Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-26)
MR MYLES
WICKSTEAD, MS
SARAH MULLEY
AND MS
LINDA DOULL
29 APRIL 2008
Q20 Ann McKechin: Linda, you made
some very interesting comments about the problem of conflict of
ownership when the UK has a set policy about no user fees. Professor
Mick Moore of the University of Sussex has queried the value and
the emphasis on ownership because he said that in many cases the
best uses of aid are regional rather than country-led, and he
believes that donors need to make their central concern the quality
of aid. I just wondered how you view the relationship between
ownership, which demands that the recipient country's view be
taken into account; and the second important thing about the quality
of aid.
Ms Doull: Maybe just going back
to the example of the Congo. It is interesting in that it is a
country that does have already a fully developed PRSP with the
donor support behind it, but the government currently in Kinshasa
does not articulate that in terms of its policy development and
the policy that is rolled out countrywide is very weak. So the
question there is again how are donor governments supporting?
Indeed the Congolese Government articulate these policies more
effectively and I think that is one thing that needs to be looked
at, and perhaps because there is a difference between the international
community's views on the Congo that is sort of negating or weakening
that support. If you compare it to somewhere like Afghanistan,
there is a very self-determined government that also receives
huge amounts of technical support to enhance that strategic leadership
role in the country and I think we need to look at why those different
approaches were taken.
Q21 John Battle: In terms of the
quality of aid there are new buzz words around that idea of impact
evaluation and I wonder what sense we can make of these words
in a world in which it is very difficult to get quality standards
for evaluation. Even here in Britain there are great rows going
on at the present time of what the retail price index is and whether
the National Statistics Office is objective or a corrupt body—I
will not make a political comment about that! It is not easy.
We obviously cannot just leave it to the self-assessments carried
out by DFID, can we, in terms of this impact evaluation? There
is a kind of consensus that we should have it, but what would
it look like and how can we build an objective consensus around
it?
Mr Wickstead: I think it is a
very difficult question because it is very difficult, for example,
for individual donors to be able to say that their particular
input has led to this particular result. In a way that was easier
to do under project assistance, where you could say, "We
have built this school, this health clinic," or whatever,
and before it was servicing 500 people a week and now it is servicing
2000. It is easy to judge that impact. As you move along that
spectrum towards budget support and you are aligning yourself
with others then it is more difficult, perhaps, to judge the individual
impact but it is, I think, potentially easier to judge the impact
on the country as a whole, and what you have to do essentially
is to say that the international community has contributed to
these developments, i.e. the MDGs, essentially—more children's
schools. Some of those things are very easy to judge, like the
debt relief that was given in 2005 and this sudden massive increase
of numbers of children getting universal primary education because
of the abolition of school fees—that was a very easy thing
and very quick. In a way this demands a bit of a change of mindset
amongst the donor community too, where they cannot say, "We
did this and this is the result." It is "we" together—the
international community support of this government doing this,
and these are the results. In a way it sounds vaguer but I think
actually that is the route we have to go.
Ms Mulley: I think that is exactly
right, but I think what we need to make sure that DFID and other
donors are doing is supporting country-led evaluation processes,
so this should not be a donor effort to measure development outcomes
in Tanzania—it should be a Tanzanian effort to measure development
outcomes in Tanzania. The second thing I would say is that this
much more broad outcome-focused evaluation is exactly right but
we also need measures which allow us to hold individual donors
to account for their performance and for their delivery, and I
think at the moment that that kind of evaluation is also significantly
lacking. There are no independent sources of data and analysis,
and one of the things we would like to see come out of these international
conferences this year is a commitment from all the donors or from
the EU or from whoever is happy to engage with it to actually
establish that kind of independent process internationally because
we do need to be able to hold individual donors to account and
that needs to be there to complement that more general outcome.
Q22 Mr Singh: I think the issue of
predictability of aid has already been alluded to, but the UK
Aid Network in its memorandum to us stated very strongly that
developing countries need to be able to rely on long term support
in order to implement development strategies. First of all, surely
it is not possible to offer long term support to every developing
country? Surely there needs to be some criteria in terms of stability,
in terms of governance issues. What kind of issues would you look
at to actually recommend a country for that long term predictable
aid? And what kind of models would you suggest that should be
used? And when it seems so blindingly obvious that this is necessary
for a country to develop in some kind of rational, long term way,
why are there donors not going down this path?
Ms Mulley: I think it is absolutely
essential and from a recipient-country point of view you just
cannot plan long-term health interventions or anything else if
you do not have it, so I think we have to look at a way to get
there. You are absolutely right; you do not want to be making
binding, unmoveable 10-year commitments to every country. I would
go back to the point that was made earlier about having a plan
B, so that you can continue to be predictable about the amount
of aid that you give but be flexible about the way you give it.
The other thing I would say is that it is absolutely vital that
those criteria are transparent. So at the moment from a recipient
country's point of view it is often not very clear what the criteria
they are being held to are, and certainly from a civil society
point of view, or from a citizen's perspective, it is difficult
to know what criteria their government is being held to. So I
think the model I would propose is that you make long-term commitments
and you are very transparent and clear about how you are going
to make decisions about delivery on those commitments. The other
thing is that at the moment the recipient countries that go off-track
in whatever way are punished swiftly and severely by the international
community, whereas for donors who do not deliver what they said
they will deliver there is no mechanism to hold them to account.
We have been calling for donors to publish an explanation when
they fail to deliver money they have promised, for example. The
question of why donors do not do it is a complicated one. A lot
of donors have annual budget rounds, so USAID[8]
only gets its money one year at a time, which makes it harder,
and obviously DFID is in a better position than that because they
get three-year budget settlements. But I think the fact that DFID
are able to make 10-year commitments, even though obviously they
do not have 10-year budgets, demonstrates that donors ought to
be able to get around this. To me, the main reason it does not
happen is that in many donor countries aid is highly political
and the flexibility of making short-term commitments is used to
make decisions on the donors' political objectives or strategic
objectives rather than for that long-term impact. But I think
this is an area where we should be able to make real progress
this year. I think the EU has made some very strong commitments
in this area and we ought to be able to build on that to really
deliver on it.
Chairman: A couple of final questions
on the role of coordination and conflict issues in fragile states.
Q23 Hugh Bayley: The first recommendation
on peace and security from the Commission for Africa said to make
it more effective at reducing conflict all donors should be required
to use assessments of how to reduce the risk of violent conflict
and improve human security in formulating their country and regional
assistance strategies. When you read the Paris Declaration it
does not really say anything specifically about conflict prevention
at all. Do you think that the Paris Declaration has taken its
eye off the ball, and in what ways could it be improved to take
greater account of conflict issues in fragile states?
Ms Doull: Certainly from our perspective
the question is what are the drivers of fragility which lead to
conflict issues, and I think the provision of basic services comes
into that. I think there is, as was alluded to earlier, quite
significant emphasis on the provision of basic services by a number
of international donors, so I do not think there is a lack of
recognition of those issues. Perhaps at the level at which that
discussion is articulated it could be better addressed but again
it comes down to what is predictability and the ability of a country
to show that those services are going to be delivered on a regular
basis to a community, particularly in a post-conflict environment,
where there are high expectations of service provision. I think
again it comes down to the fragility of a national government
if they are not being supported to take through the issues. We
have talked about this but if we do not sort these things out
that is another driver for conflict.
Ms Mulley: There is not very much
in the Paris Declaration about these issues and there is a danger
that the aid effectiveness agenda as set out in Paris becomes
an agenda for the good performers. One of the things which is
on the agenda at the meeting in Accra in September is to try and
move this forward. I am no great expert on fragile states per
se but I think we should not underestimate the extent to which
the same arguments apply, so governments in those circumstances
need coordination, predictability and transparency from donors
even more. The question is about being flexible with the modalities
again to make sure that you can give aid in a way that is appropriate.
The way the Paris Declaration is currently monitored tends to
miss some of the fragile states because the monitoring process
depends on the capacity of individual countries to monitor what
is going on with their own donors and obviously fragile states
are less likely to have that capacity, which means they are somewhat
under-represented in the data, which I think is an issue that
needs to be addressed.
Ms Doull: To use Liberia as an
example, it is well documented that fragile states or post-conflict
countries slide back into conflict within five years of that conflict
end. If we take the concept of providing the basic services against
reducing fragility, Liberia right now has 20 donors inputting
into the health sector. The Minister of Health only knows two
of those donors will fund him beyond 2009. That is the Global
Fund and USAID. I think therefore there is a challenge to us to
say "What are we doing?" If he is living with that degree
of uncertainty, we need to question whether that is of benefit.
Q24 Hugh Bayley: In their evidence
Saferworld said, "well-intentioned development assistance
may, in certain contexts, affect the relative advantage of one
ethnic group over another, or affect access to scarce resources—thereby
fuelling tensions and exacerbating the potential for violent conflict."[9]
They concluded, "It is therefore essential that the Paris
Declaration fully examines the extent to which conflict issues
are being taken into account in its implementation".[10]
Whereas I accept very much what you are saying, Linda, that the
needs of post-conflict countries for transparency and predictability
are the same as other countries, would it not make sense to build
into the Paris Declaration a conflict filter which requires donors
to answer that question? Is there a way, for instance, of rebuilding
health care that is going to be seen by some people as favouring
one group over another or of promoting inequalities between communities?
Would it not be a good thing at Accra to suggest that a new filter
is built into the Paris process?
Ms Doull: Yes. That is probably
a good answer. There is the whole issue of health equity and whether
that is what we should be trying to achieve or whether we should
be deliberately targeting services at populations that are most
likely to create disturbance in the country.
Q25 Hugh Bayley: The answers are
not there but the questions should be asked?
Ms Doull: Yes, I think the questions
should be asked.
Q26 Chairman: The Committee has visited
a number of post-conflict and fragile states such as DRC, Sierra
Leone and Afghanistan and we have seen some of the problems associated
with that. In those situations, if you are going to assist in
reconstruction, who should coordinate all this? The reality is
that by definition there is not a functional government, if it
is functioning at all. Should it be coordinated by a lead organisation
like the World Bank, to take Afghanistan? Two different things
happen there. One, the World Bank administers the trust fund so
budget support is being provided. I think I am right in saying
that uniquely in the world it is the one area where the United
States is effectively engaged in budget support. At the other
end of the scale in Afghanistan we also saw money being given
to community development committees to spend, although they were
given it for one year and did not know what to do next, even though
it galvanised communities working together and identifying projects.
It is not coordinated. We have the budget support at one end,
so who should take the lead if you are going to try to rebuild?
I remember John Battle saying, when we came to look at the DRC
something that he could have prefaced by saying heretically: is
actually having an election the first priority or is building
a functioning state a first priority? What is the way forward
and are we doing it in too piecemeal a way?
Mr Wickstead: That is another
difficult set of issues. What is encouraging about what is happening
within the British government at the moment is that there is a
lot more thinking around this issue of state building and building
effective states in which not only DFID but also the Foreign Office
and the Ministry of Defence are engaged, because it is likely
that in these circumstances you will have possibly the need for
some sort of military operation, the need clearly for a humanitarian
operation, the need for state building which takes all those sorts
of things into account, and of course the need for diplomatic
interventions too in New York and elsewhere. I think that is an
imperative development. One probably has to be a bit pragmatic
over this, depending on which particular country you are talking
about and what the historical circumstances may be. From time
to time, as I suppose happened in Sierra Leone, the UK took very
much a lead in those issues and I think that was absolutely fine.
In other cases it may be the World Bank, although the bank is
a little bit constrained because it is forbidden under its Articles
from really getting involved too heavily in political governance
issues. The UN clearly is a potential leader in some of these
things, UNDP[11]
and others, and in many ways I think that is the most appropriate
body as the kind of fallback position if there is no other obvious
person to take the lead. My view would be that one has to be pragmatic
and look at what might work best under given circumstances.
Chairman: Thank you very much, all three
of you, for coming and giving us that insight. Obviously it is
not an easy subject but equally, if you are a poor, developing
country, it is not easy to deal with a huge number of donors with
conflicting agendas, so it is in everyone's interest to try and
improve that interface. Thank you very much indeed.
8 United States Agency for International Development Back
9
Ev 92 Back
10
Ev 92 Back
11
UN Development Programme Back
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