15
The complete roster
Everything, in one list
Fifteen pieces across four parts. This is the whole site; the front page carries a selection of it.
The MDGs, and what a target does.
- Eight goals with deadlinesThe MDGs ran from 2000 to 2015 and were the first time the field agreed on a short numbered list with dates attached.Read →
- What a target does to a programmeA measured target gets managed and an unmeasured one does not, which is the central criticism and also the central point.Read →
- The baseline problemProgress against 1990 was calculated for goals agreed in 2000, which decided how much of the achievement was already banked.Read →
- What was left outInequality within countries, governance and environment sat awkwardly with a short list of countable things.Read →
Alignment, harmonisation and who owns the plan.
- Aid effectiveness was a question about paperworkThe 2005 Paris Declaration was about alignment, harmonisation and untying — the administrative plumbing rather than the money.Read →
- The five principles, as the text defines themOwnership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results, mutual accountability — each with an indicator attached.Read →
- Paris, and the twelve indicators it setThe monitoring survey is the reason there is any evidence about whether the agenda worked.Read →
- Who owns the plan, and who agreed to stop askingOwnership means a country’s own strategy leads, which requires donors to give up parallel reporting — the part that proved hardest.Read →
HIPC, MDRI and the arithmetic of relief.
- Debt cancelled against conditionsHIPC and then MDRI wrote off sovereign debt in exchange for a completion point and a poverty strategy.Read →
- The completion pointRelief arrived in stages, and the stage gates are where the conditionality actually sat.Read →
- What relief actually freed upDebt service saved is not automatically money spent elsewhere, and tracing it is a measurement problem of its own.Read →
Where the figures come from.
- The number is made in somebody’s front roomBehind a headline poverty figure is an enumerator at a door with a questionnaire, and every property of the number starts there.Read →
- The offices that publish itNational statistical offices, not international agencies, produce most of the underlying data — and their capacity varies enormously.Read →
- Modelled against measuredWhere no survey exists the figure is estimated, and published series rarely make that distinction visible.Read →
- The revisionRebasing national accounts can move a country’s headline figures by a large fraction overnight, without anything real changing.Read →