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, 10-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 2007-09. 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.
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