Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-49)
DR MARTIN
GAINSBOROUGH AND
MR RAMESH
SINGH
19 JUNE 2007
Q40 Sir Robert Smith: One of the
concerns expressed to us was about what happened to Sweden, that
by going very much directly to signing cheques and handing them
over to the government, in effect they lost influence because
they were not engaged so much in the day-to-day happenings in
Vietnam and therefore had less credibility and ability to give
advice. Would that be another concern?
Mr Singh: Of course we lose contact.
There is the moral issue; if you have fewer staff and not of the
same quality, then a cheque transaction is the best way. Contact
at a general level of engagement is reduced. I certainly feel
that.
Q41 Chairman: You do not get any
suggestions in Vietnam, the doing more with less point, that budget
support is easier to deliver than project support? The concern
we sometimes have is ensuring that budget support is done for
the right reasons and not the wrong reasons, namely because it
is easier to deliver, cheaper to deliver and less staff demanding
if you give budget support, whereas it should be a positive thing:
give budget support because the engagement with government means
that together you deliver more. I suppose what I am putting to
you is: in terms of Vietnam, which camp do you think DFID is in?
Mr Singh: I think it is in the
effectiveness camp. It does work. The state there is capable and
it wants to do it. It is a strong state. It has its own agenda.
I think that is the right reason for doing it but there is, nevertheless,
an efficiency framework that is not totally outside it. That is
the real reason for doing that, particularly in Vietnam, certainly.
I can see that.
Q42 Ann McKechin: Both of you have
commented today that the monitoring systems operated by the Government
of Vietnam are fairly weak. I wondered to what extent they can
be relied on and where the danger of deficiencies lies. How should
donors interact to try to improve these systems? This is about
monitoring and evaluation and where the expenditure goes and how
effective it is.
Dr Gainsborough: Individual projects
presumably are audited and reviewed and evaluated. It is important
to make sure that is a real exercise and not in a sense a paper
exercise. Also, many donors are still setting clear benchmarks
and goals in the broader sense and those probably are specific
in particular projects about achieving particular targets. It
seems to me that there should be a focus on the area of ensuring
those targets are met in terms of disbursing monies.
Q43 Ann McKechin: From the donors'
perspective, the problem is how to justify increased amounts of
spending—DFID is increasing its spending—and specifically
the impact of their intervention on poverty reduction. If you
have poor research and monitoring in government, it is much more
difficult to try and clearly show where that improvement lies.
I am trying to find out what are the best mechanisms for donors
to try to improve monitoring and evaluation and to make sure that
they can, in turn, tell us the taxpayers where the impact has
been.
Mr Singh: At one level, Vietnam
has an amazing capacity to produce quantitative data. You just
need to go to any village and ask any question and they will be
able to flick over the diary and give you a quantitative answer.
A certain structure does exist. The question is about capacity
and intention. I think quantitative data is collected on a large
scale in Vietnam in every village, but I do not think there is
enough capacity either to generate qualitative data or even a
system or attitude to do that.
Q44 Ann McKechin: There seems to
be a weakness about examining the outputs and the inputs. To give
you an example, we visited a village in a rural community and
there was a very good teacher-pupil ratio because the government
had put extra teachers into the schools but they all stop working
at midday. At the same time, almost all the female adult population
was illiterate and there was no attempt to try and take that resource
and use it for what was clearly a very great need within the community
a whole. You are quite right that they can tell you now many teachers
there are and what the teacher ratio is and give you the arithmetical
data, but there seems to be very little about working out how
effective and efficient you can make the outputs. Would that be
fair?
Mr Singh: The capacity, method
and system could be hugely strengthened, both for quantitative
and certainly qualitative data and the ability to synthesise the
data is just not there in smaller organisations; we do have projects
obviously and do a lot of that because we have a presence on the
ground. We continue to rely on the view of people and take a lot
of qualitative data as well through various techniques and methods
of reflections and reviews. That area could certainly be strengthened.
Q45 Ann McKechin: Would you agree
that one way that NGOs and donors could help is if by their own
research they could show that better auditing and evaluation would
lead to greater efficiency in how the money was spent by the Government
of Vietnam if they are trying to find examples?
Dr Gainsborough: It is about cutting
the right tone from the outset of a nascent project or an embryonic
interaction. There can be a sense on the Vietnamese Government
side: we will meet with you, we agree with you, you give us the
money, we will do something which vaguely resembles what we talked
about and then we will have a workshop and we will all shake hands
and it is all done. If we do not want that to happen, and I am
not saying all projects are like that, it is very important in
your interactions to get a real sense that you are working with
serious people who understand each other, that you are working
to a common purpose, and that you are serious about getting real
results and finding ways to measure them. That is easy to say
but hard to do.
Mr Singh: Unlike with delivery
of projects, the impact has to be so much more bottom up. The
impact needs to flow from the bottom end. It is culturally different
as well because we have a system whereby a lot of things can flow
everywhere, from top to the bottom, but flowing from bottom to
top is not really established. That is because of capacity and
also because of the environment but I think it can be done. At
the provincial level, we can discuss anything we want, provided
it is done in a manner that is not simply criticising and it is
much more open and people themselves, communities, can come and
talk about it.
Q46 Chairman: On the whole, Vietnam
is doing well on poverty reduction and it is doing well on most
of the MDGs, certainly better than many other countries, but there
are a couple of areas that have been clearly highlighted to us
where they are not doing very well. The first is HIV/AIDS, and
we did look at a couple of projects when we were in Hanoi which
DFID were involved in supporting. At the urban level, it would
appear that there is an epidemic. I wondered whether you feel
that both the government and donors are doing enough to reverse
this or what more they could do. One that we did not really have
a look at but we certainly had information about was sanitation.
We had been to Ethiopia a few weeks before and seen what they
were trying to do. The fact that there was no systematic programme
was a matter of concern. Just as a by-product, we were looking
at a biogas project outside Hue, which involved effectively diverting
slurry from domestic pigs into a biogas digester. It occurred
to the providers of this that actually human waste from the house
could be usefully channelled in there as well. Effectively, they
were providing people with pressured loos, not because this was
a good idea in sanitation terms but because it was a good way
of feeding the biogas digester. I wondered whether you had any
take on both of these areas where they are off-track: what is
being done and what more could be done. Is there an HIV/AIDS strategy
led by the government; is there a sanitation strategy; should
there be; what is the role of donors?
Dr Gainsborough: I do not feel
qualified to comment.
Mr Singh: I do not have a clear
idea about sanitation at this time. I will be able to provide
that information later[2].
We can say a lot more about issues related to water. I can focus
on HIV/AIDS. We have to recognise that this is a difficult issue
and this is a relatively new problem for Vietnam. It is a cultural
matter.
Q47 Chairman: The time to tackle it is
when it is relatively new.
Mr Singh: That is correct, but
we cannot be mechanistic because it is about culture and attitude
and habits in some ways. The environment in Vietnam allows the
pandemic to grow. To check that, we have to have much more innovative
ideas. HIV/AIDS will not be tackled simply by pumping in money.
The issues of increasing urban poverty, the informal sector and
women's rights are all the difficult bits, as well as the general
relationships in families. The more intricate social and cultural
factors require dealing with it in smaller doses and much more
deeply. I feel that the overall strategy of the government exists.
There is general attention by donors and at one level we see an
overall amount of money is available as well. This is about the
quality of the money. In the countries where we have been able
to make headway in HIV/AIDS it has been through developing innovative
methods of talking to communities and affecting their sexual practices
and dealing with social stigma. That requires a much more diverse
approach rather than a big blanket approach. There is not enough
money available to do that on a smaller scale and everybody is
working hard on that. I have a feeling it will happen. We need
some leverage to open it up. I think the government it happy to
open that up in many places but the social structures, social
fabric, culture and taboos are still quite deep. I think we need
to work on that.
Q48 Chairman: It is also part of
the gender strategy?
Mr Singh: Yes, I think we need
to have space for innovative funding, smaller and much more diverse
rather than mass blanket funding. The bigger money is available
everywhere in the world, as we know, but we need that to be a
little more nuanced and to get a strategy for that in Vietnam.
It can be done and we are doing quite well in that direction.
Q49 Sir Robert Smith: Earlier, you
touched on how the UN was not the right vehicle. Have you followed
at all the attempt to get the UN to act coherently across its
offices with the "One UN" project in Vietnam, even if
you are sceptical about the UN being the source?
Dr Gainsborough: I worked for
the UNDP last year at the university and that was all the rage
when I was in Hanoi. My understanding, and correct me if I am
wrong, is that that has rather stalled. That structure is not
in place. I do not know how quickly it is going to be in place.
If I am wrong about that, I apologise.
Mr Singh: For a while, there has
been the one resident UN co-ordinated presence. Certainly, it
is better than before but I think the power relationship between
different UN organisations is such that it does not work beyond
a particular level. Beyond the communication level at a more operational
implementation level it does not work because the power relationship
is very different between resident representatives. I still maintain
that the UN cannot play the role that international, bilateral
and multilateral development organisations have been able to play,
not least because of its ability to channel money but also its
ability to negotiate.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that.
Your final comment is interesting and subject to debate, the role
between multilateral and bilateral. I think there was a fashion
when people believed that everything could and should be done
through multilateral agencies, whereas in reality a lot of the
innovation is by bilaterals. I guess we are probably now in a
state where the fashion says there should be a balance between
the two. Can I thank both of you for coming in. As I said at the
start, and we will be taking final evidence on Thursday, we will
be producing a report. The objective is to try to get the report
published before the summer. I hope we will succeed. It has been
valuable to have your input because we have obviously talked to
people in Vietnam and physically seen things, but for most of
what we have had, and that is no criticism at all and the country
director is here, we were very much in the hands of DFID in organising
and arranging the programme. We had an extremely good programme
and a good insight. To be fair, I can say that we were impressed
with what DFID was doing but it is really important, nevertheless,
that we hear what people like yourselves think about that, both
in terms specifically of DFID and your own ideas. It has been
helpful to have that evidence. Thank you very much indeed for
coming.
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