Memorandum submitted by Oxfam GB
Summary
Oxfam GB offer a submission for consideration by the
International Development Committee against the following issues of particular
interest to the Committee:
• The impact of budget support on recipient
countries. Key points are:
1. We support
the UK government commitment to providing more of its bilateral aid through
poverty reduction budget support and sector budget support.
2. An Oxfam
survey indicates several positive aspects of this shift but raised concerns over
lack of results monitoring.
• Gender and the implications of the recently
published Gender Action Plan. Key points are:
1. We welcome
the new DFID Gender Equality Action Plan.
2. We are
concerned that it is not clear how the proposed activities will achieve the
Plan's aspirations.
1. Contribution on Budget Support
1.1 Oxfam
is supportive of the UK government's commitment to provide more of its
bilateral aid via poverty reduction budget support. We are also supportive of
the UK's leadership in providing long-term, ten-year budget support to poor
countries. Oxfam believes that long-term budget support (general or sector
specific) can be an effective tool for reducing poverty, providing one of the
best means for supporting developing country governments to scale-up delivery
of essential services.
1.2 Oxfam's
recent publications 'Essential Services: In the Public Interest' and 'Paying
for People' make the call for donors to provide more long-term predictable
budget support (or sector budget support) to developing country governments
with committed national (or sector specific) poverty plans in place, in order
to assist them with building effective and sustainable public health, education
and water and sanitation systems which are accessible to all. It is, for example, one of the only ways of
enabling aid money to be used to cover recurrent costs, such as training
and salaries of much-needed education and health workers.
1.3 Recent
findings gathered by an Oxfam survey of our country offices in Mozambique,
Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Vietnam on general budget support (as part of the UK
national audit offices assessment of DFID budget) supported our view of the
merits of budget support, but also showed the need to strengthen monitoring on
the ground to ensure results. Key
results were:
1.3.1 Four out of the five Oxfam country offices
agreed that budget support is an effective tool in reducing poverty. In Kenya,
our country program pointed to the success on the ground of the Free Primary
School Education for All Initiative, a result of donors, including DFID,
providing budget support via the Fast Track Initiative for Education.
1.3.2
Our Rwanda office disagreed and questioned whether budget support was effective
or appropriate. They identified failings in the transparency and accountability
of current government spending on poverty.
1.3.3
All our offices agreed that budget support had either largely or partially
increased the ownership or empowerment of beneficiary governments over the
development process.
1.3.4 In Mozambique and Rwanda our country
offices felt that budget support is helping to strengthen their respective
governments' public finance management systems.
1.3.5 However, all our country offices identified the lack
of monitoring of results as the biggest gap in the current approach to
DFID's budget support. The Vietnam office noted the weakness of the monitoring
and evaluation framework of Vietnam's national poverty plan - the
Socio-Economic Development Plan - and
highlighted the difficulties of attribution, in terms of the successes or
failures of DFID budget support on health and education in Vietnam. The
Mozambique office also highlighted the failures of the existing multi-donor
monitoring mechanisms, on which DFID currently relies, and which failed to look
at results on the ground, especially in terms of the impact of budget support
on corruption.
1.4 Related
to budget support is the need to do more to end economic policy
conditionality at the World Bank. The UK has
made excellent headway in using its political and financial muscle to reform
World Bank conditionality. However, the
World Bank and the IMF are still continuing to impose economic policy
conditions on poor countries, as part of their aid. Oxfam believes that the
only conditions that should be tied to aid are those that ensure aid money is
spent in an accountable and transparent manner on poverty reduction. As
outlined in Oxfam's recent report 'Kicking the Habit', economic policy
conditionality has been proven in the past to undermine country ownership,
enhance the unpredictability of aid, and at times do more harm than good in
terms of poverty reduction. The UK government at the IDA 15 negotiations should
repeat its strategy of making a proportion of its IDA contribution contingent on
the World Bank phasing out economic policy conditionality.
1.5 There are emerging concerns over
the possible negative impact of budget support on the work of civil society
organisations working on women's rights. Recent research suggests that those
particularly affected are smaller grassroots organisations, those who have been
unable to respond to the shift in funding toward advocacy work, and those
critical of Government positions, for example, on reproductive rights. Together
with support for government plans and budgets, parallel support is needed to
build civil society skills and capacity to hold governments, bureaucracies and
providers accountable.
1.6
As a member of the UK Aid Network, Oxfam GB also supports their submission to
this IDC inquiry
2. Contribution on Gender Equality
2.1 Oxfam GB warmly welcomes DFID's new
Gender Equality Action Plan 2007-9. It represents a very positive response to
the challenges identified in the 2006 evaluation of DFID's work on gender
equality including that of translating strong policy commitments into actions
that actually make a difference to women and men's lives on the ground. Oxfam
GB along with other development organisations are struggling with very similar
challenges. We also welcome the fact that the process of implementing the
action plan will be led by a senior member of DFID, Mark Lowcock, Director
General Policy and International, as we believe that strong leadership from the
top will be critical in achieving the plans aim of 'changing all aspects
of DFID's business and systems' to achieve greater progress on gender equality
and women's empowerment. Hilary Benn's public launch of the action plan on
International Women's Day and his strong public commitment to provide
leadership on 'putting gender equality and women's rights at the heart of
development' were very welcome.
2.2 We welcome the statement in the
plan 'At its heart, gender equality and women's empowerment is a political
issue, needing a political response, and not a technical one'. This is a critical
acknowledgement of the need to go beyond a technical approach to mainstreaming
gender across DFID's institutional structures and processes, to one which
actually empowers women. As part of this the plan acknowledges that 'making
progress toward meeting the MDGs means
more direct action is needed to promote women's rights and freedoms as ends
in themselves alongside improving women's access to services, and economic
and political opportunities, and reducing violence against women'.
2.3 Our main concern is that it is
not clear how the proposed activities will achieve these aspirations. The
approach proposed appears to be one of mainstreaming the issue of women's
rights into other programme aims without any clear plans for programmes which
are focused on promoting women's rights and freedoms as ends in
themselves. 'Twin-track' approaches
were originally intended as part of the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995
which launched the idea of 'gender mainstreaming'. However, it is not clear how
DFID's gender equality action plan will take forward this 'twin-track'
approach.
2.4 Wide international
experience, including Oxfam's own experience, shows that gender mainstreaming
can very easily become de-linked from the reality of discrimination against
women and the objective of women's empowerment. It thus becomes a technical and de-politicised process which can
lose the potential for transformation of gender relations in sustainable or
meaningful ways. In addition, without additional momentum, mainstreaming can
easily disappear off the agenda.
Therefore, it best supports women if it is accompanied by another
dedicated body of work that specifically focuses on the promotion of women's
rights and can be the source of innovation and inspiration for mainstreaming.
Such a dual approach would provide an integrated strategy and strengthen a
collective DFID voice on the need to achieve women's rights and gender
equality. If DFID is looking for a step change in its work on gender equality
and women's empowerment, we feel this twin-track approach will be critical.
2.5 There is, for example, no mention
at all of support to women's movements who are key stakeholders in this work.
We believe there should be clear objectives on this in the 'Partnerships'
section of the plan. The AWID research mentioned above shows that the
rights-based work of women's organisations has been undermined by recent trends
in funding and donor practices, and the ways in which the process of gender
mainstreaming has been undertaken in many contexts (often a rhetorical gesture
rather than a reality), so that many women's organisations, particularly
smaller ones, are struggling financially. Donors such as DFID need to listen
more to women's movements, in all their diversity, and draw their priorities
for action on women's rights from these conversations. What women's
organisations want is solidarity, sometimes capacity-building and most of all
for donors to invest in them financially in a sustainable way over the
long-term. Alliances with stronger women's organisations would also enhance the
impact of DFID's work to mainstream gender across other sectors. Therefore, we would stress the need for DFID's gender equality action plan to
have a stronger focus on supporting women's organisations, whilst we also
strongly support the statement that 'it is critical that men and boys are
involved in this process of change, particularly in situations of violence,
unrest and conflict'.
2.6 Another area where we think DFID
could articulate clearer objectives beyond the mainstreaming approach is
building women's active participation and leadership in institutions and
decision-making processes at all levels: household, community, national,
international. Making progress on the MDGs will depend largely on a critical mass
of strong feminist voices, and particularly the voices of poor women, speaking
out on women's rights issues in key institutional structures and political
processes, whether formal or informal. DFID has an important role to play in
ensuring that more women have access to those positions of decision-making, and
that a critical mass of both male and female leaders have the capacity and
commitment to lead progressive policy-making on women's rights and development.
2.7 As a member of the UK Gender and
Development Network, Oxfam GB also supports the GADN submission to this IDC
inquiry.
