Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
22 JUNE 2004
MR SUMA
CHAKRABARTI, MR
MASOOD AHMED,
MR MARK
LOWCOCK AND
DR NICOLA
BREWER CMG
Q60 Ann Clwyd: It is the same situation
in Afghanistan as well.
Dr Brewer: We spent in the previous
year a certain amount on some of the necessary hardware support.
We spent less last year for staff security, and we have in the
pipeline some spending coming up in the next financial year. It
will be a rolling contract which we will take forward to provide
additional personnel security for our staff there, because, as
Mark outlined, the security context in which our staff are operating
in Afghanistan is also more difficult.
Q61 Ann Clwyd: How much are your staff
able to travel outside Kabul?
Dr Brewer: It is difficult. We
rely on a range of things to get a picture of life outside Kabul.
We have a development adviser in the Provincial Reconstruction
Team (PRT) up in Mazar-e-Sharif. We have, as I say, DFID staff
in three others in the centre, in the south and in the south-east.
We also rely on contacts with our implementing agencies and with
relationships we have built up more informally with a range of
organisations that operate throughout Afghanistan. But it is harder
to travel outside Kabul.
Q62 Ann Clwyd: There have been a lot
of recent examples of the murders of aid and construction workers
in Afghanistan. A number of aid agencies would blame this on the
blurring of the distinction between development work and military
security work. How would you respond to such criticisms?
Dr Brewer: When I went to Afghanistan
with Gareth Thomas early last December, we went up to Mazar-e-Sharif
to visit the PRT there, and that was one of the particular questions
we had in mind that we wanted to explore a little bit. In particular,
we had heard earlier some criticism coming from some of the UN
agencies precisely on the point you raise, and we went to see
some of them, and they said, "Having seen the way that the
UK PRT is operating, we are now much more reassured that this
is a sensible way forward, that you maintain the focus of the
PRT on essentially helping to create a more secure environment,
but do not blur the necessary distinction between that work and
humanitarian work which needs to be kept separate." There
was still some criticism coming from other aid agencies such as
MSF, but the UN had changed its view having seen the way that
the UK PRT was operating. It is an important distinction and one
that we keep a very close watch on, but we were reassured by the
actions of the UN and also by the way that the team in the UK
PRT was operating.
Q63 Ann Clwyd: A major concern, of course,
was the position of women in Afghanistan. I read bits and pieces
and I do wonder whether things are improved sufficiently for women.
I know they have been able to return to professions, but what
about education and other opportunities for women?
Dr Brewer: In terms of getting
girl children into school, very positive progress has been made
there. In terms of representation at the Loya Jirga, that was
also quite encouraging. There is a long way to go and I would
not for a moment suggest it is anywhere near satisfactory, but
there has been good progress there. On a purely anecdotal level—this
is something I have talked about with two of our staff in the
country, who happen to be women, working in the DFID office there,
and their comments were extremely positive—only anecdotal,
and you cannot put too much on that, but I think the trends in
education of girl children and representation in the Loya Jirga
were in the right direction.
Q64 Ann Clwyd: What about security for
women walking around?
Dr Brewer: Again, it is something
that I was looking at. I do not have any quantitative evidence
there, but the women working in the DFID office said that this
is not an easy environment to walk around in. It certainly was
not for western women, any more than for western aid workers of
either sex. It is still a concern. Perhaps going back to the earlier
question about the links between development and security, that
is why providing a secure environment and helping to create that
is absolutely essential before you can get development off the
ground.
Q65 Ann Clwyd: On our last visit there,
complaints were being made by the people responsible for offering
alternatives to the farmers. There was criticism that not enough
money had been made available. What is the progress on that?
Dr Brewer: We have been working
very closely with the Foreign Office and with MoD and others.
We have put a lot of effort into the alternative livelihoods component
of our programme, and significantly increased resources to go
to that, but we very much wanted to see it as part of the whole
programme to help build an effective state, of which providing
licit economic livelihoods is part. We have over the last 12 months
significantly increased the proportion of spending on alternative
livelihoods.
Q66 Mr Davies: If I can just say, before
I ask a question about Zimbabwe, that I want to make it clear
I am not against spending money on security, or indeed helping
central banks or any of these other good causes. What I think
has come out very clearly this afternoon is that, despite all
the propaganda and rhetoric, the 1998 Act has not changed anything
at all. Ministers can still decide, as they could before, to take
money away from poverty reduction programmes and spend it on security
or helping central banks. This is actually the issue we fought
in 1998. This is a good expenditure of taxpayers' money—I
am not against it—it was merely in the interests of transparency
that I asked my question this afternoon. On Zimbabwe, Mr Chakrabarti,
I think we are all conscious of the dilemma we face when we have
a tyrannical regime, as we have here, and not merely a tyrannical
regime but a regime that is pursuing economically suicidal policies.
On the one hand, if you say if you put any money into that country
at all, even under the rubric, as you are doing at the moment,
of humanitarian aid and HIV/AIDS relief, which apparently has
nothing to do with politics or the government, it actually provides
some relief for the government, and the government will take whatever
credit it can from the existence of these programmes. These programmes
reduce some of the difficult internal pressure on them, and you
may be putting off the day when that regime will be overthrown.
It is, if you like, the mirror image of the dilemma we had over
sanctions in South Africa. In the short term, if you impose economic
sanctions, you might make the position of the poorest people even
more uncomfortable, but it was felt by many people that it was
worth doing that because it would in the long term be in their
interests to get rid of the regime sooner rather than later. It
is the same sort of difficult dilemma and difficult trade-off.
Against that background, can I say to you that one thing struck
me is that you came to the Committee last year—I was not
on it—and I gather you said a number of things about Zimbabwe,
which I quite agree with, about it being a failing state, with
policies so bad it is very difficult to do decent development
work, and so forth, and you had at that time an intention of spending
£12 million this financial year and next financial year.
We notice in the latest annual report that your projections for
this year and next year have actually more than doubled to £27
million. That is striking because surely there has not been any
political improvement in Zimbabwe. The dilemma that I have just
described is as acute as ever it was. I imagine your judgment
is still valid, yet you have more than doubled the amount of money
being spent in the country. Can you explain that?
Mr Chakrabarti: It is to prevent
more deaths. This is all about humanitarian assistance.
Q67 Mr Davies: More than you anticipated
last year?
Mr Chakrabarti: The humanitarian
situation in Zimbabwe has worsened significantly over the last
few years, hence the plans have been changed to spend more, but
it is still a humanitarian assistance programme. You are right
about the dilemmas we obviously face. The policies in Zimbabwe
are no better in terms of running a development programme; it
is not possible, but this is about feeding people, keeping people
alive. DFID alone was feeding 1 million Zimbabweans each day during
the worst periods. Without us doing this, these Zimbabweans would
be dead. That is why we are doing it and that is why we have increased
the allocation.
Mr Davies: At least your motives seem
to be of the purest humanitarian kind, so I will leave that there.
Q68 Mr Robathan: It has been said, I
think by Hilary Benn, that Darfur is the worst humanitarian crisis
facing the world today. I applaud DFID being the second donor
of humanitarian assistance in Darfur, but that does not mean it
is going away. Alan Goulty, as I recall, used to report to DFID.
He is the Government's Special Representative to Sudan, and was
instrumental in the laudable attempts to achieve peace in the
south, Machakos and Naivasha. We now have this peace agreement,
but unfortunately—and it may be part of the peace agreement—there
is now this ghastly crisis in Darfur, where you have rebel groups
and you have the response of the government in exactly the same
way, the authoritarian and devastating response of the government,
in Darfur. Do you think in some way we had our eye off the ball
in the west through Mr Goulty, and the conflict sprung up in the
west of Sudan whilst we were looking at the conflict in the south?
Do you think we should have appreciated that in any way?
Mr Chakrabarti: I do not think
that would be fair. I think Alan Goulty and DFID and UK Government
generally were pointing out the problem in Darfur before the peace
agreement was agreed in Naivasha. This conflict has been going
on since February 2003 in Darfur, with government-backed militia
attacking the ethnic population, and we have highlighted it a
number of times. The situation has now reached absolute crisis
point, as you know, and that is why it has suddenly got a very
high profile. It is not because it was being neglected while people
were sitting in Naivasha discussing the south. Hilary Benn has
described it, as you say, as the worst humanitarian disaster facing
us. The UN projections for the number of deaths are that it could
be up to a million who could die if we do not intervene. The Sudanese
government are behaving quite badly it seems to me, in terms of
letting aid through, in terms of giving visas for aid workers.
Q69 Mr Robathan: What is the current
situation?
Mr Chakrabarti: That has improved
in the last couple of weeks, I think, but it was really difficult
and until the Secretary of State went to Darfur and pressed and
pressed, and the UN also put pressure on Kofi Annan, making calls
to Khartoum, things were not moving. The situation is not great.
The UN has now got its act together but we also need other NGOs
to really get involved in Darfur. It is quite an unusual humanitarian
crisis. Not quite so many NGOs have got involved yet as you might
have seen in some other places around the world, and we are trying
to galvanise them to get involved.
Q70 Mr Robathan: You may have met last
week, as I did, the foreign minister from Sudan when he was over,
and indeed, one of the finance ministers, both of whom were not
in any way telling the truth—whether they knew the truth
I do not know but they were not telling the truth. With such a
government, which has no legitimate presence, as far as I am concerned,
and has an appalling track record since 1998, do you think we
can achieve anything more? Do you think there is anything more
we can do with it? Whilst we have been assisting—and I pay
tribute to that—peace in the south, they are still doing
exactly the same thing in the west and indeed in the upper Nile,
and it seems to me they do not learn very much. Do you think there
is anything more we can do? Should the African Union do more?
Dr Brewer: Picking up Suma's earlier
point about access, one of the things we do have to continue to
push on, and we can do more in quite a concrete way, is to get
the full team of African Union observers in. There is an advance
party but we need to build it up to the full strength of 120 people,
and also the eight human rights observers, because I think access
and transparency and improving that is going to be vital.
Q71 Mr Robathan: Is the Government of
Sudan now showing signs of co-operating?
Dr Brewer: Yes. They are not in
place yet, but they have agreed that these people must be given
access. They are not yet on the ground, so it would be premature
of me to say it is all OK now. It is not, and we have to go on
pressing.
Q72 Mr Robathan: Do you think that there
is sufficient aid promised and coming to stop the very large suggestion—I
think some of these things get rather wild—of 300,000, perhaps
a million people dying in the west?
Dr Brewer: There is not enough
yet.
Q73 Mr Robathan: Is it coming?
Dr Brewer: We are lobbying hard
and there are signs, I think, that there will be increased contributions,
but it is not there yet, and Hilary Benn has been very active
in speaking to people.
Q74 Chairman: Before I ask Tony to ask
you about the reorganisation of DFID's policy division, can I
ask a question: one of your PSA objectives, Objective 4, is working
with key multilateral agencies in reducing poverty, but of course,
one of the tasks you have is also working with other Whitehall
departments on reducing poverty. There is quite a lot, whether
it is Zimbabwe, Sudan, Afghanistan or Iraq, of conflict resolution
and there is quite a lot of work on conflict resolution. We have
across Whitehall these conflict resolution teams and there is
fairly extensive mention of them on page 107, and this is a shared
objective that you have with the FCO and the Ministry of Defence.
One of the mysteries about Whitehall is the way in which the Cabinet
Office is growing from being just a co-ordinator of Cabinet sub-committees
to a major policy department. Whether it is Iraq, Zimbabwe, Sudan
or Afghanistan, these are failing states, and this is an area
where we all have an interest. There is no mention of failed or
failing states in here, but the Cabinet Office I understand is
doing quite a lot of work on failing states. One would never know
it from here, and one is never quite sure who has ownership of
this policy work in Whitehall, whether it is policy work that
has just been worked up for the Prime Minister or whether it is
worked up for your Secretary of State or where it is done, or
whether this is going to be part of the work for the Commission
for Africa. There are whole chunks of work being done now in Whitehall
that seem almost to fall off the radar screen, and I would have
thought that for DFID, the work on failed and failing states would
be rather crucial to your work, particularly in relation to conflict
resolution in other areas.
Mr Chakrabarti: As for the work
that is being done by the Strategy Unit, as you have just mentioned,
in the Cabinet Office, there are DFID secondees in that team,
and we are in close touch with the team. There is also a team
in Policy Division working on the same set of issues. It is more
joined-up than it looks. That work in the Strategy Unit will be
for the whole of government, in particular, obviously, for departments
like ourselves, the Foreign Office, MoD, Treasury and so on, but
it is meant to be useful for the whole of government, and it will
feed into the Africa Commission as well.
Q75 Tony Worthington: Can I first of
all talk about the reorganisation of your Department? You have
had a year of it being reorganised, and there was a supplementary
reorganisation in 2004. In retrospect, how do you think it went?
Mr Chakrabarti: There was an evaluation,
as you know, of the organisation process, and in retrospect, quite
clearly, we could have done some things better in the process
of the reorganisation itself.
Q76 Tony Worthington: "There was
a wide concern about failures in the reorganisation process used
to achieve the changes." What does that mean?
Mr Chakrabarti: There is a perception
on the part of some people that it was too long drawn out, and
that it started off without being very clear about where we wanted
to end up, and therefore a lot of staff felt that their views,
even though they were being consulted, were not being taken into
account. The evaluation says there was no blueprint that we were
hiding. We obviously did not know and perhaps we could have managed
that a lot better. There was an issue about the number of teams
that we created, whether that really was refining the priorities
down sufficiently. There was an issue about the balance between
standing capacity and new policy capacity, and there was a further
issue, which the latest reorganisation finally settled, on structures,
whereby an office of chief advisers was floating freely, offering
advice, but the teams were also there being managed by administrators
and what was the relationship between the two. We reorganised
the last bit of that to make it a more integrated approach. So
there were a number of issues that came out of the reorganisation
process. The evaluation also, to be fair, pointed out a number
of benefits, which staff recognised, even if they did not think
the process was brilliantly handled. The major benefit that came
through, even as early as late summer/early autumn, was greater
inter-disciplinarity—a terrible term, but what it means
is basically people from different professions working together
across professional boundaries. What we have in our country programmes,
which works very well, are economists, sociologists, anthropologists
working in teams together. In London we grouped them in silos
and the whole purpose was to bring them together around issues
of interest, like HIV/AIDS.
Q77 Tony Worthington: You had silos?
Have you got them now?
Mr Chakrabarti: We have now reorganised
them in various subject groups. You know about the HIV/AIDS team
because that produced the Call for Action, and there is
a strategy that works. That is a set of people who are not just
health specialists, whereas in the past it was a health team,
whereas we know HIV/AIDS is not just a health issue.
Q78 Tony Worthington: Can I turn to HIV/AIDS
and reproductive health? How are you going to cope with an emerging
problem, which is the high rates of incidence of HIV now in some
middle-income countries? You have an overall target of reducing
poverty and focusing your attention on the poorest people in the
poorest countries, but in Europe and central Asia, unfortunately,
it looks as if there is a growing epidemic, and there are other
areas. How can you cope with that?
Mr Chakrabarti: I will ask Nicola
to give you some country detail, but in those countries it is
not really a transfer of resources that is the issue. I went to
South Africa recently to discuss this with them. They are not
looking for massive UK resources to deal with HIV/AIDS; they have
resources to deal with it. It is much more an issue for them of
supporting innovative new ideas. For example, in South Africa
we have been working on education around HIV/AIDS. There is a
programme called Soul City, which we have supported, essentially
to educate the South African public through TV and other media
about the dangers of AIDS and how to cope with as well, the social
consequences thereof. That is the sort of thing they have found
very useful, and they have then been able to sell this programme
to a number of other, much poorer countries, and it has proved
very useful. In Russia, when I was there two years ago, the issue
there was not, again, transfer of resources, but how you co-ordinate
an AIDS effort across the whole of government. The Russian approach
had been that it was a health problem, a young man's problem,
a drug problem, "nothing to do with the rest of us, thank
you very much," but really to be dealt with in various provinces
by health teams, until we got the World Bank to do the analysis
which showed that if the prevalence rates kept going the way they
were, it would have a massive impact on the Russian economy, and
perhaps have economic consequences for the Russian government.
They then set up a government-wide advisory council. It is that
sort of thing that we can do in middle-income countries to galvanise
effort.
Dr Brewer: A couple of other examples.
All of the teams working on middle-income countries are really
conscious, because they know about the constraints on financing,
that HIV and AIDS needs to be a focus of the programmes there,
whether bilateral or regional ones or whether it is working through
the multilaterals. It is something that they say to us quite a
lot. Suma has already mentioned South Africa and the work through
Soul City which we are supporting, but we also have a £30
million multi sectoral commitment on HIV and AIDS with South Africa.
We do not have any bilateral programmes on HIV/AIDS with the other
three middle-income countries in southern Africa—Botswana,
Swaziland and Namibia—but we do support Soul City, which
is operating there as well, and we also support SADC, the South
Africa Development Cooperation Programme, which operates in those
countries, and some others as well. So regionally and multilaterally,
we are supporting HIV/AIDS in those middle-income countries in
southern Africa, not bilaterally. In a number of other middle-income
countries we are also designing some regional programmes that
will impact on HIV and AIDS. Two examples are Serbia and Montenegro,
where we are at the design phase for a £1.5 million programme,
which will be regional, but will be focused on prevention in vulnerable
populations, and we have some similar things in Latin and Central
America as well. The last point I would mention is that we are
also supporting some work which involves south-south cooperation,
so some really interesting contacts between the Brazilians and
the Russians, passing on best practice from Brazil that Russia
is interested in applying. We have supported and facilitated some
meetings between them.
Q79 Tony Worthington: At the weekend
I became conscious of the news that the National Audit Office
came out with this report about your AIDS work, and I have been
trying to understand what they said. Can you tell me what what
they said means? It is not very clearly expressed. How do you
react to what was reported in a very simplistic way in the media?
What do you think they were saying to you?
Mr Chakrabarti: I have read the
draft, and the final report has arrived on my desk in time for
me to appear before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) next Monday.
Basically, there are three strands or conclusions. They start
off by saying that DFID has done very well in this area compared
with other donors, but there are three criticisms or three areas
to explore. One would be around how much have we spent on HIV/AIDS,
and Mark can explain a bit more about our scoring system. We score
HIV/AIDS as direct expenditure but also our sexual and reproductive
health is part of this. We are transparent about that. We do not
hide it. They say that if you take out sexual and reproductive
health expenditure, you have obviously spent less on HIV/AIDS.
That is one area to explore, how much you are spending on this
problem. The second area is something I mentioned earlier on:
to what extent is the strategy that we had in 2001 on HIV/AIDS
helping to inform country programme managers on what they do and
how they do it? The third area is in engaging with multilateral
institutions: to what extent are our strategy papers pushing this
big development challenge and getting these multilaterals to take
it seriously?
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