Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 45)
TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2009
DR NAOMI
HOSSAIN AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
HULME
Q40 John Battle: It is likely it
is highly interventionist, then, and personal almost, but is it,
in fact (back to Naomi's concept, really), building in the capacity
from it to be a base upwards development?
Professor Hulme: I actually joke
about conspicuous investment—particularly academics in the
USA and people in the USA are worried about welfare dependency,
but when these ultra-poor women (and it has gone well for four
years, which it often does) you actually find that there are two
sort of mud plinths that have been made to put the food on for
the cows—they have actually gone from one cow to three cows
and they are renting some land in. It is at a micro-level but
there is a whole sequence of planned things and it really gets
these women planning how they are going to turn a dollar into
two dollars and turn two dollars into four dollars. That might
take a month or two but they will plug away at it.
Dr Hossain: Can I add to that
because I did work on that programme when I was in the BRAC Research
and Evaluation Division, and there are two other things I would
add to what David has had to say. One is that the programme is
designed to enable people to graduate—they call it—into
regular microfinance programmes, so that these women who were
too poor, initially, to actually be in regular microfinance programmes
because they just did not have the capacity to repay loans, after
a period of a year/18 months/two years they are expected to be
able to graduate into getting regular micro-finance along with
moderate poor people or non-poor people as well. That is one aspect
of it. Another aspect of it—and this is why the CFPR—BRAC's
Ultra Poor Programme—is quite distinct from the old CLP
programme. This is that BRAC has this sort of 35-years of experience.
It adapts its programmes very fast on the ground very effectively,
and one of the things it did, as soon as it established itself
for poor programmes it realised that these women needed some extra
help, and the staff could not supply it, so they organised these
committees of local village elite to support them through this,
to become mentors, to be providing them with security and so on,
and so forth. These, I think, have had a little bit more of an
institutional building effect. They have also been organising
the women into women's groups interested in local governance issues;
interested in these issues that David is talking about, like when
you have government social protection schemes, monitoring who
is getting it, and that sort of thing. So they are having a bigger
impact; it is not about giving them cows and then going away.
Q41 John Battle: One question I was
going to ask is what we are learning from the BRAC programme,
but I gather other people are seriously interested in it now,
and I wonder if I could trouble you if there were some recent
evaluations, if you could reference me the evaluations so that
I could read them. My attitude to development is that we probably
learn more from what is going on elsewhere than in inner city
Leeds and I am looking to see if we can have a kind of BRAC programme
in inner city Leeds. That is why I am interested really. There
are parallels in what we can learn from a mutual exchange of where
things are different, and this scheme strikes me as a very different
kind of approach and if there is serious interest by donor institutions
we might make a bit of progress.
Professor Hulme: I have just written
a report on that which we can send to you.
John Battle: If you could let us have
that, we would be grateful, thank you.
Q42 Mr Lancaster: I will move from
the particular to the general and ask a couple of questions about
expanding the social protection programme. Professor, you have
written that while development assistance may be essential in
starting up programmes, in the medium and long term it is very
important that they are funded domestically. Is that something
that can happen in Bangladesh or are there constraints stopping
the expansion of such programmes?
Professor Hulme: In Bangladesh
finance is always scarce and that sort of thing, but I do not
see finance as a binding constraint. It is the delivery systems
in getting the institutions that can deliver social protection
and other services that is the main constraint.
Q43 Mr Lancaster: So there are not
financial constraints! I see that only three out of 140 million
people pay tax. There are no revenue constraints?
Professor Hulme: There are revenue
constraints, but there are domestic resources and those domestic
resources are increasing, and there are donors such as the UK
and many other donors who would like to support Bangladesh, so
I do not see finance as the critical constraint; it is the delivery
systems where we need the breakthroughs and the innovations.
Q44 Mr Lancaster: Can you expand
slightly on that? We are nearly out of time.
Professor Hulme: Basically, at
the moment in Bangladesh NGOs are being used extensively because
they are effective. They often have effective delivery systems,
so in a way we need to work more with them and working out how
they can scale up, but then it is also looking in a way at whether
one can get some of the public sector schemes to work more effectively.
Donors particularly have tended to keep clear of what the Government
of Bangladesh is doing, but old-age pensions have been introduced.
Certainly in my field experience they go to very old women who
have very low incomes. Donors in a way seem to keep away from
that because "Oh, it is the Government of Bangladesh; it
has not been designed outside". I would suggest that one
could look at what the government is doing and see if one could,
in a way, go with the grain and improve it on those programmes.
The politics are not perfect but democracy does mean that there
are pressures for the government to take care of its people, and
politicians are aware of those. I think focusing more on building
on domestic political ideas, which may not appear technically
to be as good as the ideas that we might bring from the UK or
the World Bank, actually there is a constituency because one of
the things with social protection schemes is that you want them
to work but you need to build up a political constituency that
will keep them working and improve them. You do not want miracles
from outside. You need to look at whether there are one or two
programmes. The old-age pension programmes in Bangladesh, I think,
merits some analysis to work out whether donors could help those
be expanded, because at the moment they have got low coverage;
they only cover 5-10% of the potential elderly unsupported.
Dr Hossain: That is a perfect
example of these informal accountability mechanisms working reasonably
well, the old-age pensions.
Q45 Chairman: Thank you both very
much. You have certainly given us a flavour of what is obviously
a complex but interesting country.
Professor Hulme: Enjoy your trip.
Bangladesh is fabulous. There is so much to learn there.
Chairman: Thank you very much. As I say,
if you feel you could give us any supplementary information, that
would be extremely useful. Thank you very much indeed.
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