Political pressure to show 'results' is distracting Canada from foreign aid goals, expert says
The pressure Canadian politicians are putting on Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to link its aid spending to demonstrable outcomes is leading to "superficial results," a foreign aid expert says.
Gloria Novovic, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa who studies global governance, said the political pressure to show results is "distracting" the department from long-term goals such as fostering gender equality.
"You will see a lot of initiatives to give seeds or other agricultural products to women farmers but very limited resources invested in land rights and making sure women are protected in terms of access and ownership of the lands they are working on," she said.
In late March, the auditor general released a report saying GAC was unable to demonstrate how Canada's international funding is contributing to gender equality. The report also cited administrative issues at GAC in communications and training.
WATCH: GAC's system for tracking aid outcomes is outdated, AG says
Novovic said Canada can't afford to get distracted by administrative issues.
Instead, she said, Ottawa should focus on the funding needs of local organizations.
Not everyone in the field agrees. Nipa Banerjee, a senior fellow in International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, said the auditor general's report is valuable because bad administration makes international assistance less effective.
Banerjee worked for decades with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which was rolled into GAC.
She said that when she was stationed in Afghanistan in 2003, her evaluations were ignored and CIDA continued approving projects that were not getting results in the field.
"The headquarters goes on making their own decisions and implementing projects and project approvals without properly consulting with the field," she said.
She said CIDA conducted very few field visits, even in places where there were no obvious security concerns.
Banerjee said CIDA staffers tasked with training local residents were themselves not fully trained. When she joined in 1975, she said, she received no training before her first deployment to Bangladesh.
"I didn't know what to do in the program. What is my job?" she said.
The federal government unveiled its Feminist International Assistance Policy in 2017, intended to advance gender equality around the world.
Novovic said that while she supports the policy, she fears that in the hands of politicians it has turned into a hollow exercise in nationalist branding.
"All parties have enjoyed this idea of being presented as globally recognized leaders and global experts … this being some sort of national pride," she said. "Then obviously discussions about what Global Affairs Canada is doing tend to be also paternalistic."
Novovic said global emergencies like the pandemic and conflicts like the one in Sudan can have devastating effects on gender equity. Aid volunteers and field agents can be forced to evacuate, leaving aid-receiving communities on their own.
Florence Allard-Buffoni is a program manager at CARE Canada. She said that while administrative issues are important, programs like Women's Voice and Leadership (WVL) — a federal government initiative that works with grassroots organizations to expand women's rights in lower income countries — are tackling them.
"We strengthen the capacities of women's rights organizations that are, generally speaking, very small. We help them be better managed and better governed, we help them deliver quality programming to their community members," she said.
The federal government last month announced additional funding for the program, which Allard-Buffoni welcomed.
She said that the WVL program is important because CARE co-designs projects with country offices and local organizations so that "it is not someone in Ottawa writing a project on their own."
Allard-Buffoni said one key strength of the program is flexible funding that allows local organizations to ask for more money when their requirements change.
"During COVID, we had some organizations that came to say that their community members no longer want to have community dialogues on gender-based violence … and could they change their budgeting in order to assist the population," she said.
Allard-Buffoni said that the WVL program is not only making a change in the local communities but it is encouraging discussions within CARE as well.
"It is changing the way we think … how we work with partners, how we work with women's rights organizations and how we can best adapt our systems and our policies internally to make those partnerships easier and more equal," she said.
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