UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 179-iiiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREINTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
AID UNDER PRESSURE: SUPPORT FOR DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE IN A GLOBAL ECONOMIC DOWNTURN
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the International Development Committee
on
Members present
Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair
John Battle
Hugh Bayley
Andrew Stunell
________________
Memoranda submitted by Dr Jennifer van Heerde and Dr David Hudson (UCL)
and DEA
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Cathy Pharoah, Professor of Charity Funding, Cass Business School, London; Dr David Hudson, Director of International Public Policy, University College London; Hetan Shah, Chief Executive DEA (development education charity); and Kirsty Hughes, Head of Advocacy, Oxfam, gave evidence.
Q115 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming to share your views with us. Obviously, at this session we are concerned
about the fact that we have the potential pressure on aid because of the
economic downturn and the falling value of the pound as well. The interest is to what extent public support
is affected by such developments, and also what is it that the public do
support and how do you measure that and so on.
First, on that particular point, I wonder if you would perhaps give us
your views as to the extent to which the economic downturn may be having an
effect on public support and what are the things that affect people. The simplest thing when we were taking
evidence, I think specifically in
Professor Pharoah: I think the first thing that has to be said is that there is still
not a lot of objective evidence about what is happening to charity income. There have been quite a few snapshot surveys,
perceptual surveys, of what people think is going to happen, quite a lot of
surveys of their fears and anxieties, and some anecdotal reports of things that
are happening, but we still do not have very much objective evidence. I could draw on some of the research data
that has emerged from work that I have been involved in and that has come out
of the
Q116 Chairman: What do you draw out of that?
Professor Pharoah: Looking back to the recession of the early 1990s, between 1990 and
1995 the overall income to development charities continued to go up, in spite
of the recession, but it fell in two years of the recession, in 1992 and
1993. It fell in 1992 by five per cent
in real terms, and it fell in 1993 by ten per cent in real terms. A similar picture emerges from research which
has been carried out by a very authoritative centre in the
Q117 Chairman: In a sense, that is what you would expect.
Professor Pharoah: Yes.
Q118 Chairman: What about the state's contribution, which clearly is sensitive but not so sensitive? Clearly individuals are still looking at their budgets and saying, "I have more immediate priorities". Does the state do the same thing?
Ms Hughes: Perhaps I could comment on both those issues from Oxfam's point of view. In terms of overall public attitudes, we certainly do not perceive - and there is a certain amount of survey evidence out there - the public suddenly telling us: we do not care about poor countries any more; we do not care about poverty any more. Obviously there is a question of whether they then put their hands in their pockets and what sort of donations we get, as well as the question of what money the state gives, and also the public attitude towards that state giving. In terms of Oxfam's own position, for instance, although we are making some cuts going forward to make sure we are resilient in the face of recession, we have seen very good performance in our shops. For instance, the Oxfam shops, though we have seen some decline in donations of articles to the shops ---
Q119 Chairman: Do not your shops benefit during a recession?
Ms Hughes: It turns out that to some extent that is one of the myths that people trade down. So far we have been doing pretty well, but obviously we are affected by variable trends. As I was saying, the donations to the shops to some extent have fallen, so that impacts on our ability to sell if we are getting fewer products into the shops. We have seen some small decline in the support of donations and we are predicting a fall in terms of planning for best and worst cases and how that might continue to fall. What Oxfam is certainly quite worried about is what you said in your second question, the point about state levels of giving, because we have seen those fall in previous recessions. For instance, in the run-up to the G20 Summit on Thursday, we have been pushing very hard for governments to re-commit to the aid pledges they made at Gleneagles in 2005. To some extent it was reassuring to see the OECD aid figures that came out yesterday showing that aid in the OECD actually did not fall overall last year. It did not go up as it should have done if we were to keep to the Gleneagles promises, but to see it has not fallen yet when we have in previous recessions seen a fall is very encouraging.
Dr Hudson: Thank you for inviting me to come here. The evidence is based on some joint work with Dr van Heerde of UCL. We have done several papers over the last year or so, conferences and publications. Our interest in this very much predates the recession. I can probably give you some general information about the relationship between public support and aid and then we could perhaps infer from that forward. We focus very much on public support for official development assistance and not charities, so I cannot comment on that. There is a lot of data out there, an enormous amount of survey data, but very little analysis of it, so it tends to be reported just in percentage terms without looking for relationships and changes over time between these things. That very much frustrated us as researchers, hence our project. The importance of this is that there seems to be a really clear assumption that guides the OECD, DFID and other donors that somehow public support is absolutely essential for keeping aid high and indeed for increasing it. The good news is that the survey evidence suggests that public support is incredibly high and stays incredibly high and consistently averages over 70 per cent across most countries.
Q120 Chairman: Did you say that is across most countries? Why are other countries apparently so much
more sensitive about maintaining or increasing aid compared with the
Dr Hudson: I have absolutely no idea but if you look at the EU Eurobarometer surveys, then public support is pretty similar across most countries. I do not have an answer to that puzzle. The bad news is that there has been a real failure. This does not lead to the increases in aid that we want towards the 0.7 per cent target. The other bad news is that we think that this support, as expressed in surveys, does not really represent political support. It is not a real committed sense of support from the public. To answer the specific question about whether we know if there is gong to be a downturn, as has already been said, in past recessions we have seen a decrease in aid but there is no evidence that public support goes down in aid. Obviously we do not know - this is a very different recession from previous recessions - but our work suggests that the data that these surveys are based on is so poor that we will not know. We cannot rely on the survey data that we are being given, either by DFID or the other OECD countries. We did some analysis looking at the level of aid giving and correlated that with the level of public support, and there was no relationship at all between the two, so aid levels seem to move completely independently from levels of public support.
Q121 John Battle: Do you think the public are aware that, for example under present figures, aid is increasing? So many people think aid is decreasing. Why do you think that is?
Dr Hudson: In general, the public seem to lack good knowledge about
development assistance across the board.
I would imagine, though I do not have the figures here, that if you were
to ask people in the
Ms Hughes: We did a recent Oxfam survey of this, and it is certainly true that the public does not know what aid spending is and hugely tends to overestimate it. A recent survey we did showed that only 12 per cent of the public know that it is under one per cent of government expenditure; almost one-third admit they do not know; and 59 per cent overestimated, which is obviously not helpful.
Q122 John Battle: Do not most people think that aid is being cut and reducing?
Ms Hughes: At the moment we do not have any direct evidence on that. You can certainly ask the public whether they think aid should be cut or should be increased, and you will get a variety of views, but the majority will tend to say "spend some more to help world poverty"; it depends how you put the question. I think DFID's own polling shows that the number has gone down a bit, which I would imagine is recession-related.
Professor Pharoah: The support for giving and help for international aid comes from quite a specialised section of the population; it is highly related to people with higher incomes but behind that, more strongly, the relationship is with higher levels of education. I think that in talking about how the recession might affect attitudes, I would not have thought that group would immediately defect simply because they are worried about the domestic economy.
Mr Shah: Can I point to some research by DFID which has been tracking a
general sense of concern for poverty and development? In 2006 the number of people who said they
were very concerned about those issues was 33 per cent; that has dropped to 27
per cent in 2007; and then 22 per cent in 2008.
They are dropping down to the concerned level rather than the very
concerned, but it does suggest that there is a shift in emphasis towards perhaps
the domestic agenda. I would also like
to address the point you raised about how other countries are looking to us and
what is different about us. One thing I
would point to is that there has been historically a very strong commitment to
the educational agenda in the
Chairman: We have quite a lot of questions, some of which will be addressed to individuals. Mr Shah, there are one or two questions for you at the end. It would be helpful if you did not all try to answer every question, otherwise we will be here till mid-afternoon, but there are some which are directed to all of you. Feel free to chip in.
Q123 Hugh Bayley: I address the question to Dr Hudson. I am not quite sure from your paper whether your conclusions are based on your analysis of the data collected in other surveys or whether you have collected further data of your own on which you draw conclusions.
Dr Hudson: The easy and short answer is that that is based on other data. There are two things we are doing at the moment. One is to use the data that is out there; the second part is to look at the quality of that data. In the second part we were concerned about the quality of the data, so we put together a funding application, which at the moment is in development with the Nuffield Foundation. We are hoping to conduct our own surveys of that new data.
Q124 Hugh Bayley: So your findings are based on the conclusions you have drawn from other people's data?
Dr Hudson: Yes.
Q125 Hugh Bayley: It is a point of view rather than empirical evidence?
Dr Hudson: I would not go as far as just saying it is a point of view. This is data that is not only collected by
the OECD, DFID and various polling companies in the
Q126 Hugh Bayley: Let me provoke somebody else to come in. Arguably, if you are an NGO wanting to create support for aid, you would construct your survey to generate those results, but DFID would have been rather foolish to have constructed a survey on that basis and so would the DAC. What recommendations would you make about how the DFID survey ought to be amended and have you had any conversations with their research division to put your critique on that? What did they say? How should they change their work and do they agree with you?
Dr Hudson: We had a brief meeting with the Head of their Strategic
Communications Division. That was late
last year. We have not followed it up
yet. We have been doing some of this
work since then. She was very open to
having further conversations. That is
something we would look to do. That is
one question. In terms of direct
recommendations, very simply, there are two key points to emphasise. The first one is moving away from the
question: "Are you concerned about
poverty in developing countries?" It is
not a good question to track true support; it is not the same thing as
political support for aid. There is some
evidence to show that when people are asked these sorts of questions about
whether they support the principle of aid, for example, they are thinking about
humanitarian aid, which is obviously very different again, and who is going to
say "no"? There is an enormous social
desirability bias in this. It is a very
cheap answer to say "yes, I support it".
This taps into the other key point which is the difference between
absolute support and relative support. I
think this is relatively easy to resolve.
You ask questions about how people would rank increasing developing aid
versus other commitments - domestic commitments such as spending on the NHS or
law and order, et cetera. That is when
you really tap in to whether people support increasing or maintaining levels of
aid at the moment. For example, the
British Election Study a couple of years ago had an open-ended survey question
asking: what are the key issues that
face the
Q127 Andrew Stunell: I welcome a dose of realism into this particular discussion. You have also made the point that there is a misperception by the public when we are talking about humanitarian aid rather than development aid. I am tempted to ask whether we should even try and close that gap actually. What can DFID do to make the public more aware of what they are spending their money on?
Dr Hudson: There are two answers and one is in terms of surveys. You simply say that the Eurobarometer survey says that this is not about humanitarian aid but about long-term development aid for budget support, et cetera. That is very easily done. In terms of the broader point, whether it is strategic communication or development education, I think very much development education is the way to go. We have not done as much work there, so I do not feel suitably qualified to answer on that.
Q128 Andrew Stunell: Is there evidence in what you have seen so far that there would be a sharply different answer to the question if people did understand that difference?
Dr Hudson: Yes. A study was done in the US in 2001 and 84 per cent of respondents said that it is more important to take care of problems at home before you take care of problems overseas, which would rather suggest that we would see different responses. A welcome dose of realism hopefully, but we really do not want this to be read as a rejection of the importance of public support; far from it. We need to know what we are dealing with first before we design appropriate strategies.
Q129 John Battle: You glossed over something. You said that it would be easy to understand if we spelt out figures. The reason I say that is that I attended a conference recently with people in different religious traditions, faith communities, who work for Oxfam as volunteers. What was shocking and surprising was the hostility to budget support, for example. I say that because I believe we should go for some budget support and help countries to develop their capacity but it is a complex argument to get across when people think that aid it helping those who suffer from a tsunami. I put to you: is not the whole business of aid complex and controversial and that simply to suggest handing over money in a crisis is what people have in mind and, frankly, we are not really talking about development? I wonder whether we could ever shift the debate on if we ask simplistic questions. Am I being too harsh on your analysis?
Dr Hudson: No, I would agree with you, absolutely. Paul Collier in his recent book, The Bottom Billion, makes the point that public support is the big barrier that DFID and the development community need to deal with because public support is very fragile. They support things when they think they are going well and they can see individuals and have an emotional connection. When they think it is going to budget support, for example, I think there is a lot of suspicion about corruption, and that shows up in surveys a lot. It does not always seem to be successful. I think there is a craving to see outcomes and success from investments.
Ms Hughes: From Oxfam's point of view, we find that there is support for both
development and humanitarian aid.
Obviously as that sort of agency that is combining both, we have
different departments and income streams from different stories to tell the
public about that. In terms of the idea
that it is easier to sell the tsunami than it is to sell maternal care or care
for under-fives and stop child deaths, I think what we find our supporters want
to know and what some of the wider public want to know are the actual
stories. It is about aid
effectiveness. It is not just about
saying that this money got through, it was not corrupt, we had the right
accountants in; it is about saying look at what happened to under-five
mortality figures in
Q130 John Battle: That is exactly the problem where you pulverise the narrative which is the story shaped to the person and cut the institutions out of the story. That is where it becomes difficult. If you are talking about the institutions and governments in developing countries, whether it is local government or a clinic system or a health centre, a health system as opposed to a clinic is not part of the story.
Ms Hughes: That is not what I was trying to say.
Q131 John Battle: You are saying that people want a story in the narrative but not the institutions.
Ms Hughes: I think people want to get to the end. Money goes in one end and then what happens? Certainly they want the story at the far end but there is a very important intermediate story. Again, on the budget support, it is partly about encouraging governance, accountability and good practices like that. For us that is part of the story and part of the explanation.
Q132 Andrew Stunell: I have a question for Dr Hudson but I would like to hear from Oxfam. If you have two separate streams, development and humanitarian aid, and you are talking about a potential reduction in giving and you have a working model of where the public support for the one is going to survive better than the other, I wonder if you would be ready either to give this evidence now or write and tell us whether you could detect any differentiation in the public's response to those two sectors of your business, because that would seem to me to be quite useful. To Dr Hudson, you have made the point in your research that actually public support and state giving are not strongly connected; in fact, they may not be connected at all. Do you see any merit in DFID spending a lot of time persuading people that they are spending money on development aid, which might make them less likely to support the programme, instead of letting them go on thinking it is spent on humanitarian aid?
Dr Hudson: Yes, if they do it properly. I think the conclusion that there is no relationship, therefore we can reject public support is not a conclusion we are particularly comfortable with and I am sure not one that you would be comfortable with either, but it is based on the erroneous inference that if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. We are in danger of that. I think we need properly to understand and measure public support and then we can design strategies. I suppose it is a question which I put back to you: what happens if public support is much lower than we think it is? What do we do then? That becomes a normative question, a question of policy. For what it is worth, I do think it points to the importance of development education and that we need to give more sophisticated and nuanced understandings of what development is to people, rather than this very strategic sense of communication that DFID is currently undertaking.
Professor Pharoah: As part of our research on overseas giving, we carried out quite a
lot of in-depth focus groups with different sections of the public and nobody
at all raised this issue whether the aid was humanitarian or development; it
simply did not crop up. I do not think
it is something the general public thinks about or is aware of; they think a
lot about people in need, regardless of what causes their need. In a humanitarian crisis, you see huge
amounts of support for the British Red Cross, for example.
Mr Shah: Could I put in my oar, which is to disagree with that? I was speaking yesterday to Nick Dearden who runs the GB Debt Campaign and he was saying how it was very interesting that many of the supporters of that campaign now think that the debt has been cancelled and that that was an error in the way that they had actually framed the campaign. If you have simple campaign messages, that serves a short-term purpose but afterwards people switch off. Of course we need to do some of that sound-bite stuff and sell certain messages and so on. If there is a concern about the way that aid is delivered that is completely at odds with the reality, let us do something about that, but what we need to do is to involve people in those longer term debates. Otherwise you switch on that support but it switches off just as quickly.
Ms Hughes: That is an important point with which I want to disagree. Obviously it depends how you do your campaign messages. At Oxfam we are doing anything from very sophisticated policy papers to some simpler campaign messages. If you take the example of Make Poverty History and the 0.7 per cent Gleneagles aid commitment, then we have a series of points to come back to aim to meet that 0.7 and achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Next year we have the European commitment to get as far as the 0.56 per cent. I think the point of campaigning around relatively clear, simple messages is to make sure that it is a process and it is ongoing and it is about finding the campaigns in an intelligent manner. It is not about saying that we cannot have simple messages that mean something and can be carried through.
Professor Pharoah: I would like to dispute that giving evidence of impact is a sound-bite. I think it is very hard to show evidence of impact. It is one of the hardest things there is to do.
Q133 Andrew Stunell: If you went to the public, they would want to support the NHS. If you said that the best way of doing that was to buy some computers and get some more accountants, they would reject that. They want to know whether people are going to get better. I can see that that is obviously the same with development aid and so on. I wondered whether Kirsty Hughes could come back on this Oxfam question. You are a working model. Do people react in different ways to the development message and to the emergency aid message?
Ms Hughes: Obviously we have fund raising that is a constant effort over time
to raise money for our longer run development programmes. We have about half a million regular givers
in the
Q134 John Battle: In fact in charity law there are problems, are there not? If you raise money for disasters and you get too much, dare I say that, if you have more than you need for the immediate disaster, you cannot then spend that on development, if I am right? The tsunami was a classic example of that. Could I ask you, particularly Kirsty Hughes: what impact has the fall in the value of sterling had on Oxfam's humanitarian development work?
Ms Hughes: It is having quite a big impact.
I did bring some figures on this.
We are affected both by the exchange rate and also to some extent by the
interest rate falling because of course we get some income from our
reserves. I think we have probably seen
a fall of something like £7.5 million in terms of exchange rate impacts. I can send you the correct figures. It varies by country because although
sterling has fallen in many countries where we are working, their exchange
rates have fallen as well. Overall, it
is certainly having a negative impact.
To the extent we have already been making some financial cuts in our
Q135 John Battle: I have a small question and a larger question. I will ask Kirsty Hughes the small question. I am thinking of Oxfam. Do you think that the smaller charities that do not have the same name or reputation as Oxfam, although they may be doing good work, are suffering more? Do you have any data on the impact of recession on the smaller competitors of Oxfam, if I can use that term?
Ms Hughes: I do not know the answer to that question. I am not sure if we are collecting that sort of information. Certainly we talk to our fellow NGOs. On the whole, we do not try and see them as competitors. We are often talking to government together or talking to supporters together about emergency appeals and it does vary by the focus of the NGO, their typical support base. We are quite unusual obviously in the extent of our shops and therefore the extent to which the Oxfam brand is also known and recognised.
Q136 John Battle: The larger question is this. You might say I take a perverse view about the economic crisis because I think it is a massive opportunity for transforming our approach to the economy. I am not going just to prop up banks and believe the trickle down theory in marketing will solve all those problems. I think there is a paper out today from the Sustainability Commission on whether growth is a good thing or not. I put on a question mark because growth has to be kept in the frame. That is a big debate. The question I put to you is this. I have been very encouraged by some of the NGOs, including Oxfam. Is Oxfam starting to blend the sustainability questions with the tackling poverty questions so that we might have a new approach to the economy in the future? In other words, if we do not get the challenge of climate change right, forget the global recession because the effects of climate change will wipe out all the increases in development spending over the last ten years and projected for the next 20. Do you have that larger frame to say it is not just the economic crisis now but can we keep together into that bracket tackling sustainability with the climate change agenda?
Ms Hughes: Yes, absolutely. Our top priority, not just as Oxfam GB but as
Oxfam International and our network of affiliates this year, is climate change
and the prospects for a global deal at
Q137 Chairman: It may be an opportunity in the long term. The point of this inquiry is that in the
short term it is having a negative impact.
We have just come back from
Ms Hughes: I do not think we have made any appeals for that sort of assistance. Obviously we are looking at our income funds and our income is made up of a mixture of sources from charities, from trusts, some money from DFID or from the EU humanitarian arm, for instance. So of course if we are going to them and saying, "Last year you gave us this but this year that buys this much less", and I imagine our fund raisers are precisely having those sorts of conversations, I think from our point of view we are concerned as much with the overall levels of aid as with our specific income. We are putting our weight behind the argument, first of all for keeping to the Gleneagles commitments, so increasing the amount of aid as promised, and also, because of the recession, we have been arguing for that to be brought forward, that countries should see, despite the difficulties of the recession, if they cannot speed up the aid. As we have seen, even the World Bank and the IMF have been saying that the poorer countries need emergency support; they need emergency funding or we are going to undermine all the investments we have made in the previous ten years. Again I have already mentioned that the G20 is on Thursday and that is a very important moment to see what sort of commitment those 20 economies can made to make sure that the poorest countries that are not represented around the table are protected as much as possible from the worst impacts of the recession.
Q138 Chairman: Obviously in terms of your first approach, DFID is simply going to turn around and say, "We have the same problem as you; sorry, go and find it somewhere else". They are unlikely to be able to increase funds.
Ms Hughes: We are looking at different ways of going to trusts and other sources of independent funding to increase our fund raising and not to rely only on our individual donations from supporters or from our different amounts of international government support.
Professor Pharoah: I think the problem is that the trusts are not going to have as much money either because they depend so heavily on their investments and some of them on annual profit donations, which are also going to be under threat. I think the trusts are not going to be a source of increasing income; they will be looking very hard at their own priorities.
Q139 Hugh Bayley: This is a slightly tangential question to Kirsty Hughes, prompted by what David Hudson was saying about their being broadly similar levels of support for ODA in different European countries. Why do you think Oxfam and other partners in Make Poverty History and the GB Debt Campaign and so on have had relatively more success in persuading the UK Government to increase aid, to take initiatives on debt relief, to argue for changes in the Common Agricultural Policy, than your counterpart - Oxfam in Spain and charities particularly in southern European countries that have been less willing to commit?
Ms Hughes: As you know, there is a huge variety across even just European countries in terms of levels of aid as a percentage of gross domestic product of GNI and the Nordics are of course ahead of us.
Q140 Hugh
Bayley: The question is why. Does your campaign make any difference? That is what I am really asking. If so, how are you campaigning? Are you able to transfer your campaigning
skills or Nordic or
Ms Hughes: Absolutely and I think with these things it is very difficult to
draw out exact lessons. Every political
system is different; the domestic political debate is different in
Q141 Hugh Bayley: It does seem to me, in terms of developing a sophisticated campaign strategy during the downturn, that writing off the Doha Round would be a terrible mistake because for the rich countries getting a new trade deal would substantially boost growth in the medium term. In terms of the south, it is the north that is blocking a trade deal, principally on agricultural subsidies. Is there now a very special window of opportunity, particularly with the new administration in the United States, for campaigners to bear down on those in the Republic of Ireland and in southern Europe who are so resistant to change in the Common Agricultural Policy and in North America to try and exploit the new politics and say, "Look it is in our own interests in the north and desperately in the interests of the south to secure a trade deal"? What is stopping that?
Ms Hughes: Obviously Oxfam and other NGOs were concerned at the way the Doha Round developed. It was meant to be a development round and it ended up with a proposed deal that, as you know, did not work and that we as Oxfam did not support. In terms, as you say, of the current crisis, we have seen this massive fall in trade volumes; we have seen the huge falls in trade finance. Those sorts of things have direct impacts on growth and poverty in developing countries. We are certainly calling for action on trade finance; we are calling for the rich countries not to resort to protectionism. We are also saying if there is a new development, if there is a new Doha Round, it must go back to its development roots, which would include sorting out things like unfair agricultural subsidies. We do not want to go back to a Doha Round that does not recognise the needs of the developing countries and does not allow them the policy space they need when they are very poor to develop in ways that are going to give them sustainable growth.
Q142 Chairman: Before we leave the point about what Government could do, there has been a controversial suggestion for a Mehta/Mirrless proposal about giving the top people, the rich people, even bigger tax breaks to encourage them to give money to charity aligned to the MDGs. What do you think about that?
Ms Hughes: I think that as Oxfam what we are saying out this crisis is that this is a crisis of the system - this is not just a specific business cycle - and that we need to change the system away from one that in many countries has promoted greater disparities of wealth to a fairer, more just system.
Q143 Chairman: You would tax them rather than give them a tax break?
Ms Hughes: I think we might.
Dr Hudson: I vehemently disagree with that proposal. I think, if anything, the last 24 months has shown that that sort of system and those sorts of incentives do not necessarily work and the problem here is getting taxation for the rich as well as taxation for the poor and to be able to tap into that through institutional and public channels. I would be very much against that sort of proposal.
Q144 Chairman: In relation to that, do you have a view on for example Lord Stern's suggestion that to deal with a combination of the needs for development and climate change we should raise the UN target to one per cent and Bob Zoelleck's proposal that 0.7 per cent of any of the stimulus packages should be top-sliced for development?
Dr Hudson: I do not see any logical problems with those. The problem of course is political in all those things but the 0.7 per cent target has been with us since the Pearson Commission. It is long-standing. It is not arbitrary. At the time it was not arbitrary but it is arbitrary now. It is now a campaigning target which is great; it serves a very useful purpose but it has not been worked out at current levels of expenditure, et cetera. There may be a campaigning issue about moving it to one per cent which I do not feel I could comment on, but in terms of the problems of raising that, I do not see it.
Ms Hughes: Could I comment on that very briefly? I think we probably would not support saying
"go to one per cent of ODA in order to tackle climate change". We are calling for more funding to help
adaptation and mitigation of climate change.
In terms of the politics of getting to a deal at
Q145 Andrew Stunell: If we go back to the question of public support, the issue which comes out time and again when people are rejecting the idea of giving support is corruption, waste and misuse. It is a very clear public perception that this is the main barrier. If that is right, what do you think DFID can actually do to change the public perception?
Professor Pharoah: It can give more messages about different countries, lots of
positive messages about countries where there are some very good clear stories,
so that people do not just see it all as
Q146 Andrew Stunell: Do you think, if I can put it this way, that there are two sorts of people: those who think that they will not give because of corruption and those who will give anyway, or is it a bit more subtle than that?
Professor Pharoah: Yes, I think there is a problem in talking about the general public. Some of the sophisticated arguments a lot of people and a lot of donors already understand. I am not sure how much any of this will get through to the general public or make a difference. Obviously that is important in terms of attitudes to government but it is not so important in terms of getting in a lot of money from people for these issues.
Ms Hughes: I think in some ways it is just like in the UK; we have all sorts of mechanisms here to stop corruption, to create accountably and the public do not necessarily understand every last legal detail of that but they know it is there and they have confidence in that system. If the confidence starts to go down in that system for a scandal, then there will be a lot of media and political attention on that. It is the same for development aid and the sorts of things that DFID might say or we might say as Oxfam: "We need this sort of scrutiny, this sort of accountability, these sorts of mechanisms". We might not put all of those on a flyer to the public when we are trying to raise funds, but it is very important that I can stand whether here or in a public meeting and say we do have this list of things and outline them and say, "That is how you tackle corruption and accountability and effectiveness of aid". It does not mean that the aid‑giving business is not risk-free and, like any form of public expenditure, it is a question of the best accountability you can set up.
Q147 Andrew Stunell: It is clear, I think, that if the public said, "I am going to give £10," they would probably prefer to give it to you than give it to the Secretary of State for International Development, which may be just or unjust. How can DFID create that level of confidence which the NGOs have?
Professor Pharoah: Does it need to? It was suggested in our focus groups that perhaps governments should take a slightly more humble, more behind-the-scenes role while supporting the NGOs to carry out more of that role in communications.
Dr Hudson: Another problem is where the public get their information from. People say that they get most of their information from the media, mainly from newspapers and television. We did a brief contents analysis of global poverty stories from 2005, presumably a year when one would expect to see poverty covered very well. Most of the coverage was very short. That is a problem of copy. The stories were very short and there was no subtlety or complexity in there, attribution of causes or responsibility. Either they were very emotive, which creates the feeling I think of 'nothing can be done, this is a lost cause', or they were very negative and highlighted things such as corruption. So it is no surprise that when DFID then surveys the public 50 per cent of the public think that corruption is a major cause of poverty. For all the excellent work that NGOs do, there is also the role that the media plays. It is very difficult to see how one influences the media to change their reporting of these stories. It is not something you want even to consider directly intervening in but it is important, nevertheless, when people get their information from those sources.
Professor Pharoah: The media could be used. I think the Government could support more use of the media when it does it directly itself. You only have to look at the Comic Relief campaign to realise how powerful the media is and it has been very powerful in international aid. I do not think we can change journalism much; I have been trying for years. I think we could make much more use of the media to raise levels of public awareness.
Ms Hughes: I would be a little more positive than that. Obviously at Oxfam we work with the media quite a lot. We try to get them to tell some of the good news stories and obviously the tsunami was a bad news story; we want that out there as well. We had some excellent coverage a couple of months back in terms of our work on maternal mortality and preventing maternal death in childbirth. That is a question of talking to journalists, explaining what we are doing, finding why it might be interesting for them to write about without compromising what we know is the real story. It is not always easy but it is possible.
Chairman: Is there a case for DFID, perhaps, to draw out more of the proper division of labour? Whilst there is, obviously, a clear overlap between some aspects of what DFID does and NGOs - and this is where they can work together or, indeed, DFID can use NGOs as a delivery mechanism - there are other things which NGOs cannot and will not do, one of which is budget support on a significant scale, capacity building, in terms of institutions, and Andrew's point about training accountants and things like that, on which I suspect, Oxfam have an even harder time than the Government in persuading their donors. Is there some need to try and draw that out in a clearer way? You know, so that there is not total competition but divisions of labour where only government agencies can work with governments in the sense of actually building up capacity, health services or education services. Do you want to add?
Q148 John
Battle: This is where I am passionately campaigning
against the view that governments are all bureaucracy and accountants - they
are not, and we need good ones. I will
give an example: when you did the report, and I saw the report, and we did a
report on maternal health, of course we want to see women get proper clinics,
but what I think you need are doctors and nurses. One of the things the government, DFID, is
doing, because of the row over African doctors being trained in Britain and
then staying in Britain to get a higher wage and send the money home, is that
to get them to stay in Malawi, our government - our taxpayers - pay the wages
of doctors to stay in Malawi, through the government. When I asked the media could they spell out
that we are paying doctors salaries in
Ms Hughes: I think that is absolutely
right. We, as Oxfam, actually face that
issue as well. I am the Head of the
Public Policy and Advocacy Team; I am not running a clinic in
Hugh Bayley: Just reflecting on the media argument, I think we are stuck with the media we were stuck with 25 years ago. I was funded by Oxfam, Christian Aid and others to set up a television company to make serious documentaries about development, which is very difficult now because the cost base of broadcast/television has changed. I am not sure that suggesting that NGOs put in money to do that makes sense against the other priorities you have, and you could not possibly have a state-funded propaganda service. So we are lumbered with the ----
Chairman: We do have one, actually!
Q149 Hugh Bayley: What you are doing is promoting the positive stories wherever you can find a journalist to pick it up. My question is a different one: do you think the public respond better to a moral argument for us to help the needy or a self-interested argument that development brings benefits to us through lower migration or undermining the drugs trade, or better security? Which is the better persuader?
Professor Pharoah: Are you thinking in terms of support for charities here or support for government?
Q150 Hugh Bayley: I am thinking in terms of support for the concept of transferring resources from our country to developing countries, whether through voluntary giving or through the coercion of the Inland Revenue.
Ms Hughes: I would say it is both, although we would not necessarily put it in exactly those words. We would talk a lot about shared interests, especially in the context of the current crisis and climate change. We are getting so many lessons in global interdependence, so that is about shared interests, which is also about self-interest. Certainly, you would not expect Oxfam to stand back from making the moral argument about absolute poverty or about things like: "Who is responsible for climate change, and who is it impacting on?" and: "Who is responsible for the economic crisis, and who is it impacting on?" I think we do and will continue to use both. I do not have any particular survey evidence saying which one impacts better.
Q151 Hugh Bayley: David, you were suggesting that there was a false dichotomy here, set up in this way, but reading what you said you in your paper made me think you were saying something that is pretty similar to Kirsty - it is not either/or; it is use both the arguments because some people respond better to one than the other.
Dr Hudson: In one sense it is erroneous
to speak of "a public"; we have "publics"; there are different constituencies
out there and you can appeal to them in different ways. Even in individuals, we can respond
differently to the notion of voluntary giving that may work along a more moral
narrative, and if you think of your taxes which your government is spending,
you might want a more self-interested argument.
That is purely speculative.
Another speculation might be that moral drivers are more robust in
downturns. That is something that we may
be seeing at the moment. It seems that
DFID has always operated with those two logics, but from, for example, the
foreword that Douglas Alexander recently put out in the White Paper, the notion
of interdependence is really up there in the first line, so I know it is
something that DFID is pushing. We
constructed a model looking at the data from 2005 from the survey, and we tried
to see what the correlation was between people who said they had a level of
concern and the extent to which they said that poverty is a moral issue and
that poverty affects them personally.
Those that said it is a moral issue, perhaps unsurprisingly, correlated
with high levels of support. The
self-interest argument was actually negatively correlated, which would suggest
that is a bad route to go down. We tried
to pass this out a bit, because there was a question about: "Does it affect you
personally or does it affect the country - the
Mr Shah: Can I build on that, as well, just to point out that there is also a question which has to be thought about in terms of whether some of the arguments that you make might undermine the actual thing that you are trying to support. I have noticed the prevalence of child sponsorship adverts on the Tube now, and that is very moral, in a way, but it actually leaves you thinking that it is helpless African children; that that is what development is about. It seems to me the narrative around, for example, Fair Trade, which is about building institutions and creating capacity and empowerment, is more powerful and develops a longer-term understanding of what development really is.
Q152 Hugh
Bayley: I agree that there is a moral responsibility
on fundraisers and development campaigners to make sure that you do not just go
for the sort of quick hit and raising the maximum from the disaster appeals,
and that the most grotesque pictures are not necessarily the answer. David, I felt that the core of your argument
was your recognition that there are "publics" rather than "a public", and that
it is horses for courses; you use different arguments for different people. You were suggesting that there is a negative
correlation using the interdependence argument.
I would have thought with some "publics" there are, and with others
there are not. I have spent the last
eight to ten years on the Economics and Security Committee of the NATO
Parliamentary Assembly, and I have shifted the agenda away from an old-style
defence economics - "How many tanks have they got?" "How many have we got?" - to looking
regularly at development spending because it has security implications, not just
in
Dr Hudson: I would agree with that. I think that is a perfectly fair analysis. Off the top of my head, if we were to go back to that data and look at it, I would imagine education is an important predictor of it. When you think about arguments about trade as well, obviously, those people who work in export-dependent sectors are much more pro-trade. One problem is that the shared interest argument is very hard to make because it asks a lot of people. I say that as someone who tries to teach comparative advantage to Masters students, and even then they do not necessarily get it; logically flawless, but it takes a bit of getting your head round it, and I wonder whether we see a similar thing going on here.
Ms Hughes: I would not entirely disagree with that but, equally, if you look at the coalition we joined in advance of the G20, the Put People First Coalition, that had its rally on Saturday, that went from starting off with about 30 organisations from trade and NGOs to faith groups to, I think we are now at something like 150 organisations. Okay, those are the activists, but we have had to talk to each other to find a shared agenda to promote that communication strategy to those many "publics" out there, and it has been very encouraging to see how easy it has been for NGOs like Oxfam to talk to something like the TUC and to link the job worries in a country like the UK to questions of Green New Deal and to questions of poor villagers in Bangladesh who are losing their land because of floods. I am not saying it just happens automatically but sometimes when it does start to work it is remarkable that you see it build up rather rapidly.
Q153 John Battle: I would like to ask a few questions about DFID's communication strategy. DFID published a communication strategy in 2008 and they divided the public into the following categories (six of them, I think): active enthusiasts; interested mainstream; family first sympathisers; distracted individuals; insular sceptics (I do not know whether that is just sceptics who live on islands, but never mind) and disapproving rejecters. Then they decided just to address the first three, really, and forget insular sceptics and the rest of them. I just wonder: was that a wise decision? Are those kinds of categories helpful and should they not focus on tackling the sceptics a bit more?
Professor Pharoah: Most people give to charity; very few never give to charity. I think the real issue is getting people to give more. I think they were right not to concentrate on the sceptics. There are a few people who do not have those kinds of ethics, and they believe they pay their taxes and that ends their public responsibility.
Q154 John
Battle: My constituency is within one of the poorest
in
Professor Pharoah: No, they give a higher percentage of their income but they do not give more money.
Q155 John Battle: They have not got more money, that is why, but in terms of percentage, to be fair, they are much more generous than rich people who give a tiny fraction when they are giving sometimes five per cent of a not very large amount. To say they do not give as much money is an inevitable comment on the mal-distribution of wealth rather than their generosity. If, for example (and DFID is suggesting they do), MDGs are a key way of getting people interested in development and gathering people around them, but, in fact, only six per cent of the population know what MDGs are - Millennium Development Goals. I was addressing, again, a place where people probably mostly had degrees, actually, and they thought the Millennium Development Goals were for the Millennium, and since we have passed Millennium they are now over. With a lack of awareness about the MDGs, is it a flawed strategy to go behind the MDGs when no one knows what they are or really understands what it is about?
Mr Shah: Can I just say, on the communication strategy, that it needs to be seen with the building support for development strategy, which was the 1999 or 1998 strategy. If you ask me more questions along the education element of the work I can tell you more about it. In a sense, that strategy is about saying: "Who are the different people that we need to work with to build support for development?" and that does not categorise them in the same way. So that strategy is trying to deal with everybody and, in particular, through the schools routes. Not all of the communications work is working on that market segmentation approach.
Ms Hughes: Can I just say, on the Millennium Development Goals, it may be that there is a certain disconnect there. You are saying there is this lack of awareness of the Millennium Development Goals; I certainly would not say, from an Oxfam point of view, they are not important but it goes back to the discussion we were having earlier about how do we hold governments to that 0.7 per cent Gleneagles commitment? How do you get there in stages? That is about saying that that money is going towards achieving those goals, giving you big political commitments and United Nations commitments. I think as a political, public policy set of arguments, it is extremely important, but if you are saying maybe DFID or maybe we, too, have failed to get that over to the public, then that is an issue about wider communication, and is it easier to get over the stories rather than the sort of policy acronyms, almost. We do not want to throw the baby out with the water either, because we have got those goals, and that is still creating a lot of political energy, even if we have not got it out to the public.
Q156 John Battle: Should DFID be doing more and doubling its advertising budget, do you think? Only 22 per cent of the population know what DFID is anyway, never mind what its messages are. So would you advocate DFID increasing its activities to let people know who DFID is, what DFID does and about campaigns such as the MDGs and the 0.7 per cent? Would you advocate that?
Professor Pharoah: I think the messages are the opposite; what the people want to know is outcomes and impacts, and they are not interested in the institutions.
Q157 John Battle: So we give up on the institutions. Is that what you are saying?
Professor Pharoah: No.
Q158 John Battle: How, then, do we get round that equation?
Professor Pharoah: I do not think people need to know about the Millennium Development Goals or DFID; they need to know about what they are doing.
Q159 Chairman: Does it matter that DFID does not mean anything to most people?
Professor Pharoah: No, it does not matter at all - not if we are talking about the general public. This is why I am having a bit of difficulty; I am not exactly sure who we are trying to get through to here. There is an educated public who understand a lot of it and, maybe, need more education, but when you are talking about the general public, what is it we actually want them to know and do? How will that help - I suppose.
Ms Hughes: I would certainly distinguish
between Millennium Development Goals and DFID.
It is the same with climate change; we want the public to know about
climate change, but do they have to know exactly about Ed Miliband or his
department, and so on. It is probably
beneficial but you would have to ask: what are the goals? Is it to fundraise for Oxfam? Is it that it is a better, nicer world if
everybody understands the way the world runs and the need for development
better? What is the purpose of the
communication? In the end, however, we,
as Oxfam, would want more understanding of development among the
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 per cent of them would have some idea of what Oxfam did but I doubt if nine per cent 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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
Professor Pharoah: Can I add here? When we did our focus groups we had groups of
people who were not born in
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
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 "
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 of DE 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 ten years ago, things like the Big Lottery and the European Commission
also provided quite a lot of funding for development education work in the
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
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
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 ten 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, DEC (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 departments 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
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.