Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-58)
17 JUNE 2003
MR SUMA
CHAKRABARTI, MR
MARK LOWCOCK
AND MS
SUSANNA MOOREHEAD
Q40 Chris McCafferty: Creative accounting.
Mr Lowcock: I would not quite
want to have it described in that way. It is flexible financial
management.
Q41 Chris McCafferty: Given the increasing
proportion of funds that are channelled to the big agencies, for
instance Global Fund for AIDS, what is the Department doing to
ensure that the smaller NGOs dealing with sexual and reproductive
health do get grant funding and can make a contribution to nationally
developed strategies?
Mr Chakrabarti: I presume they
can compete for the Civil Society Challenge Fund. Many of them
do so. The figures that I have in front of me suggest that funding
from that source for these NGOs has been increasing over the last
few years from £0.38 million in 2001 to £1.67 million
in 2002-03. There are signs there that they are doing quite well
in that competition.
Q42 Chris McCafferty: Some NGOs have
made the point to us that they are not invited to negotiate for
programme partnership agreements. Is that the case and, if so,
why?
Mr Lowcock: We are just going
through the third round of applications for programme and partnership
agreements. At the moment we have these agreements with about
eight or ten agencies and we have said that this year we will
negotiate them with another four or five. We had 39 applications
for those four or five grants so I am afraid that it is the case
that most people were disappointed. The thing I would draw attention
to is that between the current financial year and the financial
year after next our total funding available for centrally funded
civil society schemes like the Civil Society Challenge Fund and
the PPA is due to increase by about 30%. I am afraid it is also
the case that we will still be unable to fund a lot of requests
we get, but the overall funding is nevertheless increasing substantially.
Q43 Chris McCafferty: The UK Gender
and Development Network have raised the issue of how can you ensure
that gender related development goals are interpreted more broadly
than perhaps the programme suggests[6].
They are concerned that programmes for women's reproductive health
and education are just being used as proxies for gender equality.
Is there a way that you can ensure that those things are not the
case?
Mr Chakrabarti: I think we buy
into the basic analysis in that report which we got last week.
That is not surprising. This Committee will remember last year
saying that we should do more evaluation and this is one of the
evaluations that fed into this report. They have actually used
our own analysis and data which is fine. We buy into that. The
overall direct expenditure on gender equality has actually increased
remarkably from £57 million in 1999-2000 to £167 million
in 2001-02. However, as our own evaluation shows, I think there
is some worry that we have that some of our country strategies
and some of our delivery plans are not reflecting gender equality
issues. I can name two very good examples, the China Country Strategy
and the Asian one are excellent models of what others should be
doing. We do need to go back and look at that. What we agreed
when we found our evaluation came up with these results was that
we would firstly complete the evaluation and see how bad this
issue is. We do not think it is terrible, but there is clearly
some loss of ground. Secondly, we would hire a gender and human
rights adviser who would have this specific task of trying to
ensure that we are mainstreaming properly. It is something we
are committed to as an organisation for the way we work, it is
certainly something we believe in in the Department as well. What
I plan to do is copy the IDC the reply we will send to the Gender
and Development Network. It will be an open process and you will
see what our response is.
Ms Moorehead: I think this is
a case for the need for constant vigilance. It has been very useful
to have it highlighted that we did not take our eye off the ball,
but thought we had made rather more progress in gender than perhaps
we have. That said, we are very aware in the Department that these
rather unsatisfactory indicators are just that. They are the least
awful ones we can find and we are fortunate in having one of the
largest groups of gender analysts in our social development advisors
of any bilateral organisation. More and more, what they are doing
is not what might have been seen in the past as standard social
development work, they are engaging in PRSP processes—that
is an area where we are concerned that gender tends to become
rather invisible—they are doing a lot of work in developing
mechanisms for Poverty and Social Impact Analyses. How do you
tell, before you do a macro-economic change, what the likely impact
of that on women is going to be? As Suma said, we will have this
cross-cutting advisor based at the centre in Policy Division whose
job will be to make sure that country programme experience is
feeding into central policy work and that all our teams, the team
on agriculture, the team on trade, the team on poor performers,
are taking adequate account of this issue. I think it feeds back
to your earlier question on reproductive health. This is the key
to good mainstreaming. It is not to think it is in the bloodstream
and to forget about it, but to come back and evaluate regularly
and if you are a little bit off track then correct it.
Q44 Alistair Burt: Paragraph 3.44
of the Report states that, "Research has shown that investing
in education for girls is one of the most effective ways of reducing
poverty" and an argument is, Okay, if that is the case why
do you not do more of it? And why do you not put many more resources
into tackling education for women and girls as the answer?
Ms Moorehead: I think the short
answer is that we should. The slightly longer answer is that if
you are a girl, particularly in South Asia in a very poor household,
there are so many barriers to your accessing that education that
even if there is a place there, your labour will be required to
do other things. Our view is that we need to work on several fronts.
We could put more money into education but we also need to put
more money into issues of child labour, of removing non-income
barriers to poverty, of supporting inter-generational transfers
so that in due course educated mothers are much more likely to
send their daughters to school. It is not just about money and
education.
Q45 Alistair Burt: Could this be
done under the overall umbrella of ensuring that more women and
girls are going into education? In dealing with the particular
barriers and facts you mentioned, could it be explicitly stated
and tied to targets and goals of achieving more girls and women
into education?
Mr Chakrabarti: Absolutely. I
think we agree with you. Looking at our Public Service Agreement,
for example the PSA objective for reducing poverty in Asia actually
has in the indicator target if you like, "An increase in
gross primary school enrolment from 95% to 100%, an increase in
the ratio of girls to boys enrolled in primary schools from 87%
to 94%". This is going to drive the Asia Director's delivery
plan and one of the things he is going to have to try to deliver
is exactly that and he will have to gear up his country programmes
to do so. That is probably the best way to look at it. Yes, we
should be doing more in this area. Clearly we, the international
community, countries generally, but in the context of the MDGs
and the PSA as a whole rather than setting up a separate sector
fund or something like that, which would have been the old approach
in trying to deal with this.
Q46 Alistair Burt: Do you take a
view on the efficacy of mass primary education as against fast-tracking
certain women through to secondary, further and higher education
in order to improve the ratio of women in senior positions in
developing countries?
Ms Moorehead: Our position so
far has been to focus on primary education, but we are looking
at the longer term implications of that. I think we need to get
back to you on the details, but we certainly realise that universal
primary education is really a first step.
Q47 Alistair Burt: It just takes
a long time and if you are to meet the points Christine was making
about equality issues as opposed to raising the levels of the
population as a whole, then fast-tracking in certain circumstances
might be seen to be a potential answer.
Mr Chakrabarti: It could be. We
will be looking at this as part of our look generally at tertiary
levels. I think from memory most of the research analysis tends
to suggest that, for example, impact on the number of children
women have, the major change can come through at least achieving
primary education and getting into secondary. The additional tertiary
education does not give you the same returns to the same extent.
Primary and secondary education is really what we should be focussing
on.
Q48 Tony Worthington: Can I turn
now to an issue which has concerned the Committee during the year.
It came to a head in our southern Africa report and our visit
to Malawi, and that is the issue of agriculture. I think there
is a general feeling that a lot of emphasis has been put on areas
like health and education—and absolutely legitimately so—but
we seem to go to country after country with poor or almost non-existent
ministries of agriculture, with no sense of an overall land strategy,
with inadequate marketing of any goods that might go to export
or to wider markets. All we seem to have is something called livelihoods.
Do you not share that sense of concern? If we are going to end
poverty, in almost all these countries income is raised off the
land. Malawi is the most extreme; 85% of people working off the
land are needing to live off the land and they do not have a land
policy. All that there seems to be is maize. Diversification has
not worked. Do you see the point I am getting at? There seems
to be a gap in what DFID is doing.
Mr Chakrabarti: We have to keep
reminding ourselves that development is a collective effort so
DFID should not be trying to do everything in every country. Notwithstanding
that, what you say about agriculture I think we could ascribe
to; agriculture is vital. Most poor people live in rural areas.
Unless one improves agricultural economy one is not going to get
the reductions in poverty that we are all seeking. In the last
20 years agricultural productivity—particularly in Africa—has
been dropping whereas in the 60's and 70's at least in south Asia,
it was rising. I gather that the numbers of hungry people in Africa
have increased in the last 20 years. Some of that is due to conflict;
some of that is due to adverse weather conditions; some it is
also due to the very failed policies in agriculture that we, as
donors, supported: state marketing boards and the like. Donors'
involvement in agriculture has been both a boon and a bane; very
good on the Green revolution, not so good on supporting the state
involvement more generally, partly because most states in the
past were getting into agriculture to subsidise the urban sector
to get cheap food for the urban sector and that ruined agriculture
in many of those countries. So what are we doing? I know the livelihoods
jargon is off-putting but actually I think there is something
there in it. The essential idea is to look at poor people in the
round in terms of their needs in the rural sector. We obviously
need to increase agricultural production where we can, where there
is a comparative advantage in doing so. We also need to put in
the inputs for other things like access to health and education
in the rural sector; rural roads to make sure that agricultural
goods get to market, which is often part of the problem. We need
to do all of that and it is a much more holistic package. In the
last year DFID has produced two documents which were essentially
trying to influence the rest of the international community to
do better than this, one for the World Food Summit—Tony
Colman is not here today, but he was involved in that—and
one for the WSSD event. Again, we are trying to say that actually
we have to do something about agriculture—we, collectively—have
to do something about agriculture in order to improve the rural
livelihoods of these people. At the moment I think what we are
trying to do is focus on trying to up the profile of agriculture
in PRSPs. There has been some success. The latest return suggests
that agriculture is getting more of a profile than it used to
in the past. We are supporting some sensible investments in the
rural setup like rural roads. We have been supporting agricultural
research globally. We have also been pursuing this debate internationally.
Fundamentally we have to remove agricultural subsidies. One of
the reasons these agricultural ministries are empty and these
sectors are not performing so well, is the subsidies that are
going into agriculture in the west in the OECD countries which
make it unprofitable.
Q49 Tony Worthington: I accept that.
We say abolish the CAP and I agree. But there seems to be an assumption
that if you abolish the CAP then the people in southern Africa
will get wealthy. That is not true. They still have to grow the
food, export the food, deal with the problems of land depletion,
deal with the dependence upon agri-business from elsewhere. That
is the gap. What we are saying about livelihoods and so on we
agree upon, but there is a dimension above that which is just
not being adequately tackled.
Mr Chakrabarti: If it is to do
with the policies and institutions in countries, then yes, as
part of the PRSP process what we are trying to do is to get the
governments concerned to focus much more on sorting out—for
the great day when the CAP is reformed—how they would get
their agricultural sectors to perform better. That is partly to
do with the inputs that go into the agricultural sector, marketing,
land reform, all those sorts of things. The good PRSP would pick
up on a lot of those angles; not all of them have done so, clearly.
Our role is much more that sort of policy end, trying to influence
governments to do that. It is much less to do with the approach
we used to have 20 years ago which would be financing extensions
and those sorts of things.
Ms Moorehead: As Suma says, the
main thrust is to try to work at changing government policy, but
we are still doing a lot for small farmers. In Malawi the starter
pack programme is reaching two million small holders with fertiliser
and seeds and we are getting to the stage now where we can actually
measure the impact that that is having on their income. In this,
let us not forget Asia. Two hundred and thirty million of the
819 million hungry in the world live in India, others in Bangladesh.
We have new programme in the areas of Bangladesh which are under
water for half the year. We are investing £50 million over
seven years that will help eight million farmers. That is old
style agricultural extension but in areas which were never touched
before because they were so marginal. I think the difference now
is that instead of those being freestanding successes—which
is what we used to have—we all have the mechanisms to feed
those in to a wider policy dialogue. There is this iteration between
the macro and the micro level. Inevitably there is a long way
to go. As Suma said earlier about the PRSP process, the glass
is still only half full. One of the challenges over the next few
years is to join up what is happening to poor people on the ground
and the macro environment.
Q50 Tony Worthington: I think what
I am seeking from you is an assurance that you recognise that
there is a considerable gap there. I went to see the High Commissioner
of Malawi the other week about our report and he said that we
had got it absolutely right on agriculture.
Mr Chakrabarti: We fundamentally
agree with your observation to such an extent that we have just
created a new agricultural team which we have not had for years
in our policy division. One of their first tasks is to follow
up this approach to see if we can do better.
Mr Lowcock: The organisation has
had a historical strength in agriculture and we continue to have
a large number of really excellent people working on these issues.
In the financial year 2001-02 we spent more on agriculture and
related areas than we did on education, so we are very alive to
the importance of this sector. A lot of the things we are doing
are not through ministries of agriculture, often because the constraints
of agricultural development are not ones best addressed by ministries
of agriculture. They are the ones you have talked about, rural
finance or regulation or infrastructure.
Q51 Mr Walter: I wonder if I can
just focus on water for a moment. We have had the G8 summit recently
in Evian—a very appropriate place to talk about water—which
reaffirmed that the G8 Action Plan and the commitment are on improved
sanitation and access to potable water. However, if you look at
our own ODA budget the amount spent on water and sanitation has
been going down and is currently about 2%. It has been falling
since 1998. How are you at DFID looking to address this in light
of the commitments to prioritise water and sanitation which the
UK Government has made at various summits?
Mr Chakrabarti: Water is clearly
crucial to poverty reduction. Our bilateral expenditure has been
around the £90 million mark over the last few years; I do
not think it has actually been falling that much. That does not
include what we contribute multilaterally as well. There was a
very good NAO report on this some months back and I gave evidence
to the PAC on this. It said essentially that DFID was doing excellent
work in the water sector, largely at the policy end. We no longer
work at the infrastructure end; that is left to some of the donors
who are better at that and it is a comparative advantage. We are
respected much more at the policy end which does not require a
lot of spending but does require trying to change policies of
governments to take water more seriously, both demand and supply,
and to involve the private sector much more than they have done
in the past. We have now concentrated our water efforts in a few
countries only. The key thing again is to try to get many more
of these PRSPs to take water more seriously. It is not surprising,
perhaps, in one or two cases that they have not given priority
to water, which then gets reflected in donor priorities. This
is partly because they have seen health and education as an earlier
priority, if you like. It is quite interesting that in India and
Uganda—two countries where we have worked in the water sector—they
have given water a much higher priority. In a sense they feel
they have made sufficient progress with some of their more basic
requirements. Water is a fundamental input into achieving health
outcomes. We cannot achieve some of the outcomes we have talked
about without achieving good access to water and sanitation. That
is the way we have now pitched this in our new PSA, so you will
see this in delivery plans for Africa or Asia, that doing work
in the water sector is a way of achieving some of the health outcomes
that we talked about. That is the way we are going to try to work
at it.
Q52 Mr Walter: This may be the question
that you were not looking for, but I have looked at your Annual
Report and I see the foreword is by Baroness Amos but signed by
Clare Short. If you look at the flow chart at the back—the
organisational chart—the name Sally Keeble appears but not
Hilary Benn. It is alleged that you spent about £30,000 pulping
one version of the report and then reproducing another one. Is
that true? Do you have an explanation for it?
Mr Chakrabarti: We spent £29,300
precisely.
Q53 Mr Walter: Did Clare write it
and Valerie head it or was it the other way round?
Mr Chakrabarti: No, this is a
different foreword from the one that Clare Short had. The argument
that we put—and Valerie accepted—was the following:
firstly that this was a forward looking document as much as a
backward looking document. Not as forward looking as Mr Bayley
quite rightly says, but it should be. We were trying to set out
a strategy here as well. It is our flagship document. It is not
as if a Permanent Secretary had resigned so you could have an
erratum slip. It is clearly an important thing when your Secretary
of State goes before you have presented it to Parliament. Fundamentally,
I think the crucial argument for why Valerie had to write the
foreword and sign it before we put it to Parliament is the noise
that had been around about Clare's resignation, internally and
externally. Internally staff were very concerned about the mission,
about whether the clarity of the mission since 1997 would be eroded,
whether we would start taking political and commercial benefits
into account. Similarly, externally whether there were other donors
or NGOs with similar concerns. In a sense people were worried
about DFID's reputation. Valerie felt very strongly that she wanted
to say on day two that she was sticking to the policies, she was
sticking to the clarity of mission and that is what she says.
She says the two White Papers still guide her approach. It was
quite important from that point of view as well.
Q54 Mr Walter: But she did not manage
to sign it.
Mr Chakrabarti: She did.
Q55 Mr Walter: My copy says Clare
Short.
Mr Chakrabarti: Mine says Valerie
Amos
Q56 Chris McCafferty: Some copies
say Clare Short and some copies say Valerie Amos.
Mr Chakrabarti: How strange.
Q57 Mr Walter: Foreword by Valerie
Amos, signed by Clare Short.
Mr Chakrabarti: I am sorry about
that.
Q58 Tony Worthington: Can I thank
you and your team very, very much for answering our questions.
I hope you find the questions that we ask valuable to you because
we do spend a lot of time looking at the work of the Department.
Can I, on behalf of the Committee, thank you and your Department
for the co-operation, assistance and guidance which we get throughout
the year. This is the time when we can express those thanks.
Mr Chakrabarti: Thank you very
much. We also benefit from appearing here.
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