Here is a simple, perhaps loaded question: How does the United States know if our development strategy in Pakistan (or anywhere else for that matter) is working? What would success look like?You might answer that question in any of a number of ways. But one thing you probably wouldn’t include is any measure of the direct impacts of U.S. funded aid projects. USAID could build hundreds of schools, dozens of hospitals, string up miles and miles of power cables, and still overall development in Pakistan could slide backwards. In a country the size of Pakistan, the direct impacts of aid spending are dwarfed by the impacts of government policy and plain-old good governance. It might therefore make sense to worry less about accounting for every cent of U.S. aid spending and worry more about measuring Pakistan’s overall development progress—the combined impacts of actions taken by the Pakistani government, international partners, and Pakistani citizens.This isn’t controversial territory. In introducing his new development policy, President Obama underscored his administration’s focus on impacts. “Let’s move beyond the old, narrow debate over how much money we’re spending, and instead let’s focus on results -- whether we’re actually making improvements in people’s lives,“ Obama said. Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has repeatedly declared development results the key to the U.S. image problem in Pakistan. “When people see American money helping their lives, that is what will change the public opinion of Pakistan,” Qureshi told Katie Couric in late September.So how might the U.S. government go about measuring real progress? In an open letter to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke earlier this year, we suggested that the United States and Pakistani governments should sit down together and come up with a short list of such indicators—and commit to regularly collecting and sharing information on them with the Pakistani people and with the U.S. Congress. This idea resonated with discussions and ongoing thinking already taking place in the State Department, USAID, and the White House. Together we’ve been discussing how best to move forward.As a first step, we’ve drafted a short paper – still a work in progress – that lays out the rationale for tracking overall development outcomes and suggests an illustrative list of the sorts of indicators that might be included in this sort of endeavor. Our five (each explored in greater depth in the paper):
- The number of children completing primary education and sitting for a standardized examination.
- The amount of electricity delivered and paid for by end consumers.
- The yield per acre under cultivation of Pakistan’s five main crops.
- The percentage of infants receiving three doses of the Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis vaccine (DTP3).
- Total development spending by Pakistani federal and provincial governments (or total revenues collected).
Of course, any real list would have to be drafted in consultation with the Pakistani government (and, ideally, with Pakistani civil society). Our aim here was simply to illustrate the sorts of indicators that we envision would be most effective—indicators that are easy to understand, easy to measure, and are close proxies for the strength of Pakistan’s main service delivery systems.As we polish this draft, we would like to know what you think! If you have expertise in a specific sector (say, if you work on power sector issues in Pakistan), please let us know if you can imagine an indicator that fits our criteria in your field of expertise. If you think we’ve left a critical sector off of our list, let us know that too. We’d like to spark a healthy dialogue between Americans and Pakistanis on what their development priorities are.Ultimately, we see a focus on outcomes benefiting not only development in Pakistan, but also U.S. public diplomacy efforts and the strength of Pakistan’s civil society and democratic institutions. The information collected and shared could help empower Pakistanis to play a more active role in demanding real improvements in service delivery from their political representatives. The first step, however, is in deciding what to measure. Read the paper and share your thoughts below!
