Learning from History: Know How Fund
FCO
between what those people thought they should be paid an hour and what ODA thought it might be reasonable to pay a water engineer in Tanzania was quite dramatic. The other problem that we faced – and it is entirely a reflection of the political interest in the programme both in the UK and in Central Europe – was the need to be seen to be doing something as well as the need to actually do something. Those are not necessarily objectives that can be achieved with the same project. We initially had really quite a difficult time trying to make sure something as trivial as the names of the projects did not in themselves send people to sleep: that the names of the projects actually sounded quite interesting. There were some projects which, not really from our efforts, were fantastically successful in presentational terms. One of those was the Moscow bread project, when somebody turned up at Downing Street and said, „I have this brilliant idea; we are going to revolutionise the bread circuit in Moscow.‟ Everybody knew that the bread situation in Moscow was ghastly, so we said, „Yes, okay, go ahead‟. By the end, the guys had produced a whole booklet of press cuttings which had been in the Russian and British press about their project. One of the best stories about that project, which is a real transfer of Know How story, is nothing to do with money at all. The consultant gets there, says to the guys, „How are you running this factory?‟, and they say, „Well, it is easy: we have 650 shops out there and every day, they ring us with their order for the day and then we deliver that amount of bread to them tomorrow.‟ „That sounds a very good system, are there any flaws?‟ „Well, yes, because every day, we only have one phone and about 150 shops do not get through and so they do not get any bread at all.‟ The consultant said, „If you had a different system it would work better‟. The Russian official bridled at that. The guy said, „Look, why do you not just deliver the same amount of bread tomorrow that you delivered today, unless they ring up to change it.‟ „Ah‟ – a lamp light moment. That is what they did. What does that cost? Absolutely nothing. I know that most of the other parts of that project were much more expensive, but that is the sort of thing that was in the minds of the people who set up the Know How Fund. There is a counter-example. ODA‟s power advisors went to Poland, convinced that a little bit of adjustment, and the Polish power stations could produce 15-20% more electricity. Guys came back and said, „There is nothing to be done. Not only are they more or less as good as us, but in terms of things like working on live wires, they are years in advance of us. It is clear that we did not have the knowhow to provide in every category. The key lesson that we drew – and maybe there is a lesson for the Arab Spring – is that the best is the enemy of the good. If you spend long enough trying to make sure that the project is perfect, the Minister of Finance will have changed three times in that process. You have to, at some point, say „Good enough‟. If somebody says to you, „I really need somebody to rewrite the bankruptcy law in Poland‟, you find somebody to re-write it and send him to do the job. There is a famous story that, as a result of this process – and we paid some guy a ludicrous amount of money to draft this law, something like £10,000 – as the law went through the Polish Parliament, the six-man German lawyer team who had been hired by the PHARE Programme to draft a bankruptcy law, arrived in Warsaw, two years late. There is no point in a very, very rapidly changing situation, in trying to make sure that what you are doing is perfect. I can remember sitting in the car with Tim, saying, „You are doing lots of small projects are you not?‟ I said, „Yes‟. He said, „Yes, that is how it works because you are doing so many that some of them are bound to be successful.‟ I think one of the other lessons we learned relatively quickly – and I think the country strategy papers that Adrian was talking about were absolutely vital in that regard – was to say, „There are things we do and there are things that we do not do‟. You need, somehow, a mechanism in the face of what was originally envisaged as a demand-led programme; you need some way of saying, „I am sorry, it is a good idea but it is not what we do‟. One of the ways that we dealt with that was to have a whole set of schemes: „You want to invest in Eastern Europe? Julian
30 October 2013
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