 Y cyfnodr, mae have three speakers to continue on this theme that Karen introduced us to on the big theme, on the bigger picture. A to help us to do that, we have Leonce Nindekwmana. Leonce is from the University of Massachusetts, has also been associated for a long time with African Development Bank, the UN committee on development policy. Meena Balamuni Lutz, Professor of Economics at the University of North Florida. She is currently in Ghana with the Africa Central Centre for Economic Transformation. We have Kai Gehring, who is at the University of Heidelberg and is doing a lot of work on gender issues. You'll have full details of everybody on this piece of paper here, which is out with the agenda. Without further ado, I'd like to ask Leonce to come and say something about his research work for RECOM on this important topic. Then we'll take the next speaker and then the third, and then we'll take some questions and some discussion. Leonce, please, if you could join us. Good morning everybody, and I would like to thank UNU either for giving me the opportunity to be here. Take part in this interesting discussion. My contribution is about a beginning, really, a beginning of an analysis of how it contributes to improving both human development and specifically gender. I'm saying it's a beginning because yesterday we were talking about dinner. I think we all agree that this is the first time that actually the research and policy community zeroes in on the linkages between aid and gender. I'm happy to be able to take part with this discussion. This paper is a joint work with my colleague Linda Pickbone from Hampshire College who could not be here because she's doing more serious things. She's expecting I'm soon going to be an uncle, so I'm very excited. But she sends her regards. Tony told me I have 15 minutes I had prepared for an hour and a half, so I don't know how I do that. But I'll give you a flavor of what we're trying to do in this paper and the following, the follow-up research. And then during the discussion you can ask me more the details about the work. So this work is a continuation of my own interest in the issue of aid effectiveness, which is something that donors have been focusing on and pushing for basically asking what do we get out of our dollars. But on the other side, on the recipient side, the people also in developing countries have been asking and asking more loudly about what they get out of all the aid with all the things that it comes with. My second interest is with what researchers have been calling the micro-macro paradox, which is that when we look at the impact of aid in development, there has been a lot of research at the macro level looking at how aid improves economic growth over time. Do countries that receive more aid grow faster? Can we establish a linkage between growth and aid? And the evidence is very mixed. In fact you find that some people will demonstrate that there is no impact with very good economic analysis and others will prove that there is impact. So we get very confusing evidence. But at the micro level, you have more mileage in the sense that when you look at sectoral level analysis, project level analysis, you can find impact of aid. But the problem is how do we bridge the micro level evidence and the macro level evidence? In terms of illustrating the micro impact, I always give an example of myself. People contend that aid doesn't help, education doesn't help health, but I'm a product of public education funded by public aid and I think it works. Look at me. But also if you go to developing countries, you'll see health clinics built by aid, good schools built by aid. I also give an example of some very targeted project that actually happened to work. In my work on Uganda, one of the tools that really worked was the school feeding for kids. When kids were given lunch, they attended school more. So when it is well targeted, it does work. The next interest is to look at aid and gender specifically, looking at how aid can help bridge the gaps. We know that there are huge gaps in terms of human development. Inequality along gender is much wider. Even if we look at the traditional, the classic problems of rural urban duality, the gaps are much larger when you look at the gender dimension. Yes, developing countries have made a lot of progress in improving education in terms of enrollment, retention, completion rate, but the gaps are still significant. Granted that there are countries again who have made a lot of progress in bridging that gap. The question is how do they do it? How can other countries learn from that? So we ask some very simple questions that we try to undertake using data analysis using OECD dark data. I'm going to share quickly the results. Going back to the issue of micro-macro paradox. Here I'm drawing from a paper I did last year for the European Development Network, where I was trying to reflect about the ways in which we can explain why when we go on the field and look at specific projects, specific sectors, we do see some impact. But when we look at the macro level, we don't find the impact. At the macro level, I'm saying why is it that developing countries have been receiving so much aid and haven't grown faster? One is simply a quantity problem. Yes, aid targeted does work, but we don't have enough of it. If you look at the needs, the amount of needs that say African countries have in infrastructure, aid, education, health, how much they would have to invest in those areas to generate meaningful impact and compare that to the amount of resources that they have been generating, whether it is from aid, FDI and government resources, the gap is huge. So one of the key problems is the financing gap that still exists in that country's still face. The other problem is the quality of aid, which is how it is allocated across sectors, across users. Here I want to single out the fact that the donor community has not been very systematic, has not been consistent. You see shifts in terms of allocation of aid. We go decades and people think that the best way to improve development is to invest in infrastructure. Then after a while some people come up with evidence that no, no, it doesn't work, then we shift to social development. In fact, when you look at the trend in aid to say African countries, there has been a long period where aid to productive sectors have declined because we thought it was about reducing poverty and the way you do that is to go to social sectors. But as Karen has said, you need to eventually create the results. If you want to reduce poverty, one of the things you have to do in countries where 80% of the population is in the rural sector, is in agriculture, is to get agriculture going. My own view is that for most of developing countries to develop and to improve in well-being, you need agriculture to be more productive, which means you need to invest in infrastructure that helps agriculture to raise productivity. So allocation of aid is key. The second problem is weak additionality, in the sense that many times you have done aid in such a way that people go in as individual donors, as individual projects, and you don't have leverage of the aid that's being allocated. Whereas if you are going to pull the resources so that everybody goes in to try to attract other people to contribute to the projects, then you get speed of effects, technological and knowledge transfer and so on. So that we aid that would play what we call a catalytic role in mobilising more additional resources. Regional development institutions do this much better than individual donors. I was at the African Development Bank, I can talk to you about this over coffee if you like. The third problem is that aid has remained very timid in terms of influencing institutions, and the tension here is about whether donors should be involved in improving institutions at the country level. Some people will tell you that donors should stay away from institutions, but I'm going to tell you that you cannot improve effectiveness if you don't improve institutions. One of the weaknesses of the aid processes that we have been using is that they are very, very much removed from influencing and improving institutions. The fourth problem is poor alignment of incentives and interest between the donor and the country. Many times the donors come with their own interest, and it doesn't match with what the countries are trying to do. Unfortunately, countries have started at a lower bargaining position, and what's being targeted is not necessarily the priority in the country. The last point is lack of learning. We have been in the aid business for so long, and many times you'll be surprised we keep making the same mistakes. We refuse to learn, and that's one of the reasons why we haven't been as effective as we could. I have said that we have made substantial progress, but we still have a long way to go. In this particular project, what we're trying to do is address three very simple questions. One is, does increasing the volume of aid help ameliorate human development outcomes at the country level? The second one is, does sectoral allocation of aid improve human development? Here what we call, what we mean by sectoral allocation, we mean aid going to health, aid going to education, aid going to infrastructure, water and sanitation. Do you get better results if you put more money in that? Then specifically we want to look at how sectoral allocation of aid affects gender gaps, because some sector aid have clear implications on gender. Like aid to education, we want to ask whether it increases, it reduces the gender gap in terms of youth literacy between women and men, but in the case of aid to health, we want to see whether it helps to reduce maternal mortality. We find that, again I can tell you about the techniques, the technique about how we do the analysis, but in terms of the key results is that overall there appears to be some positive impact of aid sectoral allocation on human development in general, but this is conditional to initial conditions. In the sense that when you look at countries that start at a lower level of human development, they tend to improve faster, it's not surprising. If I look at Africa specifically, you do see that improvements in human development, for example, are much higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in North Africa, because North Africa starts at a higher level. But when you look at the impact of aid allocation, you find that controlling for initial conditions, you lose the positive impact of aid. It makes sense in the sense that to the extent that aid is typically targets the lower levels or the lower income countries, which have other structural problems other than lack of resources, they tend to perform less. So if you link the volume of aid directly to the outcomes, you may think that there is a negative correlation, but it's because there are other factors other than resources other than aid that explain the lower performance in lower income countries. Many of them are fragile states, conflict countries, so that aid is actually not necessarily promoting development, but it's used for humanitarian emergencies. In this case, it demonstrated my concern, which was a quantity concern, that unless these countries get more aid, they cannot go over the hump and get growth going. This has important implications on how we evaluate aid effectiveness. It means that we have to be very cognizant of the heterogeneity across countries, the initial conditions in those countries, and be able to evaluate relative progress rather than absolute progress. So in the sense that post-conflict countries may have huge gains relative to where they start from, but if you compare it to a country in peace that have been growing faster, you may conclude that they have not performed well. So we can't treat all countries the same. We have to be very specific. But the key message is targeting can work. Initial conditions do work. The quantity and effectiveness of aid are very important. Thank you very much. OK, so we're joined by Kai Nan from Heidelberg University who's been working a great deal on gender analysis and gender issues. The papers from the, yeah, why don't you come up and then we're all here for the discussion. The papers, by the way, are on the Recon website. I very much invited to visit the website and to sign up Kai. Ladies and gentlemen, first I want to thank UNU wider as well. And I'm happy to be here and present the results of our research. Donors of official development assistance have committed themselves to target gender issues. They have, or they want to allocate aid to sectors where gender inequality is particularly serious or to countries where gender inequality is a particularly serious concern. The little provocative question that we ask in our research is, is this just gesture politics or do donors really follow that commitment? The results I'm presenting is joint work with the senior researchers Axel Dria from Heidelberg University and Stefan Klassen from the University of Götting. We look at aid commitments from all bilateral and multilateral duck donors for the whole period where data is available, that is from 1982 to 2011. And we also use disaggregated data in aid sectors that are most relevant to gender issues. That is, it's a very large scale econometric analysis where we try to provide a really comprehensive picture. But I'll try to spare you with the details about all the econometrics we use and focus on our main conclusions. What we did can mostly be summarized in two questions. First is, we look at do donors really respond to needs in terms of gender inequality. That is, we look at the current state of inequality in developing countries and look to donors allocate their decisions in response to that need. The second set of results focuses on the question, do we actually do donors follow a merit-based aid allocation? That is, if countries can improve in terms of gender issues, for example if they improve in the ratio of girls that finish primary schooling, do donors actually reward such improvement with increases in aid or what happens? As Karen has pointed out, we really face a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted problem, which is why we chose to focus on five indicators that is an index of female rights. Of course, the important issue of education, but also labour market participation, life expectancy, which is a proxy for the overall health status of women, and of course political representation of female. I also have to point out that the choice of these indicators is partly driven by data issues. That is, the development of more comprehensive indicators is still being done currently and not available for a long data period, but it's a very important point that we really continue in developing more comprehensive indicators. We also look at two different set of indicators, which is very important. First, the relative outcome of women compared to men, and on the other hand, as well to absolute outcomes for women. That is, for example, we look at the primary completion ratio of girls compared to boys, as well as to the overall completion ratio of girls. To show you why it's important to consider different indicators, we can, for example, see if we look at female rights, that problem seems to be most severe in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. That is the dark regions on the map. On the other hand, when we look at the political representation of women, that is the share of female MPs in polyamans, we can see that the issue seems to be most severe in the Middle East and Northern Africa region. Our first set of results corresponding to the responsiveness to need is that I have to say donors seem to only partially respond to need, but there are some areas where you find the respondents. That is, when we look at education, low female tertiary enrollment rates are actually followed by higher aid allocation, so to some extent donors take account of that problem. We also found, and that's one of the most robust findings, that when we look at life expectancy, both as imbalances in life expectancy between men and women, as well as overall low female life expectancy, the donors really respond to this issue. That is, the health really seems to be on the agenda, and that's also what we see in the data. On the other hand, when we look at women's rights, there's a little more aid, but overall this effect is economically not very large, and there's also more aid targeted at women's equality that is specifically to promote female rights in the recipient country. There's also, and that's another very robust finding, female political participation in developing countries really seems to be on the agenda, so that's an issue where we see a close relation between higher representation of female is really rewarded with higher aid allocation. That sounds very positive, but there are also other areas where you find, and that's also what Karen mentioned, that with regard to labour market participation of women, that's on average mostly neglected by all donors, really there's absolutely no relationship that we can detect for average aid allocation. As well, we cannot find any significant correlation to primary schooling, and that's also something that we might want to consider. The second issue, and that differs a little in how we analyse the data, in the second set of results we really controlled for the status quo, and wanted to see if recipient countries succeed in improving in one area, for example if they succeed in increasing the share of girls going to school, is such a behaviour rewarded by donors. Sadly, we have to say that we find little evidence of such a merit-based aid allocation, in particular improvements in education and improvements in female life expectancy are followed by considerable reductions in aid, that is if a developing country succeeds in reducing this gap it actually gets less aid. The one exception that we find is that if recipient countries succeed in increasing the share of female MPs in parliament, they are actually rewarded with more aid, so that's the one area where we find that aid is allocated on a merit base. Overall, there are very few, I would say, I was surprised that there are so few areas where gender specific improvements are really rewarded with higher aid commitments. There's a bunch of other analysis we do, I will only present the maybe most interesting details. First, it seems to be important to consider the importance of gender issues actually in the donor country, that's an issue that has of all completely been neglected in the literature, that is we found that donors that themselves have a higher share of female MPs seem to be much more sensitive to gender issues. We also find that on average, left-wing governments seem to respond stronger to need in terms of imbalances in education and female rights. And maybe another interesting finding, I don't know if it's surprising but I find it quite interesting, there's also a gender gap in responsiveness to aid allocation. That is, we actually find very consistently that male ministers on the one hand allocate aid to countries where female rights are already quite high, but it's only female ministers that react to need in terms of a whole series of other indicators. Only female ministers react when there's low female tertiary enrollment rates, only female ministers react to gaps in life expectancy, so that's a very interesting finding. We also saw that only female development ministers actually show some kind of rewarding behaviour, that is, female ministers actually tend to reward improvements in female rights, and female ministers also tend to reward increases in female MPs in parliament. We also saw, I don't have that on the slides, we also disaggregated our analysis for all individual donors, that is, for example, we looked at what does the UN do, what do Scandinavian donors do or what does the US do. And there we also find that there's a considerable heterogeneity between donors. For example, with regard to labour market outcomes that are overall neglected, we saw that Scandinavian countries actually respond to that indicators, but other countries don't. For example, the UN seems to put an emphasis on health issues, but also doesn't react so strong in other areas. So, as Karen has also pointed out, there's really a multi-dimensional problem that we are facing, and it's also very hard to tackle with empirical evidence. We found that donors really respond to need, but only in very few areas, particularly labour market outcome doesn't seem to be on top of the agenda. We found that donors do not reward recipients for improvements, and I want to conclude with two questions. Maybe we need to take a more comprehensive approach and really consider all areas that are important to empower women, and what incentives do we set if we do not reward improvements? What kind of long-run incentives do we really set for the recipients of aid if we do not reward improvements in those important areas? Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Kai. Very interesting set of results there, if you could bring the chairs round. If I can invite Mina up to the podium. Interesting questions there about the choice of gender of your development minister, which I think will get some discussion. I'm going to go over a coffee, also actually showing some of the power of quantitative analysis. Okay, Mina, what are you going to tell us? Thank you, Tony, and I would like to thank Wyther and Karen for organising this. Okay, so what am I going to tell you, so I'm going to try to keep it, of course I have no choice, keep it within the time allowed. So in my study I looked at the effect of official development aid on women's equality organisations and institutions. So that's a specific, although not as specific as I would like it to be, but it's a specific area in terms of, you know, for that variable. And why is it that, and I looked at actually the aid on women's organisations for equality organisations. That effect on women's empowerment, political empowerment, and I use the variable of just the share of women in parliaments, national parliaments as an indicator of political empowerment of women. So first of all, why is it that this interest in political empowerment of women, of course it's just one dimension. As Karen said this morning, there are many, many dimensions to gender equality, but that's one dimension that hasn't been looked at a lot. We looked at the effect of aid on gender gaps in education, in health, the effect of aid on fertility rates and so on. But the political empowerment of women, it hasn't been examined a lot in the literature, especially the empirical literature. So why this focus? First of all because political empowerment of women is also one of those things that are included in MDG 3, which is about promoting gender equality and empowering women. So it would be interesting to see what happens in that area. The second thing is that gender equality itself, which includes women political empowerment, when it is good it really has an impact on the other minimum development goals and that's something that has been documented in the literature and using empirical studies. But at the same time we have seen recently from data published and lots of people are talking about the slugginess of progress towards gender equality. While countries are progressing on different MDGs, this minimum development goal while there is some progress but the progress is sluggish. So maybe hopefully we can come up with some things that we could implement as world community to push the agenda forward. And the third reason for me is that women's political empowerment can have significant effects for countries that are in transition. With the Arab Spring, I'm looking at the Minar region which includes Arab countries plus Iran and Israel and Turkey. But we have seen the transitions in some governments and that's very important for me now. Because this is new, the Arab Spring is relatively new so there is no long history of looking at data and see what's happening. But we can look at other countries within Sub-Saharan Africa for example, where countries that were in transition and that's included many women in their national departments, we can see certain impact on the policies that came about. Now many of us would like to see, for example, in Rwanda a lot more progress but at least at the level of getting some actions in parliament, some of them has been. It's an example which is the gender-based bill against gender-based violence which was introduced by women in Rwanda when they joined in the parliament and it was successfully lobbied for and it was adopted in 2006. So just to give you a little example, but there is evidence documented about other countries where really when you have a critical mass of women in parliament that push for women's rights and bills and so on that these things are happening. So that's very important for me hence the focus on political empowerment of women. Now the minor region has substantially reduced, like most countries in the world, gender inequality and education and health. This morning we saw data on that. But when we look at all the countries, we still find some of the countries that still have high inequality in employment. Claeson and Lamana did a study in 2009 and also there is a paper from the United Nations report where we see these things that women are not joining the labour force and when they are in the labour force they are not really having the best jobs if you want or jobs that pay higher and managerial positions and so on. There are also some countries that tend to have high discriminatory social and legal institutions and these can be the social ones could be for example the son bias you do want a boy as opposed to a girl. Although this has diminished a lot compared to say 25 years ago or so, but it still exists and there are other restrictions for example restricted physical integrity and then there are discriminatory family laws all do again in some of the countries. In recent in the last 5-6 years there were changes. I know in Morocco where I'm originally from there was a change in the mudawana which is the laws that govern the family law where now the husband cannot just go to the judge and say I'm divorcing the woman who is staying at home. You have to actually take the woman who we do and she has to agree and all these things and more importantly the husband cannot just go and marry a second one and then bring her home without the first one knowing about it. Okay then he needs actually the formal approval of the. Now the implementation of these things really can take different forms and of course there are those who cheat who would bring another woman cover her face say she cannot show the face. This is my first wife she says that they can marry but then again the government when they see that they come up with rules where actually there are women to take the woman who is covered to a house and then there is a woman who opens and looks at the face and looks at the idea and see if it's the same person. But anyway those are technicalities and but we still we have to work on that to make sure that the implementations of the laws is happening. And also there is some data about the DAC aid going to gender equality. If you look at just here the North African countries of Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia in 2010 there was about 11.5 million dollars disbursed to women's equality organizations and that was up from 3.83 million in 2000 that's a huge jump already. And this amount reached 71.33 million dollars in 2011 that's a huge jump but remember 2011 that's when we heard about lots of movements in North Africa and people demand the rights and so on. So this is just the aid allocated the gross disbursed men's were 13.9 million dollars in 2011 but it's still a lot higher amount that was happening in 2010 and 2000 and 2000 especially. Ok so this is now more money put in these things and now this is I'm going to go quickly over this. This is just a table that shows the percentage of women in national apartments and regional differences. Of course it comes at no surprise that Nordic countries of Europe are on the top and as you can see 42% of the lower house are women but the Arab states I don't have the total percentage in this table for the MENA. But the Arab states in particular rank very low in this table. Again this is not something that's surprising. Now within the region you have countries like Yemen where women really are nowhere to be found in parliament is 0.3% going up to a country like Tunisia where the ratio is very high. The data are for 2010. So there is a huge disparity. So what were the main fundings in my study? So this is a panel data from 2002 to 2010. The aid data were from the OECD statistics on aid and the rest was mainly from the World Bank World Development Indicators. So what are the main findings? First the results suggest that official development aid to equality organisations and institutions is effective in the sense that it is associated. With higher aid is associated with higher levels of representation of women in parliament. It comes down to this where if I hold everything else constant if we give $200 increase on ODA per 1000 people the number of seats or the share of seats in parliament goes up by three points which is not insignificant. Second thing is that in my study I find that autocracy, autocratic regimes are associated with lower share of women in parliament. It's not obvious because there are some studies done on other countries that find that maybe in autocratic regimes the autocratic regime decides so many women will have to go to parliament and it happens. This is not happening in the MENA region. And then there is evidence of a robust negative effect from adolescent fertility rates on women's political empowerment and that's simple. When young girls get pregnant have a child to take care of they don't have time to worry about anything else. So it's as simple as that. But another finding also in the study is that if we give aid to family planning and reproductive health it does not have an effect on political empowerment. So of course when you give aid to family planning and reproductive health you are not looking for political empowerment you are looking for health but one would hope that there will be an indirect effect but that effect is not there. What are the implications for aid allocation? One thing is that we need a critical mass of women in parliament because this can create more push for gender equality. The second is there are some studies that have shown that increased female representation in politics is associated with significant changes in policy in the sense that women actually can enact laws and policies that are female friendly, that push for gender equality. And so these changes can be more significant the higher of course the proportion of women in national parliament. Now there is this issue of critical mass. What is the percentage that would be really a good percentage as a critical mass in parliament? So we can talk about that. But the more aid you give the more women in parliament you have and then those women will push for better policies that are supporting women. And so it becomes really kind and that will empower women more. It becomes a virtuous circle there. So foreign aid could have this catalytic role in this process and that's an important route to think about. And then given that there is documented evidence on the ineffectiveness of aid to family planning in these countries then it might be worth looking at whether foreign aid to family planning would be more effective if it were given to these organizations. And then as an indirect effect we'll get lower fertility, we'll get better productive health and so on. So that's something to think about. Okay well this is the conclusion. So women in the minor region played an important role in the Arab Spring but not in all countries. For example the participation of women in Yemen wasn't the same as the participation of women in Tunisia. And so again we have to look at where were there those differences. And then the rise of Islamist parties that have secured. Of course the paper was written before the military took over again in Egypt and even down I had doubts as you can see it was written in the paper. They secured the jury and possibly also the fact of power but it turned out that actually the Islamist in Egypt did not secure the fact of power or at least not for a long time. So in some countries this seems to create concerns about the gender equality. Women are worried that some certain things might be imposed again on them. I was very deeply concerned about Tunisia but so far it doesn't look like really the Tunisian women are suffering from this but let's hope they will not suffer from it and that concludes my presentation. Okay thank you very much Mila. Very rich conversation. If you could join us at the front if you could just switch around. And of course we've got 15 minutes till we have a coffee break and you can chat to some of the speakers during the coffee break and obviously over lunch so we can have this sort of team here. Okay so you've been very patient and listening to some of the presentations. If I could take some interventions from the floor if I could ask people to be very concise in their questions you don't have to ask everything and I'll just start on the side of the room first I think. Are there any questions on this side of the room first. Yes please could you just briefly say who you are. My name is Liv Tonneson I'm a senior researcher at Christian Mickelsens Institute in Bergen in Norway. I don't know if it's a question or a comment but it's for the last presentation. And it's a comment about the political system and its effect on the number of women in parliament. I'm just if you open up from northern Africa to the whole of Africa then whether it's autocratic or democratic has no effect on women's or the number of women in parliament. But what does have an effect is whether the country is post conflict. So you see that most of the countries in Africa that have been going through some kind of conflict has a higher percentage of women in parliaments. So a crucial question there about fragility and conflict one for Mina perhaps also the rest of the panel in a minute. The lady here could you tell us who you are and if you could be relatively brief please. Yes. Good morning. My name is Lynn Lee Chwana Carlton. I'm from the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences. Thank you to all the speakers. It's been extremely refreshing especially when you do see a correlation between the political representation in terms of parliamentarians and how that affects gender equality. I'm just thinking about a specific case in point where you have representation at the highest order like a female president in the country of Malawi. And yet where you have a very strong patriarchy and very little support in terms of let's say the Nordic countries which are quite forefront in gender issues. How does that play or what sort of advice or support could they be for such representation which is at the very highest order. Very interesting question there real real tension implicit in that one. Any other questions on this side before I leap over to Roger Williamson. Sorry Roger say who you are because some people don't know. Thank you very much for Roger Williamson ideas. Kai a question to you. I realize you had to summarize it quite briefly but isn't there a danger of personalizing it just in terms of the female development ministers. Isn't the point much more that countries with a strong commitment with social movements and in the bureaucracies to to gender equality are more likely to have a woman development minister. And that that will also be likely to have impact on the policy. I'm a bit worried about personalizing it in terms of just the minister. Thank you. Okay so it isn't just the ministers. If we could have the microphone to feel me if you could identify yourself please. I'm Bobby Connistor from a Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. And Leons was mentioning in his presentation that the aid doesn't produce macro results because it doesn't impact policies and institutions. Is there certain kind of aid that works better than some other kind of aid. So with those scarce aid dollars Leons where where are you going to put those scarce aid dollars. We'll have to pin you down maybe onto one sector where you might prioritize. Any further questions or comments from either sides of the room now. Okay. I think you know Finn so it doesn't have to introduce himself again. Thank you very much. I was just wondering when you were talking about merit based aid and thinking about the specific indicators that you were listing. Aren't we here in this area which we sometimes as economists refer to as the endogeneity of aid that us countries develop. As they need as aid less than obviously they should get less aid. I mean this doesn't I mean I'm not saying this goes across all of the different variables but I'm just sort of wondering about those specific areas whether they're not really inherent into that process and if they are should we then be so unhappy about that. Okay. And that's of course a really interesting question the context of the transition from low income to middle income status and you know the use of IDA resources and the attention of donors. Okay. So if there are no other questions or comments at the moment I sure hand it back to the speakers. They will start with Mina at the very very end. Mina. Thank you. The first question was about the fact that countries that just came out of civil war or internal conflict have more female representation in parliaments. And first of all I didn't look at those countries of course and I looked specifically except if you think of Lebanon as one of those countries but then Lebanon has been more or less stable for some time until at least until the end of the year in my data. But in my understanding is that when you are coming out of a conflict you are actually in the process of reconstruction and you are and I wish you would think of women as part of constructing a society and as just reconstructing. But anyway part of it could be eight donors insist that women are represented in the process so that's why they end up with more women. But I don't see, I mean I didn't look at them in terms of empirical studies because again I looked at 13 Minna countries and did not include ones that suffered with the exception of Iraq but I didn't have enough data for Iraq anyway in the paper so I don't talk about that. But it is a very relevant point so maybe as an extension of this work I could add those countries or look specifically at countries that had recent conflict and see what happened there then compare to countries that didn't have a conflict and see the difference. But the point was also about the autocratic or democratic regimes again we are looking only at the Minna countries and heavily you know the Arab countries are heavily represented in that pool and Arab countries as we know most of them have actually autocratic regimes starting with Morocco even though they have a parliament and everything but it is an autocratic regime. The second question was about the fact that there is representation at high levels in some countries with women in Africa but it's not just Africa. Sometimes people think that this gender inequality in the Arab countries or the Minna it's because of religion but it's not because there are two countries at least that come to mind that had women at the highest level Bangladesh and Pakistan and those are Muslim countries. So it's more than it's it's not just religion it's not it's not religion specifically but it's the way people behave in society towards women. So what can they learn from that of course in Morocco you cannot be president because they have a king so they cannot even have a queen the wife of the king is called princess she cannot be called queen. But in countries like Tunisia why not I mean really I am I hope that before the end of my life I see a woman in Egypt or in Tunisia as president. So you know these things are not now you talked about the fact that these are patriarchal societies of course they're patriarchal societies but then many societies around the world if you look at 100 or 200 years ago they were like that too. So we're waiting for progress and it's just in my sense it's not happening fast enough in the Minna region. Thank you. So progress is not not fast enough and but it is an extraordinary interesting region colleagues should note also that there's a recon program of work on governance and fragility which we've been doing with these and I do encourage you to go look at that because isn't isn't just what we say on fragility. So Kai. Thank you very much for the question. I think they are both really interesting. I tried to summarize the first question I think it was mainly about should we really focus on the gender of the minister or is it in addition like the bureaucracy and the commitment of the bureaucracy that of course drives eight allocation and I completely agree it was not my intention to focus on the gender. On the other hand I think one could say that while the likelihood that a minister is female or male is probably not completely random but due to the sad importance that the post of development minister still has in many countries it's kind of random if he or she happens to be female or male. I can just tell from Germany where right now our supposedly new development minister is someone who before was responsible for mostly traffic and infrastructure so he didn't chose to become minister or he was kind of a result of a political bargaining process so I think there might be something to that result that also it sounds convincing to me that female ministers might just care a little more. I think the second question was concerned with the merit-based approach and of course a lot of endogeneity issues when we do econometric analysis of aid and I cannot agree more that that is a problem. I first of course we control for a lot of factors but as a more general I commend while of course it makes sense that we allocate aid to countries where need is most severe or where the situation is particularly bad. I think as economists we have to or Eisen economists always was told to keep in mind that incentives matter in particular for the long run and there are some examples that merit-based aid allocation really can make a difference. I think there is a paper by Ylla Ed Al who look at US aid and their Millennium Challenge Account project where they set particularly goals for recipient countries and promised them to reward aid or maybe aid in another category if they achieve these goals and that was quite successful so I think we should consider incentives particularly in the long run. Thank you very much Kai. By the way just before we moved on to Leon so I was quite worried about Kai's results I'm sure it's a very good you know the econometrics who sound that donors aren't rewarding increased primary schooling and better labour market outcomes because you know Marty Sen said to us explicitly this is where the action is so something is going not quite right there. We do actually have a big program of recomb work on the social sectors and I really encourage you to take a look at that there's a lot of papers a lot of interesting work there so again complimenting here the gender. Leon's now maybe you're the chap who's going to answer the question on Malawi but leadership and patriarchy okay well maybe it's going to be over coffee but Leon's. I live the question because I think it would be a good thing that donors reduce aid when education improves so that they can move aid to the countries that have lower education but let's talk about that. The reason I start with that has to do with my answer to the question about institutions. I think one of the first problem is that donors are conflicted in the sense of do we leave institutions to the domain of the sovereign states that we don't want to interfere with the basic processes. Or ydyn ni wedi'i ddweud olig o'r ffordd yn mynd yn ysgrifennu, mae'r ffordd yn ffordd yn ymgyrch. A ydych chi'n hynny'n gw研io'r ffordd a'r ffordd yn ffordd yn bach cyfnogaethau'r ffordd. Ym gofyn wyan, cydych chi'n cystech chi'n cyfrifio at y manffordd, felly mae'r bwysig yn yn cynradd jydoedd yn cyfosigol oherwydd Ie ddod o'n ddod o'r ddod yn cyfwyrd yn gweithio ddod, gallwch hynny'n ei ddod yn argyrchu'r cyffinol o ddod yn gyfreidio'r cyffinol, sydd gyda chi'n gweithio'r cyffinol o'r ffordd, felly os ydych chi'n gweithio'r cyffinol o'r ddod yn gweithio a'r cyffinol o'r ddod. Ac ydyn nhw'n ymgylch yn fwy o'r cyffinol? Mae'n cael ei ddod yn gweithio'r cyffinol o'r ddod yn gweithio'r cyffinol. So, if you want to help them, you actually have to work on the institutions. You have to help them improve the institutions. I give you a couple of examples of where, when donors actually do that, you have good results. One is in the tax administration area, where donors have worked with countries to reform the tax system. An example is Uganda. In 1991, the UK put a lot of money and people in technicians in the tax system and established the autonomous authority. And you go find, look at the evidence. It's clear. Tax collection improved. The same in Ghana, in Kenya, in Burundi. It's a more recent experience, but there is positive results. I was talking to a colleague from the OECD who is working on the tax program. And they are developing targeted interventions that actually go to countries with technical experts to help them in the tax audit and tax implementation. And you do see positive results. My sense is that if we want to see gains from aid, that's the area we want to go to. I'll give the last example is in transport. When you look at the transport cost, that's the paper I'm writing now. They are much higher for landlocked countries in Africa, relative to other countries. So how do donors react? They go put more money in building more roads. No, that's not how you do that. You look at the management in the industrialisation of the sector to improve effectiveness of the use of the infrastructure. Because you may have roads which are not being used. You may have roads which are not productive because there's huge governance problems. So in addition to giving countries good roads, you actually need also to teach them how to manage the tracking industry, the transit corridors and so on. And there's a gender dimension there of course, which is of course enormous. There are huge gender dimensions. Yes, if you have bad roads, poorly connected to markets, then the women are going to pay the price of... They do the farming but they can't sell their crops so they don't generate the rewards for their hard work. So I think we can't go around institutions. Of course it's very difficult. The problem is that the impact is going to many times its medium term, long term. And unfortunately here I want to be frank. As donors we want immediate results. So that if I go into a country, I want to come back three months later and have a report on how many schools have bought, how many are built. But if you talk about developing institutions, you may have to invest more time in that.