Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
PROFESSOR CATHY
PHAROAH, DR
DAVID HUDSON,
HETAN SHAH
AND KIRSTY
HUGHES
31 MARCH 2009
Q160 Chairman: If you ask people
in the street what they thought Oxfam did and then asked them
what they thought DFID did, I think 90% of them would have some
idea of what Oxfam did but I doubt if 9% would know what DFID
did. Does that not matter a bit?
Mr Shah: It matters a bit but
I think there is also a strategic question about if you doubled
the advertising budget would it just backfire? We know that people
do not trust messages from government and people are sceptical—and
that is not an unhealthy thing; that is an active citizenship
thing. If we were just going for DFID on billboards saying: "We
do this; we do that"—
Q161 John Battle: If the scepticism
shifts to cynicism, then people will not pay their taxes for development
and it will all fall on the charities, which is exactly where
it went in America. So you rely on Bill Gates to meet the Millennium
Development Goals from his charitable donations, who gives more
than most countries do in his charity. It is not my answer to
the problem but I just detect that in the discourse we are having
we do not think that institution building is sufficiently positively
significant to be a part of the equation.
Mr Shah: It is crucial; it is
just how you do that. For example, DFID could get smarter about
actually making sure that the work that it funds has its branding
on it, and that is something that the UK is less good at than
it probably is overseas.
Q162 Chairman: Have people got the
perspectives all wrong? The Scottish Parliament has its own development
budget; I think it is about £5 million. DFID's budget is
£8 billion. Again, if you stopped 100 people in the street
in Scotland they would tell you an awful lot about Scotland's
engagement with Malawi and absolutely nothing about DFID's engagement
with Malawi, or anywhere else, even though it is 100 times greater.
Surely that matters a bit. What is the point of even having a
separate Department for International Development—which
we had a slightly robust exchange in the House about yesterday?
Are you saying this is entirely a sort of theological discussion
amongst politicians and of no relevance or interest to the wider
public and their engagement and understanding of what we are about?
Ms Hughes: I would not say that
but I think it is about an order of understanding. First of all,
you want people to understand something about the world out there
and not just their own town or their own country; so you want
them to understand about poverty and getting out of poverty. Then
you want them to understand not just, perhaps, that they may have
their own individual moral responsibility to contribute to a solution
but that governments have a responsibility, because that is how
we structure international relations. So you would want them to
understand that it is not only the Scottish Parliament but there
is an overall UK budget—how big it is, what is it going
on—and then it is one step below that if you want to start
having discussions about: who is DFID? Is it important that it
is an independent department (we would say yes)? How does it relate
to the Foreign Office? How does it relate to issues of wider security?
All of those are extremely important arguments; they are about
delivery of aid; they are about effectiveness of aid and they
are also about responsibility as governments and as society. So
I am certainly not disagreeing with it. If you are talking about
communication strategy, it is about how you rank it and where
you start first in terms of which understanding.
Andrew Stunell: It is not a question,
just a comment. I am on the side of the panel here; I do not think
that too many of my constituents know what the Primary Care Trust
is, but they are very, very concerned about the National Health
Service. I think, perhaps, this is an interesting debate to take
forward.
John Battle: Until it is taken away.
Q163 Andrew Stunell: It is important
to have, but it is not important to understand.
Dr Hudson: There is some important
evidence from studies done in the US that general political knowledge
yields very different levels of support for policy issues than
specific policy issues. So if you know about DFID and you know
what DFID does, that might render one type of support, but if
you actually know the specifics of a particular project and outcomes,
you see a very different type of outcome. So, in the study, knowledge
of how the Senate worked was not a very good predictor about whether
particular policies were supported or not. I think it is important
what the public knows about DFID. At a personal level, I think
it is very important, but (and this is a question I do not know)
is there a limit to how much money DFID can spend?
Q164 John Battle: Perhaps that is
why they live in the country that has built up the biggest debt
in the whole world. It does not say much about American politics,
does it?
Dr Hudson: No, but if they are
spending money on promoting DFID's image and public knowledge
about DFID, would it produce a backlash amongst those who would
think: "Why are you spending money telling me this? Why are
you not spending money overseas?" I am not saying I particularly
agree with that, but I could imagine that scenario coming about.
John Battle: I think they are now asking
the questions as to why the whole financial system crashed because
they were not asking questions about it, and they might rethink
the politics as a result of it. America is the worst example to
choose for people who enter politics.
Q165 Hugh Bayley: I think it is a
slightly narrower question that we ought to address in our report.
I have found, on a number of occasions, looking at DFID's work
in the field, not only is there a limited understanding of who
DFID is or what DFID is, almost all other state development agencies
call themselves, for example, CEDA—stressing the Canada—or
NORAID, or US AID. It is something that the Chairman has picked
up on particularly—DFID's brand is not understood as being
a British brand and quite often the funding goes through in partnership
with other agencies, which is a good thing, and it is therefore
seen as a Danish project or a Norwegian project or whatever. Does
that matter? For a long time I have said: "No, it does not
matter at all", but actually we live in a pretty interdependent
world. There is a huge Pakistani Diaspora in Britain; would we
create a better support for aid amongst that public if they were
aware that we were spending £100 million a year in Pakistan
on bringing water, and so on? Is there any merit in DFID looking
at how it brands itself abroad?
Dr Hudson: The enormous irony
here is that DFID has so much to be proud of. DFID is often seen
as a model development agency, both within the development community
and further abroad. So I do not think it would have to do much
to re-brand itself; it is not like it has to generate good news
stories that do not exist—they are there.
Q166 Hugh Bayley: It has a good reputation
amongst the development professionals; the Bank, UNDP and others
say: "You are the people we look to for advice on health
and education", and so on. However, amongst the wider public
I think there is no understanding—DFID is one of these international
agencies, banks or UN bodies or whatever; nobody really knows
what it is. Does that matter?
Ms Hughes: I think it comes back
to what we were discussing earlier on, about how you communicate
what is happening. What is the level of expenditure? How is it
delivered? How much of the detail do we need to know about or
explain to the wider public about delivery? What is the impact
on the ground? If you look at Oxfam, for instance, in our international
federation we are often there on the ground branded as Oxfam,
but we also work with partners, or through partners. If you look
at our Dutch partner, they work almost all of the time through
partners, so you will not see their branding on the ground—you
will see their partners on the ground, so they will be telling
their constituents in the Netherlands: "We have worked with
these people". For example, in the recent Gaza conflict,
in one of our partner organisations an ambulance worker was killed
but we still put out an Oxfam release on that and we made it clear
it was our partner. So I think there are different ways of delivering,
and it is not just one way of delivering, but there are also the
issues we talked about earlier about co-ordination and not duplicating.
There would be a risk if you over-emphasised "DFID must be
branded on the ground", but that is, again, a way of saying
what is the best delivery mechanism. Of course, there needs to
be a good communication of what DFID does, why, and that it works—just
as there is for Oxfam—but for the brand to come on top of
the delivery would not be right, I think, for us or for any other
agency.
Professor Pharoah: Can I add here?
When we did our focus groups we had groups of people who were
not born in Britain, and on the whole they were much more supportive
and less critical of government than the other groups. That is
the first thing. Secondly, you kind of implied there was not a
lot of support for aid amongst the Pakistani community, but I
think if you researched it you might find that support for aid
was actually much higher amongst a lot of the ethnic minority
communities. That is certainly borne out; overseas giving is high
amongst ethnic minorities because of the links with the countries
being so strong. I think it comes back to what we have been saying
all along: where people understand and know about the outcome—the
need—and where it is going, they are much more linked into
support for aid.
Hugh Bayley: I understand that, but the
question I was asking is would it therefore help to build support
in the UK amongst the Diaspora and everybody the Diaspora interacts
with if the Diaspora in the UK was more aware of British development
work? In other words, if DFID's profile in the country had the
word "British" attached to it? I think Kirsty's view
is right; it does not really matter if you brand yourself "British
Aid" so long as you always think what is the most effective
way to deliver clean water or deliver freedom from malaria, and
that if you had a policy which said you have got to promote the
UK, that would be a bad policy, but if you call the brand "British
Aid", and it is appropriate for there to be a label, then—everybody
seems to be nodding!
Q167 Chairman: We had two examples
in our recent visit: one was in Kenya, where we were looking at
projects which were being managed by a French NGO called Solidarité.
The project was very small, £900,000, but was entirely funded
by DFID. One of our Members of the Committee asked the lady who
was telling us about the things that were going on: what was the
engagement of DFID? She said: "I have never heard of DFID.
I know nothing about DFID. I do know about Solidarité and
we are appreciative of what they do". We had a similar situation
in Tanzania where it was exactly the same; the money was coming
from DFID but the agency that was delivering—and which had
the expertise and the connections on the ground—was WWF.
I am with Hugh; I totally support what was being done, I think
it was the right agency support, but you are kind of left with
no footprint at all. Does that matter? Maybe it does not (that
is the argument, really), but there is the question: does it do
any harm in letting people know, given that your partners are
making it absolutely clear who they are, how wonderful they are
and what their brand is? Yet it is British money that was funding
the entire programme.
Professor Pharoah: I think that
awareness is important but it probably is a separate question
from whether you promote the name and the brand in DFID. Just
looking at the speed at which other government departments have
changed their names over the last few years, there might even
be a danger in spending a lot of money on branding and promoting
DFID.
Q168 Chairman: I do not think we
are suggesting that; we think it might be a little bit simpler—just
have the word "UK" in there somewhere!
Mr Shah: I would also say that
engagement with Diaspora communities in this country—you
could have a strategy around that, whether you call it DFID or
UK Aid, or whatever, if you think that is important. If we have
got good stories to tell why do we not tell them? One thing that
DFID did some years ago was hold a series of development fora
around the country, and the feedback on that was very, very positive
because it treated people like adults. It said: "These are
some of the dilemmas that we are dealing with, but this is some
of the great work that we are doing".
Q169 Hugh Bayley: I know what development
education is because I am a boring old fart, but what on earth
is global learning, and why change the name and the brand?
Mr Shah: Development education
has got a long history, as you know, about helping people learn
about development issues. We have broadened the term that we use
from "development education" to global learning partly
because educators respond to it better; development education
never took off amongst education circles. Also, it enables us
to talk about issues like climate change and about community cohesion
as well—so how do people live in the wider world and what
are our connections to it? That is a slightly broader concept
than development education, although most of the work that we
do is within development education.
Q170 Hugh Bayley: What impact is
the downturn having on funding for global learning?
Mr Shah: I think it is exacerbating
an existing trend. For example, Oxfam has just shrunk its development
education department and stopped funding project work. Save the
Children has also made its staff in that area redundant and closed
its development education department. UNICEF had already cut funding
in the area and Christian Aid had also done the same. I would
say that the downturn is actually leading to an acceleration of
what was already going on, in terms of the availability of funding
for that work. If you look back to 10 years ago, things like the
Big Lottery and the European Commission also provided quite a
lot of funding for development education work in the UK; now we
would say that DFID is really the major source of funding, and
that is something that needs investigation and thinking about.
Q171 Hugh Bayley: How much does DFID
spend on development education?
Mr Shah: I think £19 million
was last year's budget, increasing to £24 million in the
coming year. I would say that that is for building support for
development, which is a whole series of things under the title,
some of which we might not quite consider development education.
Q172 Andrew Stunell: Does that include
the community linkage? You had some concerns about that. Could
you just explain what the problem with community linkage is and
how it could be fixed?
Mr Shah: Sure. There are two linking
programmes that DFID funds: one is a global schools partnership—so
creating links between schools—and the other is a new community
linking scheme which is just getting off the ground now, linking
communities around the world. On the surface you can see why this
is attractive from a policy perspective; it is something very
tangible, it brings people together so that they actually make
that real connection, and it is quite easy to quantify because
you can count the number of links, which is always a plus from
a policy perspective. We reserve judgment, as it were, on this.
The anecdotal evidence that we have suggests that some of these
experiences can reinforce stereotypes and actually close people's
minds about development as much as open them. For example, there
was a teacher who went on an exchange to Africa and on walking
into an African village said: "I felt like Victoria Beckham".
This was not a development experience, from our perspective; it
reinforced stereotypes. I suppose we have two questions: one is,
what is the actual impact of this linking work (and we think more
research needs to be done on this), and the second question is:
what is the cost-effectiveness of this kind of an intervention
as against others. It is a relatively expensive way of doing things
and DFID has funded a whole series of other ways of embedding
global learning and development education into schools and other
places. It is worth comparing those from a cost-effectiveness
perspective. We are not saying we have the answers, but we think
those are questions that need to be asked.
Q173 Andrew Stunell: In the debate
yesterday in this place the Member of Parliament for Hastings
gave a very good account of the "twinning", I suppose
you would say, between Hastings and Hastings in Sierra Leone.
In my own constituency I have a constituent who is working very
hard with twinning young people from a deprived area who are actually
going to Ghana and vice versa to village schools, and so on. Are
you saying that you do not believe that is a cost-effective strategy?
Is that the question?
Mr Shah: We are saying it needs
to be explored, that is right. We are saying that in practice
some of those links, or twins, are very, very well done and helpful
on both sides. Some that we have seen can be fairly inequitable
in the way that they are conducted; there is not enough recognition
of actually the level of support that is required in the developing
country; so teachers get annoyed that they are not receiving the
responses quickly enough to the things that they are sending across,
not realising that it might take a cycle ride to get to the internet
café. DFID has increasingly focused on the quantity of
links rather than the quality of links, and so we are concerned
that by driving up the numbers, which, as I say, is a nice tick-box
for policymakers, it may have an actual effect on the quality
of the work.
Q174 Andrew Stunell: On the other
hand, if you had high quality links they would be very high cost
links, presumably. Obviously, there is a quality versus quantity
question—how are you going to evaluate which route we should
take? You could take 10 people for a month or you could take 100
people for a day. What are you trying to measure? What is the
result?
Mr Shah: I would say that the
result we are trying to measure is people's understanding and
support for development. What would be interesting is to measure
both those kinds—what you might call a highly supportive
link and a less well supported link—but then, also, some
other measures. DFID is funding a volunteering programme—so
let us compare that—and it is funding curriculum resources
and work with schools. If you can compare all of those things
and actually look at those in terms of cost-effectiveness and
impact, that is just work that has not been done, and I think
that would help us and you to answer some of these questions.
Q175 Andrew Stunell: What is your
intuition about it, prior to that research being done?
Mr Shah: That some of the work
in linking is not actually building a very high quality support
for development, and that the work that DFID has done around,
for example, enabling effective support for schools, so developing
linkages between local authorities, schools and NGOs, in this
country, whilst it is slightly less glamorous than a link, actually
has more effect upon helping young people understand the issues.
Q176 John Battle: I think that I
will press this conversation for a deepening of the understanding
of the need to support good institution building, and I think
I also want to challenge the notion of development education.
I think we have got in a 19th Century mode and not in a 21st Century
mode. I passionately believe it is not a case of us helping African
people but development being a mutual conversation where we learn
from them. If I were critical of development education in principle,
I would say it has been, in the past, patronisingly (if I am abusive
about it) "learning about" rather than "learning
with". Without boring the Committee again, some women we
met, on a visit that this Committee made some years ago, under
a tree in Ghana—quite a lot of years ago—introduced
me properly to the concept of participatory budgeting. We brought
them back without public money or support from NGOs but we got
them back into our neighbourhood to help reopen a community centre,
where we had a celebration and they asked the women there, in
that neighbourhood: "What are you doing about participatory
budgeting in your neighbourhood?" and it blew their heads
off in order to get to grips with the council and get on with
it. We can learn from them, is my answer; they might help liberate
us in the cleft of wealth and poverty across the world. That was
not just an education question, that was a local government question.
What about DCMS and the culture departments? What about other
departments that deal with youth work? Right across the piece,
is there enough "joining up of government departments"
in this work? Are we still focused on learning about, as if it
is part of the geography department, rather than learning with,
about changing our politics?
Mr Shah: I will address those
two questions separately, if I may. It seems to me that there
has been movement from learning about to learning with; the fact
that we now talk about global learning is actually indicative
of that; it is about learning in both directions. There is much
more that could be done in terms of joining up the different government
departments on these agendas. I think DFID has played a very good
lead role on this and is now starting to try and develop linkages
with the other departments, but much more could be done. DCSF
is the obvious department in terms of the educational agenda;
the new secondary curriculum, for example, has now got a global
and sustainable development dimension that runs across every subject,
and that is something that is now firmly embedded in education,
but DCSF needs to take more of a role in actually funding this
agenda. Then, as you say, DCMS, DECC (the new climate change department)
and Defra; and even the global skills agenda, all have a role
to play. It might be that DFID could play a role in actually bringing
these agendas together. The way that it has operated on this agenda
has actually been very positive in terms of thinking about, for
example, the community cohesion agenda; not just saying: "We're
only interested in Millennium Development Goals and if it is not
that then we are not interested in talking about this". The
commitment has been there from the Department about a longer-term
and slightly wider agenda.
John Battle: That is encouraging.
Q177 Chairman: A lot of what you
do is in schools. Certainly I know, and I suspect Members of this
Committee all find the same thing, there is a lot of engagement
between parliamentarians and schools on issues of development,
such as Fair Trade issues and aid and development issues, but
what about other activities, whether it is youth organisations,
exchange programmes, or further and higher education? How much
are you doing there? How much could you or should you be doing?
Schools are important but they are not the only vehicle.
Mr Shah: I would agree with that.
I would say DFID has been most successful in its strategy around
the schools work, and that far less has been done around non-formal
education for young people, so those people that are not necessarily
engaging with school that well. There is now an emerging amount
of work around what is being called global youth work, but that
is something that DFID has not yet put its weight behind. We are
just about to deliver a small piece of mapping work for DFID to
actually say: "This is the lie of the land", as it were.
Similarly, in further and higher education and community education,
there are interesting examples of good practice, but it has not
yet been taken up in a systematic way. DFID is doing a review
at the moment on the impact of its building support for development
strategy, and looking forward to what it should be doing next;
the White Paper also gives space to kind of review and look forward,
and I would suggest that DFID, essentially, makes a series of
commitments around those areas—non-formal education for
young people, further education and higher education—to
build on the sort of work it has done with schools, so building
capacity, providing support around the curriculum and providing
support around networking and training.
Q178 Chairman: Is this a one-way
or a two-way process? This is DFID promoting education for people
to understand global learning. What feedback is there in terms
of the whole discussion we have just had? You engage with these
people; do they not start asking questions and make comments that
start to—not question the strategy but feed back and say:
"Hey, we have got something wrong here"? What kind of
feedback do you provide?
Mr Shah: What feedback do we provide?
Q179 Chairman: If you are in the
process of engagement and education, do you monitor the sort of
questions or the misunderstandings or the challenges that come
up and feed them back in to the process?
Mr Shah: As far as we can. One
of the things we have been talking to DFID about is how they could
better engage with different sorts of communities in the UK. Those
are things that we are picking up. For example, one issue that
has come about is there is a new duty of community cohesion on
schools, and schools in, particularly, mono-cultural, fairly white
areas are struggling with how they would do that. The international
and global perspective is actually a really important way of being
able to do that; so with things that DFID cannot pick up from
Whitehall we are able to help them make those local linkages.
Chairman: Thank you very much. I think
that has been a very interesting discussion, and it has been fairly
even-handed on both sides because, clearly, we are all in the
same game; we want to know what works and how it all changes in
the present circumstances. Thank you for your comments. We will,
obviously, be pulling all this together and, indeed, it will feed
into the White Paper. Our intention is for this report to be published
in time to feed into that process. Thank you very much indeed.
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