Donors dealing with ‘aid effectiveness’ inconsistencies: national staff in foreign aid agencies in Tanzania

In the name of ‘aid effectiveness,’ public foreign aid is meant to be an equal partnership between donors and recipients of aid, while at the same time proving its efficiency to taxpayers in donor countries. Moreover, as state institutions, public aid agencies are required to follow their own bureaucratic regulations, and increasingly so also those of their partner institutions, while simultaneously managing aid in the most cost-efficient way. This article turns the spotlight on a category of aid workers who help foreign aid agencies manoeuvre through these conflicting objectives: the desk officers employed locally by donor agencies in aid-recipient countries. The article centres on Tanzania, a country at the forefront of the aid effectiveness agenda, illustrating well the tensions it embodies. Tanzanian desk officers advance donor conditionality and circumvent heavy bureaucratic regulation by tapping into their resources as locals. Such resources involve their identity as citizens with a right to hold the Tanzanian government accountable for how it spends development money. They also involve desk officers’ personal networks in the Tanzanian development industry, which help agencies expedite aid interventions – a resource important enough to be assessed by some foreign managers in the recruitment of national staff.