PowerPoint Presentation Economic Growth and development in Southeast Asia

Two things to keep in mind:

There are lots of people out there with extensive country experience, language, and good technical skills (116,000+ on the FB page). Many also with project management experience: what can you bring that is new?

Entry level jobs are increasingly going to local staff, also increased south-south hiring. This is different from when I entered the field.

Learn about how the aid system works: much development work is financed by “foreign aid”

• Foreign aid includes
• Financial flows, technical assistance, and given by one country (donor) to another country (recipient) either as grants or subsidized loans.
• Can be given or received by governments, charities, foundations, businesses, or individuals
• Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD is international organization that tracks ODA flows.
• 30+ industrialized countries belong to the OECD, including most of the major donor countries
• According to the DAC, foreign assistance must meet two criteria to be counted as aid
• Designed to promote economic development and welfare as main objective (military aid excluded)
• Provided as a grant or heavily subsidized loan
• Referred to as “concessional assistance”, if loan then grant element much be 25% or more (ref. WB IDA lending on highly concessional terms qualifies)

There are different categories of “aid”

• Official Development Assistance (ODA) is aid provided by DAC donor governments to low and middle income countries for development purposes
• Bilateral, national aid programs
• Multilateral (UN organizations, WB, ADB, also regional banks)
• Private Voluntary Assistance is another important source increasing rapidly—including (some) humanitarian assistance
• Churches, faith based organizations have been involved for decades
• More recent, rapid expansion of assistance provided by INGOs e.g. Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision and foundations
• And new foundations like Gates, which current provides more than $1 billion in support primarily for education and health research and programs in low income countries.
• In recent years, private assistance is estimated to provide countries with as much as half to two-thirds increase over official development assistance (ODA)
• But private assistance is not counted in ODA, which is limited to “official” sources