Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 108)
TUESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2006
MR ANTONIO
GARCÍA FRAGÍO,
MR SERING
JALLOW AND
MR STEPHEN
TURNER
Q100 Chairman: Perhaps we could have
that in writing, if you are able to send it to us?
Mr García Fragío:
Yes, I have it here.[15]
Q101 John Barrett: You have touched
on the EU Water Facility which was set up in 2004 with €250
million from funding but there has been a bit of confusion about
the way that the EU Water Initiative and the EU Water Facility
are linked together. There has also been criticism, that the Facility
should in fact be scrapped and that the resources should be redirected
towards bilateral support for national budgets. I wonder if you
could respond to that criticism and also say what added value
does the Facility give to global efforts on water sanitation?
Mr García Fragío:
First of all, as I have said, the Water Initiative is more of
a policy and forward-looking instrument. The Facility is just
a financial muscle to support, to some extent, the Water Initiative.
The criticism was raised by WaterAid—we have read it and
I think there was a point; I do not know if it still maintains
it today or not after the discussions we have had; it is up to
them to say that later. I think that scrapping it is a bit too
much. Probably reshaping it is a better thing. I spoke before
about the need to have an instrument that would provide some additional
leverage to what we do at national level. The basic approach that
we follow, and this is held by Member States, is that most of
what we do should be through the national programmes. Today there
is no way that with centralised instruments—which are, in
a way, top-down-driven, even though there is a strong demand because
we respond to a call for proposals, but at the end of the day
priorities are set out mainly in an abstract way—I do not
think that those facilities should replace in any case what is
being done at national level. There should just be small and very
targeted instruments to steer up, to try to push forward, to try
to motivate, to try to do what the national programmes are now
doing. Scrapping I do not think is the solution. Advantages that
the Water Facility has had at least—and I do not want to
be here the absolute defender of the Water Facility because, as
I say, there are good and bad things—first of all, I think
it has been possible for us, and probably for a number of Member
States, to respond to a demand which existed and that was filtered
by the national governments. To say it in other words, municipalities,
communities, have had access to funding which in the past they
did not have, or in a very limited way. I think that is a plus
because that is opening up aid from what is a formal bilateral
flow, government to government or international institution to
government; and I think other actors come into the picture. That
is one point. The second point, which I think at least is a point
to say that it has not been all that bad, is the fact that when
you look at the results a substantial share of what has been committed
goes to civil society projects. There are actions which are directed
at a grass-root level, that is point one. Point two, it has also,
with a limited funding, allowed for leveraging some funding from
development banks or other actors in the financial sector that
were not directly working with us, or were more ODA-oriented.
Those are two things. Probably on the other side I think we have
to acknowledge, and this is something we have to do if there is
a new Water Facility, the fact that there have been calls for
proposals without very, very clear—I would not say guidance,
but structure of what we really wanted—has created a multiplicity
of actions lacking a little bit of coherence. I think if we go
into the next phase we have to be much stricter in trying to say,
"This is what we want. These are the three or four areas
where we are going to intervene", and so it will be done
through other mechanisms.
Q102 Mr Singh: One of the things
we keep coming up against in our written submissions and in verbal
evidence is the lack of technical expertise and know-how. You
yourself have said that money is one issue and is just as important
an issue. What is the Development Bank doing to address the lack
of technical know-how and ability? I think it applies probably
mainly to Africa; I am not sure how much it applies to India or
China—they do have some capacity in that area. What is the
Bank doing to address that need?
Mr Jallow: Within the water sector,
of the programmes we are now developing, the capacity-building
components of these programmes are much bigger than what we used
to do in the past. Particularly in the area of rural water supply,
we are moving away from centralised activities at the level of
the ministries, going down to local government level, and helping
the local government authorities build capacity for implementation
of projects, not only for designing projects, implementing them,
but also for financial management. In many of these countries,
with the level of decentralisation, Ethiopia, for example, the
government transfers the project implementation directly to the
district level now. You find out in many of these the capacity
does not exist for any of these activities—financial management,
design and implementation. Within these programmes we build a
huge capacity-building component. This is why I said earlier on
that we recognised this problem but we do not think the solution
is to build capacity before and come in later with investment.
We need to try and do these together. That is what we are trying
to do in these countries. It is a very big challenge, we know
that; and I think the governments also recognise that now.
Q103 Mr Singh: Are you making progress?
Mr Jallow: In some countries,
yes. What we are trying to do, we have a programme that we are
going to be financing in Ethiopia with the World Bank, and we
are using private sector elements within the community and training
at the district level, called in Ethiopia "woredas".
So we call them "woreda support groups". These are basically
small consultancy units which are trained and then given a number
of districts to work in and they help those districts build their
capacity for examining what sort of water infrastructure is needed
within certain communities and then helping them to do the procurement
required for implementing them. There are a number of people who
have finished school or who have dropped out of school but can
be easily retrained to do simple things like constructing wells
and installing hand-pumps which a lot of the community rural schemes
will consist of. We are training these artisans and then contracting
them to build the simpler type of water scheme. There are other
groups that are trained to work with the communities and help
them, (ie the communities that will be expected to inherit, operate
and maintain these schemes that are put into the communities).
These are also being trained by what we call the "community
facilitation teams" to operate and maintain systems, collect
money from the community members and manage finances. That is
the way we are addressing that.
Q104 Chairman: Do you have a constraint
on the number of trainers you have got?
Mr Jallow: There is that, but
in a country like Ethiopia that is a very big constraint. In Ethiopia
I think the population is estimated at about 71 million right
now. 85% of those live in rural areas. Ethiopia has the lowest
water supply and sanitation in Africa right now so that is a major
constraint.
Chairman: We may see and hear some of
that.
Q105 John Barrett: We have heard
submissions about the shrinking number of technical advisers within
DFID. We know about the target of cutting the headcount by 10%.
It would seem DFID has doubled the spending on water in 2005 and
again in 2006 so that it will reach £200 million by 2011.
Your own organisation has highlighted the problems this is going
to raise. I wondered if you could go into that in a bit more depth.
Clearly one of the implications may just be DFID should spend
more money funding water—I am sure it is more complicated
than that. I wonder if we could go into problems of this mismatch
of increasing funding and reducing personnel?
Mr Turner: DFID have got an enviable
track record in using personnel and technical assistance to put
into line ministries at critical points. In Uganda the fact that
they have got a national framework, they have got an annual sector
monitoring process that is based on all government departments
involved in water and sanitation, and donors, bilateral, multilateral
and NGOs, is probably down to something DFID did by putting somebody
to work within the Ministry of Finance. Something is now currently
being done in Ethiopia, and I hope you will be able to see the
first stages of that. People have been in place for six months
or so. If the headcount prevents DFID offering that particular
quality then I do not know whether other donors are going to be
in a position to put in some of the people. Other donors are themselves
having headcounts capped. There is a loss of being able to properly
use one of those particular successful tools that DFID have currently
used. I think the questions from an NGO perspective are then:
what are the issues about contracting out to others; contracting
out to, say, UK service providers to do some of that work; or
by putting more money through multilateral channels; and the questions
on whether DFID have a sufficient hold or handle on those processes
to ensure those policy agendas are met? We did some work with
the Asian Development Bank on the impact of their lending policies
in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, and the Asian Development Bank's
lending policies effectively excluded the poor from connecting
to services. That is clearly not DFID's policy. With DFID funding
into the Asian Development Bank they could not actually influence
the direction of how that policy was working, given their limited
percentage stake in that policy. There is a real risk of losing
a role that they can play, and they are recognised for playing,
contracting out service providers who do not have the same values
and ethos, or the risk of not actually having a handle on where
the multilateral money is going.
Q106 Chairman: Do you get the impression
that if DFID did not have this constraint there would be more
capacity?
Mr Turner: I think it comes down
to this chicken and egg situation about where is water prioritised
within national plans. I think DFID would respond if that was
happening there; but is enough being done with development partners
to work out why water does not get prioritised? If there is a
constraint maybe it is still not looking at the governance, or
the health or the education advisers themselves are incorporating
water within the dialogues where there are established priorities
within national government frameworks. I do not think it is just
more water; I think it is more integration.
Q107 Hugh Bayley: If you look at
the imbalance between girls and boys attending primary school,
how much do you think you can attribute that imbalance to girl
child labour in collecting and carrying water and the absence
of safe, private toilets for girls at school once they reach puberty?
What do you think NGOs and government bodies and governments in
developing countries should do to integrate water and sanitation
policy with gender considerations?
Mr Turner: There are studies that
tell you 15% more girls went to school because there were facilities,
so there are studies that say that it is quantifiable; but we
did a study which was much more about the impact of lack of access
and then subsequently the access to water and sanitation. We have
looked at 25 communities in four countries over two continents
with control groups, and we asked the communities open-ended questions:
what do you think the change has been; and consistently communities
said they got better exam results; they got better exam results
for their girls. Those exam results came because better teachers
were attracted to the schools and because there were better facilities
in the community. It went through the whole system. Water and
sanitation was actually really part of a base for achieving girls'
targets in health, education and gender. For DFID maybe they should
be reporting in their Public Service Agreement a much more targeted
issue about the gender dimension of access to essential services,
not just what is happening in health, what is happening in education;
so reporting there. I think the aid community can support local
governments to begin to plan more holistically, not just look
at how do we support more service delivery capacity for local
NGOs and local private sector; but actually what is the factor
in that community, in that district, that prevents girls from
going to school. I hope when you are in Ethiopia you will see
some of the work that WaterAid has been doing with district offices
about thinking in a holistic way about bringing those services
together. It might mean that the starting point is not water in
the community—it might be water in the schools and sanitation
in the schools. I think it is a question of how can the aid system
think more holistically and support the implementers of service
delivery as well as the national framework and the policy area.
Q108 Hugh Bayley: May I ask a quick
question to Mr Jallow about the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation
Initiative. Have DFID committed financial support to it and, if
so, how much?
Mr Jallow: Not directly. At the
moment we are working with DFID on a technical assistance project,
which is basically to boost up the Bank's capacity for developing
these, i.e. helping countries develop the rural water supply and
sanitation programmes—as part of the Bank's decentralisation
process, to also help with capacity in these country/ field offices
that the Bank is opening to help the governments implement the
rural water supply and sanitation programmes. We are working on
this. The other areas we have discussed, we are to open 25 field
offices—I think we have about 16 of them open—which
include a number of francophone countries. DFID do not have offices
in francophone countries, but I think they are thinking of possibly
supporting francophone countries in the area of water supply and
sanitation. One of the things we are looking at is the possibility
of the Bank helping with the development and implementation of
those programmes within these countries where they do not have
field offices and them supporting us in those countries where
we do not have field offices. We are just beginning. We are working
on the technical assistance project which will start with a needs
assessment in the first quarter of next year, and that will last
three or four years. Then with the country offices we had a meeting
in Tunis in October where people from the African department of
DFID and people from the Bank met on different aspects of collaboration,
and water was one of the main areas we were discussing.
Chairman: Our thanks to all of you. By
the sound of it, we are obviously going to see a number of different
things in Ethiopia which will help us in a practical sense. One
thing I can testify to on the human rights issue, clean water
is essential to survival. I have lost count of the times during
our trips in Africa how often when you ask people what they wish
for and, I assume because clean water is a given, they say "sanitation".
Politically the suggestion is that sanitation could be much, much
higher up the priority list for the politicians and in the national
plan because it is clearly what people want, yet it is way down
the list in terms of delivery. If our Committee can do anything
to help further the attention on that then it would have served
a useful purpose. Thank you very much for giving us your different
perspectives on this, which is extremely helpful to our report.
15 Ev 141. Back
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