Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 97)
TUESDAY 2 JUNE 2009
MS CAREN
LEVY AND
MS RUTH
MCLEOD
Q80 Andrew Stunell:
You have set out a level of in-country engagement which is interesting.
What about engagement with other national and international bodies?
Ms McLeod: There are a range of
bodies which are involved in urban and some of them are entirely
focused on it, such as Cities Alliance and UN-Habitat. Others
are within existing agencies, like GTZ[7],
lots of bilateral arrangements. My feeling is there have been
two fora for that discussion to take place. One has been UN-Habitat,
which is huge and the discussion takes place amongst many, many
governments, so you can get an approach which maybe takes a lot
longer to implement and to accommodate a whole range of different
opinions. Cities Alliance has operated far more as a club and
the people within it have been able to make faster decisions and
have, therefore, been able to implement and provide support, perhaps
with fewer constraints. It would be interesting for DFID to look
at what they feel has been successful in Cities Alliance' interventions
because some of it has been policy-based and strategy-based, some
of it has been direct project financing and there have been a
range of different approaches.
Q81 Andrew Stunell:
Do you sense that DFID is doing that now but keeping quiet about
it or are they not doing it?
Ms Levy: They are obviously there
and they are involved. The reflective side of it is perhaps done
on a case by case basis rather than as a totality. I think there
is room for an overview of DFID's role in relationships with multinational
and bilateral donors, from which I think one could draw very valuable
lessons.
Q82 Hugh Bayley:
People will move to towns for work. What policies make it more
likely that they will find a secure place to work with a secure
livelihood which provides a reasonable income, reasonable security
and reasonable conditions at work, both in the small formal sector
and the much bigger informal sector?
Ms Levy: As you say, people come
to cities for work and they often find it. They make it in different
forms, sometimes it is self-employed, sometimes it is working
in other people's enterprises and often those enterprises can
be informal in many parts of the world or formal, when they can
find work in formal sector areas. Particularly towards the end
of the 1970s governments tried to get involved in employment creation
schemes of different kinds and with the support of international
agencies, like the ILO[8],
made some interesting interventions in small and medium-sized
enterprises, trying to support those, looking at the financial
and technical dimensions of that support and trying to give people
access into those enterprises through building their capacities
and their access to resources. One could argue that not enough
was done or some people might argue that perhaps too much was
done. I think this is an ideological discussion about the relationship
between the state and the market in this enterprise. What we have
seen also is the enormous capacity of when communities are given
access to doing things for themselves; collectively they have
the capacity also to create jobs in all sorts of ways. For example,
I think one of the most under-talked areas is the construction
industry. In our experience, in India, in the CLIFF programme,
the large-scale redevelopments engaged the medium-sized construction
companies very effectively and also were able to use the labour
of the communities in that process. I think there are lots of
possible creative avenues to address that question.
Ms McLeod: May I add one point
to that. There is a very tough dynamic often for city administrators.
I can remember being in Phnom Pen 10 years ago and it was just
beginning to develop and big multinational companies were coming
in and they wanted to set up factories. There were very few resources
available at the city level and very little capacity within the
city to negotiate what was going to happen. That led to very harsh
and unproductive displacement of people, often the same people
who would presumably be needed by the factories, because the land
allocation and development had not been planned thoroughly. The
need to plan for the future and to plan land for employment and
informal sector activities as well as residential developments
in a mixed development kind of way becomes crucial. When you see
it done well it seems terribly apparent. One of the places I have
been working recently is in Indonesia. There is a small city there
where rather than chase off the informal sector vendors to make
the city more beautiful or to get rid of them, which is what happens
in a lot of places, the mayor has celebrated them and has created
a night marketplace where they can come and he gives them access
to loans to have proper stands and so forth, so he has built on
that entrepreneurship. I think there is a mix of different things,
but inevitably land becomes a really crucial one because of the
need for factory space and so forth and the commercial pressure
on land is displacing huge numbers of people in these cities.
Q83 Hugh Bayley:
Can one or other of you say something about the gender dimension
of employment and livelihoods in urban areas? What are the particular
challenges which face women?
Ms Levy: I think in most parts
of the world one would find that women were predominant in the
informal sector. That is largely because, first of all, they have
lower education levels, lower skill levels, which are easily inserted
into the informal sector, and they are also, of course, balancing
their roles on the domestic front with their productive work.
This may then result in them not being able to fully participate
on a full-time basis in work. Nevertheless, I think many women
are making very important contributions to the incomes of their
households. I suppose one of the characteristics of many households
in low income areas is that one has multiple earners in households
and those multiple earners include women who are making an important
contribution to the total income of those households.
Q84 Hugh Bayley:
What would you say about my concern about crime? In my constituency
all the violence, drugs and theft all take place in the poorest
areas of town. Why is this not a crucial focus of strategies for
coping with urbanisation, so looking at crime, drugs and gangs?
Ms McLeod: I think it is a massive
problem and, as was said earlier, it is very variable. The difference
between Kingston, Jamaica and Accra is huge in terms of how that
all operates. There are many, many complex factors which affect
it, and one of the problems of trying to address it head-on is
because you are addressing the symptoms, in many respects it is
difficult to tackle it necessarily directly. Where I have seen
successful approaches to it, it has been where people are given
the capacity to withstand that criminal force. At a household
level, I can remember once going with a representative from a
women's savings group from South Africa to women's refuges in
Northern Ireland and the women in the refuges in Northern Ireland
said to this woman from South Africa, "Do you have women's
refuges?" and the woman said, "No, we don't have any
refuges, we don't even have houses". She said, "What
happens when a guy beats you up?" and she said the savings
group go to visit him but there are 260 of us.
Q85 Chairman:
Persuasive!
Ms McLeod: It is local. If you
build that up, people have to have the capacity to set a different
agenda. Very often that means women have to be given the capacity
to have a voice and be respected by the police. The kinds of community
policing systems which have been developed now in Mumbai are fully
supported by the head of police there. It means that small incidents
which can be dealt with locally are left to be dealt with locally.
Where the police are needed to be brought in, you have got a credible
community selected group of people who will bring the police in
and buffer them, so it does not become a complete head-on with
the police. In terms of the crime which is associated with drugs
and so forth, the basis of that is economic. Where communities
have literally been determined as "no go areas" by the
police and everybody else, then what people are left with is an
armoured situation where they are defending their territory, they
are trying to do the best they can and in that situation very
often it is the gunman or the crime person who is also the welfare
deliverer, so it is complex.
Q86 Hugh Bayley:
We are short of time, but can you weave in one more dimension.
Corruption in local government in a lot of countries is a very
major problem and it is always the poor who pay. If somebody takes
a backhander for a schools' contract, then one fewer school gets
built; if somebody pays enough a building inspector will not mind
if too little cement goes into a building which collapses on top
of the people who live in it. How importantly should we take the
fight against corruption as a way of building sustainable communities?
Ms Levy: Many of the communities
we work with on the ground take it very seriously and I think
they deserve our support in that. Many of them mobilise and make
a very hard decision for them because what they decide to do is
not to pay bribes in exchange for regulatory processes. They know
very well that means long waits and it means difficult times.
The way in which we try to support that process is, for example
in CLIFF, by providing the bridging funding so they can take that
risk of doing that. If we had more examples of those kinds of
situations I think we would have more successes.
Ms McLeod: I think a huge amount
of that is information. When people get organised around collecting
their own information and making that information publicly available,
it cuts through things remarkably fast. If you know as a community
exactly who lives where, how many people there are, what they
do, what resources they have got, whether there are toilets and
all of that is available publicly, it makes a big difference.
Recently I was visiting CODI[9]
in Thailand and went to visit a project there where they were
redoing the whole waterfront. It is one of those situations which
is terrifically open to corruption. When you go under the bridges
and you go into the community hall you find an entire wall covered
with whiteboard and every construction cost is itemised, every
payment made is itemised and every loan which has been given out
is shown. Anybody can come in and read who has paid, who has not
paid, has the cost gone up and getting to that situation where
a community values creating and managing information about itself,
takes an investment, but once you do it, it completely transforms
the kind of leadership which is acceptable and not acceptable.
Q87 Hugh Bayley:
Could you write that up as an example in a few paragraphs?
Ms McLeod: Yes.[10]
Q88 Chairman:
I have to say, we saw something exactly similar to that in Northern
Afghanistan when they were being given community funding and the
community had exactly the same situation and had the information
on the wall.
Ms Levy: You would find the same
in the federation groups in India. For example, in Mumbai the
books of the local groups are regularly audited by the federation
themselves. The money is visibly displayed on the walls, open
there for everybody to see, so I think there are many examples.
Q89 Mr Singh:
The DPU lays great store by community-led initiatives and that
word has been mentioned quite a lot. What is it that community-led
initiatives can achieve rather than a top-down approach?
Ms Levy: When we talk about community-led
initiatives we do not mean that the state is let off the hook.
We see that very much as a situation where local government has
a role to play in that and so does central government. There are
things which only central government can do and there are things
which are appropriate to do at local level. The notion of community-led
initiatives is not something about the community on its own, for
example, the community bearing costs on its own and taking initiatives
on its own. This is really important when it comes to city-wide
initiatives, which I think have to be the emphasis of future interventions
in cities. We have done a lot of work in the past in urban interventions
on projects in neighbourhoods and I think obviously that will
continue in different ways. What we need to do now is lift our
head up a little bit and look at city-wide issues. Once you are
looking at city-wide issues, then you need the partnership between
the communities, local government and central government in that
process.
Q90 Mr Singh:
How could DFID help in promoting local governance and community-led
initiatives?
Ms McLeod: One of the things DFID
has been supporting has been the whole SUF initiative, which is
very young in lots of ways. As I said earlier, I have been involved
in some of this and have helped them set up some of the local
finance facilities. What has been incredibly important about resourcing
and capitalising those facilities is that it is not just that
it makes a source of capital available to leverage commercial
finance, to bridge finance and to provide capacity building grants
and so forth, but it brings into a single forum all the key stakeholders
in that city who are concerned about settlement upgrading or slum
upgrading. You will have key people from the mayor's department,
engineers from the engineering department, slum dwellers, local
councillors, independent professionals, who are also important
because people do need access to architects, engineers and surveyors,
and you will have bodies such as the traditional councils. Anybody
at all who is a major player comes around that table and starts
to make decisions about how seed capital, which has been basically
provided by DFID, can best be used and leveraged to bring in other
resources. I think that could be tried far more often. How you
choose to do that, how you choose to deliver it, whether you do
it directly to local government or directly to the governments
to pass on, you have got a range of options. I think it is a very,
very important development because cities are just beginning to
learn how to deal with their own budgets and leverage them. To
be able at this stage to provide an option for them to do that
specifically around urban poverty, settlement upgrading and land
issues is an opportunity which is not going to come again and
it may be too late for some places already. The experience again
of CODI in providing small capital funds which can then be built
on has been really important.
Q91 Mr Singh:
Could micro-finance be a resource which could tackle urban poverty?
I have not heard that mentioned at all.
Ms McLeod: There are lots of views
on micro-finance and urban poverty. I think micro-finance has
proved itself very successful in terms of supporting small and
medium enterprise developments. It has also discovered that as
it has got institutionalised up to 40% of customers have used
those loans to improve their housing. The fact that they are improving
their housing may also mean they are improving their business
because their business is located in the house, so it is not that
they are tricking anyone, but some of the micro-finance institutions
are now specifically developing home improvement programmes, which
is great. What micro-finance does not do is address this bigger
issue of settlement upgrading, slum upgrading and city-level planning
for all of this. You cannot put in a major settlement sewerage
system with a micro-finance loan, you have got to have around
a table not just people who understand small loans but also people
who can put together the finance, the land, the engineering, the
infrastructure and the politics of all those issues. I do not
think there is a shortcut to creating new institutional forms
which deal in a way with the complexity that we know urban poverty
is composed of. If you dodge it and say, "We will just take
this angle, we will just take that angle", you are chasing
yourself around like this and the problem just moves around from
one part of the city to another.
Q92 Mr Singh:
In terms of providing opportunities for business, for employment?
Ms McLeod: Definitely. For instance,
if you look at the self-finance facilities on those boards, there
will be representatives from micro-finance institutions and often
they will have networks which may be geographically based. In
Sri Lanka, for instance, one of the groups that has taken out
the first loan is a micro-finance institution which has a network
of women working in all sorts of places but a concentrated group
of women in one particular settlement. They have decided to do
a settlement upgrading project which will involve all sorts of
quite complex planning around that, but they have taken out a
loan to use as a guarantee to access commercial finance to actually
do that.
Q93 Mr Singh:
Which brings me on to the point about generally empowering women.
We have seen examples before of micro-finance empowering women.
Is that happening in these slum areas?
Ms Levy: It can do, but what is
a much more important part of that equation is the collective
of women in that process of empowerment. Collectives of women
who work with money, savings, credit, micro-finance, I think the
potential there for empowerment is much greater than an individual
one to one kind of relationship.
Ms McLeod: Can I give you an example.
We often talk about rural versus urban but they are increasingly
coming closer together and are inter-related. There is a group
called IVDP in Tamil Nadu in India which started off basically
helping women in relatively rural areas set up savings and loan
groups. They have now got 100,000 women living in peri-urban groups.
Over the years those 100,000 women have built up a capital base
which exceeds £80 million. They bulk purchase direct from
Korea, they can control the election results, they have a majority
use in many of the local banks, but that has taken a huge amount
of time to build up. They have done it around this very strategic
approach to helping women to organise, to make sure they have
had access to capital finance to develop investment in the areas
they were prioritising. It is an astonishing development but not
that many people know about it.
Q94 Chairman:
Can I pick up on a previous point you made where you were talking
about bringing all the areas and players together. Is there a
role for DFID and UK local government to play more of a role?
We have been lobbied by the LGA[11]
who say they have expertise which they think they could use in
developing countries. To be blunt, they are looking for DFID to
contribute to all of that, although they would produce the people,
DFID maybe would pay for the travel. Is there scope for that because
it does seem to suggest that some of the expertise in this context
is much more likely to reside in British local government than
it does in DFID?
Ms Levy: As you know, part of
our evidence was promoting a city-to-city approach and I think
there is more scope in developing that and in exploring it. As
Ruth implied before, it is not the one and only line, but it is
certainly an interesting line. There are local urban areas, for
example, that have taken the commitment to commit 0.7% of their
budget towards work with partnering and twinning cities abroad.
Q95 Chairman:
That is not in the UK, is it?
Ms Levy: No, mainly in Sweden
and Germany. I think the UK could do more on that. I have been
involved within a Commonwealth framework within the Commonwealth
Scholarship Fund in promoting professional exchanges between local
government abroad and local government in the UK. They are always
extremely successful and great learning can be achieved, so I
think definitely more could be done on that.
Q96 Chairman:
I think it is helpful and we might want to explore it a bit more.
Just a final point: you mentioned the blurring between rural and
urban. How can those links be more positively exploited? We have
had a food crisis. If you take Sub-Saharan Africa the argument
is the productivity of agriculture is extremely poor and there
was a lot of poverty, especially with rising food prices, in urban
Africa and it comes to you, fairly obviously, that if you could
use the agricultural resources to feed the urban population in
Africa, you would enrich and reduce poverty of both communities.
What are your thoughts about how you can usefully use those urban
and rural links?
Ms Levy: Maybe Ruth can pick up
another dimension, but at the moment I have colleagues in the
DPU working with urban agriculture and trying to promote within
the planning systems the use of certain kinds of land which maybe
would not be appropriate for living uses to grow food within cities.
It touches on questions of gender because in many cases it is
women who get involved in that and it touches on questions of
income and employment because that food becomes a possibility
to sell and then, of course, it also provides food which does
not have to be transported long distances to local markets. It
fits a lot of the challenges we face in urban development. I think
this is an increasing movement, both within the UK and beyond.
In fact, again, there have been some interesting exchanges between
the UK working with urban agriculture and networks in Latin America
and Africa.
Q97 Chairman:
If you are looking at agrarian revolutions, it is tending to release
people from the land, whether or not they tend to move to the
towns to become an urban labour force or for whatever other reasons.
Is there scope for using these changes as an opportunity to reform
arable land use in agriculture in both places? It may need security
of tenure in the urban areas to enable the development of the
infrastructure to take place, and the argument is you need a degree
of enclosure and extensification of agriculture to be more efficient
in the rural areas. Is this something you have witnessed?
Ms McLeod: I think sometimes we
unfortunately get stuck on, "Is it rural or urban?",
and obviously you cannot do it like that. Going back to an example
in India, again a DFID supported programme, probably now 12 or
so years ago, it provided the first guarantee to release loans
for local women's groups to build new housing for themselves and
they were in a disaster prone area of regular flooding and they
needed to build brick houses with high foundations. One of the
unexpected impacts from that was once the women had got the houses,
girls' education attendance and achievement sky rocketed and we
did not know why. We tracked it back. What happened was as soon
as the women had access to the loans and built the houses, they
were permanent houses, the local government was then prepared
to extend electricity lines. The electricity lines meant the women
could have freezers and the children could study at night and
be left on their own while the women were working because it was
safe, they were not using naked lights. One of the biggest problems
before was fires because they had thatched roofs. The fact that
the women had freezers meant that their guys' fish did not have
to be sold immediately to the middlemen who took it to the town
but, in fact, could be stored until there was enough of it and
then the women took the fish to the city to sell. When they got
to the city to sell it they discovered the city had very good
schools, so their older children, who did not have access to good
senior schools, they started taking with them during the week
and bringing them back. There was this whole cycle of positive
effects which came out of it simply because women had been given
access to loans to make decent houses. That linkage, both in rural,
peri-urban and urban areas becomes incredibly important. People
tend to think if you deal with the complexity of housing and infrastructure
it is not productive, it is a consumption item, it is far better
to set them up in a small business but, in fact, if you give them
access to that kind of capital investment, it affects health,
employment, education, everything, it is one of the most catalytic
of interventions you can make.
Chairman: Thank you. That was a fascinating
session with so many different threads coming together. It has
been very helpful to us. Thank you.
7 The German Technical Co-operation Agency Back
8
International Labour Organisation Back
9
Community Organisations Development Institute Back
10
Supplementary written evidence submitted by the Development Planning
Unit, UCL Back
11
Local Government Association Back
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