How Global Affairs Canada Manages Research Grants to Foreign Institutions

Through the past decade, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) awarded grants worth around 31 billion dollars to the International Development Assistance Program (formerly known as CIDA). Of that funding, three billion dollars went for purposes that included the word “research” in their descriptions.

I know that’s not a particularly accurate way to identify program goals, but International Development Assistance Program documentation isn’t particularly transparent. It’ll have to do for now.

In any case, we’re not talking about research conducted by Canadians here in Canada. Instead, those billions pay for programs executed by foreign researchers and institutions. In the context of some of the excesses discovered in thousands of now-cancelled USAID projects,¹ I’m curious how standards and oversight are applied to the non-government organizations (NGOs) and foreign institutions that handle all that money.

Dr. Yehudis Stokes recently shared with me some findings from a new paper she’s currently completing. The paper includes a meta review of existing studies into the use of art therapy for trauma patients. Dr. Stokes isn’t particularly interested in measuring outcomes from art therapy programs: she believes program delivery is far too complex and varied to be usefully evaluated. Instead, her research is focused developing a standardized intervention framework.

As far as I can tell, none of the 40 or so studies Dr. Stokes reviewed was directly funded by GAC (although GAC did provide $10,772 for a closely related study in Burkina Faso back in 2018). However, they do seem to reflect methodological standards that are common in the modern academic industry. So even if we didn’t pay for those specific research projects, we undoubtedly paid for many others like them.

And for anyone concerned about academic integrity and funding oversight, that’s bad news.

Take these five separate published studies focusing on the use of dance or art therapy on cohorts of former Nigerian child abductees:

• Comparative analysis of the effect of interactive audio-visual based art

  therapy and music therapy in reducing suicidal ideation among school

  children who survived abduction (2023) - Psychiatry Research (Elsevier)

• Effect of Audio-Visual-Based Art and Music Therapy in Reducing

  Adolescents Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (2023) - Journal of Adolescent Health - Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (Elsevier)

• Interactive media-based dance and art therapies as interventions

  for treating posttraumatic symptoms among school children with

  abduction experience (2023) - Journal of Pediatric Nursing (Elsevier)

• Using interactive television-based art therapy to treat post-traumatic symptoms among survivors of abduction in Nigeria (2023) - Health Promotion International (Oxford University Press)

• A randomized control trial establishing the effectiveness of using interactive television-based art, music, and poetry therapies for treating the post-traumatic stress disorder of children exposed to traumatic events (2023) - Psychiatry Research (Elsevier)

The problems with those publications are obvious, and include:

Salami slicing

Academics under pressure to publish research at scale will divide the relatively modest results of a single study into multiple papers. The goal might be to enhance their academic reputations, or to multiply the proceeds from government and NGO funding sources.

In that context, it’s noteworthy that each of these five Nigerian/Chinese papers involves:

• Between 400-470 freed child abductees divided into either two or three cohorts.

• Individuals often included as authors of two or even three of the papers.

• No reported funding sources (even though executing four 6-12 week studies involving ongoing interventions with nearly two thousand subjects would be expensive).

Despite all the overlap, the papers were published in four separate journals (were the authors trying to maintain a low profile?).

The five papers were written using a highly similar structure. There’s a sense that the authors worked from a single template and simply swapped out some methodology details and outcome numbers.

Improbable effect sizes

The most astounding element is how all five papers report between 50 and 75 percent improvements in measures (like PTSD symptoms) among the treatment arms, but no significant change at all among the control arms. That such improvements could occur at all in just a few weeks is unlikely - unprecedented, in fact. But that it would occur all five times beggars belief.

It’s similarly unlikely that the control arms (those who received no therapy at all) would have seen no improvement through natural healing. Some healing is apparently expected, given the growing passage of time since the ends of their ordeals.

I’ve previously written about the thousands of children kidnapped and murdered by Islamist gangs in Sub-Saharan Africa. I’m sure that survivors suffered serious trauma and they deserve support. But I’m not convinced that those particular studies either reflect reality or are useful in finding successful treatment for such children.

I guess it’s possible that the anomalies from those five reports are the results of innocent errors. But the fact is that the studies were, one after another, approved, each of the papers was peer reviewed and then published in (notionally) reputable journals, and the real costs were carried by someone.

The odds are that neither the Chinese or Nigerian governments were the ultimate source of that funding. Instead, the money probably came through NGO’s which are, in turn, funded by Western governments like the U.S. and Canada.

Which brings us back to GAC and the International Development Assistance Program. GAC is notoriously awful about properly auditing their overseas spending. Is there anyone in the department who’s reviewing the results, auditing the processes, and watching the spending for the foreign research programs we’re paying for?

I haven’t yet seen any evidence that inspires confidence.

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1. Over-reported - and outrageous - claims that shutting down USAID will lead to millions of preventable deaths were based on deeply flawed statistical models and plain old incorrect assumptions.