Reimagining technical assistance through dialogue. The first in a six-part series of informal conversations with experienced practitioners and development partners on the practicalities for delivering effective technical assistance, the day-to-day challenges for doing things differently, and suggestions drawn from their own experiences.

In this first episode, Alexandra chats with Andrew Wyatt about the value of genuine dialogue to address the practical challenges in reimagining technical assistance. 

Andrew has impressive experience working on public sector change, both as part of the government and as an external technical advisor. Andrew served for over 23 years in the UK public service as a policy adviser, manager, trainer and training manager. He served for six years as Director of the Government Group at the Civil Service College, the predecessor of the National School of Government, where he developed and delivered training for the most senior public officials on accountability, strategic management and corporate governance, and for civil servants at all levels on improving policy processes and policy management. From 2003 until 2019 he worked for Oxford Policy Management as a Senior, then Principal Consultant, and is now a freelance consultant in the field of governance, specialising in policy management, public sector reform, institutional assessment and capacity building.

As a consultant he has provided support to a range of sectors across all stages of the policy cycle, from analysis and appraisal to implementation, monitoring and evaluation. In recent years his work has focused particularly on the assessment and strengthening of institutional and organisational capacity. He has led functional reviews and institutional capacity assessments at national and sub-national levels in Antigua, Kenya, Lebanon, Rwanda, Zambia, Zanzibar, Zimbabwe and mainland Tanzania, led the provision of technical support for the establishment of a Social Assistance Agency in Moldova, and supported the development of a competency framework for health personnel in the State of Bihar. He has also led teams to design new public sector organisations and their supporting processes, systems and staff requirements, including a parliamentary foundation to support accountability and policy-making in Tanzania and a social protection secretariat for the Government of The Gambia. 

Andrew’s principal interests lie in assisting the development of effective government institutions, policy processes and systems for managing the delivery of coordinated, efficient and responsive public services.

Alexandra Nastase is an experienced development professional who designed, implemented and evaluated multiple public sector change programmes in the past decade. Alexandra’s work is centred on advancing structural reforms, strengthening state capability and government performance to deliver public services in Europe, Asia, Africa. She held multiple leadership and senior advisory roles for multi-million technical assistance programmes funded by the World Bank, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the European Commission, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and UN agencies. Before joining OPM, she also worked for the World Bank, UN, and non-governmental organisations.

Reimagining technical assistance over coffee, episode 1: Dialogue

Reimagining technical assistance - Finance. The fourth in a six-part series of informal conversations with experienced practitioners and development partners on the practicalities for delivering effective technical assistance, the day-to-day challenges for doing things differently, and suggestions drawn from their own experiences.

In this episode, we discuss combining financial assistance and technical advice to drive change, with Naveed Aziz, who shares lessons from Pakistan. Naveed provides insights from working across sectors, including governance, health, education, and at the federal, provincial and local level.

In this episode we explore: 

•	How can technical assistance complement financial support?

•	How to pursue transformational changes, such as a push for a 
 performance culture in the government?

•	What should policymakers and development practitioners consider when working to improve service delivery?

•	How to ensure reform support is sustainable?

•	What are the advantages and the practical limitations of adaptive development programmes?

•	How to manage risk effectively, while creating space for innovation and get things done.

•	How will technical assistance needs and delivery change in the post-pandemic world?

Naveed is currently a lead Governance Advisor and Provincial Representative of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office in Kyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan.

Reimagining technical assistance over coffee, episode 4: Finance

Reimagining technical assistance - Localising aid. The fifth in a six-part series of informal conversations with experienced practitioners and development partners on the practicalities for delivering effective technical assistance, the day-to-day challenges for doing things differently, and suggestions drawn from their own experiences.

In this episode, we discuss some of the nuances of localising aid, the opportunities raised by the current crisis, and the remaining agenda with Aggie Nakirya.

In this episode we explore: 

• Why it’s essential to look at existing power structures when it comes to comes to reimagining technical assistance. I’m referring to the primary relationships between donor- implementer – government – and other local actors and at the internal power structures with the programme delivering technical assistance. Changes in localising aid will have to address directly the existing power balance. What are the practical challenges of further localising aid and what do we need to do to get better at this?

• The challenges in the education sector in Uganda and how the government managed to address them? In education, how did governments balance the response to the learning crisis and offering some formal instruction for the children in a socially-distanced manner with the long-term need to build resilient and adaptive public sector governance systems to respond to…any situation?

• The opportunities for reform whilst addressing the Covid-19 crisis and how ‘useful now’ was balanced with ‘relevant later’? 

• What is the future of technical assistance and how optimistic should we be about the lessons we’ve learned in the past two years? Will business as usual mean business as before?

• What are the gender dynamics in designing, delivering and evaluating technical assistance?

Aggie Nakirya is a former Felix Scholar and holds a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from the University of Oxford. She is currently the Deputy Team Leader for a Technical Assistance programme being delivered in Uganda

Reimagining technical assistance over coffee, episode 5: Localising aid

Reimagining technical assistance - Localising aid. The final episode in this six-part series of informal conversations with experienced practitioners and development partners on the practicalities for delivering effective technical assistance, the day-to-day challenges for doing things differently, and suggestions drawn from their own experiences.

In this episode, we discuss how to design, implement and evaluate programmes that are intentional in advancing gender equality, with Johanna Riha.

We explore:
• What could development practitioners do in their day-to-day work to be more intentional about advancing gender equality?

• What works in advancing gender in health programmes?

• What does an effective organisational gender architecture look like?

• What are some of the challenges to having relevant actors speaking with a common voice on gender and equality, and engaging towards a common objective? What are the practical solutions?

• What is the Gender and Health Hub, how will it work, and what sort of information development practitioners should expect to be able to access?

Johanna Riha is a Research Fellow at the United Nations University’s International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) working in the Gender and Health Policy Hub. She is an epidemiologist with close to ten years of experience in health policy and public health research, largely focusing on Africa.

Reimagining technical assistance over coffee, episode 6: Gender equality

In the first episode of the new series of our Policy in Pandemics podcast, Acting Chief Economist, Stevan Lee talks to Selim Raihan, Professor of Economics at the University of Dhaka and Executive Director at SANEM, about the economic impacts of the Covid-19 crisis in Bangladesh – and the Government’s response.

Policy In Pandemics: Covid in Bangladesh…what the government did - and didn’t do

Join Policy in Pandemics host, Stevan Lee, as he explores the economic impact of Covid-19 in Kenya with economists Wangari Muikia and John Nyangi.

As in many countries across the world, stories of hoard-buying, home working and the emergence of a ‘new normal’ characterised the arrival of the pandemic in Kenya. 

The Government responded quickly with an almost immediate lockdown, triggering a wave of urban-rural migration as the urban services sector felt the impact of the strict containment measures. Despite pivoting towards the domestic market, sectors such as tourism and other services were heavily affected – micro, small and medium enterprises in the informal sector in particular, bore the brunt of reduced trade in cities like Nairobi. 

Conversely, other important sectors – namely agriculture – were less affected, and their resilience helped to support the economy as a whole at a time when export markets suffered. 80% of agricultural firms remained open and operating compared to around 40% of those firms operating within the tourism sector.  

Despite enjoying years of relatively strong growth before the pandemic, a shrinking fiscal space caused by a high debt burden left Kenya with limited options for a stimulus package. With little fiscal buffer, a large bailout of the magnitude seen in countries like the UK simply wasn’t possible. Instead, like may other sub-Saharan African countries, the Government has had to rely on multilateral borrowing from the World Bank and IMF to help weather the economic storm caused by Covid.  

This has left the country walking a difficult balance between providing support to households through tax cuts and cash transfers while still trying to raise revenue for public expenditure – indeed, this year saw the reversal of some tax cuts and the introduction of completely new taxes.  

What this means in reality is that while estimates for growth and recovery don’t appear too ominous – with forecasts suggesting setbacks equivalent to just a year or two of lost growth – the impact on poverty at the household level is likely to be much more severe and long lasting and is further compounded by pervasive inequality between genders and regions.

Kenya’s recovery from Covid will be very much dependent on the ability of policymakers to recognise this inequality and address it to help reverse the effects of poverty which could otherwise worsen livelihoods for years to come.

Policy in Pandemics: Kenya

Covid in Pakistan: Financial consolidation vs. damage limitation – who wins and who loses? 

The fifth most populous country in the world, Pakistan has witnessed four waves of Covid, yet deaths to date – while high – have not amounted to the numbers seen in some less populous countries. 

Pakistan is used to macroeconomic shocks and crises.  The boom and bust cycle of economic growth in Pakistan has continued since independence and is closely linked to the country’s electoral cycle – towards the end of each government’s five-year term, the fiscal and external account deficits tend to increase, leading the country towards financial crisis and an approach to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other creditors for support.

Inevitably the pandemic struck against this backdrop, and at a point in the cycle where the Government was gearing up to raise revenues and cut back on spending in a bid to restore some financial stability within the country. 

Interestingly, the response to the pandemic called for an almost opposite approach and the Government responded with tax exemption and price support policies to help stimulate the economy: quite an easy political option in the short term.  Broadly this expansionary policy has been successful at stimulating a strong recovery – there are winners and losers needless to say.  But coming on the back of pre-election fiscal expansion, the policy also leaves Pakistan with a severe debt burden and inflationary pressures, even though another election is just over the horizon.  

In the third episode of the new series of the Policy in Pandemics podcast, Stevan Lee talks to public finance expert Nohman Ishtiaq, about the story of Covid-19 in Pakistan and the complex route to a position where the government’s policy options might be rather limited.

Policy in Pandemics: Pakistan

In the fourth episode of the latest series of our popular podcast, Nigerian economist, Adedeji Adeniran, tells us how initial optimism turned to panic when Covid first hit the country two years ago.

While the Government’s response had proved effective at containing the Ebola virus just a handful of years earlier, Dr. Adeniran describes how it soon became clear that this new shock brought new challenges – as well as aggravating emerging ones. 

2019 saw some of the fastest growth to the Nigerian economy since the recession of 2014/15, with growth consistently at an annualised 2% every quarter that year, sparking a sense that the country was on a path to recovery.

This optimism proved short-lived, however, when the pandemic and resulting global recession struck, exposing Nigeria’s already highly constrained fiscal space and a lack of response possibilities. 

In this illuminating episode, Dr. Adeniran, describes how the limited options left to the government have acted to emphasise a trend that was already emerging within the country: the rise of a ‘new urban poor’. 

Despite the promising economic growth witnessed just before the pandemic, government finances weren’t keeping up and, with a growing population, GDP per capita continued to fall, with those in the informal urban sector hit the hardest. Covid simply acted to build on this, tipping those not already classed as poor into poverty. 

In this episode we find out what this all means for Nigeria’s recovery prospects, and how this is likely to play out against the backdrop of another global crisis:  the Russia-Ukraine conflict. 

In a country where oil still contributes more than 50% of revenue, despite accounting for less than 10% to GDP, how will the conflict’s effect on fuel prices affect the Nigerian economy? Is there scope for the Government to harness rising international demand to help redress fiscal imbalances and set the country on course for Covid recovery?

Policy in Pandemics: Nigeria

Can leaders choose a development path? Who decides and how? What conditions lead to a pro-development agenda and what’s the role of external agencies in all of this? 

We ask leading economist and former policy advisor to the UK Foreign Secretary, Stefan Dercon, these questions and more in our latest podcast: International Development, Where Now?
Chatting about his revealing book, ‘Gambling on Development’, Dercon draws on his long and far-reaching experience as a senior civil servant within the UK’s Department for International Development, to explain why some countries - like China and Indonesia - seem to opt for a growth-based future while others, like Malawi, remain poor. 

Stefan Dercon is the Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford, former Chief Economist at the UK Department for International Development and former Development Policy Advisor at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. He chats to Stevan Lee, Chief Economist at Oxford Policy Management.

International Development, Where Now? New podcast with Stefan Dercon

Loosely defined as the transfer of funding and decision-making powers to local actors, localization is certainly not a new concept – phrases such as ‘locally-led development’, ‘community-led development’ and ‘doing development differently’ have been pretty commonplace for years.

But as an all-encompassing narrative, localization took centre stage a few years ago when US Agency for International Development administrator, Samantha Power, outlined it as the rhetoric at the centre of what her department does. it has gained further momentum through the movement to decolonise aid – itself a reaction to a number of external factors, not least the Black Lives Matter movement and the need for greater inclusivity around language used within the aid sector.

But what is local? How can we ‘localize’ in a meaningful way and what’s our role as development consultants in all this?

These are just some of the questions we tackle in this latest episode of our ‘International Development, Where Now?’ podcast.

We’re not afraid to face up to some of the thorny issues in the sector in this soul-searching discussion that sees us delve into what it really means to go beyond the ‘fly in, fly out’ nature of development consultancy, whether there’s still a role for global communities and how we do away with knowledge hierarchies.

We also cover some of the potential risks and barriers to localizing and try to offer some achievable, pragmatic solutions.

Reimagining technical assistance over coffee, episode 1: Dialogue

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