Examination of witnesses (Questions 100-119)
DEPARTMENT FOR
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
4 JUNE 2007
Q100 Mr Khan: You have been spending
money since 1997.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Yes.
Q101 Mr Khan: Has the ratio of 57%
in bilateral aid to 38% through international bodies been consistent
throughout that time?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: No, if anything
the multilateral share has dropped.
Q102 Mr Khan: You have talked about
the advantages of bilateral aid—for example, more control
and accountability.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I am a believer
in both approaches. For a start, you cannot make multilateral
aid more effective—
Q103 Mr Khan: Has that been deliberate?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: No, it has
not been a deliberate policy of the Government to say that we
prefer bilateral to multilateral. Hilary Benn is very clear on
this—he is strong on effectiveness—thus the International
Development Association, the World Bank's soft loan arm, has done
very well from us over the past few years, because it is an effective
channel. We have been tougher on some of the other multilateral
bodies, as we have discussed. That is part of the reason.
Q104 Mr Khan: What is the trend in
relation to the percentage of the budget that is spent in rural
parts of a country and non-rural parts? The Chairman put it to
you that 75% of people live in rural poor countries but only 66%
of your spend is in those areas. Your response was that that was
quite a crude calculation.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: We would
have to do a special calculation, because the problem with that
figure is that it involves just the direct bilateral assistance.
As I have said, it does not take account of the research programmes
or—
Q105 Mr Khan: Just on that bilateral
assistance, is the graph going up or down, or is it staying level,
for the percentage spent in rural parts of these poor countries?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Do we know,
Sam? If not, we would have to do another special calculation,
as we did for this Report.
Q106 Mr Khan: Do you not know the
answer to that question? You are not sure whether you are spending
more this year in rural parts of poor countries than last year?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: We do not
know for sure, because of the way our programmes are designed—this
is why a special calculation had to be done for this Report. They
are based around the Millennium Development Goals, which deal
with rural and non-rural areas.
Q107 Mr Khan: Do not 75% of the world's
poorest people live in rural areas?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: We agree
with that statement; yes.
Sam Sharpe: The Millennium Development
Goals are important to emphasise here, because they are about
things such as increasing access to primary education and funding
unserved areas, which are predominantly rural. We know that because
education enrolment rates are going up, things are going well
in education in rural areas. What we have not got is the system
so that in every country—each one of which defines rural
and urban differently—we are able to break down, for each
project, how much of what we spend is on rural areas, as defined
by that country or in some other way, or on urban areas. What
we do know is that most of the things we work on are fundamentally
about addressing rural poverty.
Q108 Mr Khan: In your note can you
let us know the direction of travel for the money we invest in
rural areas in the graph that I have talked about?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: We will
have a go, but there was a special exercise done for this, because
of the data problems. [7]
Q109 Mr Khan: That was also a question
put to you by Mr Touhig. He asked whether you choose the easy
urban areas first, and you said, "No, we don't. We don't
choose the easiest areas first." You can see, if you have
a Millennium Development Goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015,
the obvious thing to do is to help those poor people whom it is
easier to help—the rich poor people, if you like—first;
the hard-to-reach poor people you get to afterwards, because it
means your numbers are going up. You can see why a perception
or concern could be that that is what you are doing.
To alleviate and deal with that concern,
you could say, "Hold on a sec; that is not the case, because
our figures show otherwise," or you could say that it was
deliberate, because certain people are easy to reach because of
what national governments, for reasons that the Chairman has alluded
to, may want to do. You might say, "We chose that initially
at the outset, but you see from our graph we are investing more
and more money each year now in rural parts of those countries."
It seems to me that you cannot answer the question.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Those are
assertions. What I was saying was essentially that we try, through
our programmes and our policy influencing, to get the developing
country governments to focus on rural poverty. As we have shown
with three country examples in the Report—there are many
more—most Governments are skewing their allocations much
more towards the rural poor.
Q110 Mr Khan: We are talking about
roughly £40 billion over the last 10 years. You have said
that you wish you had questioned some of the evidence on which
the conclusions were based by the National Audit Office. That
is a failure on the part of both of you, but it does not matter
who is to blame. You presumably do not disagree with the conclusions
that the NAO reached.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I can go
through the recommendations if you would like.
Q111 Mr Khan: No. You do not like
the word "damning". The NAO conclusions are not damning,
in your words.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: No, they
are not.
Q112 Mr Khan: How would you characterise
them?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I would
say they show there is more to do in a number of areas, and I
agree with that. If you want me to go through each of the recommendations,
I will.
Q113 Mr Khan: I will go through them,
if you like. I will ask the questions. For example, what do you
think, when the NAO says that DFID carried out little analysis
of the efficiency of interventions?
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I would
say that for those programmes and projects where we can have a
defined beneficiary population, we did carry out calculations.
For those programmes where, increasingly, we do not have defined
beneficiary populations, but they are national, it is impossible
to do that. The key thing then is to get the developing country
Governments to do the financial appraisals, which we are doing.
Q114 Mr Khan: Your consideration
of the sustainability was said to be limited.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: I completely
disagree with that.
Q115 Mr Khan: Okay, fine. You disagree
with that.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Let me just
answer; I think it is a quite important thing to bring out.
Q116 Mr Khan: You can put it in your
notes.[8]
I have got 10 minutes to ask my questions.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Please look
at figure 3.
Q117 Mr Khan: I have got a number
of criticisms, you see. If I had just two, you could do that,
but there is a third one—that DFID has a strong emphasis
on good governance at central level but its engagement at local
levels has been more patchy.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: We have
a number of examples where we are engaging very strongly at local
levels—the India and Ethiopia programmes, which we have
mentioned, and Mozambique.
Q118 Mr Khan: I suspect that is why
the NAO used the word "patchy".
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: The question
is whether we do enough in every single country. I would always
say we could be better.
Q119 Mr Khan: Another comment is
that DFID spends approximately 25% of its bilateral funding through
budget support, and little work has been done to review the impacts
on rural areas.
Sir Suma Chakrabarti: Well, there
was a multi-donor evaluation, which is mentioned at paragraph
2.10. There is also figure 5, about just one school in Mozambique,
showing the impact of budget support. We have lots of evidence,
and there is an NAO study on budget support coming later this
year. I think we have a pretty good story to tell.
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