DFID Annual Report 2008 - International Development Committee Contents


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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