Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 51)
THURSDAY 30 NOVEMBER 2006
MR JACK
MOSS AND
MR UMESH
PANDEY
Q40 Mr Singh: There are some big
water providers.
Mr Moss: You have heard the story
of David and Goliath, size is not might and some of the ventures
of the recent past have shown that size is not might. I was lucky
to be at an OECD World Bank Workshop yesterday and you may be
interested to look at some of the keynote speeches from that.
One of the issues that came up there was the great disadvantage
that offshore companies have in trying to work in different cultures
from the one they know and moving expertise which is real and
moving financial clout which is real into areas where the culture
and the governance are complicated is a real challenge. Some of
the so-called new entrants are in fact the replacements or the
partners who have worked already with some of the multi-nationals
who have stayed behind and have been able to work more easily
in their own country than some of the multi-nationals have. This
is one of the challenges we all have to face. I think there is
no doubt that large members, the large multi-nationals do bring
something to the piece. They are much more cautious than they
were for the reasons you have just explained and they see themselves
I think very much as part of a spectrum to tackle these problems
rather than being the only answer.
Q41 Mr Singh: Do you encourage your
bigger providers who can afford it to do anything pro bono?
Mr Moss: Yes. You may have heard
of an initiative that came out of the United Nations Secretary
General's Advisory Panel on Water called Water Operators Partnerships
and Aquafed is actively encouraging its members to take that mechanism
seriously. There is obviously a limit to how much they can do
that but we are advocating that to our members. Many of our bigger
members do pro bono work also because many of their staff
are every bit as passionate about water as people working in Mr
Pandey's type of organisations. The human beings employed in these
organisations tick the same way and I would like people to understand
that. People in the private sector are motivated by these sorts
of challenges.
Q42 Ann McKechin: I notice in your
written submission to the inquiry[7]
you state that local decision-makers should have clear and unbiased
advice on the various alternatives that they can use and cover
a full range of options. You mentioned this in your oral evidence
earlier today. The fact of the matter is that in the 1980s and
1990s in a great number of cases the international finance institutions—be
it the World Bank or the IMF—made it a condition in many
countries of their aid and their debt relief that they had to
introduce private sector provision. They really were not given
any choice. Would you agree that that was inappropriate and that
is actually one of the reasons why there is a great deal of suspicion
about the relationship of particularly the larger skilled members
of your organisation, those who originate from the west, in terms
of their motivation to be involved in developing countries?
Mr Moss: I think the answer to
your question is quite simply yes. I can quite understand the
difficulty that the multi-nationals and indeed donors frequently
have.
Q43 Ann McKechin: This clearly drove
the nature of the contracts. I think you made a very pertinent
point that the devil is in the detail of the actual contract which
is offered to the provider, but clearly if you actually have a
situation where you have international organisations in effect
directing the types of contract which in turn the national governments,
who are there to represent their citizens, have to offer up, it
is not exactly a good system to provide sustainable long-term
water and sanitation services.
Mr Moss: No, it is not, but I
think it was a reaction to something else that was going on.
Q44 Ann McKechin: To be fair, the
other point is that over that period of time there was no critical
comment by your members about whether or not this was the right
way to go ahead. They took the profit.
Mr Moss: Most of them took the
losses rather than the profit. They have learned a lot and I think
this is a message: let us not throw the baby out with the bath
water. There is a huge amount of learning been done and a huge
amount of learning been transferred.
Chairman: We have had slightly contradictory
evidence saying that the private sector is walking away from this
area. I take it that you are saying that they are not and that
you have learned things.
Q45 Ann McKechin: What nature of
the private sector are you talking about? Are you talking about
the indigenous private sector which clearly your organisation
would appear to represent as compared with multi-national companies
which tend to originate from Europe?
Mr Moss: There are some companies
who, for various reasons, have very clearly withdrawn from the
international market or have been driven out of the international
market—I do not know which is actually the answer. There
are others who, in my judgment and from what I see of them, are
very determined to learn the lessons of the past and make a real
contribution to the future. I think it is quite natural that any
industrial sector should be dynamic. I would still like to come
back to the comment you started about why the World Bank abused
conditionality, if you like. I think it was because it looked
at the lack of success it was achieving with what it had been
trying to do before. It invested huge amounts of money in bits
of kit—large water treatment plants particularly and many
other bits of infrastructure—which, after two or three years,
were in complete ruin. I have, unfortunately, had the opportunity
to see a lot of this infrastructure paid for with World Bank money
in complete ruin. I think it was a legitimate experiment to say
that the technology exists in these countries of the north, if
we were to get the people who can build it to also operate it
maybe we could keep the infrastructure together a bit longer.
Q46 Ann McKechin: That is totally
lacking in any democratic say about whether this was the right
way.
Mr Moss: That is another issue
and I do not want to get into that one. I am just trying to say
that some other experiments have not worked either and one has
to think behind that and learn from those lessons too. Again,
I am not saying there is any panacea because I do not think there
is.
Q47 Chairman: Mr Pandey, DFID have
actually cut the support for water development in Nepal, and I
wondered if you could briefly say what impact that has had and
specifically the extent to which you have been able to respond
to that.
Mr Pandey: We can very well understand
the reasons why this funding was cut off but the way that the
message was given to the King, the poor people were penalised.
In our programmes we could have benefited 10,000 more poor people
with water and sanitation services last year if the funding was
not cut off.
Q48 Chairman: There was a direct
impact.
Mr Pandey: Yes, a direct impact
on poor people. DFID was already initiating the sector alliance.
In Nepal the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank are the
two major players and if you take the third largest player after
those two, it is DFID, but still DFID's role is there to bring
about some improvements in the sector, so bringing the sector
alliance together and making improvements at the centre rather
than the Asian Development Bank having one set of concerns and
the World Bank having one set of their own concerns.
Q49 Chairman: You say that with additional
resources your organisation could reach more people.
Mr Pandey: Yes.
Q50 Richard Burden: As to the issue
of numerical targets which you proposed in your submissions for
connections as far as indicators are concerned for meeting the
MDGs, I would like to get a sense from you on how you would think
that would work.
Mr Moss: It is not actually a
new idea, it is an idea that the private sector put up to the
Johannesburg World Development Summit and I would be happy to
submit to you the two papers that the private sector did put forward
then.[8]
It was looking at it, if you like, from a business point of view;
"what gets measured gets done" is the slogan. I think
a fundamental reason for deficiencies of performance in our sector
is lack of good data and so I was trying to think of ways of generating
good data. I was also reflecting that the Millennium Development
Goals are really onerous because they are goals for the whole
world and nobody governs the whole world so nobody "owns"
the global targets. The nearest you can get to getting targets
that are owned is at country level. Our supposition is that if
we could find ways of getting each country to say the proportion
of the Millennium Development Goal which is shared by a particular
country is X and to be able to arrive at that X you have to try
to do some measurement and some calculation in the field, then
there might be some incentive to actually meet the target of X.
I think a lot of governments today take the view that the Millennium
Development Goals are a great objective but somebody else has
to meet it. That is from the country side and I believe that setting
targets at a country level would enable an aggregation process
of the bottom-up because you actually have to go down to the ground
to start looking for the data and the evidence. I see a lot of
benefit for countries. I also see a benefit for this process coming
the other way. If I were DFID I would be very interested in knowing
how much my money is actually giving results; how much the British
tax-payer is getting for the money that they are putting in to
whichever country they are supporting. Nobody can do that today
because there are no meaningful figures to work from. This is
a fundamental idea and I would be happy to elaborate on that a
bit more. Personally—and I know our Federation as well—think
that this is one of the ways to go forward. As far as I am aware
there is only one government today that has made any attempt and
it is an attempt from a top-down approach rather than a bottom-up
approach. It is a donor country looking at this and not a needy
country.
Chairman: I am not sure that we have
those papers.
Mr Moss: I will undertake to send
those to you.
Q51 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed for the submissions you have made and the additional information
you have offered. If either of you reflect after this on anything
else that you think would be of help to the Committee if you are
able to communicate it to us we would be very happy to receive
it. This inquiry will be on-going for the next two or three months.
Mr Moss: It has been a great privilege
to be able to come here and participate in this discussion.
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