In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world’s poorest regions, governments heavily rely upon donor Aid in order to sustain their national budgets and address the exacerbation of poverty. Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the region is no exception and part of the cause of the poverty is donor aid suspension. The United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) in Malawi introduced the School Feeding programme in 1999. The intention was to reduce dropout rates, promote regular attendance, increase enrolment, and improve children’s ability to concentrate and learn, and improve government capacity to implement a school meals programme. During the period between 2007 and 2011, the WFP announced the temporary suspension of the programme for half a million children in 10 of the 13 Malawian Districts of which the Chirazdulu district was one. Since the suspension of the programme, no proper study has been conducted to indicate the bearing of the suspension. The purpose of the study was to explore in which ways suspension of Aid provision by the WFP from 2007 to 2011 affected the school meals programme and the socio-economic status of the beneficiaries of the programme in the Chiradzulu district in Malawi. Participants in the study were three teachers at two schools where the programme is offered and four parents from the two schools who were involved in the administration of the programme. A qualitative research approached was used and a case study design was applied at two schools in the Chiradzulu district where the WFP’s school meals programme was implemented. Semi-structure interview schedules that were pre-tested were used during the individual interviews conducted with parents and teachers. The school meals programme is still implemented at the two schools today. The main findings revealed that donor aid suspension affected the continued implementation of the school meals programme and the socio-economic wellbeing of the programme’s beneficiaries. There was a reduction in school attendance by learners, increased absenteeism, evidence of malnourishment amongst learners and increasing pressure on parents to provide breakfast for the learners before they went to school. For the programme to have a sustainable impact it is recommended that its implementation must not be interrupted by aid suspension, the programme must be expanded but remain targeted and not become universal and the Malawi government assume full responsibility of the programme and stop reliance on foreign funding.

This study examines variations in the lending strategies of the four main agencies of the World Bank. Countries with similar basic development and demographic attributes often receive very different amounts of financial support from the different agencies of the World Bank. Utilizing regression analysis of panel-data covering the years between 1990 through 2011, the study finds that variation in the allocation of development aid both within and between the different World Bank agencies (IBRD, IDA, IFC, and MIGA) do not generally reflect patterns in objective indicators of economic need or institutional quality among recipients. Rather, statistical analysis shows that World Bank aid is positively correlated with several measures of donor influence. Utilizing a multi-donor model of political influence, the study finds evidence that the Bank’s top donors, countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan disproportionately influence the Bank to lend in ways that support their foreign policy interests. Countries with close economic, political, and geostrategic ties to powerful donors tend to receive more aid on average than their less well-connected peers. The data show that the Bank often lends in ways that contradict its own lending criteria. Despite the Bank’s explicit emphasis on economic need and institutional quality, the agencies of the World Bank often provide greater amounts of assistance to those with less need and poor quality governance. The study has implications for the study of international organizations, institutional design, and how donor influence at the World Bank is mediated by variations in internal agency structures. / Political Science

Orientador: Vicente Rodriguez / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-10T19:37:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Espindola_AdrianadeAndrade_M.pdf: 1657775 bytes, checksum: 7ccdc5ca074c697d098cbe8257392d7a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: No presente estudo foi abordado o processo de contratação e concessão de financiamentos externos das Instituições Financeiras Multilaterais aos entes de direito público internacional. Durante o estudo, verificou-se que, além dos aspectos jurídico-burocráticos, outras variantes influenciam este processo. Dessa forma, a problemática que se pretendeu solucionar e explicar, extrapolou o processo burocrático de contratação em si, exigindo também um estudo das relações internacionais entre estes sujeitos. Temas paradoxais como soberania nacional e a lógica sistêmica da interdependência entre os Estados fizeram-se necessários para a compreensão do processo. A fim de demonstrar algumas particularidades políticas do processo de contratação de operação de crédito, focaram-se aspectos dos setores de governança e de educação. Foi constatado que duas ordens jurídicas atuam sobre estes contratos, a doméstica e a internacional. Disso podem decorrer indagações sobre a legitimidade ou não de algumas cláusulas incidentes nestes contratos, em especial, as condicionalidades para reformas e ajustes estruturais nos modelos políticos nacionais / Abstract: In the present study the act of contract and concession processes provided by external financings of the Multilateral Financial Institutions for the entities of international right public was approached. During the study, it was verified that, beyond the legal-bureaucratic aspects, other variants influenced this process. Consequently, the problematic that it was intended to solve and to explain surpassed to the bureaucratic process of act of contract itself, demanding also, a study of the international relations between those entities, Paradox subjects as national sovereignty, systemic logic of the interdependence between the states was made necessary for the understanding of the process. In order to demonstrate some political particularities of the contract of operation for credit process, the education and governance sectors were highlighted. It was noted that the domestic and international juridical order acts on those contracts. In consequence of the existence of two different juridical orders, investigations of the legitimacy or not of some incident clauses in those contracts could be started, mainly the ones related to condition for structural reforms and adjustments in the national political models / Mestrado / Educação, Sociedade, Politica e Cultura / Mestre em Educação

Religion has played a central part in human history and is still a foundation in many societies. Faith-based organizations are in some countries the largest providers of social services and were pioneers in the humanitarian aid sector. There is in academia a growing interest in faith-based organizations and a perception that they have an advantage over their secular counterparts. This study has identified those established theories and provided a comprehensive overview of the research field. It has been argued that faith-based organizations for one should be more cost-effective than their secular counterparts. The faith of their staff members is a significant part of their motivation. They, therefore, accept lower salaries or volunteer to a higher degree. It has also been argued that projects implemented by faith-based organizations could be more rooted in local communities due to a long history of cooperation and collaboration. The claims have been mostly theoretical or supported by qualitative studies. This study contributed to filling the quantitative research gap by analyzing key differences between projects implemented by faith-based and secular organizations that were financed by the United Nations Country-Based Pooled Funds. The data selection provided a scenario where the institutional pressure from strict processes, monitoring, and evaluation theoretically minimizes differences between implementers and therefore tested the study’s hypotheses in a least-likely scenario. The analysis found that there was no significant difference between how many beneficiaries the projects reached. Faith-based organizations did however implement projects that with 95 % certainty costed between 2.20 to 7.87 % less compared to their secular counterparts. Their projects with 95 % certainty also had a four percent higher direct-to-total project cost ratio. This provides support for the theoretical claims and contributed to building a foundation for future research in this emerging field. The study surprisingly also found a significant and large difference in project cost between national and international implementers. Projects implemented by national organizations with 95 % certainty cost between 27.98 and 31.50 % less than projects implemented by international organizations. They with 95 % certainty also had a six percent higher direct-to-total project cost ratio. It was not in the scope of this paper to determine what these results depended on but they give further fuel to the current localization debate in both academia and public administration.

Foreign aid has been used on the one hand by donors as an important international relations policy tool and on the other hand by developing countries as a source of funds for development. Since its inception in the 1940s, foreign aid has been one of the most researched topics in development economics. This study adds to this growing aid effectiveness literature, with a particular focus on the under-researched relationship between foreign aid and extreme poverty. The main empirical assessment is based on a sample of 120 developing countries from 1981 to 2013. The study had two main objectives, namely: (i) to estimate the impact of foreign aid on poverty reduction and (ii) to examine the direction of causality between foreign aid and poverty in developing countries. From these two broad objectives, there are six specific objectives, which include to: (i) examine the overall impact of foreign aid (total official development assistance) on extreme poverty, (ii) investigate the impact of different proxies of foreign aid on the three proxies of extreme poverty, (iii) assess whether political freedom (democracy) or economic freedom enhances the effectiveness of foreign aid, (iv) compare the impact of foreign aid on extreme poverty by developing country income groups, and (v) examine the direction of causality between extreme poverty and foreign aid. To achieve these objectives, the study employed two main dynamic panel data econometric estimation methods, namely the systemgeneralised method of moments (SGMM) technique and the panel vector error correction model (VECM) Granger causality framework. While the SGMM was used to assess the impact of foreign aid on extreme poverty, the panel VECM Granger causality was used to examine the direction of causality between foreign aid poverty. The SGMM was used because of its ability to deal with endogeneity by controlling for simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity, whereas the panel VECM was preferred because the variables were stationary and cointegrated. / Economics / D. Phil. (Economics)