CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 95-iHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREINTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
DFID'S PROGRAMME IN
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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 |
Oral Evidence
Taken before the
on
Members present
Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair
John Battle
Hugh Bayley
Richard Burden
Mr Mark Hendrick
Daniel Kawczynski
Andrew Stunell
________________
Witnesses: Professor Geof Wood, Professor
of International Development,
Q76 Chairman: Good morning to you. It is very nice to see you. For the record could you introduce yourselves.
Dr Greeley: Good morning. I am Martin
Greeley from the
Professor Wood: I am Geof Wood and I am at the
Q77 Chairman: Thank you both very much for coming in. We have visited Bangladesh so we are towards the end of the inquiry and indeed this is the last evidence session before we take evidence from the Minister. This is a situation where we are informed, or at least we have the benefit of what we have seen and heard within Bangladesh, which will obviously come through, I think, in our questioning. One of the things that was made clear to us was that whilst the caretaker government had in many ways set the basis to enable free and fair elections to take place, which had done so and created a government with a clear majority, the indications are that the old style of Bangladesh politics is reasserting itself of winner‑takes‑all, the opposition being shut out and corruption coming back in as a major factor. I wonder first of all whether you would accept that is the situation, given your knowledge over a much longer period than our snapshot, and to what extent you think the activities of DFID in trying to improve governance within Bangladesh are effective and have been effective up until now?
Dr Greeley: I think the analysis is accurate.
I have been extremely disappointed with the performance of the current
Government and everything I hear about that performance. If anything, it is worse than it has been
before. They had a massive victory, they
are taking advantage of that and it is very much a case of winner‑take‑all. I have little optimism under the current
regime in
Professor Wood: The Awami League Government, I am afraid, has always had this
reputation. It was the party of
liberation from 1972 and I witnessed it operating in
Q78 Chairman: To what extent has DFID's budget of £20 million for governance reform, which they are spending and on which they have made some claims, contributed in any way to counter that and indeed is it capable of doing so, or is the situation beyond the ability of either DFID or the international community to influence in any way?
Professor Wood: I think there are, as always, with these situations one or two pockets of hope and it is a question of identifying them and often that means also identifying personalities and building on them. There is a unit that operates within the Assembly, the People's Empowerment Trust, which is a civil society unit supporting the Speaker of the Jatiyo Sangshad, the Assembly, in creating some of the governance structures like the ones we are witnessing here today. There is some possibility of supporting that. I am also currently associated with one of DFID's programmes in Bangladesh, the extreme poverty programme, where we have been able to, at least formally, set up an all‑parliamentary group and we are identifying one or two young MPs who we think we can begin to work with and try and provide them with enough evidence and arguments so that they can be effective. As always, there are some pockets.
Q79 Chairman: Can I just pick out one thing. In our briefing DFID says that they help to ensure the government budget is more responsive to the poor and sensitive to general issues. Do you believe that to be true?
Professor Wood: The present Finance Minister in the new government has definitely produced a far more pro‑poor budget. What is interesting is that the current Governor of the Bangladesh Bank, who is a personal friend of mine, Atiur Rahman, for many years, over 15 or 20 years, annually produced a pro‑poor critique of the annual government budget and he is now the Governor of the Bangladesh Bank and able to pull various levers. I think we have got two people in quite strong positions. I am not sure whether DFID can take much credit or responsibility for that but, nevertheless, I think that there are two people in rather key positions who are looking in the right direction.
Dr Greeley: I think it is good that they are in fact putting a focus on poverty,
but if we go back through all the five‑year plans that has always been
the case. There was much amusement in
Q80 Hugh Bayley: DFID has a civil service training programme which I presume is there in the belief that if you have a professionally trained, capable civil service you help to deal with some of these problems of corruption. Is the theory right and how effective is the training in meeting the goal?
Professor Wood: If I can take this because I evaluated this programme with one of the DFID output purpose reviews two years ago, in December 2007. I think you are referring to what is called the MATT2 programme, Management at the Top, and this is a programme which is trying to create a critical mass of committed, like‑minded senior civil servants at joint secretary and above, particularly identifying those who are likely to rather rapidly move into strong positions. When I was leading this review that meant I did have quite a bit of contact both with the cohorts as well as with the Establishments Division and the reforms that they are trying to take there. On paper, I think there are lots of positives in this programme. I have been trying to say to DFID and Dhaka that they should not under‑estimate the significance of this programme for all their other projects in Bangladesh because, in the end, if you are trying to have projects in relation to the Bangladesh government the reality of that is that you need to have a senior cadre of civil servants on your side sharing the same vocabulary, the same ideas and attempting to see them through. Yes, I was quite impressed with some of this cohort and very impressed with the training. I did have some criticisms because I felt that they were having a cohort of training in Bangladesh and then rather rapidly wanting them to do the same thing as has always been done in the past, and has always failed, which is then send them abroad. Sending them abroad is, frankly, a kind of treat for the civil servants, and their patrons in the Establishments Division resisted my attempts ‑ and my attempts were quite strong in the final briefing ‑ to withdraw that part of the programme in order to divert that funding into the building up of capacity in Bangladesh, whether it is the Institute of Government Studies in BRAC or whether it is the Public Administration Institute in Dhaka University, or whatever, in order to build the capacity in Bangladesh to take them through and maintain this critical mass and a kind of esprit de corps within it. I can only see that as a good move but I am not sure about the patronage/sending them abroad aspect of it.
Dr Greeley: Just to add that the problem even when you have well‑trained high‑calibre civil servants is that there is wholesale change at the top within the civil service establishment when there is a change in government and political friends are appointed from within the establishment, so it is very frustrating for DFID and other supporters of civil service strengthening.
Q81 Hugh Bayley: You both lead me into my next question. Governance is a very important context for development in that better governance tends to produce better development. You can look at Ghana versus the DRC if you like in Africa, which I know better, but, generally speaking, there has been a reluctance from DFID to plunge into dealing with governance deficits within the political establishment, within the Parliament or within political party structures. The Foreign Office does a bit of this but DFID not very much and yet in Bangladesh it is absolutely clear to me that unless you improve the standards in public life in the political parties and in the Parliament you will still have one of your two hands tied behind your back. DFID is putting £5 million or £6 million, quite a large sum of money, into developing the parliamentary and political structures. Do you think this is wise? Is it likely to pay dividends? What role do you think the Westminster Parliament and parties could play in supporting DFID's work in this field?
Dr Greeley: I think if you look at the experience under the caretaker government where there were very deliberate attempts by those in office at the time to enforce political party reform, we see that in fact there was sufficient political leverage with the leadership in both the BNP and the Awami League to resist that, and even when the caretaker government went to extremes of jailing the leadership and otherwise putting them in difficulties, there was sufficient political clout in both parties to resist that. I find it difficult to imagine that even so influential a voice as the British Government's is really going to make very much difference to that, but I welcome the pressure, and I think that continuing to spend in that manner, encouraging reform, is what we should be doing, but do not expect to count your chickens.
Q82 Hugh Bayley: Can I ask you to comment before Geof does himself on Geof's example of setting up an all‑party group within the Parliament to look at poverty reduction. Are you aware of this initiative or other initiatives of this kind and would you put this in the category of "worth trying"?
Dr Greeley: I think the all‑parliamentary approach is good, for sure, but again I am not very hopeful about it. I rather prefer the line that Geof was suggesting that if we are looking at generational transitions within the party political leadership then it is possible to identify some likely winners from a governance perspective and a shrewd level of support but not overwhelming public endorsement would be very appropriate.
Professor Wood: You are going to listen to Pierre Landell‑Mills after us and I
am sure he will have comments on this as well.
Part of the problem clearly with an all‑party parliamentary group
idea, just to pick that up, is that we can be absolutely sure for the moment
that the opposition will not play into this.
You are a mixed group here from a range of parties. This does not happen in
Q83 Chairman: I take that point but John Battle put that question specifically to the Prime Minister about having an anti‑poverty committee, which she was enthusiastic about and said she was going to take forward, but what you are saying is, is there no way that pressure can be brought to bear on the opposition to say, "So you care so little about poverty you are not prepared to take part?"
Professor Wood: Exactly.
Q84 Chairman: Does that have any effect?
Professor Wood: I think that is where the pressure has to be applied. There has to be an element of embarrassment-creating processes.
Hugh Bayley: Thank you, that was very interesting.
Q85 Richard Burden: Could we just examine for a minute how the extent to which providing basic services through NGOs fits into this whole picture of accountability and what that means. In the evidence that you have put forward and the things you have said you have described Bangladesh as a "franchised state". Perhaps you could say to us what you think the developmental implications are of that and to what extent the state, with all the accountability issues we have been talking about, actually does have an influence or control over the policy and the strategic direction of basic services even if not the actual delivery of them?
Professor Wood: I suppose I ought to kick off since that is a reference to my
arguments here. For those of you who may
not have come across this it is just a simple point that I was making in the
late 1990s that there is a bit of a contradiction between having a lot of donor
aid supporting the NGO activity in Bangladesh and the growth of it and so on,
particularly in the area of the delivery of basic services ‑ education and
health and so on ‑ and at the same time the donors being concerned about
governance. Because it seems to me that what you have is NGOs effectively
taking on the functions of the state but in a non‑statutory framework in
which they have no statutory obligation to their clients; it is a voluntary
relationship essentially, so you have this problem. I think this is a big development problem in
Bangladesh because clearly Bangladesh is famous for, and has led the world in
the creation of, a series of NGOs, some of whom are now international as well
like BRAC, who have done huge scales of work and implementation and brought
ideas and so on to Bangladesh. So there is a lot of praise to be given for that
process, but it does seem to me ultimately that there is a danger in over-privileging
NGOs as a target of aid and strategic partnerships for DFID, say, the World
Bank and anybody else, because it seems to me that then you have a self‑fulfilling
prophecy in that you are undermining the capacity of the state and you are
getting in between the relationship between citizen and state and reproducing that
accountability issue. I would make one
more point. I know that Martin Greeley has
a lot of familiarity with BRAC, as indeed I do, and you may have been given
copies of this book, and I saw Abed a few weeks ago in Dhaka myself, so there
is huge respect for an organisation of this kind.[2] I do not think we are yet there with the
thinking but I wonder whether we have to say with a society like
Q86 Richard Burden: Maybe, Dr Greeley, you will have something to say about this. If that would be the kind of settlement that donors should be looking at, what in practical terms would that mean as far as donor policy is concerned? How would that be different to what happens now?
Professor Wood: I think it is not realistic at the moment to propose to governing political parties that have won through the ballot box ‑ and I think actually fairly in this last election ‑ that they have got to share their winner‑takes‑all approach with a set of NGOs in a significant strategic way. However, it does raise this question - what do we think about NGOs? Are we saying that they are guides to policy, they are innovators, they show the way, but in the end they are not the ones to do the macro-delivery, or are we saying they are big enough and significant enough in Bangladesh to bring them far more into the policy and implementation process. I think that is the strategic dilemma.
Q87 Richard Burden: And you ultimately come down on the second of those?
Professor Wood: No, I think I come down ultimately on the first of actually hanging in there with democratic parties and state responsibilities.
Chairman: I think we might pursue this in some more detail. Mark Hendrick?
Q88 Mr Hendrick: Just on that point. You are saying the opposition are not playing ball and therefore they are not doing their job as an opposition. Government is not doing the things it should be doing because if it was doing them you would have no need for organisations like BRAC. When we were in Bangladesh and we met with BRAC, the head there Abed was saying that he does not want to get involved with governments because then he is showing political bias to one party or another party. How do you get round this?
Professor Wood: I think he is right. That is why I opt for the first of the two solutions but I simply open up a second one.
Q89 Mr Hendrick: If you are saying then let us not be reliant on NGOs, this is a job of government and government is not doing it, and we stop supporting NGOs like BRAC, then what is going to happen? The whole place is going to go even further down the drain, surely?
Dr Greeley: We are not doing justice to NGO thinking on this issue. Abed and his colleagues at BRAC are extremely aware of the need for transition. If we take for example the education sector, last year DFID agreed to support a new programme with BRAC and BRAC put in a budget to the donors of over US $450 million and the donors rightly turned round to BRAC and said, "Why should we give you $450 million for primary education when we are also giving $800 million to the government under the primary education development programme, phase two, at the same time? What is the point in doing this?" BRAC had developed an idea of public/private partnership in their original documentation and this was very much a response to pressure from donors to demonstrate that they were working with government. In fact, we tore up that draft and we rewrote it completely because it is not up to the NGOs to say, "We are going to form a partnership with government." Government has to come to the NGOs and make that request, so what, in effect, happened in the outcome of all this was that BRAC said, "Okay, we will continue to provide education services where the government cannot reach, in remote areas, to ethnic minorities, to the poor. We will continue to support the training of government staff in the teaching programme and we will try to ensure that there is a process of transition so that in five years' time we will not be looking at BRAC schools but we will be looking at BRAC teacher training and BRAC support to government systems." I think they are very aware of it, but the timing of transition and the modalities of transition do depend upon initiatives from the government and there is a critical role for the donors to play in supporting that transition in ways which do not undermine the political neutrality of the NGOs.
Q90 Andrew Stunell: This is a very interesting line of enquiry. We have focused rather on BRAC, which is clearly quite an exceptional organisation. There are of course many other NGOs operating in the education sector, for instance, and in some cases it seems to be almost the other way round in that the government does not really acknowledge the work that the NGOs are undertaking. Could you say something about that relationship between the government and NGOs in general when it comes to the delivery of health and education and whether that relationship is sufficiently robust?
Dr Greeley: I think it is important to distinguish amongst the community of NGOs
in
Q91 Andrew Stunell: Which way round does this relationship actually work? What seemed to us was that the NGOs spring up and then the government kind of accepts them or not rather than the government initiating a process, but tell me about these political NGOs, are they party‑based NGOs?
Professor Greeley: They are set up by individuals with connections to the political parties who are willing to pay to politicians to get access to financial resources through programmes such as the hard-to-reach out-of-school children programme.
Q92 Andrew Stunell: So it is a way of siphoning off some money rather than delivering an education?
Professor Greeley: It is a way of siphoning off some money. You have to be careful which NGOs you work
with. It is a very mixed bag in
Q93 Andrew Stunell: Do you think at the strategic level the government of Bangladesh has come to terms with how to form those relationships and monitor those relationships?
Professor Greeley: No, it has not. It has an NGO watchdog which has had good leadership on occasion and which has had reasonable relationships with some of the bigger NGOs. It could potentially fulfil that role and be an effective watchdog. It has the law behind it, it has clout, but it is not trusted because it is perceived to be political in the way in which it goes about its business.
Q94 Andrew Stunell: Does the government intend to have a pro-poor preference in terms of the way it supports NGOs in their programmes in different areas?
Dr Greeley: Yes. If you take the example of their support to microfinance, the government runs a major apex body which supplies microfinance, targeted only at those NGOs which are targeting the poorest households. Government has been able to have quite a decisive influence, in fact, on the way in which a particular sector has developed and helped it to develop in a pro-poor way.
Q95 Andrew Stunell: I think we were offered a fairly rose-tinted picture of the work that NGOs did on the one hand, in contrast to what the government was able to do on the other. You are painting perhaps a more realistic picture. Would you like to comment on where the advantage of governance lies in delivering a pro-poor policy in a rural village in Bangladesh between money channelled through an NGO and money channelled through, say, the Department of Education.
Professor Wood: One issue that really has to
be understood about Bangladesh, and it affects how you think about NGOs, in the
way that Martin has been saying, but it also affects how you think about
government, is that you have prevailing cultural forms of doing business. These are patron-client type relationships
that stretch across the country and they are extended kinship groups
controlling different bits of business and so on. You are never looking at open, transparent
relationships in the way that projects are selected and in the way that money
is managed and handled and invoiced and all the rest of it, and it is terribly
important to acknowledge that NGOs are no more insulated, in the ways in which
they work on the ground, from those prevailing cultural forms of doing
business, than the government. There is
an organisational culture which is strongly patron-client, strongly
kinship/friendship/contact-based, and that operates, as it were, beneath the
surface of the formality. That is the
case for non-government organisations, as it for government. When we talk about issues of governance and
democracy and accountability and so on, we are really talking about trying, as
it were, to take formal political and development actors, detach them, as it
were, from the prevailing cultural forms of doing business that surround them,
and they of course have to meet those expectations and pressures within their
own societies, within their own families, amongst their own clients, so you can
have very flashy, formal-looking organisations at the apex, but the reality on
the ground will always be influenced by these cultures of doing business. One of the things that we have particularly
noted in research over the last few years is, for example, the phenomenon of
the mastaan. I do not know whether anybody
mentioned this to you, but we used to think of mastaan as simply gang leaders
in urban situations (recognising that power in the countryside in the past was
landlords and money lenders and so on) but we are now seeing what we call a
'mastaanisation' of the countryside; that is to say, these political brokers
connected to political parties and connected to business, connected to projects,
contracts, engineers who are taking the big infrastructure contracts. The way in which that is done, the way in which
labour is managed on rural works programmes and any contract, is all filtered
through these kinds of relationships, and it is pervasive. That is why this is a long haul business and
- while I remember to say it - why you need people in DFID in
Q96 Chairman: BRAC is such a unique organisation.
Professor Wood: But not insulated from what I have just said.
Q97 Chairman: No. That was part of my question. It is huge in Bangladesh and internationally, and there are a number of aspects of that we want to explore. On the point you have just made, before I ask a general question and then bring in John Battle, there is the Public Procurement Bill which is being brought through. I am anticipating your answer would be, "What a good idea, but it will take years to take effect," but what is your general view about how effective it can be?
Professor Wood: For your efficiency, I suggest you really do ask that question to Pierre Landell-Mills.
Q98 Chairman: All right, if you think so, we will come back to that. The meeting we had with Dr Abed. BRAC is an inspirational organisation, although perhaps a little paternalistic and patronising in some of its approaches, but it is difficult to imagine what Bangladesh would be like without it. DFID perhaps understandably said it wants a strategic alliance with it. You have partially answered that question, saying, "That's all very well, but you have to build the state up as well." Do you think DFID is in danger of going up the wrong track, or do you think it is possible to do that whilst building up the state or, indeed, necessary to do so? Is it also a shortcut: BRAC is so big, DFID is a big organisation, it is very easy to deal with BRAC, it saves all the trouble of dealing with lots of other NGOs (who are clients of BRAC in many cases.) Do you think DFID is moving on the right path there, or is it in danger of going down the wrong path?
Dr Greeley: It would appear to be a
sensible move from both DFID and BRAC's perspective, in that it should reduce
the transactions cost of doing business.
DFID has several different contracts with BRAC at the moment, supporting
a variety of their programmes, but that could be centralised. It appears to be a major advantage. I worry that this is looking at it too
narrowly and looking at it just from a DFID and BRAC perspective. How carefully has DFID thought through the
consequences of the ways in which a government might look at this
relationship? How well have we thought
through how the rest of the NGO sector - which is very important for service
delivery as we have been discussing - looks at this? What signals does it send about the relative
importance of the NGO sector versus the state in the thinking of DFID
Bangladesh? Whilst I can understand the
reasoning behind it, it is making a major statement about British understanding
of the development path in
Professor Wood: I am very glad Martin said that, because he is closer to BRAC then I am, but that very much is my view. It is worth saying, also, that about 10 years ago DFID went into an over-privileged relationship to BRAC, supporting its microfinance work, and supporting the evolution of the BRAC Bank, and I had a lot of arguments with DFID at that time because by setting up the relationship exclusively with BRAC to enable the bringing about of the BRAC Bank, DFID effectively undermined other negotiations that were going on to create a bank for the NGO sector as a whole, to enable a whole lot of other microfinance organisations to move into the same banking relationships with the poor as Grameen obviously already had and BRAC was able to evolve. I think that DFID at that time behaved quite non-developmentally across the sector and I think on our over-privileged relationship with BRAC it will do the same.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q99 John Battle: We visited BRAC's Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction programme. We went out and saw a pre-school, we went to a village where a woman called, if I remember rightly, Chanka told us that she had lost her husband to TB. She had nothing and there was a scheme to give her a grant, that enabled her to use good husbandry - from chickens to goats to cows - to get enough money by selling milk to get a loan to put a tin roof on her home. Then we met the village Poverty Reduction Committee that was managing this. We sat round and I was impressed by BRAC's blending of livelihoods, legal advice - as well as barefoot medics, barefoot lawyers -and for women in the Muslim context as well. That blend was quite impressive, but I have come away asking: if I liked the community development/integration that is going on, what impact does it really have? They have coined the phrase "the ultra poor" but what impact is BRAC having in Bangladesh on tackling the percentage of ultra poor, making sure they get access to resources and development? Are they the only ones in the game? What are the main challenges in seeking to expand the programme? How large is it? Really whether it is making a structural impact on poverty reduction targets nationally.
Dr Greeley: This programme emerged from a
recognition that the main vehicle for poverty reduction in
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Witnesses: Mr Pierre Landell-Mills, The
Policy Practice and Partnership for Transparency Fund, and Dr Thomas Tanner,
Q110 Chairman: Welcome and thank you very much for coming to this evidence session. You obviously heard the earlier evidence and I am sure you can embellish on it. For the record, I would ask you to introduce yourselves.
Mr Landell-Mills: Pierre Landell-Mills. I am a Principal of The Policy Practice and President of the Partnership for Transparency Fund
Dr Tanner: I am Tom Tanner from the
Chairman: We had a very useful session, although we did not expand on everything we could have done, and you may well be able to add to it. I am going to ask John Battle to take the first question.
Q111 John Battle: Just on the general overall economic position of Bangladesh, someone said to me, "Bangladesh, you might as well forget it, because China will hoover up all manufacturing halfway through this century." We visited a furniture factory that was making furniture that was quite an interesting supported project. Where do you see the economy of Bangladesh going? Can it get beyond garments and shrimps to higher technology? Will it hold its own against China? What can donors do to help expand the international linkages for a market economy that would help them sell their products?
Mr Landell-Mills: The economy of
Dr Tanner: I have less expertise on the
economics side, but this paradox of
Q112 Chairman: One of the first visits we made in Dhaka was to the Scope School in Mirpur. It was a technical college, effectively, vocational training, I would say, comparable to the best I have ever seen anywhere, including here in the UK and better than some. We were told that it was providing skills in the usual things that technical colleges do, like electricians, plumbers, joiners and so on, and they were guaranteeing 95 % employment take-up for the graduates of that school. The point was also made to us that they were providing skills which were imported from around and about, so that if you needed your fridge repaired or your car repaired, the chances were it would be imported labour that was doing it. Is that the way forward? Is that not a classic area where there could and should be public/private partnership, because the beneficiaries of these skills are mostly private sector companies?
Mr Landell-Mills: Absolutely. One of the tragedies in the past was that so many good projects were started and then 10 years later had succumbed to bad governance or wider dysfunctional societal cultural factors that Geof so well described. I hope that that school will continue to do good work, but the challenge is to continue to try to keep these kinds of institutions functioning properly.
Q113 Chairman: One of the Members of our Committee said that, just looking at it, it was a no-brainer and DFID was putting in a substantial amount of money. It was extremely efficiently run by a retired brigadier, so the discipline was clear. The point to make is that the Bangladesh government was not supporting it. If you are arguing that what you need to look at is how you raise the growth rate by 2 or 3 % per year, is it not the simple fact that if the government would support those kinds of institutions, that would be a simple way of helping to achieve that?
Mr Landell-Mills: It depends how the government
supports them. If they take it over, you
may find that it starts to function like a government institution and does not
function in the way that you have described.
Q114 Chairman: That may be a cultural point. When you walk into a place like this particular school, you can see the benefit that Bangladesh gets from the skills provided, you see the benefit the private sector gets from the availability of those skills, and yet neither the government nor the private sector is making a contribution. How do you break that cycle?
Mr Landell-Mills: It is a very short-term perspective that people have. The businessmen could provide a very strong lobby for governance reform. Yet all the businessmen are integrated into these cultural networks, political networks, and reform is perceived as taking a long time. A businessman wants his customs clearance next week. It is much easier to pay somebody to get that done than to mount a programme of reform of the customs organisations. There has to be some kind of reconciliation between the short-term interests of businessmen and the longer-term perspective; and the issue is how to create that longer-term perspective. One of the ways - and this is a surprising area of neglect by all the donors - is to build institutions in civil society - and I do not mean that of NGOs, because NGOs are just one part of civil society - to build up chambers of commerce and industry, to build up professional associations, to build up the media, to help the accountancy profession to perform correctly. There are odd examples of that being tackled, but generally there is no strategy for dealing with strengthening the institutions of civil society. The only way in which governance is going to be improved is that pressure comes internally from a broad spectrum of stronger civil society institutions that infiltrate, as it were, the whole political culture.
Chairman: We have a few questions that are going to follow that up.
Q115 Andrew Stunell: Bangladesh has very low rates of revenue collection which means obviously it cannot really pay for services. We were quite struck by a story we were told that MPs are now all paying tax - but, on the other hand, they get a coupon to re-claim it, so it is not a very effective system. Do you see this as mostly a question of administrative capacity or is it political will? Where are the barriers? What would be an effective route for DFID or other agencies to take to improve the situation?
Mr Landell-Mills: The barriers are those that
Geof described. It is the whole society
that is embedded in a cultural system that does not make that very easy. How can DFID or the donors generally make an
impact? They can do so by a very
long-term persistent effort, working with government on reform. There has to be a very clear sense that this
is not a short-term issue because they are long-term issues. There has to be a clarity of purpose which
the donors have never had that takes the reform programme forward over 10, 15,
20, 25 years, and keeps trying to strengthen that system. A very good example is DFID's support for the
accounting system which was initiated in the mid-1990s: a very successful
programme, but one which in the end did not deliver anything like the results
that were expected because it was not continued into phase 2, phase 3, phase 4,
phase 5. Once you start an institutional
reform in a country like
Q116 Hugh Bayley: What can you tell us about the level of corruption in Bangladesh? What proportion of the state budget is currently diverted away from purchasing public goods? What is DFID doing about this and what is it not doing that it ought to be doing?
Mr Landell-Mills: The estimates would be wildest guess estimates. Almost every transaction somehow has a corrupt element to it. While I was there - and it may have changed since: I spent 5 years as the country director for the World Bank - a minister of public works was "selling" regional engineering director positions for half a million dollars.
Q117 Hugh Bayley: The budget of a regional engineer during the period ----
Mr Landell-Mills: It would have been a number of millions, but he would only get a part of whatever he collected because he has to distribute it around the whole system. I would think that you should be thinking of 15 to 30 % is getting siphoned off.
Q118 Hugh Bayley: It is staggering. What is DFID and the Bank perhaps doing to address the problem and reduce its own vulnerability for the problem? What more could be done?
Mr Landell-Mills: There are various ways of
reducing it. You obviously can make sure
that your own operation ostensibly does not have any corruption in there, in
the sense that you track every transaction, you make sure that the accounting
system is good, but the fact of the matter is that anyone who bids for a
contract knows that he is going to have to pay off people and so everyone will
include an element for that in their bid, otherwise they will find out that
they cannot carry out the contract. If
you take something like the construction of the
Q119 Hugh Bayley: If you had that level of corruption in an African country, other than possibly in the mineral extraction sector, you would get no foreign investment at all because it would be more trouble than it was worth to work in that kind of economic environment, and yet Bangladesh does attract inward investment. Why?
Mr Landell-Mills: You get investment if you can make a profit. You take account of the fact that there is corruption involved in transactions. There is much activity going on and it is obviously profitable activity. I think that is a problem. If you take the recent surveys, the 2005 surveys which were done on investment climate, nearly 80 % of the people said that they would expect to make payments in order to do business.
Q120 Hugh Bayley: You overheard the earlier exchanges that we had about DFID funding governance improvements within the parliament and the political parties. Does that seem maybe a long-term but nevertheless sensible strategy?
Mr Landell-Mills: There are two sides to governance reform. One is supply side and the other is demand side. The donors have concentrated, DFID in particular, very largely on the supply side; that is to say, how can we make accounting more efficient or more accountable and less corrupt. How can we make procurement less corrupt? How can we see the public finance system being managed in a non-corrupt way? There are all sorts of methodologies for achieving that and they have worked on those consistently for a very long time. But if there is not a demand side, and if there are no sanctions, ultimately, for misbehaviour, you are not going to get rid of the corruption. There has to be a focus now to try to get the balance right between the demand side and the supply side of governance. The demand side comes from civil society.
Q121 Chairman: Is the Public Procurement Bill going to make any difference?
Mr Landell-Mills: I think it would make a difference, yes. But you need civil society watchdogs, you need the media to be watching - you need to be sure that somebody is watching to make sure that it is being implemented correctly. Passing a law does not achieve anything if it is not implemented correctly.
Q122 Hugh Bayley: Civil society and the media are important. I simplify the argument but in our earlier exchanges I think we were being told that the older generation, the current leadership of both parties, is so culturally attuned to this way of doing business it is never going to change but maybe there are some younger elements who perhaps have had international exposure who could be persuaded to build reputations for themselves by doing politics in a different way, in the same way that some of the NGO leaders have won international reputations for themselves by building a capacity for delivery of public goods in an accountable way. Do you think it is worth pursuing that?
Mr Landell-Mills: The fact that younger people are exposed to an international environment, getting educated at reputable universities overseas, maybe working for a while in environments that have integrity systems in place is all for the good. Obviously what you get, in a sense, is a family that has young people coming back who are appalled at the corruption. Whether they can avoid getting drawn into it is the issue. Some will get drawn into it but some will fight it. They will be the key elements for the long-term reform.
Q123 Hugh Bayley: It seems to me that until you break this stranglehold that the political class has, this malign influence that the political class has over the economy, you are going to abate development by 3 or 4 % a year. It is going to have a long and invasive negative effect. Even though it may be a long haul, donors like DFID ought to be working on governance within the political elite as well as the administrative Civil Service.
Mr Landell-Mills: My observation in
Q124 Mr Hendrick: Whilst you can do some things electronically, under-the-table payments can still take place in cash. Certainly from my knowledge of Central and Eastern European countries, what we would regard as corruption they either see as commission or hospitality. Is there not an element of that in the culture still? Will it not be almost impossible to eradicate that?
Mr Landell-Mills: You will not eradicate it, of
course. We have not eradicated corruption
in this country and we have not eradicated it in other European countries, so it
will go on. It is a constant
battle. It is a battle for integrity.
But I think the important thing is to try to get the systems functioning with a
reasonable degree of efficiency and integrity. At the moment there is so much
interference in the transactions that you have a very high level of
inefficiency. One must try to get those
who are corrupt to see that certain actions are so damaging to their own
interests that that corruption can then be tackled, although they will always
be searching for other ways of being corrupt, that is for sure. For example, at
Q125 Chairman: Thank you. Dr Tanner, climate change is absolutely the central issue for Bangladesh. The impact of climate change is already happening there. Could you give us your up-to-date thinking on the current impacts and the developing impacts of climate change as it affects Bangladesh? For your information, we did meet with the Prime Minister and, of course, she is certainly going to be in Copenhagen and will be making strong points on behalf of the country for their need to have substantial funding for adaptation, but it would be useful from the Committee's point of view to hear your take on where Bangladesh is at the moment on this issue.
Dr Tanner:
Q126 Chairman: The impact has three different directions, does it not? It is a greater volume of water coming down the river from the ice melts of the Himalayas, the increased frequency of devastating cyclones, and rising sea levels. It is coming at them from all sides. What capacity do they have to deal with this? You could say, in a sense, that what we saw in the chars was a practical response to seasonal flooding, measured by what they know the levels are and the raising of the plinths. We were told, "Yes, you could manage that, you know what level it is" but cyclones are unpredictable. Of course if you have a situation of the sea level rising and more water coming down the rivers, then things are going to happen which are not predictable or which are way above what is predicted. In terms of anticipating those things and in terms of doing anything about it, does Bangladesh have the capacity? Perhaps I could put it in this context: if at Copenhagen they got what they wanted, if they were to be told, "We are going to give you a fund," what would they be able to do with it?
Dr Tanner: The level of resilience not
just to economic but to climate shocks and stresses in
Q127 John Battle: If the sea rises, it is salt water that, in a sense, infects the fields and they cannot grow things. Is that a risk now? Is salination - if that is a word - a real problem? How do you solve salination?
Dr Tanner: I do not know whether it is salination or salinisation. Yes, that is a very real concern. That is already a concern for, again, a mix of human and natural. There is evidence that there is greater saline water coming further inland now. Some of that is to do with a change in climate and sea levels which are already rising, and some of that is to do with drought conditions which can be either climate-related or human-related, because in the dry seasons you have upstream river control through sluices and dam barrages. Saline ingress has been steadily increasing and this is as important for drinking water as it is for field systems.
Q128 John Battle: Is there a filter system? Are there technological answers to that or do people just have to move if the salt water rushes in and floods your rice fields?
Dr Tanner: The low-tech solution would be to think about how you change that system. Are there different varieties of rice or whatever crop you are growing that are more saline tolerant? Then there is the moving to a different type of crop or different agricultural system. There are lots of examples of moving more to agriculture. There are lots of examples of crab fattening and shrimps. The final one is: when do you actually move? Another example is floating gardens, so you float reeds on the water hyacinth and then plant crops on that.
Q129 John Battle: So there is some technical imagination going on. In Bangladesh DFID use the Opportunity and Risks of Climate Change and Disasters (ORCHID) methodology to assess its programmes for climate risk. You have worked on that assessment. What lessons have been learned from the ORCHID assessment about the vulnerability of DFID's programmes to climate change?
Dr Tanner: There are two things. The main lesson, I guess - and this is common
across many donors - is that we need to start considering climate within our
due diligence processes. Currently they
exist for the environment, through environmental impact assessments and often
environment screening procedures, particularly in the multilateral banks where
you have infrastructure, and it is all about the impact of the development on
the environment. Now the thinking is
about the impact of a changing environment on the project. The IFIs[5]
met last week here in
Q130 John Battle: Has that been built into the new Country Assistance plan, for example?
Dr Tanner: In
Q131 John Battle: Yes.
Dr Tanner: I am happy that there has
been a consideration of climate in those programmes. In the country programme it is reflected in a
much stronger emphasis on how different aspects of development can contribute
to climate. It is not: "Here is the one
solution." They look at how governance
can help improve resilience to climate and other shocks and stresses. What it misses is perhaps the regional dimension,
particularly through international water management, and the migration
question. DFID has a role to play, given
its engagement in other countries in
Q132 John Battle: I hope that is not just a conversation going on in DFID. Good though that is, is that shared with the government of Bangladesh, so that they are on side for that agenda and properly co‑operating in that risk assessment?
Dr Tanner: The ORCHID work started while
I was working in the government of
John Battle: Thank you.
Q133 Andrew Stunell: Following on from that, if you were in charge, what would DFID do over the next five years in supporting Bangladesh to adapt to climate change?
Dr Tanner: I am optimistic that DFID in
Q134 Andrew Stunell: Yes. We visited Nepal as well and it was interesting to see the interaction between the issues in the two countries. What steps do you think that DFID can take to help the Bangladesh government get climate proofing into its own policy and development programmes?
Dr Tanner: The step is already made in
trying to build capacity not just in the Ministry of Environment, but also
working in the Ministry of Food and Disaster Management and other ministries as
well. That is an important first
step. There are limitations to what the
government can deliver that have been raised already. In terms of getting the screening procedure
in place, that conversation is not being had with the government. There are existing deficits to the
environment screening procedure, but at present the discussions between DFID
and the government on climate change are at this much higher level. They are on strategic planning, on the
movement from the
Q135 Hugh Bayley: The government has grand policies: a National Adaptation Programme of Action and a Climate Change Strategy. To what extent do they identify the government's funding priorities as far as donors are concerned?
Dr Tanner:
Q136 Hugh Bayley: Christian Aid said in their evidence that it was noticeable how little money donors had put up to fund the government's priorities. Is this because of fears about corruption or fears about priorities being wrong? How could and how should donors use funds to address priorities? Should it be through NGOs or how?
Dr Tanner: There is the Multi-Donor Trust Fund, which I am sure you have heard a lot about, which intentionally was joint with the government. The government now has its own trust fund and there is a donor trust fund separately. The issue is fiduciary management. There is an international responsibility for any international body giving money, whether it be DFID, whether it be through the adaptation fund, or whether it be under the UN Framework Convention, that this money is spent responsibly. It is crucial, first of all, that there are clear lines of access for civil society organisations to be able to access that money, that there is work undertaken in the Multi-Donor Trust Fund - which is managed by the World Bank, but to the chagrin of some - to improve the capacity of the government to be able to take on that role in the future. One of the areas of evidence is going to be: what is the process that the government goes through now in implementing its own trust fund? We can look at the transparency, the fiduciary management, the access by different parties and the impacts and the areas that it funds as an evidence-base for their suitability to implement a multi-donor, larger trust fund in the future.
Q137 Chairman: Perhaps I could just finish on that point. As you say, some people are not keen on the Multi-Donor Trust, although inevitably the international community tends to favour it. You have explained to Mr Bayley some of the problems of the country's own proposals. Of course many people say they want country ownership. How valid are the criticisms of the World Bank Fund? The Bretton Woods Project say that it is too costly, that it is donor-driven rather than country-driven, and that the World Bank has a poor record on environmental issues. They quote specifically the project causing the destruction of the oldest mangrove forest in the sub-continent. How valid are those criticisms? As a Committee we have learned that there is a sort of inbuilt position from which certain NGOs come to that; but, first, we have to evaluate whether or not their criticisms have validity.
Dr Tanner: Yes, and if they are
two-handed economists on the one hand, and on the other hand ... I do not wish to speak on behalf of the Bank,
but I recognise the need to lobby hard against the World Bank subsuming climate
change project finance in the normal World Bank way. This is not the same deal - although this is
ODA[8],
which I am sure you have also found has been raised. The concerns about the amount of money the
Bank will take in commission are not very well-founded. The figure that was put out in the press and
by CSOs[9]
in
Q138 Chairman: The Committee has some concerns about that. In terms of the trust fund being used as the delivery mechanism, you sound as if you are reasonably satisfied, in the circumstances.
Dr Tanner: In the circumstances it is about fiduciary management. What is crucial is that there is a transitioning process that builds the government capacity to do that job and, also, looks at the evidence of the government's own trust fund, to ensure that within a set number of years - and I do not think we should be thinking too short term here - this is a fund that is likely to increase and grow, so we can look at 10- and 20-year time horizons rather than two, three, five. That is the crucial element for me.
Chairman: That is extremely helpful in terms of us being able to make useful recommendations. Thank you both very much for your contribution. It has added a lot and fleshed quite a few things out. Thank you very much indeed.
[1] Subsequent to this meeting, I addressed the APPG in
[2] Fajle Abed, Director of BRAC. The book referred to is Freedom from Want by Ian Smillie.
[3] International Development Association, the development arm of the World Bank
[4] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[5] International Financial Institutions
[6] National Adaptation Programme of Action
[7] UN Development Programme
[8] Official Development Assistance
[9] Civil society organisations