Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
TUESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2006
MR MARK
LOWCOCK, MR
ELWYN GRAINGER-JONES,
MR GREG
BRIFFA AND
MR IAN
CURTIS
Q60 Ann McKechin: In the light of
that, given that you have obviously a finite number of advisers,
do you think you should have a strategic plan to thread that type
of knowledge amongst other sectoral disciplines, health, governance
and education, to make sure that they are aware of the issues
of water and sanitation in their own work?
Mr Lowcock: Again this is a fundamental
issue because a lot of the issues around water are to do with
governance or finance and so on. Perhaps I could ask Greg to say
a bit about how the central water team works with the other advisory
groups.
Mr Briffa: The central advisory
team has half a dozen people who work predominantly on water and
that has doubled over the last couple of years.
Q61 Chairman: So it has gone up from
three to six?
Mr Briffa: Depending on when you
count from, it has gone up from two to six, but I suppose I would
like to illustrate the range of expertise we bring now, so it
is not simply people who have expertise in water and sanitation.
The team now, as well as senior water advisers predominantly in
the engineering and infrastructure background, includes an environment
adviser, it includes a communications adviser, a governance adviser
and an economist, so all of those are bringing a range of different
skills to bear on these sectoral problems.
Q62 Ann McKechin: Obviously you are
commenting on something at the head office level, but talking
about the actual outcomes and what is actually happening at the
country level, perhaps you could give us an indication of that
link between head office on the one hand and the country level
and the staffing level.
Mr Lowcock: Perhaps I should say
something about the staffing at the country level. There are 10
African countries in which we have people with water expertise,
so, broadly speaking, they are civil engineers of one sort or
another by background. In all of those offices, we also have some
governance, economic and social expertise, so within a country
team we have a cross-mix of expertise, but there is also the key
issue about how we communicate from the centre at DFID to the
country teams and the knowledge transfer especially. A significant
part of what the team that Greg leads does, working also with
Ian who looks after a lot of the African programmes, is communicate
across the whole DFID network on what is going well in one place,
what is going badly in another place and what the lessons are
so that there is that effort—
Q63 Ann McKechin: There is that transfer.
Mr Lowcock: Exactly.
Mr Curtis: We also have an African
advisory team which has a sort of flying capacity to go in and
provide support.
Q64 Chairman: One of our witnesses
last week said that there was a general problem of capacity to
deliver the MDGs. They were saying that virtually all organisations
had reduced their capacity over the years and there was a requirement
for training. Is there anything which DFID are doing both in-house
and in country on training?
Mr Lowcock: Yes, the place where
the capacity is the biggest problem is in the countries themselves
and, in a way, building that up is the most important thing. The
capacity that the aid donors have, to be very frank with you,
is a little bit like second best. We are doing some things to
build capacity in developing countries and we have a resource
centre, for example, through which we finance five national centres
of excellence in dealing with water in Africa, including one in
Nigeria and one in Uganda. We also have, for example, a programme
in Bangladesh where we finance continuing professional development
for people from the Institute of Engineers, but this is a dimension
of what is a core problem in Africa across the whole of the development
spectrum. There is a shortage of at least one million health workers,
a shortage of at least one million teachers and there is a similar
shortage in the water area too, so countries have to address the
capacity overall. There are things we can do, and will do, to
build it in the water sector, but it is also important to look
wider.
Q65 James Duddridge: The DFID submission
identifies the size of the problem, US$7 billion per annum, which
is quite flabbergasting, taking whatever metric you compare it
with. It is particularly shocking given how inadequate and how
non-fit-for-purpose the aid infrastructure is internationally.
What can we do globally, what can we do in country and specifically
what are DFID doing over the next two to four years really to
bridge that gap?
Mr Lowcock: You are right on the
institutional arrangements, this is a substantial concern for
us, and in the publication we sent you that the Secretary of State
issued two weeks ago after the main submission,[5]
we set out a plan for "the five ones", as we call it.
Firstly, that there should be a single annual report which is
a monitoring of progress on this so that the world can see what
the situation is. I think that you took evidence from Kevin Watkins
recently who is also the author of the Human Development Report.
That was a fantastically valuable contribution to this debate,
raising awareness and so on, but what is now needed is a follow-up
report every year so that we can see what is going on. And we
need a single annual meeting globally so that we can, amongst
those who share responsibility for this problem, assess progress.
Then at the country level, in our view, as has been done, for
example, with HIV and some other issues, each country should have
a national plan and in some countries that is in place and it
is proving very effective, Uganda, Tanzania and one or two other
places, but you need a coherent national approach to deal with
the issues.
Q66 James Duddridge: Is there one
in Ethiopia?
Mr Lowcock: Yes, in Ethiopia we
have two staff members with an engineering background working
in Addis Ababa at the moment. One of them is seconded to the Ministry
of Water and his job is to help them develop their national plan,
and it has to be their national plan, but there is a role for
helping develop it. There needs to be a single group co-ordinating
external assistance. As you say, this is, even more than some
other bits of the aid architecture, very fragmented and donors
come with different perspectives and that is hard for developing
countries to manage, frankly. In the UN, and the UN, I think,
has 23 bodies involved in one way or another in water, we think
there needs to be some rationalisation of that and some co-ordination
within country and there is a role for UNDP, and actually there
is an important role for UNICEF as well who are much the most
significant body, so we have set out an agenda for that. Of course
the challenge for us now is to win support for it. We have had
some discussions with the Germans who have the G8 and EU Presidency.
There is a commitment arising from the G8 Summit in 2003, the
Evian Summit, where an action plan was signed up to by the Heads
of Government to review that in 2007, so we have been suggesting
to the Germans, who themselves are big bilateral financiers, that
that is a really important part of their Presidency.
Q67 Joan Ruddock: I think you will
all recall that sewerage and sanitation was not even one of the
original MDGs and it got added later. Perhaps that was symptomatic
of international attitudes or donors' attitudes, we do not know,
but a very slow start and one of the most off track of the MDGs.
What do you think are the prospects?
Mr Lowcock: Well, you are right
and I thought the memorandum, if I may say so, from Dr Cotton[6]
was very good on analysing the sanitation issues and we agreed
with a lot of that analysis. It was hard work at Jo'burg to get
agreement for sanitation.
Joan Ruddock: I remember.
Mr Lowcock: Yes, you will remember,
the MDG. The world will have to roughly double its effort over
the next nine years if the sanitation MDG is to be achieved and
let us just remember that that only reduces by half the proportion
of people without sanitation, that is only half the problem, in
other words, but we have to double the effort. Now, perhaps we
could say a little bit about some of the things we are doing through
our own programmes. One of the things Dr Cotton says in his memorandum
is that sanitation is very complex and there are a lot of things
which are around culture and behaviour change and there is an
investment dimension, but it is not just about that.
Mr Curtis: I was involved in the
whole Johannesburg process in actually securing that sanitation
target, so I suppose I have a keen interest in seeing how this
is taken forward. I think we have what I would describe as a "multi-pronged
approach". Firstly, at the international level, so raising
awareness of the issue and the Water Supply and Sanitation Council
have been particularly effective in raising this as an issue at
an international level and working closely with governments at
the highest level as well. And that has been led by Gouri Sankar
Ghosh, who used to be the Secretary of Water for India as well
as subsequently the head of water supply and sanitation at UNICEF.
So that has been very, very significant in raising awareness globally
of the issue. Then I think there are some very significant initiatives
that we have been involved in supporting. So the work at UNICEF
on school sanitation has been hugely important and there has been
very significant progress there which has impacted on attendance
of girl children, but it has also been significant in terms of
raising the awareness of school-age children to the importance
of sanitation which has been taken back to their villages and
has had an additional impact. We have supported some very innovative
work in Bangladesh through UNICEF and with the involvement of
WaterAid as well—a total sanitation programme, which has
been remarkably successful in introducing sanitation into a large
number of villages in Bangladesh. But there has been a knock-on
effect of that in that, with the Water and Sanitation Programme,
we took a number of ministers from India to see what was happening
in Bangladesh and to actually look down latrines in Dhaka. They
were amazed by what they saw of the process and the Government
of India have now adopted a similar approach in India. I suppose
this is an interesting story because of the way that that good
practice has been replicated, first from Bangladesh to India and
now from India to Africa—again through UNICEF and through
some of the work that we are supporting in, for example, Nigeria
through UNICEF.
Mr Lowcock: We could give you
more examples on sanitation if that would be helpful.
Q68 Joan Ruddock: I think what we
perhaps might be interested in is what are the key catalysts and
one clearly you are saying is education, but what about behaviour
change, what about political will and what about affordability
of the infrastructure? You say that much, much more has to be
done, but what exactly are we saying is the key to getting it
done?
Mr Lowcock: I think, like many
issues, the single biggest thing is political will at the national
level. You can do a lot if you make this a big priority and you
then do get into institutional issues and often responsibilities
are quite widely shared within national structures, and you get
into financing issues if you are talking about big infrastructure.
You then get into the major public information campaigns and behaviour
change issues, but I think there are some signs that people are
thinking more imaginatively about how to deal with this set of
problems. For example, I was told the other day about a new programme
in Vietnam which we are supporting which is a collaboration between
the government, the donors and civil society, but also Unilever
and local soap producers. They have found a strategic joint interest
in promoting hand-washing and this is very early on, but it is
an example of something that does have promise if it is backed
and the knowledge is spread and if the political will is maintained
and generated.
Q69 Joan Ruddock: You talked earlier
about this divide between the World Bank doing primarily urban
projects and yourselves doing primarily rural. Is that because
of the numbers, about 500 million people in urban settings and
about two billion in rural settings, or actually is it much easier
to do work in the rural areas than to construct sewers in slums?
Mr Lowcock: Perhaps I could ask
one of my colleagues to comment on the relative needs.
Mr Curtis: I think we also need
to be clear as to whether we are talking Africa or global as well,
because we have a tremendous amount of involvement in urban development
in India. It is a comparative advantage in India, partly because
we have been involved in urban development there for many, many
years. We have, as a number of you will know, worked, and continue
to work, in Andhra Pradesh in the Andhra Pradesh Urban Services
Programme and in Madhya Pradesh together with the Asian Development
Bank and more recently we have worked in Calcutta through the
Calcutta Urban Services Programme. It is interesting that the
MDG talks about basic sanitation which is basically the safe disposal
of faeces, and there are challenges in urban areas. There are
challenges around ownership of land, for example, land tenure
and what it is possible to do on land. I was involved in a project
a little while ago in Lucknow in India where it was a real, real
challenge to be able to implement a programme of basic sanitation
there because the city authorities did not want services to be
provided to people without tenure, even though they had lived
there for 20 years and it was a very, very big political issue
and it was exceedingly difficult. At one point, a lot of very,
very poor people were moved off their land because of the concerns
of the city authorities about the tenure rights that the provision
of these services would provide, so it is an extremely complicated
issue and one that requires a very careful approach. There are
issues of technology and we look for the most basic and most appropriate
technological solutions partly because they are the only ones
which are affordable.
Mr Lowcock: If I can add a couple
of points on the rural aspect, of the 2.6 billion people who do
not have access to adequate basic sanitation, two billion are
in rural areas, so, as I was discussing with Mr Barrett, it is
about need partly as well.
Q70 Joan Ruddock: My challenge to
you really was: is it because you perceive the need or is it actually
because it is rather easier to do? I was just asking out of interest.
Mr Lowcock: It is need-driven.
To be honest, I think that it is maybe harder at the level of
scale necessary in rural areas. I am not sure DFID is frequently
criticised for doing the easy things rather than the harder things.
Maybe we should do more of the easy things, I do not know, but
it is need-driven, is the answer to the question.
Q71 Joan Ruddock: If you are looking
ahead a decade, with increasing urbanisation, will you be constantly
looking at that need and making adjustments if indeed, as we all
anticipate, there will be quite a rapid urbanisation?
Mr Lowcock: Absolutely, and some
of us were talking last week to our colleagues in Sierra Leone
who are grappling in Freetown with a very difficult set of issues.
There are millions of people in Freetown and there is a very run-down,
publicly owned utility which the government wants to strengthen.
People get their water from a variety of sources, but there are
only 8,000 people who pay bills to the water utility, so they
have to get the remainder of their finance from somewhere else.
Then there is a category of people in Sierra Leone, essentially
the rich, who are able to pay someone to bring a tanker to their
house and fill up their tank, then there is a group of people
who are living somewhere near part of the pipe system that the
Guma Water Company runs who are able legally, or in whatever way,
to get a connection, then there are the people who buy their water
in a plastic bag from the guy who sells it on the street and then
there are the people who do not have access to any of these things
and rely on shallow wells or streams or various other polluted
sources. We are not ignoring the issue, but we do think, given
what everyone else is doing and the overall scale of the problems,
that it is right for us to have a stronger rural focus.
Q72 Chairman: One of the issues which
was raised last week was the need for community engagement both
in rural and in urban areas. Is that consistent with putting a
heck of a lot of extra money in which almost certainly means that
it goes to government agencies or large-scale institutions and
how can you ensure that the money does that?
Mr Lowcock: One of the things
we have all learnt over decades in the water sector is that things
do not work unless you engage with the local community. Something
like 30% of the water facilities in Africa are not functioning
and that is largely because the operation and maintenance costs
are not there because communities have not been involved, so it
does not actually matter whether you are doing the small-scale
things or the large-scale things, you have to work in a way which
from the outset engages with the people you are trying to support
and hopefully one of the things we are doing with help from civil
society in Freetown is a lot of upfront work on exactly that.
Maybe we could go back to the Indian urban upgrading programme
and we could talk a bit about the community participation there.
Q73 Joan Ruddock: Well, I would just
ask the final question and you could perhaps cover the question
of participation in your answers. When we were talking about the
numbers, of course the huge number of rural poor are not actually
in Africa, but in India and China and you have given us some indication
about India, but I wonder if, in your final answer to me, you
could cover China as well.
Mr Grainger-Jones: We have a very
active programme in China on water and sanitation and the really
striking statistic is that one in three of the world's population
without access to water and sanitation live in China, so really
meeting the MDGs is going to require a lot of work in China. The
Government has just agreed a five-year strategy to really integrate
and develop processes to ensure that it does more on water and
sanitation and really links that up with some of the hygiene work
that is going on. DFID has just agreed a project working with
UNICEF and the World Bank which is called the Rural Water and
Sanitation Hygiene Project and that is working in the driest and
poorest places in China. It is $75 million, of which a third is
DFID's contribution and it is really trying to link up the delivery
of water and sanitation schemes and attach with that some hygiene
promotion. What is interesting there is that we have added a small
bolt-on project really which is to try and learn the lessons from
that at national level, and this is working with UNICEF, to try
and develop some advocacy work at national level which would take
those lessons and try and help the Government to do more.
Q74 Mr Singh: Would you like to tell
the Committee a little bit more about integrated water resources
management, how successful that has been and what there still
is to do?
Mr Lowcock: Well, in most places
where we work this has been a bit of a Cinderella issue. Just
to give one example, something like 3% of renewable water resources
in Africa are managed in the sense of infrastructure, dams, reservoirs
and so on, as opposed to, I think, 80% in the US and 40% even
in Asia. This is another area where I think there is a massive
need in Africa and the African Development Bank are doing a bit
about it. Something like 20% of our programmes are on water resource
management-type issues and that is one of the things that is being
sustained over a long period. One of the things I would say is
that there are major water resources, especially in Africa, which
are not at all being touched at the moment by proper integrated
water resource management. The Congo Basin accounts for 30% of
the precipitation in Africa and there is no cross-country process
or arrangement to manage those resources, mainly, we understand,
because of the conflict and the problems in that region over recent
decades, but nevertheless that is the real, fundamental challenge
to try to help that set of countries to deal with. The Nile Basin
example is one where there is some collaboration which we are
supporting a bit. Obviously it is difficult in a number of ways
politically not least, about who gets what share of the resources,
but these are big challenges and we do some things on them and
probably we need to increase what we do.
Mr Curtis: I think our support
to the Global Water Partnership (GWP) has been significant in
terms of addressing the broadest use of integrated water resources
management and the Global Water Partnership work with country
governments to help them develop their own management.
Q75 Mr Singh: There are two issues
there. One is that I am slightly puzzled that the integrated water
resources management concept, you yourselves said it was an ideal
and yet that ideal was turned into a target and I do not understand
why you did that. Secondly, you mentioned the Global Water Partnership,
but that has been said by the World Bank and others to be totally
ineffective. Given that one of the things that DFID should be
doing, in the background paper we have got, is ensuring that money
is spent effectively and fairly, then where are you coming from?
Mr Curtis: The target actually
comes from the sixth session of the UN Commission on Sustainable
Development (CSD-6). So that was the Commission for Sustainable
Development which met six years after Rio in 1998 and they agreed
that target. Although it perhaps does not appear to be a useful
target, it was actually a very significant move forward to focus
on the importance of better planning at national level and also
in the context of the river basins as well for the use, and for
the more equitable allocation, of water. So it has undoubtedly
raised awareness and has played a significant role. And evaluations
we have undertaken of their work would indicate that they have
made a significant contribution. One of the most significant has
been working with the Government of China in helping them to look
at ways in which they manage their own resources. And if you achieve
something like that in China, I think that is a very, very significant
achievement. Please remind me of your second question.
Q76 Mr Singh: You raised the issue
of the Global Water Partnership and that has been said by people
to be completely ineffective.
Mr Curtis: We would question that
suggestion, that GWP has been ineffective.
Mr Briffa: We keep a rolling programme
of evaluations and we supported an external evaluation of GWP
jointly with the Swedish development agency and the Dutch in 2003
and just to quote from that, it said, "GWP has demonstrated
its ability to perform and can be considered to represent very
good value for the investment made in it". We are continuing
to do that and we are discussing a subsequent evaluation. One
of my colleagues has just returned from the annual management
board meeting of the GWP and the sort of things we would like
to see it doing is more emphasis on the regional level, but also
greater linkages between the work it has been doing and some of
the actual development challenges around irrigation and hydropower,
as Mark was talking about. We clearly recognise that it needs
to develop, but we would not agree with some of the harshest of
the detractors.
Q77 Mr Singh: In reality, over the
next two years or so, what do you expect to see from the GWP?
What in reality is it likely to achieve in terms of increasing
the integrated water resources management? Have you got a target
or something concrete you are aiming at?
Mr Lowcock: Could we write to
you with a game plan on the GWP.[7]
I have been struck with some of the written evidence that you
have had about the criticism and I would like to unpack that a
bit further. The thing I would say, Mr Singh, is that we need
to have a long-term horizon on these issues. As Ian said, the
contribution of programmes like GWP, which actually is quite a
small programme, we contribute £1.8 million a year, the contribution
is about raising awareness and helping governments to get to address
issues in a more effective way. I gave the example of the Congo
Basin. We need to have a reasonably long-term understanding about
how those countries are going to deal with a massive issue that
they face. I think it was Mr Duddridge who made the point that
the infrastructure of aid arrangements on water is terribly fragmented,
and that is a problem, frankly. Where there is an organisation
like GWP it is really important that they play to their niche
and they do not try to extend into things that other people are
doing. We will have another look at GWP.
Mr Curtis: I have another example
of what we are doing on water resources as well, in working with
SADC[8]
in Southern Africa. So we are in the process of developing a programme
there and we are likely to be putting the money through GTZ, the
Germany development agency, to support SADC on water resources.
Chairman: We would appreciate a further
response from you. I do not think anybody is suggesting that what
these programmes are trying to achieve is not a desirable outcome
but it is almost like putting the cart before the horse when you
have not got even the most practical provision on the ground.
It looks too ambitious.
Q78 Richard Burden: In a sense, it
is a similar line of questioning, perhaps, going back to what
Ann McKechin was asking you before, about DFID's own capacity.
When you were answering that you put a good deal of emphasis on
the capacity you are trying to build by partnering in-country.
I think you specifically mentioned the centres of excellence that
you are sponsoring in different parts of Africa. We have had a
number of submissions that say that there is a problem in that
DFID is actually cutting down on supporting monitoring activities,
diagnostic activities and scientific capacity in-country, and
that that is causing problems of the quality of meteorological
data and other data, which itself is going to be crucial to effective
programmes. How would you respond to that?
Mr Lowcock: There are a couple
of dimensions to that. The first is that there is a big question
about what we do on research. For example, the British Geological
Survey had capacity in this area. As you know, we have made a
commitment to double our funding for research. We will be in the
process over the next 12 months of replacing the current strategy,
which we published in about 2004, for a three-year period, with
a further three- or possibly five-year strategy, and water will
be a significant part of that strategy. One of the big issues
on research is uptake, who gets it and the capacity of local institutions
to use it. So that will be a vehicle through which we try to respond
to that. The broader capacity issues are in a way fundamental
to why the problem is of the scale it is. Our basic view is that
the sustainable way to deal with these problems is for each country
to have a plan, and for public expenditure priorities to be set
in such a way that the plan can be financed, especially the recurrent
costs and the maintenance costs—which applies just as much
to monitoring and ongoing scientific work as it does to who is
paying the guy who is maintaining the washer on the pump in the
village?—and then to adequate levels of external financing
as well. You really have to, in our view, have a kind of comprehensive
overall approach to dealing with this, otherwise you risk a repetition
of the kinds of problems we have had previously where we or others
were financing a project for a while, it might be fine for as
long as you are financing it but then you stop and who is taking
on the responsibility after that? There are more examples. Uganda
is one where governments have, over a period of years, used the
resources they have had from, for example, debt relief and greater
donor flows to invest more in the water sector. That has had an
impact on the MDGs but, also, their own institutions. So Uganda—just
to follow through that example—is a country in which its
own institutions (perhaps Greg can remind me of the name of the
institution) are providing services to neighbouring countries
on a cost recovery basis because they have—it is the national
water and sewerage corporation—built an institution and
it has been financed, and so on. Our view is that the way to deal
with the problem you identify is through that kind of national
prioritisation and support for it.
Q79 Richard Burden: I do not entirely
follow that. I am sure developing national plans that are coherent
and hang together is very important and very useful, but if you
have not got the right data in place, if they have not got access
to the right diagnostics, they are not going to be in a position
to do that anyway. A lot of the things we have been getting from
a number of witnesses so far—and in a sense you have yourselves
said it today—is that the really important place you need
to intervene is at the community level. We do need to have community
ownership, we do need to have community engagement; people on
the ground need to understand. In many ways they will understand
what needs doing but they need the tools to do that and they need
the information that goes with that. That, presumably, feeds back,
and the priority, in many ways, is to get that information to
them. If, in a sense, the diagnostics and the scientific help
on that is almost taking second place and saying: "Once you
have got the plans in place that can follow it", it does
not seem to me to make a lot of sense. Or have I misunderstood
what you are saying?
Mr Lowcock: I agree with everything
you have just said, so if I conveyed a different impression I
am sorry about that. One of the things a sensible national plan
should do is evaluate what the resources are and maintain the
data and the systems. I think there is a difference between the
kind of mega-resource, if you like. There is clearly an important
role for organisations like British Geological Survey (BGS) when
you are talking about the Congo Basin. At the community level
you can often do a lot with a much lower level of scientific and
technical resource. Maybe I could ask Elwyn to comment further
on that.
Mr Grainger-Jones: I wanted to
raise one example, and this forms part of the new £18 million
water and sanitation research programme which was launched this
year but we are still developing certain components. One component
that is very interesting in this respect is the RIPPLE programme—this
is the Research Inspired Policy and Practised Learning in Ethiopia
and the Nile region. What that is doing is trying to advance evidence-based
learning on water and sanitation, looking at financing, delivery,
sustainability and the technologies in Ethiopia, and that is really
working at quite a local level to see what lessons we can learn
and build that knowledge out in partnerships with other Nile region
countries.
5 Department for International Development, Why
we need a global action plan on water and sanitation, http://www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/global-action-plan-water.pdf Back
6
Ev 227. Back
7
Ev 113. Back
8
Southern African Development Community. Back
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