Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 239)
TUESDAY 20 FEBRUARY 2007
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP, MR ELWYN
GRAINGER-JONES,
MR GREG
BRIFFA AND
MR IAN
CURTIS
Q220 Mr Davies: You say you do not
know what the result of the trials will be. Let me put it to you
that the result of the trials will be, to a considerable extent,
a function of the continuing international interest, concern and
pressure on this matter and we should not let up. I thoroughly
agree with the decision you took for the reasons you mentioned,
and I believe the whole of the Committee does, and we said as
much to Meles Zenawi. You have described the dilemma you face:
you do not want to penalise poor people but you want to sanction
the government. The problem is what you have done has not been
to continue to provide projects or support through NGOs or international
agencies such as the United Nations. What you have done is simply
provide the same amount of budget support you were providing through
central government through regional and local government, in other
words through the existing bureaucratic structures and through
a structure which is still dominated by and beholden to the Tigray
People's Liberation Front and the rest of the coalition. It follows
that there has not really been an element of political sanction
in your moves at all. We visited a whole lot of water and sanitation
projects and I think I can say truthfully not a single one was
supported by DFID. When we said "Why are you not supporting
this as it seems a good project", which we did on a number
of occasions, we were told "We do not support these projects
run by NGOs. We do not think that is an efficient way of operating.
We think the best thing to do is to provide the support through
government organisations. We cannot unfortunately provide it through
central government for the moment because we have had to withhold
budget support but we are carrying on providing the same support
through the same governmental structure cutting out that top layer
of government." I have to say to you that a number of people
in Ethiopia, without mentioning any names specifically, thought
you were being made fools of and if you really meant what you
said it would be more effective if you delivered your aid programmes
through genuinely non-governmental organisations or international
organisations or indeed through DFID structures if those were
in place, which they are not.
Hilary Benn: I would not accept
that we are being made fools of. I think it is fair to say that
the government of Ethiopia was very unhappy, not to say angry,
about the decision that I and the other donors took. I say that
on the basis of conversations I have had. It was not an insignificant
step to take given the relationship that we had with the government
of Ethiopia previously. The question we then face is what is the
most effective means of providing support in another way. Yes,
you could, in theory, consider a development programme in Ethiopia
or other countries where you did it entirely by NGOs.
Q221 Chairman: Or UN agencies or
international agencies.
Hilary Benn: The question we all
have to ask ourselves is how is any country in the end going to
be able to fix the problem of water and sanitation, which we are
discussing this morning, or anything else, and the answer is by
building their capacity. I have seen no evidence—and if
you saw any yourselves I would be grateful to receive it—that
in providing support through the regional and local level system,
the woredas, that there has been any partisanship about the way
in which those resources have been distributed. One of the things
we have been very anxious to ensure is that that is not the case
and no-one can say by virtue of the way we are giving support
that that enables the governing party, where it is in control,
to give assistance to one area rather than another. I have seen
no evidence of that.
Q222 Mr Davies: I am not saying that.
Previously you provided the budget support to central government
and they were passing the money down to regions and to woredas.
At the moment we are saying we cannot give the money directly
to central government, we are giving it directly to the regions
and the woredas. The actual effect on the ground, including the
effect so far as the prestige and influence locally of the existing
government structure is concerned, is unchanged. That is the point.
I have to say to you it would not be right in open session to
quote the specific conversations we had with members of the government
and I am not going to do so but may I say the impression you have
that the government are extremely upset and very worried about
the removal of budget support and its replacement by this new
form of indirect budget support is not the impression we got.
I certainly had the impression people feel that in reality nothing
very much has changed and your move is largely symbolic and, as
a result, I fear may not have the political leverage you anticipated.
Hilary Benn: On that last point,
I took the decision because I thought it was the right thing to
do not because I thought by taking it that it would have a particular
political effect because in the end the government of Ethiopia
is responsible for the decisions it takes. I took it notwithstanding
that because I thought it was the right step. With respect, I
would not underestimate the political impact, in the broader sense,
of saying to a partner country, with whom we have been working
very closely, "I am very sorry but the form of support, and
the trust that comes with direct budget support, is not going
to continue because you have breached that trust." I do think
it did send a political message about how the Government felt
about what the government of Ethiopia had done. That is my perception
of it. To say that we have found an alternative way of continuing
to provide support to poor people, I plead guilty to that, because
that is what we were trying to do by finding an alternative means.
The final point I wanted to make is that in theory you could construct
a system in Ethiopia, or anywhere else, to provide support for
water, sanitation and everything else entirely through an NGO
or UN structure, but the problem with that is in the end how does
that help the country and the local authorities manage to build
the capacity to meet the needs of the people if when people want
to change what is going on they end up having a conversation with
people like me and us rather that putting pressure on their own
government. I accept in Ethiopia at the moment the system is not
working. Having voted in significant numbers for the opposition
and then finding some of the people you put in parliament being
locked up and put on trial tells you a lot about what is happening
in that country. I think it is legitimate and right to try and
balance it in the way we have and that is the reason I took that
decision.
Q223 Richard Burden: Perhaps I could
pursue a little about the withdrawal of direct budget support
and take a slightly different line of questions from that put
forward by Quentin Davies. There were three impressions we got
of the mechanisms that are being developed to replace direct budget
support with the Protection of Basic Services Programme. One was
essentially what Quentin has suggested, that this is just budget
support under a different name delivered a bit lower but nothing
else has changed. A second one was that it was trying to do something
a bit different and was, in many ways, a programme that if you
were delivering budget support in the right way with the right
accounting mechanisms, not just in Ethiopia but elsewhere, you
might end up coming up with a programme a bit like the Protection
of Basic Services Programme. And the third one, even amongst people
who thought there was some merit in the second of those arguments,
was that there was a problem in the way it was delivered because
it was delivered according to a pre-arranged formula which, in
a sense, reflected Ethiopia's federal system. So in fact how much
money went where was not necessarily related to need but according
to the political settlement they have in Ethiopia about which
region gets what and that was a problem. The other thing being
said was that the accountability mechanisms that are built into
Protection of Basic Services were not necessarily ensuring the
accountability in the use of those funds. It was sometimes about
building accountability mechanisms in areas so there was a disconnect
between the accountability mechanisms and the Protection of Basic
Services. I do not know if you have any observations on that but
perhaps that is an area that could be looked at in terms of how
that programme is actually working.
Hilary Benn: The first thing I
would say is the Committee can be certain that we will be reviewing
the way in which the new arrangements we have put in place are
operating. I am very conscious of all the points you have made
in those circumstances. We want to be sure that it achieves the
objective we set, which is to continue to provide support to poor
people but does so in a way that does meet needs. I would have
to reflect on the particular point you made about pre-determined
formulae because within any country the government will have a
view about what is going where and how the resources themselves
are going to be distributed. The point I was trying to make to
Mr Davies in relation to concerns that might have been expressed
that somehow money was allocated on the basis of how people voted
in particular areas, I have seen no evidence that is the case.
If you have seen any evidence, please let me have it. That is
rather different from the point I understood you to be making,
which is that the government has a view about what the needs are
in different areas. I had a brief discussion with the team when
I was last in Addis in November on Darfur business about how it
was going. I know from my previous visit, where I was looking
at the Safety Net Scheme, which I do not think you had a chance
to look at as part of your programme as obviously you were focusing
on something else, in Ethiopia that actually seems to be working
pretty well in terms of the impact it is delivering on the ground.
Having had a conversation with a group of the beneficiaries of
that scheme they would certainly say it was pretty accountable
and was making a difference to their lives but I will reflect
on the points you make. If there are any other observations on
this broader question which you would like to let me have as a
result of the visit, as ever I would be grateful to receive it.
Q224 Chairman: We felt we needed
to explore that, not least because your Department is making a
big forward commitment to Ethiopia especially so in water and
sanitation. Clearly the politics or the political development
could compromise that which is a point of concern. Perhaps we
can get back to the meat of that particular report. On 24 January
in questions the House, which I regret to say I and a number of
the Committee were not at because we were finalising our report
on the occupied territories in Palestine, you were asked a question
on the progress on water in Africa. You said that to move forward
what we needed was more investment, effective expenditure of aid
and the right structures. You then went on to say currently we
do not have the right structures and you would like to see some
changes. What are the right structures and how are you going to
build that? Again, observing what was said to us at the very first
briefing in Addis, we are being asked to do more with less and
our ability to deliver in detail is pressured, it would be fair
to say, although not necessarily compromised. What are the structures
you think you need within DFID to deliver more effective aid and
more investment in ways that will actually achieve the targets?
Hilary Benn: Your question is
about within DFID but is it also about the right structures within
countries and globally?
Q225 Chairman: It is both. What are
you doing here in the UK to ensure you have the structures to
reach out, and what are you doing in the country to ensure that
when you do reach out you are able to apply effectively the programme
and actually deliver identifiable results?
Hilary Benn: The first thing we
are doing is to improve our capacity to deal with it, both in
policy terms in having a bigger team than we have had before and,
secondly, to commit to invest more money. You will be aware of
the commitment to double and double again our investment in water
and sanitation in Africa to get to £200 million by 2010-11.
I can tell the Committee we will publish shortly an assessment
of our expenditure in 2005-06. Our expenditure on water and sanitation
in Africa in 2005-06 was around £78 million, which is up
about 15% from the 2004-05 figures so in demonstrating our capacity
to invest more we are making progress overall. The second thing
we are doing is to concentrate our efforts on particular countries
where we can either help to make a difference, because there are
a lot of people who do not have access to water and sanitation,
or countries that are most off-track. As you know, in Asia, as
far as the MDG is concerned, it is on-track for water and off-track
for sanitation, and in Africa it is off-track on both. That is
why we are particularly focusing on the four most off-track countries
in Africa, Ethiopia, DRC[1],
Sudan and Nigeria, along with Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Zambia,
Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda as far as Africa is concerned, and
India, Bangladesh, Nepal, China, Pakistan and Vietnam in Asia.
That is the second thing I would say. I would be interested in
your impressions of how you think it is going with sanitation
in Ethiopia because when I talked to the team in November I have
to say I was pretty impressed by the way in which they were going
about their work and working with others given the ambitious plans
the Ethiopians have to try to improve coverage. More broadly,
as you know, when I published the call for action if we are going
to get the world to focus more on this, because frankly we all
took our eye off the ball, that is the story that we are talking
about here. Kevin Watkins and co of the UN Development Programme
produced a wonderful Human Development Report this year.
I think we should have that every year and that is one of the
things I have called for and we are talking to UN Water about
making that happen. We should have one meeting a year where we
get together to discuss progress because that is a good way of
encouraging people to do more. In-country you need one lot of
people coming together to draw up a water and sanitation plan,
and you will no doubt ask more questions subsequently why it has
worked in some places and not in others. In so far as there is
international help, we as donors, as always, need to get our act
together. The UN, with its 23 different agencies all having a
finger in the water pie, if that is not a contradiction in terms,
needs to get their act together. One of the other proposals I
have made is that within each country one UN organisation should
have the lead responsibility: how you make money flow more effectively,
how you get water and sanitation to figure more prominently in
PRSPs[2],
how we get the range of international organisations, World Bank,
EC donors, who are spending more on water—having taken our
eye off the ball we are seeing a growth—to make sure that
that money flows effectively and can be used. What DFID is trying
to do is focus on particular countries, support a range of international
activities, various partnerships and so on, which no doubt we
will come on to discuss. In a country like China I think it is
fair to say, because Ian was reminding me of this, we funded some
research which helped to lead to the process of change. The Chinese,
I think you would say, have got it through the Global Water Partnership.
As we know, in China once they get convinced that this is something
they should do, they do it big time to a big scale. In the end
it is about identifying where we can make a particular contribution
to help the international system to work better, to increase the
political pressure plus focusing on particular countries where
we can make a difference. That, in a nutshell, is what we are
trying to do.
Q226 Chairman: One of the comments
we had, both before we went and while we were there, was that
the specialist expertise that exists within DFID is rather limited
and actually reduced. We met and spent time with Simon Kenny,
the infrastructure adviser, and Mark Harvey, the water adviser
seconded to the Ethiopian Ministry of Water, and we were very
impressed with what they were doing. The question left with us
is how many more of these people are there and how able are you
to apply them in other areas. We went to Ethiopia because of the
projects, we saw some projects: on a community in a hill area
which was effectively enabled through the World Bank which DFID
supports, the other in a water-stressed area which was a WaterAid
project which Quentin Davies has pointed out DFID did not support.
Richard Burden made the point that that was an area where the
cost of accessing water was higher than the highland areas but
the distribution of resources was no different. Although they
had a bigger challenge, they did not get better resources. That
presumably is what advisers and specialists would help to do,
yet the impression we get is you do not have enough of those people
to enable you to deliver that kind of project anywhere else.
Hilary Benn: I do not think that
is quite fair. We have specific water expertise in the 10 countries
in Africa and the six in Asia which I just listed because those
are the ones we are focusing on. We have about 38 infrastructure
advisers with relevant water experience and that is up since 2004.
We do other work to make sure that staff knowledge is kept up
to date. I would say that the real issue is not that but how you
get the politics in countries to work to raise the profile of
water and sanitation so that people demand these changes. Picking
up the point you made, Mr Bruce, if you have countries where the
funding for water and sanitation is unevenly distributed in the
end it is going to be demand from below that is going to make
the change. All the evidence from history, and it is our story
in this country, is when people finally make their voice heard
that they are not going to put up with this any more—and
we are sitting in a building that was part of that because when
the Thames stank in the 19th century finally people in here began
to get the message—people in the local authorities start
building the water supply and sanitation. That is how we moved
as a country where we had exactly the same sort of problems as
we have today and you need the same process in developing countries
too. I would ask the question of the team when we started work
on this, when I came to the conclusion we were not getting enough
on water and sanitation and needed to do more what actually made
that happen was conversations with people on my visits, most famously
a meeting in Tanzania. We spent an hour with a group of villagers
and we discussed everything, health, education, transport, jobs,
agriculture. In the end I asked the question "what is your
one priority" and the women said water. I reflected on that
and thought if that is what people are saying why is that not
being heard by the political systems in countries so that politicians,
governments, plans, PRSPs respond by doing the business on water
and sanitation.
Q227 James Duddridge: You said how
important local government was in this area in the United Kingdom
and increasingly elsewhere. When we were in Ethiopia there were
fundamental weaknesses within local government. We visited one
town where the NGO was doing all the work. All the budget at a
local level was being spent straightaway on salaries and there
was no significant capacity. There were lots of competing priorities
in local government. What is the department doing to ensure that
national money flows down to a local level effectively and that
national governments are encouraged to develop capacity at a local
level, because ultimately that is where the ownership is going
to be?
Hilary Benn: That is absolutely
the challenge that we have. My colleagues may want to say more
about some of the countries we are working in to try to support
the government in doing that. It is about clarity of responsibility.
Unlike national health and education ministries, you do not often
have a national water ministry. Surprise, surprise does water
figure as prominently in PRSPs as it should do? The answer is
no, it does not, although it is now figuring more in PRSPs than
was the case in the past. We were just discussing the figures
this morning. I think it is now up to about 50% from about a quarter
five years ago. That is one example of the efforts that we and
others, and government themselves, are making to bring greater
attention to this. The second thing I would say is where you have
local authorities with that capacity they face a whole host of
problems. Take the urbanisation of the developing world, that
is where a lot of the growth in the population is going to find
itself in urban and peri-urban areas and there you have got a
whole list of questions: can they get access to finance, the whole
issue of sub-sovereign lending, because they are the ones who
are going to have the responsibility to make these thing happen.
Can you sort out issues of land tenure and settlement? One of
the big problems you have in cities is informal settlements everywhere.
The authorities do not want to recognise that because people are
squatting on land that is not theirs. On the other hand, the economy
of the city is dependent upon the labour of the people who come
to the urban areas so at what point do you regularise this. One
of the ways in which you regularise it is to take a decision to
supply electricity to the settlements or take a decision to supply
water and sanitation. I think that we need systems in countries
that support local authorities in taking on that task, but the
real answer to building a capacity is, in the end, for people
to say what are you doing about it. That is what is going to turn
people's attention to work on that in a way they may not be working
on it currently.
Mr Curtis: I just wanted to add,
the way we look and learn from experience elsewhere. Uganda provides
a very good experience of where we have worked with the government
and the Ministry of Finance in establishing procedures to improve
planning but also to improve financial management. Of course in
Simon Kenny we are very fortunate in that he was involved in that
Uganda process and will, therefore, be able to transfer that learning
into the Ethiopia situation.
Q228 James Duddridge: You mentioned
sub-sovereign lending. One of Prime Minister Meles's red lines
was not deregulating the financial service market-place. If local
government and sub-sovereign lending is going to be the way forward,
to what degree do DFID mean to get involved in that space and
encourage deregulation?
Hilary Benn: Are you talking about
deregulation within the countries?
James Duddridge: Specifically in Ethiopia.
Prime Minister Meles said one of his red lines was not to deregulate
the financial services market-place and he would not let overseas
banks come into the country long term. That might be something
that would happen but he wanted to control that slowly, but to
get sub-sovereign lending you need those banks.
Hilary Benn: Private finance is
one potential source. I was thinking more of the international
institutions, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the
European Community. I think I am right in saying if you take the
European Water Facility, for instance, that is in effect funding
projects that are sub-sovereign. The bids come in from particular
urban or local authorities saying can we have funding to get on
and provide water and sanitation. As I reflected on the nature
of the problem, if you accept the argument in relation to urban
and peri-urban water and sanitation, that it is going to be the
local authorities who are going to bear the principal responsibility
for making it happen, then finding ways of giving them access
to finance to be able to do that is an entirely sensible thing
to do.
Q229 James Duddridge: In relation
not to Ethiopia specifically but more generally, what is the Department
doing in terms of building local capacity on water and sanitation
and also doing general research into the sector that is to the
national benefit?
Hilary Benn: Overall, as you know,
we are doubling our research programme and water will be a significant
part of it. We have just agreed this £18 million water and
sanitation research department and we have to ask how do we learn
lessons about what works effectively. Water resource management,
which we will no doubt come on to, is an important part of that.
One of the tasks with research in this area, and lots of others,
is how do you get the knowledge that is there applied. Climate
change and water resource management apart, because there are
big new challenges coming and there are things we need to understand
and work on, broadly speaking there is evidence from around the
world of what works successfully if you have the right set of
circumstances and the right people and it is about putting that
into operation. It is not as if I would say on water and sanitation
that we lack for knowledge about what can work in the right circumstances,
it is how you get people to apply that knowledge and make it happen
on the ground. Take something like the total community-led sanitation
programme in Bangladesh. It has been astonishingly successful
and we played a part in supporting that. You have seen real progress
in that country in bringing sanitation to people.
Q230 James Duddridge: Does DFID pay
for people early on in a career in water and sanitation to come
over to the United Kingdom, or alternatively to go to places like
Uganda where there might be best practice so it is not just DFID
staff who are transferring information but paying for local experts
to develop their level of expertise?
Mr Curtis: What we focus on is
learning within the project and programmes. We have found that
it does not benefit very much to provide training outside of projects
and programmes. In other words, there is little point in training
in a vacuum. What we do encourage is cross-learning so it is outside
learning in particular. Where we are doing something around the
community-led total sanitation programme in Bangladesh, we would
look for opportunities for others in the partner countries in
which we are involved to learn from that experience and bring
it back to their own countries.
Mr Grainger-Jones: Resource centres
that we have set up on water and sanitation support a number of
national academic organisations and those are in Kenya, Nigeria,
Ghana, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and India. A lot of that is about
developing capacity which, in some cases, would involve sharing
knowledge between countries so we are trying to encourage that
through our resource centres as well.
Mr Briffa: Building those local
institutions is extremely important. One of the things we found
in the past where we used to fund individuals, and to some extent
it is still a problem, is that you might get highly trained individuals
but in a global job market they start looking for alternatives
and they might disappear to some other international organisation
rather than working in their own countries. It is a real challenge.
One of the ways we try to address that is seeking to build up
local institutions.
Q231 John Bercow: As you know, your
Department has pledged to double its support to water and sanitation
in Africa to £95 million a year by 2008 and then to double
it once more to £200 million by 2011. This prompts the question
in my mind—how do you intend to monitor the distribution
and effective use of those increased resources at country programme
level? What do you anticipate, in broad if not precise terms,
will be the divide in the use of bilateral and multilateral channels
for that increased funding?
Hilary Benn: As you rightly point
out, the specific commitment is to get up to £200 million
by 2010-11. We have a big programme in terms of its distribution
planned in Ethiopia; in Sudan around £20 million annually;
in the DRC it is going to rise from £4 million this year
to £10 million by 2007-08; in Nigeria we are currently reviewing
what the scale of the programme is going to be, and Sierra Leone
also. We will monitor that work in the way we monitor all the
rest of the things we do and we will report on the success of
that. How much of it will go multilaterally will depend on the
outcome of a number of processes, EDF 10[3]
being one and IDA[4]
replenishment being another. We are certainly encouraging the
multilaterals to which we contribute currently and in the future
to be doing more on water and sanitation. I am pleased to say,
as the Committee will be aware, the World Bank has significantly
increased its contribution and we obviously are a share of that
because we are a significant funder of the World Bank. The African
Development Bank is doing the same and other donors are also increasing.
It is not actually possible to say in the end what the precise
share is going to be because it will depend on what the continuing
trend in expenditure of the multilaterals is and, therefore, what
our share is which we can count towards an overall total. In 2005-06
our overall spend on water and sanitation was about £240
million.
Q232 John Bercow: Are you content
that there will be sufficient absorptive capacity to maximise
the effective use of this increased resource? A second question
is about the distribution of funds for Africa. I so richly enjoyed
the list that you provided of the various countries that were
going to be the beneficiaries that I am very tempted to ask you
to repeat and perhaps even to add to it. I wonder if you might
say whether you think that the resources are going to the right
countries or whether you think there is an element here of an
historical accident as to how and why some countries are getting
what they are which is more than others. In other words, I know
you cannot have perfection in these matters but you started to
talk about Sudan and you mentioned the DRC. Do you think that
the resources broadly reflect an assessment of current need or
are they really just, as I say, an historical accident about who
happened to grab first?
Hilary Benn: It is a very good
question. I cannot help saying I am not sure the transcript will
quite be able to capture the full nature of that question and
the way in which it was put. It will stay in my memory if nothing
else. In terms of the decisions we have taken, of course where
we focus our efforts bilaterally is going to be countries where
we have a presence. That is obvious but within the countries where
we have a presence we have decided to focus particularly on those,
as I said in my earlier answer, most off-track countries in Africa.
We are only one bit of the system and we are focusing on what
the UK is doing. One of the reasons why I would like there to
be an annual global report, and an annual event where all of those
who are working on water and sanitation come together, is precisely
so we can ask at a global level the question you have just put.
In other words, let us look at the totality of the needs and what
each of us is doing here. As for aid in general, it is hard to
say to other bilateral donors "Actually the country in which
you are working has more than enough compared to the other countries,
can you pack up the programme and go somewhere else". For
all the reasons of presence, relationship and so on, it is much
easier to get the multilaterals to do the balancing work. Therefore,
if we had a place in which the world could come together and have
this conversation then it seems to me we would have a more effective
mechanism of saying who is on-track, who is off-track, what money
is going in, what is the demand coming up from those countries,
what are the gaps and how can we fill them. That is what we need
but we currently lack a place in which the world can do that,
including donors on a collective basis.
Mr Briffa: We have been doing
work in the Department as to exactly where the lack is, looking
at a range of criteria to identify countries that are lacking
funds in water and sanitation. Within Africa we have identified
a population of around 580 million and by focusing on the four
populous African countries, the DRC, Ethiopia, Sudan and Nigeria,
you actually hit half of those. In terms of our country focus
and putting the effort and scaling up, we think we have it about
right.
Q233 John Bercow: I genuinely do
not want to cut across a later line of questioning that Joan will
pursue, and I do not think I am about to do so, but when we were
in Ethiopia we were constantly struck in observing really good
projects by the way in which almost unthinkingly and accidentally
but instinctively the women involved in those projects were relegated
to the back of the room or the back of the queue, so to speak.
It was quite astonishing when we went to one project which was
a woman's organisation where a series of perfectly persuasive
and sincere speeches were delivered but none of them by a woman.
There was a woman with, if I remember rightly, a Master's degree
who was employed by the relevant organisation, Women for Justice,
who ordinarily had other duties but on that day she was serving
the tea and coffee. Where DFID funding is involved, and it is
going to be an increased budget, what steps are you going to take
to ensure that women's roles reflect their training, their qualifications,
their expertise and their local knowledge?
Hilary Benn: I am sorry to hear
that tale because I can think of a number of other projects we
are supporting in other countries where the reverse was the case;
indeed, it was the women taking the lead, taking responsibility
and collecting the money to make it happen in the project I visited
in an informal settlement in Bangladesh a year and a bit ago.
Women have the greatest stake of all in this getting sorted because
they are the ones who spend far too much of the working day, where
there is not a ready supply of clean water, fetching and carrying
it. One of the things we are doing is funding the Water Supply
and Sanitation Collaborative Council's programme to support women
leaders in Africa to argue the case for better sanitation and
water supply. I think your question also highlights a broader
issue which is that we need to do more in relation to gender generally.
That is why we published a Gender Action Plan[5]
having done our evaluation of what we were doing well, which was
a number of things, and what we needed to do more of. I recognise
that doing more to support people who are going to deal with the
problem you have just highlighted would be really important. Another
thing I want to say, and maybe this is going to cross into territory
Ms Ruddock will ask me about: getting sanitation in particular
into schools is absolutely fundamental to ensuring girls continue
to attend. It is also one of the ways in which the message can
be got across about safe disposal of faeces and washing your hands
because those are the two things you need if you are going to
make progress on the sanitation project.
Chairman: For the record, the organisation
which was entirely fronted by men was called the Woman and Children
Development Organisation. Women for Justice was actually fronted
by an extremely able, feisty women, a former minister, who had
established that women work 20 useful hours of the day and could
not find any useful hours of the day that men worked at all.
Q234 Ann McKechin: You referred earlier
to the need to have a global action plan on the issue of water
and sanitation. Your own Department published a proposal in November
last year. Could you advise the Committee whether you have had
any positive response from the international community to that?
What is the feasibility of setting up such a plan within the next
calendar year?
Hilary Benn: I wrote to a lot
of people in the international system and have had a lot of letters
back saying nice things. The question is what do we do. The first
step is we are going to have this side event at the Spring Meetings
which the president of the World Bank is going to co-host to bring
together donors and multilateral institutions to say if you think
that these are a good set of proposals what are we going to do
to make it happen. That is the first thing. Secondly, we have
been talking to UN Water about them taking on the responsibility
of producing an annual report. I think it is fair to say they
have expressed some interest in that because someone has to take
responsibility for making it happen. We have to see whether out
of this meeting in April we can get support for there being an
annual gathering to consider how we are going. We are already
talking to UNICEF[6]
about there being a lead UN body within each country. We have
talked to the UN and we have talked to UNICEF, because you could
see how in a number of countries it would probably be UNICEF,
but in the end it is for the UN system to determine which of the
various UN bodies who have a finger in the water pie in a country
are going to take the lead. That is for the UN to sort out. We
should just say to the UN, please get your act together and give
one body responsibility within the country for making progress.
On the other two elements, one national water and sanitation plan
in-country, that is about continuing discussion in countries with
government so they come up with a national water and sanitation
plan, some have them and some have not; and, underneath that,
once you have the plan, there is one body to bring all the people
together for making it happen. In summary, what I would say is
it struck a bid of a chord. When you look around the system and
see that a lot of people are doing more now than they were in
the past having gone through this journey—did a lot, eye
off the ball, coming back up—I think it is as good a time
as we have had for some years to make progress. The honest answer
to your question is it depends whether others are persuaded by
the case we are putting.
Q235 Ann McKechin: You mentioned
several times people taking their eye off the ball. Water and
sanitation is an issue which requires continuous long-term sustainable
funding if it is going to work. The reason why, in many cases,
it has never worked is because people have been taking their eye
off the ball and we are going through a cyclical motion where
it sometimes is in fashion and then goes out of fashion. On the
issue of funding, it was certainly clear to me visiting Ethiopia
that they have an ambitious plan about water and sanitation but
it is unclear how, if the capital investment is made by donors
and related to donor finance, at the end of the day they are going
to sustain the necessary finance to maintain the systems and the
capacity. That seems to suggest that donors are going to have
to commit themselves over a very extensive period of time to considerable
amounts of funding. Has any consideration been made by your Department
about whether we should be looking at something such as the International
Finance Facility mechanism, which we are currently using for immunisation,
on the issue of water and sanitation so that there is some form
of ring-fencing? How can people make plans which are going to
last 30, 40 or 50 years without some degree of certainty at the
end of the day that they will have funding to maintain it? It
suggests to me we could end up back with the same problem when
someone takes their eye off the ball again.
Hilary Benn: We have debated this
at some length. The truth is there are different ways you can
do it. If a government gives appropriate priority to water and
sanitation as part of its plans and it has donor finance coming
in, in some cases in the form of direct budget support, it has
its own resources it can raise, it has the capacity to spend it,
it has the local authorities—going back to Mr Duddridge's
question—that have the capacity to deliver on the ground,
then increasing aid through debt cancellation for those that are
benefiting, increasing aid as part of a general programme support
to the country, that is one way in which you can do it. You raised
a very important point about making sure that once you have done
the capital investment there is a means of paying for the maintenance
and the infrastructure, partly by local authorities, if they will
take responsibility for the water supply system, or the company,
or whoever it is being able to devote sufficient resources to
the maintenance. It raises an interesting question as to what
extent people who are receiving water and sanitation services
should contribute, and that is a different one for countries to
grapple with. Then you have something like the EU Water Facility
which is the nearest you have to a dedicated form of finance.
So far it has got two rounds but we do not know what its future
is going to be. I think the water and sanitation issue should
be put on a permanent basis as part of EDF 10. Whether everybody
else in Europe will think that is the right thing to do I do not
know. The reason I say that is the first round was heavily oversubscribed
so the demand is there. If it is oversubscribed, the conclusion
you might draw is we should provide more finance so that more
of these projects can be funded. The difficult thing is to what
extent does the process of bidding for funding from the EU Water
Facility fit in with what the government is doing in the country
on the rest of water and sanitation. To what extent is it a distraction?
Does it take away capacity? How can we make the two bits fit together?
It is the old dilemma: vertical funds over here and other ways
of providing support to countries over there. I do not know the
answer to the question whether we should go more in the direction
of more ring-fenced funding for water and sanitation. It depends
whether the countries can make their own systems work effectively
with rising aid and their own resources.
Mr Briffa: I think the Secretary
of State is right to highlight the distortionary impacts of external
financing. As long as financing for capital expenditure remains
off national budgets then the link to operation and maintenance
will not be made. We really need to get that embedded within national
programmes.
Ann McKechin: That seemed to be a very
weak process when we were speaking to people in Ethiopia. There
were very ambitious plans, very worthwhile plans, but there seemed
to be very little thought about who was going to sustain it and
where the taxable income streams within the country were going
to be located to sustain those systems. It does suggest to me
that if we are going to invest millions and millions of pounds
in these kind of ventures we need to spend a lot more time thinking
about what the end result is going to be.
Q236 Mr Davies: We did in Ethiopia
come across a number of projects where the local community had
set up a structure, often with help and support from an international
NGO, to provide long-term finance to make sure that the project
was maintained. For example, there would be small charges for
water either on a per head basis or per amount of water drawn.
It is perfectly possible to conceive of providing the long-term
viability of these projects without necessarily having to meet
the requirements of fitting in with the central government's priorities
or plans.
Hilary Benn: I think that is right.
There is a distinction between rural water supply and urban. I
agree with you. You have a borehole and as long as someone takes
responsibility for maintaining it, and it could be the local village
water and sanitation committee, someone has a bit of training,
they can get the flanges when they wear out and so on, and then
collect money. In the Bangladesh example it was an urban area
but it was a distinct community because it was an informal settlement.
They had a scale of charges and they collected from people according
to their ability to pay. You find a local solution which provides
sufficient funds to ensure the maintenance. It is rather different
when you are talking about an urban water supply system with pipes
and connections.
Mr Davies: It may be, in that case, the
urban local authority can take control of the situation. It is
perfectly possible to conceive of an NGO who would charge a sufficient
amount of money and has appropriate management structures in place
to maintain it on that basis. Can I just make one point? Mr Briffa's
instinctive reaction is that the best way of building these things
is through the government and plugging in to the government programme.
We are back to this old dilemma about DFID being increasingly
obsessed by the need to deliver its budget through budget support,
or if for some political reason you have to suspend budget support
finding an alternative that is very close to it, rather than being
willing to support NGOs. I want to be pragmatic. I know you are
about to say it is horses for courses and we must not be dogmatic
in either direction and I agree with that. I am simply taking
this opportunity to express to you the view I have formed that
there is an undue bias in DFID in the way they deliver these programmes
in water and sanitation in particular.
Q237 Ann McKechin: My point was referring
to major items of infrastructure such as reservoirs and hydro
supply which I do not think any NGO would ever in a month of Sundays
attempt to try and fund.
Hilary Benn: With respect, I would
not accept the old accusation of bias. Just on budget support,
it is 22% of our bilateral partners so can we please get this
into perspective.
Q238 Richard Burden: According to
the Human Development Report almost one in every two people
does not have access in the developing word to improved sanitation,
which is well off-track in meeting the MDG[7]
as far as sanitation is concerned, and more than in relation to
water. We are guilty of this ourselves in the title of this inquiry
because we refer to the whole thing as water and sanitation. We
are getting increasing evidence from a number of quarters that
you should not just see sanitation as an adjunct to water programmes;
it needs a separate strategy. It needs separate resources and
a distinct identity, both in terms of ensuring investment goes
into it but also so you do get the emphasis on things like washing
hands, prioritising hygiene, all those kinds of things. That does
not come from something where it is just tacked on to the end
of a programme for water. Would you agree with that?
Hilary Benn: We would agree the
two have to be integral. You want organisations and structures
at the village or local authority level which take responsibility
for both. I think our experience has been to try to keep it simple
with a simple message: safe disposal, wash your hands. Partly
it is about attitudes and approaches. When we were running a campaign
within the office on this there was a big sign in our atrium at
DFID which said "We do not defecate in the open in this village."
That was the sign, the point being made we should do things in
a different way. Going back to the point about sanitation in schools,
one of the ways you can help to change attitudes is by getting
children to understand the importance of using the loos and washing
their hands and hopefully taking that knowledge back to their
families. We provide a lot of support as part of our education
work to ensure there are appropriate loos provided, both for the
reasons we are discussing now and also to ensure that all girls
get into school. The Bangladesh example is a really impressive
one and we provided a lot of support for that. It reached, in
its first five years, about 7.7 million people. The approach there—and
colleagues may want to say more about how it worked—was
there was a big drive, a big push, and it changed attitudes and
people did it in a simple way. Maybe it is partly that people
find it more difficult to talk about this. With clean water you
do not get embarrassed. How you deal with what comes out of your
body maybe you do not want to talk about so much but you see the
consequences of failing to deal with it in clogged up sewers and
plastic bags, the famous flying toilet, tossed in the corners
of cities. On my recent visit both to Freetown and Monrovia, it
was just an old system that had completely packed in and was a
complete mess. In terms of the lessons about sanitation and what
works in changing attitudes, does anyone want to say anything?
Mr Curtis: What is really encouraging
is the transfer of experience from Bangladesh to India. I would
also say that UNICEF have played a tremendous role in this, as
have the Water Supply and Sanitation Council, in raising awareness,
running an advocacy campaign around the importance of sanitation,
and using quite high profile individuals such as Ronnie Kasrils,
who was the previous Minister of Water Resources in South Africa,
to promote this.
Hilary Benn: The other thing at
a global level that we can claim a little bit of credit for is
pressing for the sanitation target at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development and being successful in that. At least somebody is
trying to measure progress against that and that did not exist
before. It was the UK that made that happen.
Q239 Richard Burden: That Target
Strategy was going to be my next question. At the theoretical
level it has been prioritised and it is very clear in that. Is
there a sorted out action plan for taking that Target Strategy
into action? There are good examples all over the place, Bangladesh
being a classic one of those, but we are still struggling to see
if there is an action plan to back that up globally.
Hilary Benn: The straight answer
is no, there is not, not everywhere. It comes back to what we
were discussing earlier: within countries water and sanitation
being seen as a priority, the government getting their act together
to be organised and having a plan that looks at the two together.
I agree entirely with the point you made about not trying to tack
sanitation on to water, donors then providing the right support
to enable that plan to be implemented and attitudinal change.
I think those are the kind of elements and some countries are
making progress but others are not.
Richard Burden: Are we perhaps missing
the trick here? I understand entirely what you are saying that
often people have difficulty talking about poo in the same way
as they talk about water. At the same time, earlier on you mentioned
one of the problems of giving this question of water supply a
higher profile is that water, in a number of recipient governments,
does not have the same profile in ministerial terms as say health.
Yet the issue, when taking up the question of sanitation and developing
that, is much more directly a health issue. Could we do more to
prioritise sanitation in national development programmes by linking
it clearly to health issues rather than perhaps tacking it on
to water?
1 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Back
2
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Back
3
10th European Development Fund (EDF 10). Back
4
International Development Association of the World Bank (IDA). Back
5
DFID, Gender Equality Action Plan 2007-2009:Making faster
progress to gender equality Back
6
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Back
7
Millennium Development Goal (MDG). Back
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