Memorandum submitted by Save the Children
UK
INTRODUCTION
Save the Children UK is the world's independent
children's charity. We are outraged that millions of children
are still denied proper healthcare, food, education and protection.
We are working flat out to get every child their rights and we're
determined to make further, faster changes.
This submission focuses on two of the three
areas outlined by the IDC inquiry:
— The effectiveness of DFID's mechanisms
for evaluating the impact of its aid, specifically on poverty
reduction.
— DFID's approach to agricultural development
and agricultural research as outlined in DFID's Research Strategy.
MONITORING AND
EVALUATION: ACHIEVING
REAL CHANGE
1. Save the Children believes that the need
to improve the monitoring and evaluation of the UK's aid lies
most importantly at two levels: one concerns the lack of clear
mandate to promote uptake of specific policies and their subsequent
monitoring across DFID; the second, is the urgent need to address
the lack of accountability and transparency of donors' aid commitments
and disbursements globally.
2. When we consider DFID's system for policy
implementation and monitoring, there is a lot to say in praise
of its country-driven, demand-led approach in which DFID country
offices set the agenda rather than it being centrally led. However,
this creates a tension with the overall DFID policy-making process
at the centre. Responsibility for the implementation of DFID-wide
policies and priorities does not sit clearly with anyone and the
result, as the 2007 evaluation of DFID's agriculture policy makes
clear, is that "country offices show little awareness of,
or commitment to" the policy.
3. Policies such as social protection suffer
from a lack of clear internal coordination across teams and countries.
In addition, without cross-country policy monitoring no system
exists for tracking the implementation of policies once they are
produced; the DFID Evaluation Paper 22 calls for "an audit
of monitoring and evaluation in DFID", meaning that it is
not possible to say how specific DFID policies are impacting on
developing countries.
4. An additional concern in the area of
UK aid monitoring is related to the monitoring of aid that is
spent through budget support. While we strongly support the use
of budget support over a fragmented, burdensome project approach,
DFID have a long way to go to better understand what impact budget
support spending has. Efforts to better assess how budget support
affects developing country spending on poverty and at decentralised
levels are encouraged.
5. The second area of consideration in aid
monitoring is at the global level in terms of holding donors,
including the UK, to account on commitments made. No system exists
for actively tracking donor commitments, reporting whether they
are delivered upon, or holding donors to account publicly for
unfulfilled agreements. While the OECD DAC holds a database of
much of this information, some donors continue to not submit accurate
or complete information and information that is gathered is not
assessed, commented upon or circulated to stakeholders such as
the general public or recipient governments. We would like to
see the UK proposing and supporting an international independent
body that would report on donor's commitments versus disbursements,
levels of tied aid, independent evaluations, and recipient feedback
etc, perhaps building on the OECD DAC's capacity. This body would
have to be supported with adequate budget and profile with clear
mechanisms to ensure its impact such as Parliamentary and UN reporting.
6. Regarding the monitoring of humanitarian
aid, DFID's ability to support strong programme evaluation has
been reduced by its increasing commitment to channelling funds
through UN-managed bilateral funding mechanisms. These mechanisms—of
which DFID has been the major champion—include the global
Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) and the in-country Common
Humanitarian Funds (CHFs). An independent evaluation of the CHFs
in DR Congo and Sudan in October 2007 found monitoring and evaluation
to be "very weak, both at strategic level—in terms
of whether the Funds are having a positive impact—and programmatically,
particularly for UN agencies". The draft 2-year evaluation
of the CERF also raises this issue forcefully; a final version
of the report will be presented to the General Assembly in August.
7. Monitoring and evaluation are important
components of the "Learning and Accountability" principles
established under the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative,
in which DFID is a leading player. However, the monitoring requirements
attached to grants from the CERF or the CHFs are not generally
as robust as those established for projects funded by bilateral
donors such as DFID, while evaluations are not systematically
required or implemented. In order to achieve its objectives of
improved coordination and accountability in humanitarian aid,
DFID needs to take responsibility for mainstreaming much stronger
evaluation systems and standards into the new multilateral funding
mechanisms. This may require additional financing—eg for
fully staffed Monitoring & Evaluation units reporting directly
to UN Humanitarian Coordinators in country—and a political
commitment to strengthen the capacity of the CERF Secretariat
in New York to ensure higher evaluation standards for all CERF-funded
programmes.
MONITORING ACHIEVEMENT
OF THE
FIRST MDG
8. On the specific area of monitoring impact
on child nutrition, a key target for achieving the first MDG,
Save the Children commissioned a report from the Institute of
Development Studies in 2007.
9. The study found it hard to assess whether
DFID's programmes were having the benefits on nutrition that they
were directly intended to. It was also hard to ascertain whether
nutrition benefits were flowing from programmes that might have
another aim as their main outcomes—for instance, health
or cash transfer programmes.
10. DFID does not report its spending on
nutrition (tending to roll it into health or humanitarian budget
codes). This means that assessments of DFID's effectiveness must
rely on secondary data sources, such as OECD DAC Creditor Reporting
System (mentioned above), where programmes are often poorly described,
and which does not cover DFID contributions to multilateral programmes.
11. Monitoring nutrition outcomes is important
because poor nutrition is responsible for around 36% of preventable
under-5 deaths.[34]
At the moment DFID is unable to effectively track how well its
programming is tackling this major underlying cause of mortality
and morbidity (illness) in developing countries.
RECOMMENDATIONS
— Conduct a nutrition audit of current
indirect nutrition spending. This would essentially be a thematic
baseline assessing how nutrition-friendly the current indirect
nutrition portfolio is, with follow ups to determine improvements
or worsening.
— In Central Research Department, fund
work on generating new evidence on nutrition interventions and
policy (some evidence dates from the 1990s).
AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
FOR EFFECTIVE
POVERTY REDUCTION
12. Save the Children UK commends the centrality
that agricultural growth plays in DFID's poverty reduction efforts
and the critical role that DFID sees for an increase in agricultural
productivity to trigger agricultural growth.
13. Save the Children also endorses DFID's
awareness that agricultural development strategies must reflect
individual countries' development and the central role that investment
in agricultural research must play in informing agricultural polices.
14. Save the Children believes that DFID
could greatly increase the effectiveness of its agricultural policy
by sharpening its understanding of the characteristics of the
rural poor and the role that they play in agricultural production.
Far too often DFID is aligned to the orthodox view that the majority
of the rural poor in developing countries are small (and crucially
self-employed) farmers working on their own land with the help
of unpaid family members. Consequently the vast majority of projects
on rural poverty and poverty reduction strategies tend to emphasise
the key role of self-employment and small family farming and aim
to devise polices to boost poor's people capacity as producers.
15. However, Save the Children has found—drawing
on extensive literature and livelihoods research—that a
substantial proportion of poor people rely on casual and manual
work for others as their primary source of income. This work
is generally low-skilled and badly remunerated. The work conditions
they face tend to be very poor (eg long workdays, no accommodation,
no benefits such as paid leave, sick leave, overtime payments,
etc.-, no protection, arbitrariness in payment rates, and sometimes
physical threats and violence). As the number of working days
available in rural areas is low, and the income from the working
days that do exist is low and irregular, the income of rural workers
is usually low—well below the poverty line.
16. As a significant segment of the rural
poor is predominantly engaged in agriculture as an employee for
better off farmers, rural labour markets are crucial to their
livelihoods. By and large the inadequate number of working days
available to the rural poor and the inadequate return from existing
working days are the key sources of their poverty and vulnerability.
At the same time, research has shown that access to (scarce) decent
work opportunities can play a key role in allowing some poor people
to escape poverty.
17. Such a characterisation of poverty and
ways out of it has important implications for DFID's agricultural
policy:
— It is misleading to base agricultural
policy on the fact that the poorest are small-scale agricultural
producers. Policy objectives such as increasing small-farmers
return from agriculture by improving access to markets (including
financial markets), which are an important part of DFID agricultural
policy, are not directly relevant to the significant section of
the very poor who do not produce own crops (or hardly do so).
— An inclusive pro-poor agricultural
development strategy must reflect the fact the very poor earn
a high percentage of their income by working for other people.
This is an irreversible trend due to increasing pressure on land.
The policy challenge therefore becomes to identify ways to help
the functioning of rural labour markets. Save the Children UK
hopes that the upcoming new DFID agricultural policy strategy
will clearly focus on this policy area.
19. Agricultural development has been identified
as a driver of economic growth in developing countries,
which is rightly viewed as crucial to reducing poverty. However,
Save the Children has key concerns about DFID's approach to economic
growth and the impact it will have on the ability of UK aid to
reduce poverty.
20. While it is true that no country has
reduced income poverty without economic growth, we know that its
impact on people's incomes can vary substantially, and that economic
growth may not reduce non-income poverty. In its agricultural
policy work and economic growth analysis more generally, DFID
needs to:
— integrate their poverty reduction
objectives into their economic growth policy analysis, rather
than allowing the two areas to run parallel as at present. DFID
must carry out in-depth country analyses in order to identify
specifically which policies will be effectively pro-poor in each
country. These analyses must include examination of the dynamics
of inequality and exclusion, in order to understand the strategies
needed to reach the poorest and most marginalised children and
their communities; and
— understand how growth translates
into reductions in non-income poverty; for example, increasing
aggregate household income does not necessarily translate into
an equal reduction in child malnutrition; what if an improvement
in agricultural trade caused an increase in children labour? Better
attention should be given to monitoring how countries translate
growth into improvements in non-income indicators such as educational
achievements and health outcomes.
21. We hope that DFID's new International
Centre for Growth will prioritise these points and work with civil
society to understand poverty dynamics.
The role of agricultural research
22. Following decades of policy neglect,
agricultural and pro-poor growth policy research must fill the
knowledge gap currently existing on rural labour markets, as this
hampers the design of effective poverty reduction strategies.
To address the lack of decent jobs in rural areas, DFID needs
to fund research that:
— documents the significance of rural
labour markets to the livelihoods of the poor in developing countries;
— understands the nature and effective
functioning of informal rural labour markets;
— understand the reason for the existence
of a wide range of wage rates and working conditions between and
within regions of a country;
— identifies context-specific policy
options to create decent jobs in rural areas; and
— identifies the synergies between
agricultural development policies and social protection mechanisms—including
the scale and predictability of transfers—that can best
support rural workers to graduate from poverty.
23. The most promising questions/lines of
enquiry in DFID new research strategy are its focus on: "High
value agriculture in areas of medium to high agricultural potential
as a means to boost labour productivity and create jobs".
And DFID's focus on improving "our understanding of how the
rural farm and non-farm economies interact" is also important
although its focus on seasonal workers migrating to urban areas
needs to be broadened to include research on rural-rural migration.
24. Finally, DFID plans to support research
of "changing land and labour markets, the role of farmer
organisations and the increased competitiveness of small farms"
to identify ways in which farmers can obtain "a bigger share
in food markets where marketing chains and supermarkets are demanding
greater efficiency at wholesale and retail levels". Whilst
in support of such a goal, Save the Children UK believes that
well designed research would show that in small farms both labour
employing "small farmers" and casual labourers coexist
and that these two groups deserve a different policy approach.
25. In terms of policies to stimulate pro-poor
agricultural growth, it is necessary for the new research to draw
more explicitly on the 2006 DFID publication "Growth and
Poverty Reduction: the role of agriculture", which rightly
sees the role for effective state intervention in developing agriculture
in poor countries. In addition, DFID must consider how its research
into technological innovations in agriculture can incorporate
consideration of how these innovations can reach and support the
poorest, rather than increasing wealth gaps. And identify interventions
that can be taken to scale to diversify the livelihoods of rural
workers, both agricultural and off-farm, where effective demand
exists.
34 Lancet Maternal and Child Undernutrition Series,
17 January 2008, p 5. Back
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