The Product Development Compulsion and the Chronic Problem of Donor Overload
The preceding posts established the foreign aid industry’s overriding need to perpetually spend allocated funds, or the “imperative to spend” (MMS). This necessity is directly linked to another core competence of donor agencies: product development. This refers to the constant, relentless search for new ways and sectors to spend money, creating a proliferation of diverse and complex interventions that touch almost every area of human endeavor in developing countries.
This perpetual proliferation, however, results in a devastating systemic weakness for recipient countries: donor overload. This post examines how the donor obsession with “product development” leads to fragmentation, project proliferation, an overwhelming blizzard of missions and documents, and ultimately, clogs up the very recipient bureaucracies the aid is meant to support.
Product Development: The Corollary of the Imperative to Spend
Product development is the core competency of donor agencies—a term borrowed from the corporate world that aptly describes the endless searching for new ways to spend money and justify the clamor for more funding. This proliferation is intrinsically linked to the imperative to spend.
For someone familiar with the development business forty years ago, the diversity and sheer variety of ways donors are now involved in countries of “the rest” would be astonishing. The expansion into virtually every area of human endeavor that can be folded into the rubric of development is essential because organizations that expand and proliferate their activities also create more positions at upper management levels, leading to more opportunities for career growth and increased power for managers.
This continuous expansion is achieved through several structural mechanisms:
Sectoral Identification Missions: These are crucial in filling the “project pipelines”. The typical process involves a mission that:
Surveys the existing institutional setup and donor involvement in a specific sector.
Identifies basic development issues (classic ‘justifiers’ like fighting poverty, improving health, or adapting to climate change).
Analyzes government policies and identifies development priorities missed by the recipient.
Restates the donor’s overarching objectives.
Sketches possible projects and makes ballpark cost estimates.
Identifies where few donors currently tread or where co-funding might be possible.
The resulting reports, which may be mulled over, discarded, or combined with other concepts, are fundamental to feeding the donor’s pipeline of tentative projects.
Embedding Product Development in Ongoing Projects: Even within ongoing projects, donors normally ask for the identification of further opportunities, especially if hinted at in the terms of reference (TOR). The implicit refrain is always: “Explore more! Find more ways to penetrate!”. Since ongoing projects are often multifaceted (including tangential components like vocational training or civil society strengthening), each component offers potential gateways into other arenas or initiatives.
The Faddism Factor (Herd Instinct): The obsession with product development is amplified by the herd instinct (discussed further in post 10). Donor agencies engage in “isomorphic mimicry,” rapidly adopting new “fads and fashions” to appear on the vanguard of development thinking and confirm their membership in the development club. This leads to the quick institutionalization of new practices—from “resilience” to “financial inclusion”—creating bureaucratic niches with trendy names and ensuring the development organization “can breathe easy and carry on as normal”.
Promoting “Modeles Voyageurs” (Best Practices): The industry is “enamored” with “best practices”—policies or interventions deemed sterling examples that should be propagated globally, often referred to as ‘modeles voyageurs’ in Francophone countries. The fiction must be maintained that these are “easy, miraculous solutions” transferable across vastly different contexts via efficient ‘agences voyagers’. The promotion of these transferable ideas, such as cash transfers or performance payments for health services, is used to justify new interventions. The negative effect of this, however, is the loss of any home-grown initiatives in the societies dependent on these transfers.
This proliferation ultimately results in fragmentation, where few donors specialize in limited sectors or recipients, and attempts at coordination often remain elusive.
Donor Overload: Clogging the Recipient Bureaucracy
The immense scale and complexity resulting from perpetual product development create a crisis known as donor overload in recipient countries. The sheer volume of donor activities—projects, programs, missions, reviews, liaison officers, and temporary structures like project management units (PMUs) and project implementation units (PIUs)—clogs up recipient bureaucracies.
The core consequence of this deluge is that governments in the rest are kept in a constant state of reaction and catch-up, even in areas that should be their own domain.
The Tsunami of Missions and Reporting
One of the most immediate and tangible signs of overload is the volume of missions and reporting requirements imposed by donors. In 1999, World Bank President James Wolfensohn famously complained: “It is shameful that Tanzania must produce 2,400 reports each quarter for its donors. It is shameful that Tanzania must suffer 1,000 missions from donors a year”.
Despite this public shaming, the situation has persisted and, in some cases, worsened:
By 2010, official donors were collectively sending over 30,000 missions annually to manage their aid projects globally.
In Cambodia, government officials reported spending 50 percent of their time meeting with and reporting to donors due to over 400 missions traveling there annually.
Even in Tajikistan, a recipient of small amounts of aid, senior government officials spend half their time (about two meetings a day) with donors.
The severity of “mission bloat” led countries like Kenya (2007) and Ghana (2008) to institute “quiet time,” a two-month period during which donors were asked not to schedule meetings or missions, simply to give government officials “breathing space” to prepare their budgets.
This burden places immense administrative strain on recipient governments. Donors often treat recipient government structures as “free, costless goods,” assuming that local bureaucrats will “drop everything and perform as the donor wishes, over and over, and on time”.
The Inverse Sovereignty Effect
For small, aid-dependent states, the impact can be severe. In 2008, the minuscule island nation of Tuvalu (population 17,500) suffered an “almost surreal deluge of development types,” with consultants, researchers, and donor staffers arriving at a rate equivalent to 10 percent of the island’s population over the year.
This phenomenon illustrates the “inverse sovereignty hypothesis”: efforts to improve aid delivery actually have a reverse effect, placing ever more pressure on scarce local management capacities and further reducing what little ‘ownership’ the government has over its own development policies.
The Proliferation of Frameworks
Before a new initiative can even be officially programmed, it requires navigating a blizzard of time-consuming preconditions and frameworks designed to ensure the project appears integrated and cohesive. These frameworks include:
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).
Country Development Frameworks.
Systematic Country Diagnostics.
Country Partnership Frameworks.
These ‘framework’ products are “almost always prepared by donors themselves,” but they still necessitate contributions and approvals from country officials, further tying up their time.
Monopolizing Country Knowledge
Donor overload extends beyond administrative burden to the very definition of a country’s development challenges. Donors and their funding generate much—often most—of what is known about a country’s economic and developmental prospects, effectively monopolizing country knowledge.
This knowledge, generated through donor-funded studies and knowledge products, is rarely completely neutral. Its framework is typically conceived and designed around what donors perceive as important, steering interventions towards certain globalist agendas. This results in what has been termed “decision-based evidence making,” where the donor’s global consensus steers what is chosen to apply to individual countries, replacing true evidence-based decision making.
Furthermore, because this knowledge is provided for free, defined by foreign entities, and perceived as serving these entities, it is often devalued in-country. Local officials rarely have technical roles in these studies, limiting their involvement to procedural approval.
This massive volume of donor activity and knowledge creation keeps recipients in a state of bewilderment and confusion, constantly subjected to “ever more complicated concepts of new paradigms, new agendas, new financing mechanisms, and lots and lots of new jargon”.
The consequence of this system is that it makes “a joke out of anything like real ‘ownership’ on the recipient side”. The imposition of the donor’s will, disguised as competitive procurement or rigorous standards, ensures that control over how development projects are planned, managed, and assessed remains firmly outside the countries and people most concerned.
If the imperative to spend is the engine of the development industry, then product development is the frantic production line, and donor overload is the resulting traffic jam—a chaotic, confusing mess that ensures nothing moves efficiently, except the money.
The next post will examine how this drive for control extends to the most fundamental element of development work: the terms of reference and the procurement of external expertise, resulting in a form of “knowledge colonization.”