NZADDs Devpolicy Blog Series
We have some great new additions to the NZADDs/Devpolicy blog series on New Zealand aid and development policy: Gerard Prinsen writes on New Zealand aid to Africa, Pip Bennett on the need for gender mainstreaming, and Luke Craven about carefully considering how to maximise the benefits of seasonal migration on sending communities. You can access these posts, and the earlier ones in the series from this page. Keep watching, as we have more great blogs to come.

Does fair trade really work?
A friend of NZADDs got in touch in the wake of the last update, asking about the recent SOAS study on the impact of Fairtrade on farm workers in parts of Africa. Reporting the results of the study the Guardian had claimed that: “Sales of Fairtrade-certified products from Uganda and Ethiopia are not benefiting poor farmworkers as profits fail to trickle down to much of the workforce, says a groundbreaking study.”

What is one to make of this? Should we conclude Fairtrade does no good?

The short answer is no: such conclusions are not justified on the basis of the study.

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Last week a team of Australian academics and development practitioners launched The Pacific Index, an endeavour — modelled on the Center for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index — which attempts to measure and rank the extent to which the countries of the OECD contribute to development outcomes in the Pacific. Each OECD country’s score on the index is a combination of measures of its contributions to global public goods (such as attempting to tackle climate change) and its more direct contributions to the Pacific (particularly its level of trade with the Pacific, the number of migrants from the Pacific it is home to, and the quality and quantity of aid it gives to the region). Gathering data of this sort is hard work, and the dataset alone will be useful when it is released, so the team involved deserve to be congratulated for what they’ve achieved.

A two page summary of the index is here, while a somewhat longer report is here. Media reports on the index are here and here. As you can see from looking at the results chart on page 2 of the report, New Zealand ranks highest on the combined index, which in part reflects our very commendable efforts in areas such as migration and our Pacific focus as a country more generally.

New Zealand also scores higher than any other country on the individual aid component of the index. While technical details on the formulas which drive the index scores have not been released, I exchanged emails with one of the authors of the index over the week. From what he was able to tell me I think it would be a mistake to conclude the index suggests New Zealand’s gives better quality aid to the Pacific than other donors do.
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