Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 109)
TUESDAY 1 DECEMBER 2009
PROFESSOR GEOF
WOOD AND
DR MARTIN
GREELEY
Q100 John Battle: I was very impressed.
I learned about the blend. What I enjoyed the most was the legal
element and I would readily transfer the model, with some tweaking,
into inner city Leeds, where there are all kinds of challenges.
I thought that legal element would really work for community engagement
in some of the minority communities in my neighbourhood. It added
a new dimension about their personal, community and family empowerment
and I thought that was a very radical model that had a much wider
blend and a deeper mixing, as it were, of the issues than I had
ever seen anywhere in the world. I was impressed. I would still
come back to the question of the sustainability of it, however.
It was on a small scale, in one village, and they needed to choose
seven people in the village to give a grant to to get them going.
I wonder how replicable it is across the country and how sustainable
it is against really big shocks, such as if a flood comes in or
there is salination of all the fields. How sustainable is that
model of development?
Professor Wood: I have a slightly
different take. I have a lot of experience with another organisation,
PROSHIKA, which was very large on the ground for a long time—and
still is, although it is having some problems with its leadership
at the moment. The kinds of programmes that we talk about here
are not unique to BRAC. They have been in Bangladesh for a very
long time. There is a particular problem in that a lot of the
poverty reduction strategies in Bangladesh have been of this kind.
The legal services aspect has been in Bangladesh for 20 years:
it started in Madanpur in the South many years ago, and there
was an organisation called GSS, which now is also a bit defunct—you
have to remember NGOs do come and go in Bangladesh.
Q101 John Battle: Everywhere.
Professor Wood: GSS pioneered
the legal services ideas quite a time ago. All of these kinds
of ideas are around, but the particular point I want to make is
that generally in Bangladesh and amongst its donors there has
been a kind of small-scale entrepreneurialism model, "empowerment
through the market" type approach. I have been involved in
lots of programmes which have supported that. We always say that
people need to walk on two legs, they need to have economic empowerment
in order to have political empowerment and to be able to have
the confidence politically to change a lot of the institutional
environment around them. No problem with that. If we look at these
definitions that we are seeing: "ultra poor," "extreme
poor," "hard core poor," et cetera, et cetera,
all of this language and some of the definitions that we are using
for this, we are still talking about 35 million people in Bangladesh
who may not have the capacity—not just a mental/educational
capacity, not just an asset capacity, but a relationships capacity
within these patron-client relations and so on—for the kind
of counterpart action that is required for those sorts of programmes
to work. It is worth remembering that in this country (i.e. the
UK) the welfare budget outside health and education exceeds the
global quantum of official aid annually, and this is in a vastly
rich country. We have a huge social protection safety net programme
in this country, which runs into £120 billion or whatever
annually, so it seems to me that we have to be very careful when
we are looking at the extreme poor—and some of that is geographical,
in terms of particular areas of Bangladesh that are always going
to be subject to shocks and floods: they are going to be tripped
up, they are going to have crises in their livelihoods and so
on, and then there are others who are idiosyncratically poor,
in the sense that they are disabled, they are old, they are orphans
or in a whole lot of other categories there—and we do have
to look at the stronger aspect of the blend, the social protection
safety net side of it. That is where we come back to the previous
discussion about the state, because, in the end, if you accept
an element of that agenda, then that has to be through the state
and that has to be through wider taxation. One of my worries about
short-term/medium-term development thinking about donors is that
they do tend to encourage, as it were, the immediate short term—which
is your point about sustainability—whereas one of the things
that is needed is to pressurise the state in Bangladesh to tax
its rising middle classes and to be prepared to engage in a political
settlement that has a stronger social protection, safety net element
to the blend. I do not want to knock anything out, but I want
to alter the balance a bit.
Dr Greeley: These programmes do
contribute to the resilience of households to deal with risks
such as climate-related risk, by building their asset base and
providing them with the means to cope with shocks to income in
the short term. I have a more positive view than Geof about the
way in which these short-term benefits can translate into longer-term
economic empowerment of the household unit. The BRAC programme,
in particular, and also the DFID-supported Chars Livelihoods Programme
are extremely well-designed programmes: very thoughtful, based
on lots of experience, and are very well implemented on the whole.
They do provide a model which is quite distinctive from a social
protection model. They are taking not the lame, the halt, and
the blind, but other people in households who are capable of benefiting
from the market but do not have the assets, perhaps do not have
the connections, in the way that Geof was describing currently,
but can be provided with them. It is a short-term lift which makes
a long-term difference.
Q102 John Battle: Do developmentalists
always work in the south of the world and not the north? My obsession
is asking whether we could do some reverse engineering. In my
neighbourhood the thing that is missing is legal aid. It is one
of the social protections that has dropped out. I am living in
a neighbourhood where we have quite a lot of domestic violence
issues in some of the communities where women have no protection.
I know BRAC have gone into Africa on the developmental model but
does anybody ask, instead of BRAC having an office in London to
campaign for support for Bangladesh, whether BRAC could work in
inner cities in the North.
Dr Greeley: There are microfinance
programmes which have borrowed their ideas from the South.
John Battle: Indeed, but it is more of
that connection, including that legal framework that was in the
village. Has anybody done any research on it or tried to experiment
with it in North America, Britain, Germany or wherever else?
Q103 Chairman: They are moving into
the Netherlands.
Professor Wood: Oxfam have done
quite a bit of reverse engineering. It is important to recognise
that Bangladesh and Bangladeshis have taught international NGOs
and international civil societies a lot. I absolutely agree with
you on reverse engineering. We may have some slight variance of
strategic differences, but I am always looking at these programmes
and asking, "Why haven't we got them in the UK?"
Dr Greeley: Now DFID is in discussions,
including with our institute, and looking at ways in which British
aid can help BRAC promote South-South Learning, through the university
as well as through its service delivery programme. That is a very
good initiative from the DFID Bangladesh office.
John Battle: I am encouraged to follow
that up.
Q104 Hugh Bayley: The Chars Livelihoods
Programme has almost become a cliché of a success story.
A small group of us went to visit one of the chars and it seemed
to be delivering. It seemed to be modelled on this part cash transfer/part
engagement in the market BRAC model, but I wonder whether it is
cost-effective compared with other interventions. I particularly
wonder why it is managed by an international company, Maxwell
Stamp. The guys in Maxwell Stamp seem good, but why build that
layer into a programme? It must add 50% to the cost.
Dr Greeley: Yes, I certainly worry
about the role of management companies and the extra costs associated
with them, but I think DFID are doing it because they do not have
the personnel themselves to manage directly, and there are, as
we know, these massive issues of governance in Bangladesh, so
bringing in a London company to do the business makes sense. At
least they have some form of guarantee or at least they hope that
their money is being well spent. In fact, if you dig down a bit
more, the quality of spend is not always that much better because
of having these companies in. If you compare the cost-effectiveness
of the two big models of BRAC and this Chars Livelihoods Programme,
I would imagine that BRAC will come in at something less than
a half of the cost per client moved out of poverty. I worry a
bit about it, but at that price you do get some guarantees about
what is being delivered, and it seems to me that in the Bangladesh
context that is not a bad thing to be sure about, if there are
no other mechanisms to be sure that you are getting it.
Q105 Hugh Bayley: It is going back
to ground we have covered, but are you saying that you would get
less of a guarantee if you funded it through BRAC or an NGO?
Dr Greeley: No. As I said before,
the NGO is a big world in Bangladesh and there are different qualities.
BRAC have been investigated in depth by DFID, looking at their
books, crawled over with a fine-toothed comb more than once, and
there have been absolutely zero issues. They are transparent and
they are clean and it has been evident through heavyweight audit
activity.
Q106 Hugh Bayley: What is the argument,
then, of going for a more expensive way of purchasing insurance?
Dr Greeley: Diversification.
Professor Wood: Let me come in—and
I should declare an element of conflict of interest because I
am involved in the Shiree Programme. The Shiree Programme is clearly
taking an element of the model from the Chars Livelihood Programme.
It is also taking a model from something else which you may have
encountered in your visit: Manusher Jonno, the human rights governance
programme. That model, if I remember the figures, is £13
million from DFID for funding, initially, a contracting management
company, but to hand over a challenge fund to Bangladeshi management—which
is now the case—and that is to support civil society governance
activity in Bangladesh. The Sheering Programme at the moment is
a management company, Harrow Well. I think that some of this is
a principal agent problem: How much do you trust your agent? The
point about BRAC: clean, all the rest of it, reduced transaction
costs, looks hugely attractive as a partnership because of all
of that. The danger, as we have already said, is over-privileging
that. What signals are you sending, who are you excluding, and
what else are you undermining in that process? With Shiree, it
is £65 million DFID, and it is roughly 40:15:10, and the
£40 million is for scaling up NGOs which have already proved
that they can do a whole lot of stuff—non BRAC, because
obviously there is a DFID line of funding to BRAC anyway. There
are six substantial NGOs. Some of them have an international mix.
They are scaling up known ideas—these blended models and
so on, because they are all over the place. Then there is a £15
million budget for innovation (Where can we experiment?) and,
crucially, there is £10 million for lessons learned and policy
transformation. This is where the All Party Parliamentary Group
formation comes in and lobbying and taking the evaluation and
research into policy. There is an issue, and it is absolutely
current right now. I am slightly detached, I am on the National
Steering Committee with the Bangladesh government overseeing this
programme, and I have been slightly worried that the management
company has been too proactive in auditing its partner NGOs. In
a sense, it has almost been distrusting of them and doing very
fine audits—the principal agent issue—whereas my developmental
instincts are: if, through a fair amount of scrutiny, we have
brought these NGOs into a partnership, then we have to have some
trust here because this has to be co-ownership. This programme
might disappear, and what we need is those NGOs and those ideas
sustainably implemented on the ground long after the management
group has left. There are those principal agent issues here.
Q107 Andrew Stunell: I wonder if
the Professor might like to drop the Committee a note on some
of the points just raised, which obviously raise issues about
other organisations. To come back to the Chars Livelihoods Programme,
is it holistic enough? With the village we visited, the school
was miles away and there were no health workers. They are comparatively
short-term investments because the islands themselves are not
there for a long time. Can you comment on whether the programme
should look more holistically at the provision of other services
or is it even just a waste of time?
Dr Greeley: I wish I knew the
answer to that. It is very difficult to be clear about what the
right solutions are for the chars' populations. Sometimes we think
the only real solution in the long term is migration away from
those areas because robust livelihoods are impossible. But then
you ask: migration to where? Then you visit Dhaka and you see
the problems there with migrants, so you have a think again about
alternative solutions. I am an optimist: I think we will find
suitable solutions, but it is extremely challenging at these very
low levels of livelihood. If the programmes are successful—and
they appear to be moving in the right direction—in strengthening
the resilience of households to floods and other weather-related
events, it will be easier then to put pressure on the government
to deliver the other services more effectively than it is managing
at the moment. There is some evidence that success in strengthening
livelihoods will have wider benefits, but, I agree, at the moment,
just with livelihoods without attention to service delivery in
the social sector, it is an incomplete programme.
Professor Wood: The coastal areas
are going to be rather similar, as climate change will have an
impact. You may be asking some questions about that later. The
other point to make is that the Bangladeshi population moves around
quite a lot and the rural population is quite mobile—obviously
women less than men. When you are taking the whole picture, you
do have to look at rural-rural as well as rural-urban migration
patterns. People are accessing employment, they are accessing
services away from where you might have visited, even though they
have residences there, and of course a lot of these families are
remittance dependent—and I do not mean necessarily overseas
remittance dependent but internally remittance dependent—so
when you look at the livelihoods picture you have to look at that
total picture rather than just investing in what is there in that
particular place.
Q108 Andrew Stunell: That is okay
for the men, but we visited a village where most of the women
had not had education and there were 200 children who could not
access education. Is there a role in terms of advocating a broader
approach to service delivery on the chars with local government
or regional government or whatever it might be?
Professor Wood: Local government,
yes.
Dr Greeley: Support for strengthening
local government initiatives to deliver in those areas. There
is scope for DFID to play an important role there. I would strongly
endorse that, yes.
Professor Wood: On your point
about women, if you are looking at female-headed households or
female-managed households where men are not evident, then you
absolutely have a point, but it is also worth remembering that
a lot of the time you are looking at a female-managed household
where there are mobile men contributing resources to the household.
Dr Greeley: The point I would
make is that I would not see that service delivery as a component
of the Chars Livelihoods Programme. We know from experience with
humanitarian assistance that you set up independent provision
and then transitions to state provision become difficult. It has
to be through the health department, through the education department
and finding ways and means to encourage them to provide services
which they are legally bound to provide anyway and they are not
doing.
Andrew Stunell: Thank you.
Q109 Chairman: Chars is a livelihoods
programme but it is also, to some extent, a food production programme
but there are gaps in the year when that does not work. What more
needs to be done to give them food security throughout the year?
In the context of that, what strategy is needed to sustain it
through the climate change? One is more short term, but for the
longer period is it social intervention or is it something else.
In the context of climate change, is it a losing battle?
Dr Greeley: In the short term,
the provision of food security, we are sort of pushing against
an open door here, because the issue of the hungry season in the
last few years has become a huge political debate. There is wide
press coverage as well of incidents of the so-called "monga"
or famine during this period. There is scope for DFID and other
partners of the Bangladesh government to support innovation and
this would be in the form of enhanced public distribution systems
with access through some form of targeted ration card. That system
exists at the moment. There is scope for strengthening it. At
the moment we have what are usually not bad but ad hoc responses,
which are opportunities taken by politicians as well as responses
provided by humanitarian NGOs. That is the short term. For the
longer term, it is a crystal ball. I would not like to predict
what the consequences of climate change are going to be. The types
of intervention that DFID are making through the Chars Livelihoods
Programme are contributing to household resilience and I think
that is the main thing that we have to do in this era of uncertainty
about the impact of that expected climate change.
Chairman: I would like to thank you both
very much. They were very helpful answers. Probably our questions
were better informed having been there, but your long experience
adds a huge amount to it. Thank you very much.
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