Examination of Witnesses (Questions 52
- 59)
TUESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2006
MR MARK
LOWCOCK, MR
ELWYN GRAINGER-JONES,
MR GREG
BRIFFA AND
MR IAN
CURTIS
Q52 Chairman: Good morning and thank
you very much for coming to give evidence. You know we are in
the middle of our inquiry now on water and sanitation and I guess
we are beginning to get to grips with some of the issues, although
it is a huge challenge and, from what we have heard so far, a
very complex one. You may not like to hear it, but one of our
witnesses last week said, "DFID is not a major player in
this", but perhaps you could tell us differently. Perhaps,
Mr Lowcock, you could introduce your team.
Mr Lowcock: Thank you very much,
Mr Chairman. My three colleagues here, who I think come before
you for the first time today, are Elwyn Grainger-Jones who is
the Head of the Sustainable Development Group within the Policy
and Research Division, Greg Briffa who is the Head of the Water,
Energy and Transport Team, also within the Policy and Research
Division, and Ian Curtis who is a senior adviser in the Africa
Division.
Q53 Chairman: Well, I guess you will
bring them in, as appropriate, or colleagues may wish to come
in to follow up questions with those with a particular specialty.
You have made some bold commitments in DFID as to what you want
to do and particularly you want to put £200 million into
water and sanitation in Africa, but can you give us some ideas
of how you are going to do this both in terms of where the money
is going to go, whether it is going to go through multilateral
channels, through country aid programmes, through bilateral channels.
But perhaps, first of all, you could give us an indication of
how you will deliver this extra resource effectively.
Mr Lowcock: Well, it is a mixture
of all those things. It includes the bilateral and the multilateral,
so on the bilateral side the principal focus, following the National
Audit Office report which, as you know, was produced about three
years ago when they criticised us for not focusing enough on the
countries where the problem is biggest, the bulk of our growing
effort on water in Africa will be in exactly those countries,
so I am talking about Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, the Democratic
Republic of Congo and so on. We will also continue to provide
assistance in a range of other countries where we are involved
in the sector. On the multilateral side, obviously the fact that
we have dramatically increased our funding over recent years for
the World Bank has been one of the ways in which, and one of the
reasons why, they have been able very substantially to increase
their funding for water. The EC also has its programmes and I
know you are seeing colleagues from the Commission later today.
The thing on the multilateral side which I would like to flag
particularly is the work we are doing with the African Development
Bank on the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Initiative because
the African problem is, not exclusively, but predominantly, a
rural problem and the African Development Bank initiative there
is one which seems to us to be an important one to support. It
is in the development stage at the moment and we have committed
£6 million to help them build it up and seconded some staff,
but they have got an investment plan for that. There is also the
civil society dimension.
Q54 Chairman: As you know, we are
seeing the African Development Bank later today. You have mentioned
the World Bank and obviously at the moment there is a difference
of view between DFID and the World Bank about conditionality and
I have to say water and sanitation is one of the areas where that
is a contentious issue, so do you have any problems with being
able to say you are going to deliver an extra resource through
the World Bank when you are having a debate about conditionality
which is very relevant in this area?
Mr Lowcock: And a topic on which
the World Bank Board are having a discussion this afternoon. I
think, Mr Chairman, the Secretary of State plans to write to you
later today about that conditionality issue,[1]
but on water in the World Bank, the truth is that the Bank has
dramatically expanded its funding for water. In their 2001 financial
year, they spent $600 million on the sector and by their 2005
financial year that had grown to $1.6 billion and they are projecting
$2 billion for the current financial year. They are the dominant
financier in the sector, so it is very, very important that they
frankly do a good job on those programmes. We do have some areas
where we think we would like them to improve. We would like them
to have a stronger rural focus, for example, recognising they
have done a good job in the urban areas. I would say that we have
not had major issues on conditionality, public/private and all
that stuff, with them on water and perhaps we will get on to that
in a bit more detail later on, but that has not been a big area
of concern between us and the Bank.
Q55 Chairman: In your own submission,
in paragraph 119,[2]
you list a number of projects which I think John Barrett wants
to come in on in a minute and explore a little bit more, but when
you actually list them, the figure comes to £30 million a
year compared with the £200 million promised by 2011, so
is the difference other multilateral organisations or how do you
explain the difference?
Mr Lowcock: This is an illustration
of the things that we plan to do new over the next few years,
so it does not account for the things that we are already doing
in the sector. We have just taken delivery of some new data, breaking
down our expenditure for the 2005-06 year. It is not finalised
yet, but on the basis of the figures we have had, we are at about
somewhere around the £80-90 million a year mark currently,
so the issue for us really is how we grow that. I would like to
stress that this is not an exclusive list of the things that we
will do. For example, we have not referred in this list to Nigeria
which is clearly a fantastically important country in terms of
the water MDGs. We have got someone we regard as one of the best
specialists in the area about to go there to build on some earlier
planning work we have done for the next six months to help us
work out what the next set of things to be done are, so the thing
I would say about this list is that it is preliminary. If it would
help the Committee, we could maybe at the end say a little bit
about some of these—
Chairman: Well, can I bring John Barrett
in because these are the areas he wants to ask you about.
Q56 John Barrett: I actually wanted
to pick up on something that you mentioned, about it being predominantly
a rural issue. We have had a lot of evidence that has shown that
with increasing urbanisation the scale of the problem in urban
areas is growing at a rapid rate and also that effectively you
get more bang for your buck in urban supply of water to 800,000
people in Kibera rather than 800 villages of 1,000 people. It
is not easy, but it is more effective per dollar spent, but also
problems with sanitation, in other words, the health risks that
are associated with this, are better. I am concerned with, and
the first thing I would like to pick up is, the concentration
on the rural aspect of the problem rather than the growing urban
problem that we have seen and we are aware of, and we can see
this coming down the track. I wonder if you could address that
first.
Mr Lowcock: It is true that there
is clearly a massive problem, as you describe, in urban areas,
but in most of the countries where we are working, it is also
true that it is even worse in the rural areas. One point that
we have observed about the current direction of effort by the
international system in particular is that the urban is a little
bit better covered, especially by the likes of the Germans, the
Japanese, the Americans to some degree and, as I mentioned earlier,
the World Bank, than the rural is, so one of the things we are
trying to do is work out what is the worst bit of the gap, if
you like, and how we can contribute to progress in that, and maybe
I could give a couple of examples.
Q57 John Barrett: Before you do that,
you also mentioned about the African Development Bank having a
stronger rural focus, but will that take the focus away from the
urban issue rather than make it stronger?
Mr Lowcock: Well, they will certainly
do more on the rural. I do not know how much, to be honest, they
do on urban at the moment.
Mr Curtis: What is interesting,
I suppose, is that the positioning of the World Bank is predominantly
the urban and the positioning of the African Development Bank
is predominantly the rural, but I think what is encouraging is
the way that there is now an agreement between the World Bank
and the African Development Bank to collaborate particularly on
rural issues, so I would not say that it is detracting from urban
needs, but, as Mark has pointed out, I think there are issues
here of comparative advantage and there are also issues here of
a clear mapping of where needs lie and which donors are going
to take responsibility for which areas, so comparative advantage
is also an issue for DFID.
Q58 John Barrett: We also have the
formal sort of tracked countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan,
but what proportion of funding is going into those countries?
Mr Lowcock: Just to illustrate
what we are trying to do about this, on the basis of the provisional
figures we have for 2005-06, this is just for DFID bilateral,
our top three countries are Sudan, Congo and Nigeria and they
account for something like £22 million of a bilateral total
of, as I said, around £80-90 million. The thing that I would
say about this is that these are also countries where we are building
up the programme further, so I would expect both that absolute
number and the proportion to grow.
Q59 Ann McKechin: The National Audit
Office audit of DFID in 2003 stated the need for you to retain
appropriate technical expertise, but I understand that, despite
the fact that your budget in this area is increasing, you have
actually reduced the number of water and sanitation sector experts
that you employ. I wonder if you could indicate by how much your
overall cadre of technical experts in this area has been reduced
over the last five years, why it has declined and how you can
actually explain this in the light of the fact that you are now
substantially increasing your budget?
Mr Lowcock: Well, this issue is,
as you identified in your report last week,[3]
really the biggest challenge we face, how we are going to manage
this growth in delivery of outcomes with a tightly constrained
staffing resource. I would say that I think some of the figures
that are around are a little bit out of date actually. Since 2004,
for example, we have doubled the capacity of our policy team on
water which Greg now leads and he can perhaps say a little bit
about that in more detail if that would be more helpful. We have
30 people who are infrastructure advisers with a strong water
background, so they might, like Ian, be members of the Chartered
Institute of Water and Environmental Management, for example.
Now, that is within an infrastructure cadre which is around 40
to 50, depending on how we count the numbers, and some of our
infrastructure advisers, for example, are now doing other jobs.
One of them is the head of our Pakistan office, so he has that
overall responsibility as well as some infrastructure responsibilities.
We can give you a note on the precise numbers and the history
of the numbers.[4]
It is true that the infrastructure numbers came down a little
bit in the 2002-03 period and since 2004 they have gone up somewhat
and that is within the framework where overall our staffing has
fallen, but you have raised the central issue which is: how are
we going to manage growth in the outcomes, because it is the outcomes
we are interested in, within that constraint? We are going to
have to use some of the partnerships that we have much better,
so just to give one example, in Tanzania there is a water sector
development plan being developed and we have a staff member who
is actually somebody with a social development background who
goes to all the sector meetings with the government and other
donors and we also have an agreement with WaterAid and we finance
WaterAid to provide technical inputs to all of that government/donor
dialogue. We are going to have to get smarter at managing our
partnerships so that, in countries where we are unable to have
a full staffing complement for wider reasons, we can ensure that
there is an adequate coverage of the issues.
1 Letter to the Chairman of the Committee from the
Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, Secretary of State for International Development,
6 December 2006, published in The Autumn Meetings of the World
Bank and the IMF, Oral and Written Evidence, HC 1622, Session
2005-06. Back
2
Ev 109. Back
3
International Development Committee, First Report of Session
2006-07, Department for International Development Departmental
Report 2006, HC 71. Back
4
Ev 109. Back
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