents

2 The adequacy of the information the Department has to improve implementation

9. The Department does not have full and timely information with which to robustly assess its performance in Malawi, including measure of how efficiently its money is spent there. When challenged to express the efficiency and cost effectiveness of its programmes it tended to revert to general statements of the amounts of money it had spent and assurances that these disbursements had had some effect.[27] What data there is on performance is not reassuring. The Department achieved only 61% of its own targets in Malawi (Figure 1). It defended this performance by citing its targets as dependent on the performance of others. It set stretching targets without the expectation that they would all be achieved. Levels of ambition varied. The Department committed in its next country results framework for Malawi to a tighter set of targets, which are within its control and on which it can focus to improve performance. The Department also committed to clearer sign-posting of what constitutes value for money within the targets it sets itself.[28]

Figure 1: Performance against milestones for the Department's Country Assistance Plan

Sector Number of milestones Achieved

% Late achievement

% Not achieved

%

Social protection 5 100 0 0

Growth and Agriculture 6 83 0 17

Budget Support 5 80 0 20

HIV/AIDS 6 67 17 17

Health 10 60 10 30

Water and Sanitation 2 50 50 0

Governance 11 36 27 27

Education 6 33 17 50

Total 51 61 14 24

Notes: Achieved means achieved by the June 2008 milestone. Late achievement means achieved by June 2009. Non-achievement does not mean that no progress was made.

Source: Qq 1-5 and 19; C&AG's Report, Figure 4

10. The Department's performance against its targets varies between sectors (Figure 1). In the under-performing governance sector, some targets were missed as a consequence of delays by Malawi's minority government in passing legislation.[29] In Education, the Department has been working for three years to persuade the Government of Malawi and other donors to develop a new joint programme and the Government has now agreed to make necessary changes, including drawing on good experience from pilots using community-based teachers motivated to work in rural areas.[30]

11. Though the Department cited examples of good outcomes arising from its spending in Malawi, we received much less assurance as to how far this represented value for money.[31] Evidence on value for money in the implementation of the Department's programmes in Malawi is hard to find.[32] The Department offered a few efficiency measures, principally from programmes that have been led by other donors (Roads, AIDS drugs), from education (classroom construction, one part of a broader Departmental programme meeting only half of its targets), and the agricultural subsidy (estimates of cost-efficiency not based on hard data[33]). The Department conceded that it had not incorporated efficiency measures in its results and monitoring frameworks and was addressing that.[34] Until a better structure for measuring efficiency has been put in place, it will be difficult to judge whether the Department has disbursed UK public money efficiently in Malawi, and how much further the Department could drive improvement in the programmes it funds.[35]

12. The Department has invested in getting better data on the implementation and results of its programmes in Malawi, for example through funding a household survey to take place in 2010 and the tracking of drug procurement.[36] But data on the results of key programmes remains inadequate, for example on levels of poverty, access to safe water sources and on maize harvests achieved.[37] In the absence of annual data on the attrition and turnover of the health workforce, the Department awaits a one-off evaluation in 2010 to answer basic questions on the implementation of its £55 million programme to address staffing problems in health which started in 2005.[38] Data often exists locally; but is not aggregated or quality controlled at the national level.[39] The Department has helped to fund a unit which assists and tracks implementation of the agricultural subsidy, which other donors and experts view as critical to promoting good implementation.[40] This unit illustrates that it is possible for the Department to ensure that it has the information it needs to drive improvements.