Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
MS ELIZABETH
WINTER, MR
MUDASSER HUSSEIN
SIDDIQUI AND
MR DAVID
PAGE
15 NOVEMBER 2007
Q100 Ann McKechin: It is also a matter
of statistics and having some idea of where skilled labour is
based. It would be very helpful if NGOs could do that themselves.
Surely, it is within their capacity to do so.
Mr Page: Obviously, we are monitoring
fairly closely our staff recruitment. We are finding it more difficult
to find Afghans who are competent to do the kind of work that
we were employing them to do four or five years ago. We have had
to look internationally for some of the people we need for our
work simply because a lot of the experienced Afghans we had on
our staff before have gone to take on work particularly in the
UN sector, some of them with government.
Q101 Ann McKechin: This kind of analysis
would be very helpful in finding out where skilled labour is in
Afghanistan, which agencies it is passing between and what the
various agencies are doing in respect of training up and recruiting
new staff. Without that the ability of any government to find
out where skill shortages are and how it will address them in
future is incredibly weak. I put it to you that there is some
onus on the NGO community, as with all other donors, to try to
address this issue because at the moment there are so few skilled
people in Afghanistan.
Mr Page: NGOs realise that they
have these skills and they have been saying to government and
others they would like those skills to be used to help build the
capacity of the Afghan Government. If you go to a province like
Ghowr you will find that the governor who is presiding over a
growing administration where there is an issue of competence,
skill and so on will want NGOs to help in that process. But the
international community and Afghan Government have been quite
reluctant to take that skill and capacity-building help from NGOs.
One does not quite know why. Perhaps part of the reason is that
there is a tendency with the management of all the donor funds
to drive down costs to a point where the job cannot always be
done at the necessary level.
Ms Winter: We will take away this
point.[27]
BAAG will look at it in conjunction with ACBAR[28]
because if this is a recommendation that is coming to us we will
take it seriously. It will be a difficult job to do. Perhaps we
can have a word about it afterwards.
Mr Siddiqui: There is an argument
that NGOs tend to get some of the quality staff. We should look
into it. Having said that, one must also recognise the role that
NGOs have played in developing capacity not only in providing
on-the-job training to people. I can give you a recent example
of the National Solidarity Programme where the Government has
said that in the last year of implementation each district must
have two staff from the local MRRD department seconded to the
NGO implementing the project to provide on-the-job training. NGOs
have been doing that, but some of us have also faced problems
where the Government has not been able to provide its own staff
to deal with it. Further, NGOs have established some training
institutes. BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO, has been running a training
institute and they are providing low-cost training on management
and various other issues. ActionAid had its own capacity-building
unit. We provided training on rural development and three-month
fellowship programmes. There is a demand for it to the extent
that we are now converting our department into an independent
training institute which will provide fellowship training on development
and human rights issues to create a cadre of local development
workers who can work in the communities. Therefore, at one level
one must look at the argument that NGOs have provided not only
on-the-job training but contributed otherwise to developing capacity.
Chairman: I appreciate that you take
that point and on that basis we will come back to it.
Q102 Sir Robert Smith: Obviously,
one of the positive experiences in Afghanistan has been the ability
to go to a school and sit with a whole lot of girls with textbooks
who are studying, meeting women Members of Parliament and visiting
micro-finance initiatives that mainly benefit women because they
are more likely to repay loans than men. But underneath we heard
concerns that lack of faith in the formal justice system meant
that a lot of people looked to traditional justice and a number
of attitudes to women and their involvement were still very negative.
At some meetings we could not meet the women members of CDCs because
we did not have a female interpreter. When we met the President
he cautioned against the idea of radical approaches because of
the lack of popularity and there was a need to move at the pace
at which society was moving. What is your view of the position
of women and where it is going? What is the role that NGOs can
have in increasing the voice of women in parliament and in local
consultation?
Mr Siddiqui: There is definitely
a level of progress in terms of women's participation. We all
agree that we cannot go for radical developments. There is a definite
lack of faith in the justice system which is reflected in the
latest human rights report on Afghanistan by UNDP. That argues
that perhaps there must be a level of correlation between the
traditional justice system and formal justice system. Having said
that, NGOs have been providing support in terms of making staff
available on the ground to work with women separately. For example,
when we are implementing the National Solidarity Programme or
any other community-based development programme we tend to employ
women staff to go and work with women, understanding the fact
that men cannot go and work with the women, but the same thing
has to happen with the Government as well. Unfortunately, that
has not happened. It employs more and more women staff who could
go and work with women. We are not at a stage in Afghanistan where
men can go and work with women directly. I think that NGOs have
pretty much pitched in over there.
Mr Page: We have certainly been
involved in trying to empower women at the local level where we
work. We have always done this on a holistic basis in the sense
we have been working with communities and have tried to provide
whatever support we can for women. We provide women resource centres
in which we give vocational training; we have provided literacy
and health training and so on. But we do that within communities
and with the support of communities. Obviously, there are dangers
if one has a one-item programme and one goes into communities.
It is valuable to go in and say that you are helping with agriculture,
veterinary work and so on and also want to help women to become
more educated. It is extremely encouraging to see small self-help
groups of women in Badakhshan in particular putting together small
amounts of money and enabling one of their number to buy a cow,
or whatever it is, and start a small business. As you say, women
are good repayers and have tremendous acumen. Some of the projects
that we are running with our CDCs are managed by women. From what
we hear, they are also doing very well. One issue that emerges
from some of the other submissions is whether the Afghan Government
is itself perhaps providing the kind of funding for women's groups
and civil society organisations that take an interest in these
things. It is not doing so. DFID has recognised that by funding
certain initiatives for women. There is a question about how you
fund women's groups to raise the voices of women if that is not
something that perhaps traditional society would naturally see
as a priority. It is part of the broader question whether you
need to find a better balance between, if you like, supporting
the Government and seeing that as the main source of progress
or whether you should also fund directly civil society as part
of a better balance. Therefore, you seek to support civil society
and its pressure on government to make it more accountable by
that means.
Ms Winter: While it is true that
one should not have radical, insensitive or not properly thought
out solutions so one can just tick a box saying that one has said
one will do something about women and therefore it is all right,
that does not mean one should be too nervous of doing anything.
There are solutions to this which will have to be gradual and
long term. That means funding civil society development and providing
support to people who run, often at great personal cost, shelters
for women who have been subjected to abuse of all kinds and who
are also working very hard to bring them into the judicial system
and persuade members of the judiciary that they have a case and
in turn they should try to support them. All these things take
a lot of time. Meanwhile, there is a lot of underlying violence.
Women are a particularly vulnerable group as are the children
they look after. In a positive note CPAU (Co-operation, Peace
and Unity) has done work in community peace-building which we
strongly believe is another matter that ought to be supported.
It has found as a spin-off that the age of marriage has increased
in the communities and the amount of physical violence towards
women decreased. There are sensitive, strategic ways in which
this can be tackled, and I think you have seen some of the recommendations
in the submissions that have been made to you.
Q103 Sir Robert Smith: Last night
the all-party parliamentary group met members of the Afghan Parliament.
When I first put this scenario I got a one-line answer: there
was no problem with traditional justice and this issue did not
exist.
Ms Winter: Perhaps we can look
at who it was who said that.
Q104 Chairman: Men, I think!
Ms Winter: Part of the problem
is not wanting to have shameful things in the public domain. If
you are in a meeting like that you may feel that that is the appropriate
thing to say. If you talk to women it is a very different story.
If women begin to speak out on their own behalf, as many have
done, they are also subject to assassination. There have been
two or three notable examples of that recently. I think the international
community needs to take a strategic view, put its money where
its mouth is in terms of the commitments it has made and pursue
a long, slow process in supporting the Afghan Government and others
in dealing with this.
Q105 Chairman: When we raised with
President Karzai that originally it had been agreed there would
be a female vice-president and female ministers—now there
is only one female minister and she is the minister for women—he
said that he did not believe in gesture politics and what have
you. Our response was that if he was telling us there were no
able women we had met some of them. There seemed to be a reluctance
right at the heart of government to have women role models. Is
that something on which NGOs engage with government? It is not
a question of putting people in particular situations; government
is a good place to show that they are doing departmental, functional
jobs, not `women's jobs', and just happen to be females.
Ms Winter: NGOs have discussed
this and continue to press for it. There is no question that there
is a problem at the heart of government. Having said that, it
has taken us a very long time in our own society to get to the
state where women begin to take positions of seniority. Many times
in the past NGOs have argued with the UN and governments and asked
why there are no women on their missions. As soon as you start
to see women do these kinds of things you get a different perspective.
It is part of the education process. We have to continue to support
these initiatives.
Q106 Richard Burden: You expressed
some concern earlier on about the future funding of the NSP and
things like community development councils. If we look at it the
other way round, perhaps you can give your perspective on how
you see community development councils developing and their role
in relation to other sub-national government structures. When
we were in Afghanistan there seemed to be a general consensus
among commentators about the importance of developing sub-national
structures to movement in Afghanistan. In addition to your worries
about the money drying up, how do you think they should develop,
and what should their roles be?
Mr Page: Mr Siddiqui would like
to say something about this. I shall happily contribute, but he
has looked at this recently in some detail.
Mr Siddiqui: The NGOs have been
quite categorical from 2004 when the CDCs were just one year old
in demanding that there be some legal recognition of these institutions.
Millions of dollars have been put into them and capacity has been
built up at local level. As we all know, elections have taken
place. This is something very new for Afghanistan because for
30 or 40 years elections have not taken place. Recognising the
importance of CDCs as institutions, NGOs demanded that there be
a degree of legal recognition. To that there was initially no
response, but in September 2005 the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation
and Development established a working group to look at the drafting
of a law which would give some degree of legal recognition to
the community development councils. NGOs were invited to participate
but unfortunately it was a one-off event and NGOs heard of it
only later. In December 2006 there was a presidential decree about
a CDC bylaw giving those bodies legal status. In its current form
that bylaw is vague and ambiguous in terms of whether they are
local institutions of governance or parts of civil society. I
think the response of NGOs varies; there is no single position
where all NGOs say that CDCs should be only local civil society
organisations or part of the government as they are in other developing
countries. The current national consultation process in Afghanistan—today
is the last day—on CDC sustainability and its future is
supposed to look into it. NGOs did come out with a position paper
on the CDC bylaw which gave a very detailed analysis based on
their interaction with communities and our own field staff on
the ambiguities in the current bylaw and legal status. What we
have been arguing is that the Government has to come up with a
clear and coherent strategy as to whether CDCs are village councils,
as envisaged in chapter 8 and article 140 of the constitution
of Afghanistan, or they will just be civil society organisations.
Further, the CDC bylaw talks about an inter-ministerial working
group which has to see whether it is limited only to MRRD and
citizens or should be used by other ministries. It is unfortunate
that the steering committee does not include the Ministry of the
Interior which is the heart of governance in Afghanistan. There
have also been contradictions in that MRRD is going ahead with
the CDC bylaw but at the same time an independent directorate
of local governance has been established within the presidential
office with the status of a cabinet ministry to look into local
government issues. There is no coherence at government level which
makes things quite ambiguous at village level where people are
not clear whether CDCs will or will not stay. Their performance
also varies depending on the quality of facilitation and the time
NGOs can spend working with them. There is a definite recognition
that they are an important institution. A lot of money has been
invested and capacity developed in those institutions. One should
not let go of CDCs; as a project of NSP they should be taken forward.
Q107 Richard Burden: It is interesting
that you refer to the commission that has been established nationally
under the president's office. Presumably, that is Mr Popal's commission.
The way it was put to us both by him and others was that that
commission was established precisely to bring coherence and empower
not specifically CDCs but to give some oomph, if you like, to
the sub-national agenda. You appear to be saying that that commission
could be a way of muddying rather than clarifying the waters.
Do I read you aright?
Mr Siddiqui: One hopes that the
directorate of local governance, the independent commission, produces
greater coherence, but for me it is unfortunate that the day before
yesterday it refused to participate in one of the sessions which
was supposed to look at the sustainability of CDCs, saying that
by its participation in the national consultation process with
CDCs it did not want to give legitimacy to the recommendations
that would come out of the consultation process. If it is supposed
to bring coherence it should actively participate in organising
the consultation which brings together different ministries and
members of CDCs to Kabul. Three hundred delegates are sitting
there to discuss and make recommendations on how CDCs should function.
Everybody—donors and civil society organisations—is
there, but we learned that the independent commission on local
governance was reluctant to participate, thinking that that would
give legitimacy to the recommendations that came out of it and
that might not fulfil its expectations. Their participation in
organising the national consultation process was also missing.
It has been driven very much by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation
and Development.
Mr Page: The CDCs have emerged
as a very important unit of local governance. It would be a great
shame if through lack of funding or clarity that building block
was not established for the future. A lot of piecemeal work is
going on to build up from the bottom, which is something in which
NGOs are interested. CDCs are being built into clusters so that
there is a greater demand-led approach to a lot of the issues
that affect them, but at the moment it is all very piecemeal.
We are doing something like this in Samangan at the moment with
the support of the Swiss Development Corporation. There is no
clarity about this nationally. It needs a national approach. I
think that now everybody recognises that a great deal has been
done to try to improve the capacity of the national government
ministries, but if you go to the provinces that is where the concentration
should now take place. Essentially, you have governors appointed
in Kabul. There is a bit of a clash between the centralising tendency
of a lot of the thinking about how to drive forward progress and
the natural diversity of Afghanistan and tendency towards autonomy
in a lot of these regions. Marrying up these things and working
out how democracy should be implemented at that level is something
that needs to be sorted out.
Q108 Ann McKechin: Given the changes
that are taking place and the proposals for sub-national governance,
where do you think the National Solidarity Programme should fit?
What should be its role? How do you see it being developed?
Mr Page: We believe that the National
Solidarity Programme has achieved a great deal and helped to set
these building blocks. What one would like to see is a continued
stream of funding, not just for two years in a particular place
but thinking about how it might be funded over a much longer period.
From the building block which essentially sets up these elected
councils one must start to do the work of development, encouraging
all sorts of initiatives to make sure that the local economy grows,
education comes and so on. That is the natural focus for doing
it and it would be a great shame if it was abandoned.
Q109 Chairman: We have discussed
briefly the importance of agriculture. Mr Mansfield made it clear
that one had to bring in other livelihoods as well. Specifically,
what do you think can be done to improve the delivery of agricultural
development? Is it a role for DFID? Is it a matter of supporting
the agriculture ministry, or is there a clear role for NGOs; in
other words, where is the best capacity or potential for developing
that capacity?
Mr Page: Obviously, some attention
needs to be paid to the agriculture ministry because that is not
as effective as it should be. As far as NGOs are concerned, certainly
the experience of Afghanaid is that there is a shortage of money
to do the kind of work that it was doing in agriculture and in
the veterinary field. I think we employ the only Afghan vet in
Ghowr which is one of the most important livestock provinces in
that country. We find it very difficult to get funding for that
work. That is an illustration of the problems. It would certainly
be useful if funding could be made available for some of the frontline
work that has been done which NGOs now struggle to keep going.
That is one way to ensure that this kind of agriculture and veterinary
development continues. If one has to wait until a great number
of issues are sorted out in Kabul these projects dry up and that
sends the wrong message to the people.
Q110 Chairman: Could DFID perform
a useful role in training agricultural extension staff? We have
agricultural capacity in this country which it claims is under-utilised.
By pulling together those people could DFID help to develop with
the agriculture ministry an extension network by training people
locally in such work?
Mr Page: This is not one of the
three issues which DFID regards as its priorities. If DFID was
interested in doing that it would be a great advantage.
Chairman: That is one recommendation
to which we are giving consideration.
Q111 James Duddridge: I should like
to turn to the provincial reconstruction teams. In areas of relative
stability what should their role be going forward? Should they
be disbanded in areas of relative stability?
Ms Winter: They should certainly
have an exit strategy in areas of stability. We have always argued
that their main role should be to bring human security and safety
to an area. If that exists then we argue there is no longer a
need for them and aid and development should be done by civilian
actors.
Q112 Hugh Bayley: In Helmand the
PRT is often described as a military-led initiative, but it appeared
to me to be a good solid partnership between the Foreign Office,
the military and DFID. In Helmand where there is virtually no
UN presence it is very difficult for NGOs to work, yet it is necessary
to provide initiatives to improve quality of life and the rural
livelihoods of people. It is very difficult to see what the alternative
would be if you did not have a PRT to supplement the work that
the national government agencies are doing. Do you share that
view?
Ms Winter: Certainly, in an area
like Helmand it is very difficult for NGOs to operate. Nonetheless,
there has been some capacity in Mercy Corps and others. I think
you had meetings with Nigel Pont. Clearly, you need to provide
some assistance to the population and if NGOs and the Government
of Afghanistan cannot do it there must be an alternative. I do
not believe we argue that PRTs should not exist, but in the past
we would have argued that they were second or third best to expanding
ISAF[29]
outside Kabul and put in real development assistance. There are
now lots of discussions about what effect the military presence
has per se and the lack of single command with the coalition and
so on. BAAG is undertaking some research at the moment to find
out information about some of these issues, particularly from
local populations to gain their experience of PRTs and the stabilisation
forces.
Q113 Hugh Bayley: How would you do
that research work?
Ms Winter: We have undertaken
to take on two independent specialists along with Afghan researchers
to go into three provinces and discuss with people their experience
and to talk to the military, DFID and so on. It is an ongoing
research initiative and we hope that the report will be published
fairly soon. I understand that you will be drafting your own report
before too long, so if we can give you the preliminary results
of that work obviously we shall do so.
Q114 Hugh Bayley: You mentioned working
with DFID. Are you doing field work in Helmand or not?
Ms Winter: Yes.
Mr Siddiqui: Oruzgan and Paktika
are two of which I am aware.
Q115 Hugh Bayley: If you could provide
us with information about consumer experience, as it were, of
the work of PRT it would be very helpful. Having visited four
sites where PRT-supported work was being done, I saw some valuable
tasks being undertaken, but I had no idea how priorities were
decided and in reality the extent to which local people were setting
priorities. We were told that whenever work was proposed in a
particular village there would be a local meeting to discuss the
priorities. If your work can give some insight into how that process
operates and whether it is as sensitive as it could be given the
difficult working circumstances that would be very valuable.
Ms Winter: We have always said
that we need a good evaluation of what work the PRTs do so we
know what is valuable and can be done elsewhere as a result. Certainly,
local consultation is probably fairly thin on the ground and by
and large does not include women, but we will come back to you
on these things.
Q116 Chairman: The problem is that
they are patchy and variable. When we were in Mazar-e Sharif we
learned that the Swedes had been very reluctant to divert their
central government funding but had agreed to do so to fund a hospital.
That was done just to provide visible proof that they were doing
things; it was not their own preferred option.
Ms Winter: That is right.
Sir Robert Smith: The other worry in
Helmand was about the decision to build a school and whether any
thought had been given to the resource consequences of making
it available.
Q117 Chairman: One of the people
we met on our visit summarised the situation by saying that the
problem with Afghanistan was that everything was a problem.
Ms Winter: I entirely agree.
Q118 Chairman: In an hour's conversation
with anybody one goes from total pessimism to considerable optimism.
All of these factors collide, which makes it very difficult for
us to write a report but we shall do so.
Ms Winter: It is very timely and
we are delighted you are doing it.
Q119 Chairman: If you have any further
reflections that you think are helpful in the light of the exchange
this morning please feel free to submit them to us so we can take
them into account. Thank you very much.
Mr Page: We value the opportunity.
27 Ev 72 and Ev 90 Back
28
Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) Back
29
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Back
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