UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 168-iiHouse 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 International Development Committee
on
Members present
Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair
John Battle
Hugh Bayley
Mr Nigel Evans
Mr Mark Hendrick
Mr Mark Lancaster
Mr Virendra Sharma
Andrew Stunell
________________
Memoranda submitted by Merlin and VSO
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Anthony Costello, Director of University College London Centre for International Health and Development, Ms Linda Doull, Director of Health and Policy, Merlin, and Mr Simon Brown, VSO, gave evidence.
Q34 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much for coming in to help complete our evidence on our report on Nepal. Can I thank all of you for coming and, for the record, could you introduce yourselves, please?
Professor Costello: I am Anthony Costello. I am Director at the UCL Institute for Global
Health. I lived in
Ms Doull: I am Linda Doull. I am the Director of Health and Policy with
the UK NGO Merlin and we have had a programme in
Mr Brown: I am Simon Brown. I was a VSO volunteer in
Q35 Chairman: Thank you. As you know, the Committee visited Nepal at the end of last year and had a look at quite a lot of different aspects. The Committee split into two groups and went to different parts of western Nepal. That will inform some of our questions. If we start off looking at health where, in one sense, DFID are able to point to quite good indicators of improvements in health but, nevertheless, both the groups of the Committee visited hospitals and were made aware of the things that were problematic. I wonder if I could start on that. Which do you think are the groups that are least likely to be able to access healthcare and have the most problems? The thing we obviously appreciated is you do not have to travel very far in Nepal to realise people are living away from roads, there is very mountainous terrain, so access is difficult, plus the cost of travelling, and also in the hospitals we went to, whilst the people we saw were extremely good and committed, there were not enough of them to do what was expected. Which are the groups that we probably did not even see that are not getting the benefits or are suffering from the least access to healthcare provision at the moment?
Ms Doull: From Merlin's experience, I
would just say that our programmes are based in Pyuthan and Rolpa districts,
which are in the Mid-Western region, which are already very remote and
mountainous, so de facto geographically there is a physical access
barrier for many people who live there.
Within that, there are the usual cultural exclusions that you experience
throughout
Q36 Chairman: Is that only for reproductive health? I thought it was more general than that.
Ms Doull: For reproductive health services. This is positive from our side but it is too early yet, we need to indicate to what extent that has made a difference. Free services alone are not the only issues that people take into consideration about decision-making, about accessing healthcare, and for women a lot of those issues are still related to their power within households, their own ability to decision-make or not. The difference that free health services make for reproductive health needs to be tracked quite closely. Certainly we have insufficient evidence to say whether that is working or not. That said, more women are delivering at health facilities. Whether that is purely down to free care or is a wider cultural change that has occurred through awareness raising activities that we have been doing particularly with women's groups, trying to create greater demand for services, we have yet to see.
Q37 Chairman: You have talked about empowerment and I suppose what you are saying is that men are reluctant to allow their women to go to clinics or wherever they can get safe delivery. If so, is that for reasons of cost or power or control? How do you get through that? Clearly, from the men's point of view one would like to think that they would not like to see their wives suffering possibly a disability as a result of poor delivery, or children being sick. It affects the men as well as the women, so it is not rationally in the interests of men to deny it. What is the root of that problem?
Ms Doull: It is fair to say men have an
impact on the decision-making, but we also know that in places like
Professor Costello: I think it is a rational
decision for many of them to stay at home because their nearest health facility
would be a sub-health post that does not offer delivery. Health posts generally have very low quality
or absent access to delivery care, so if they are going to go they have got to
go usually to a primary healthcare centre or a district hospital which, for the
great majority of people, is a long way away.
The really interesting thing about
Q38 Chairman: We visited there.
Professor Costello: That is an interesting place because when I was there it was a two day walk to get there, but now there is a road and it has quadrupled in size. In those days, if you went out to the health posts very few of them had regular supplies of drugs and that was the only option for people. In the 1980s and 1990s the government trained up a great number of people called community medical auxiliaries - CMAs - and they were not taken into the government system and a very large number of those - there are thousands and thousands of them - set up their own pharmacies and diagnostic facilities. To a large extent that private sector care does deliver a lot of the care to households in the more remote, mountainous areas. It is not just about the government facilities providing, say, access to antibiotics. I think that is one of the reasons why maternal mortality rates have come down, that even the poorest people in remote areas can get access to some lifesaving drugs even if they cannot get access to skilled birth attendants or a hospital delivery. The other thing to say is the quality of care at health facilities often remains very poor. Although DFID has done a lot to improve maternity care at some of the major hospitals, very often they are treated badly so, therefore, there is a big incentive for them to stay at home.
Chairman: The problem we saw in Baglung was that the place we visited was supposed to have seven doctors and it had two. They were very good doctors and we had a very good presentation but clearly they had an awful lot of work.
Q39 Hugh Bayley: My question would be what should donors be doing to try and strengthen the health delivery systems locally?
Professor Costello: That is a big question. Personally, I think the biggest gap in
Ms Doull: I would concur on some of
that. From Merlin's perspective, while
there are very good policies and strategies in place in terms of health system
strengthening, and reproductive health in particular, to what extent those are
applied effectively at local level is the challenge. What we see are gaps in relation to that in
having a proper skilled workforce in place.
In the districts where we worked previously, during the conflict a lot
of health staff fled and, although there have been significant improvements,
probably 85% of the staff are in the facilities where they should be on a
relatively permanent basis, there is still that 15% gap to fill. Also, the incentives that have been
introduced to retain staff in the remote areas do not necessarily filter
through as they should do, there is a lack of transparency around that. There needs to be much more accountability
and monitoring that these initiatives are actually happening and being used for
the correct purpose. I would agree with
what you were saying earlier about staff at community level, non-government
staff, and the emphasis on building up the cadre of community workers and
creating a connection between them and the formal health system to create that
stronger compact between the communities which are using the services and those
who are providing them, so again there is greater accountability and awareness
of what services should be available to people.
From our perspective of where DFID is, some of the other donors in
Q40 Hugh Bayley: Is it a wish list or a policy? If there were active, strong effective local government I quite understand that would provide the framework for promoting and holding accountable health services, but at the moment there is not, and if we were to say, "Well, donors, you would be strengthening local government", it could be a long time before you would have the delivery systems and you could be five health emergencies down the track. What could be done without resuscitating local government to create local accountability structures of the kind that you think are needed to improve delivery?
Ms Doull: There is a very robust civil
society movement throughout
Mr Brown: Coming back on to local government, it is right that there has to be a very strong Ministry of Health and health programme and there has to be a very strong local government. We need to recognise that those things are beginning to happen as well, there is an active DFID and other organisations' sponsored programme to resuscitate local government and get it moving, and that will take time, but in the interim there still needs to be an improvement of health services. There is, and has been, a very strong national health sector programme. The first five year strategy is now ending and finishing this year, the next one is just being created. We need to recognise there are things that are very positive that can be built on. The Ministry of Health, particularly, are recognising that women are disadvantaged in access to healthcare and there are very specific parts of maternal healthcare that need to be addressed with more vigour - for example, there is a huge problem of prolapsed uterus in Nepal - and there are other groups that need specific support, such as mental health. We need to recognise that DFID sponsored programmes that are happening already are doing quite a decent job and need to be encouraged to do even more. There is good work going on there.
Q41 Mr Sharma: Very briefly, and you have touched on it, there are the village doctors as I would call them, those who go into the remote villages but are not qualified under the present system. How much recognition do they have or any working relationship between the official health state and those people who traditionally have given the service and maybe have closer links with the communities? What is the link there, if there is any?
Professor Costello: I would want to go and look
at some of the evidence on this from latest surveys, which I do not have. Compared with, say,
Q42 Mr Sharma: What impact has the Safe Delivery Incentive Programme had on the numbers of women giving birth in health clinics and attended by skilled health workers? What we are looking at is what the main weaknesses in this area are. For example, has it reached the poorest women in the more remote areas? Are there sufficient numbers of trained health staff available to meet increased demand created by this scheme?
Professor Costello: The incentive scheme was
introduced in 2005. It was after a
report prepared by one of our researchers, Jo Borghi, for the DFID programme
which had shown that there were quite substantial costs for any woman even
having a normal delivery at home, but certainly if they went to hospitals. At that time, which was during King Gyanendra's
time in charge, one of the royalist ministers said, "Right, we're going to roll
an incentive scheme out across the whole country", when the proposal at the
time was to evaluate this in a number of different districts to see how it
would work, but they said, "No, across the country". I think DFID were slightly wrong-footed by
this, but agreed to stump up the cash for a lot of this programme. We were asked if we would evaluate the
maternity incentive scheme and we got Tim Powell-Jackson, who is a health
economist from the
Ms Doull: We do not have as detailed information as that to provide because we have not done a study. As I said before, while there has been an increase in the number of women delivering at health facilities, it is only about 16% overall in the areas in which we worked, which is still quite low, which indicates there are other factors beyond the incentive as to whether people choose to go to the facility. Of course, the challenge then is to provide the quality of care once women have reached that centre, hence a lot of the focus of the work we have been doing is trying to ensure that there are 24-hour services available. Similarly, with the health worker incentives we know there are issues that when people get to the clinic the incentive is not necessarily disbursed.
Professor Costello: There was some evidence also
that providers were charging more to women who were receiving the
incentive. So you would go in, you would
receive the incentive but then the cost would go up. That may have changed now. I do not know enough about the actual
implementation of this free at the point of delivery scheme that the Maoist
government introduced a year go and do not know how far that has been rolled
out. It highlights the importance of
whenever you do these policy interventions, and DFID has spent a lot of money
doing this, it is really important to evaluate them. Something similar is also happening with DFID
support in
Mr Sharma: The Safe Delivery Incentive
Programme is only one element in the Support for Safe Motherhood Programme in
Q43 Chairman: When we were doing the maternal health report, DFID was highlighting how much they had achieved in Nepal and it was one of the things we were particularly interested to follow up when we visited.
Professor Costello: I think they have done a
great job in strengthening central ministry capacity. Their scheme meant that very good quality
people kept a presence in the Ministry of Health, whereas if they had not been
there I think they would have left. Some
of them were being paid at different levels from civil servants but,
nonetheless, it kept an integral Safe Motherhood group together over an
extended period of ten years when otherwise I think things would have fallen
apart. There has been a high emphasis on
maternal healthcare in
Ms Doull: In addition to that, the one thing I would add within the strategy is the emphasis on having skilled birth attendants at different cadres. We all know that human resources in a health gap is a major issue, not just in Nepal but in many other countries, and without that sustained focus I think there would have been less advances made. As I said earlier, one of the issues was where those skilled birth attendants are located and deployed and there has to be consistent monitoring of ensuring that skilled birth attendants are put as far out into remote areas as possible, and if you are going to deploy them to remote areas how do you ensure that they stay there. That will demand incentives of some kind, not always financial, perhaps housing or whatever. Without that I think you will see quite a high attrition rate. We are relatively pleased about the degree of retention in the areas where we are working, but it is still quite a fragile base and it would not take much for people to be attracted back to the main urban areas.
Q44 Mr Evans: Can you tell us something about the HIV/AIDS problem in Nepal?
Professor Costello: There are about 75,000 people
estimated to have HIV in
Mr Brown: VSO do have a programme in
HIV/AIDS in
Professor Costello: One of the issues that I have always wondered about, and I do not know any figures and do not know how reliable they would be anyway, is the scale of the problem of trafficking of women from the traditionally trafficked groups with the Tamang women from around the Kathmandu Valley, many of them being told they were going to go to carpet jobs or service jobs in India and then being taken to the red-light districts of Calcutta or Mumbai. I have seen all kinds of figures bandied around. Some people talk about 200,000 and others talk about much smaller numbers. It certainly goes on and it is difficult to know how many of those women come back and how many of them are infected.
Q45 Mr Evans: It is a hugely religious society, is it not? Do you believe there is a big stigma attached to HIV/AIDS in Nepal?
Professor Costello: Definitely.
Q46 Mr Evans: How do you tackle that stigma? Do you think the government can help or do you think it just ignores what is going on?
Mr Brown: Gosh, that is a huge question. Yes, there is a huge amount of stigma and discrimination. There are a lot of programmes that are funded to try and encourage people who feel they have been exposed to HIV to test, to go to clinics. Within the family, within the religion, there is a massive amount of stigma and discrimination of people who have disclosed their positive HIV status. How do you tackle it? I guess you continue to try and break those things down. There are programmes that are trying to make people more aware of HIV/AIDS, that it exists, and of the risks of contracting HIV/AIDS, and you continue to try to support those programmes that try to make people more aware, particularly amongst youth. Both the Ministry and a lot of other agencies are recognising that particularly youth sexual and reproductive healthcare is an area that needs a lot of attention and part of that is making youth more aware of the risks, making them more willing to talk about the risks, and avoiding, hopefully, what could be very disastrous.
Professor Costello: I think things are
changing. People are talking more openly
now. Certainly in
Q47 Mr Evans: Is the government proactive on this? What do they do about educating people to the dangers?
Mr Brown: It is mainly a civil society activity at the moment. It is in the national health sector plan for the next few years, and it does have some very important indicators on the awareness of youth of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections, but so far it has been very much a civil society activity.
Q48 Mr Evans: Can you say something about the health provision that is made available for those who are tested if they test positive? Can anybody get access to anti-retrovirals?
Ms Doull: In the districts where we work there is very limited provision, if at all. Basically it is awareness raising activities, prevention, but there is no access, there is no voluntary counselling and testing - VCT - in many of the facilities and there is certainly no access to anti-retrovirals.
Q49 Mr Evans: There is no access?
Ms Doull: In the areas where we work
there is not. My understanding is that
around the
Q50 Mr Evans: If you can get tested, it is a death sentence?
Ms Doull: You cannot get VCT or you would have to travel and that has a cost.
Professor Costello: The rates of positivity are
very low in those areas. A lot of the
HIV is focused in the
Q51 Mr Evans: You mentioned something about the donors. Could you say something about the funding? Do you think there is sufficient funding for the needs of Nepal on HIV/AIDS?
Professor Costello: I was talking more about a
worldwide thing. I was talking to Mark
Dybul, who was the Director of PEPFAR, who was saying that interest in HIV/AIDS
in the Senate and in
Q52 Mr Evans: You are not aware of DFID's involvement in this particular sector?
Professor Costello: No.
Mr Brown: DFID has been leading the work across the sector in HIV/AIDS. It will be replaced by the World Bank, which was supposed to happen this year but is probably going to happen a year late so DFID will continue to lead. Is it enough? It is very difficult to say. It is an epidemic, it is 0.49% of the population, but probably more people die from other waterborne diseases at the moment so it is very difficult to say it is enough. Clearly the Ministry have recognised that their ability to provide services is not good enough and it wants to do more. The money that has been spent on advocacy and awareness has been well used. Clearly with some most at risk groups showing a decline in prevalence it is working. Civil society groups are being included in policy by government. The government has recognised that their service delivery is inadequate, so to improve it they recognise they will have to spend more money on it and where that money comes from, whether it is donors or other sources within the country, is something they will have to work on. On the awareness, and right awareness, it is going very well; on service delivery clearly not enough is being spent.
Q53 Mr Evans: Do you have a view about the World Bank taking over lead responsibility for this?
Mr Brown: In what way?
Q54 Mr Evans: Do you think it will be a good thing?
Mr Brown: I do not necessarily think it should be a bad thing. Within the bilateral and multilateral donors they have come to the conclusion that the World Bank is probably best placed to do it.
Q55 Mr Evans: If you get it and prove positive, do you lose your job? How bad is the stigma there?
Professor Costello: I would not have thought so, but you may be able to find anecdotes of that happening. These days if you are positive and on treatment most people are not going to know, you are going to look pretty well unless you get lipodystrophy or something.
Mr Brown: If people do find out you will probably lose your job.
Professor Costello: Really?
Mr Brown: Yes.
Q56 Mr Evans: Can testing be done confidentially so that people will not know that you are being tested for it?
Mr Brown: There are discreet testing facilities, but how discreet they are I do not know. They are places you go into that do HIV/AIDS testing so if you are seen going in there is probably going to be some suspicion that you are going in to be tested, which naturally starts rumour. There are places where you can be tested and they are readily available for people just to walk in when they feel comfortable.
Q57 Mr Hendrick: DFID's evidence tells us that Nepal is on track to meet its Millennium Development Goals for universal access to primary education and gender equality in education. We are told that the enrolment of Dalit children is up to nearly a million and we are getting gender parity now. Certainly on our visit to one of the schools we looked at there seemed to be a lot more girls than boys and I was told that a lot of the boys work out in the fields with their fathers. Leaving that aside, can you tell us how you feel that social exclusion and inequality are affecting access to education? Do you feel that multi-donor support for the government's education programme is addressing these issues effectively? What about the quality of education? Do you feel that the children are getting a decent quality of education?
Mr Brown: I am surprised DFID say that
Q58 Mr Hendrick: Can you just back that up a little. DFID is saying through its Community Support Programme that it has contributed to the construction of 2,500 schools and also that 8% of children remain out of school in the primary age group, which is down from 16% in 2004, which is effectively half. There seems to have been some great progress.
Mr Brown: That is what I am saying, there has been fantastic progress through the Education for All Programme. It is very important to have the schools but it is a lot more than building the schools, it is about getting the community involved and making them aware of the specific availability of subsidies and grants to help children get into school, but it is not going to be 100% enrolment by the government's own target. They are targeting 98%, which is still quite close, to be fair. The government through its own analysis recognises that it is still quite a long way short of that. To get from that, if you take the 92%, from 92% to 98% is going to be a stretch. Even that 98% figure comes through the Education Management Information System which, again, is a government statistic, a government database of enrolment and retention. The UNDP have questioned the accuracy of that data, that there may be some double counting.
Q59 Mr Hendrick: Do they know how many Dalit children there are enrolled, for example?
Mr Brown: Yes. In EMIS the number of Dalit children is quite considerable and in certain districts exceeds the population projection from the 2001 Census, so you have got more Dalits in school than the population projection was saying would be eligible to go to school. Again, we should be congratulating Nepal and the education system, the government, DFID and all the others for getting this data going but there is a lot of cleaning to be done in the data still, it is not necessarily 100% accurate, and UNDP through the Millennium Development Goal report certainly questioned that maybe it is not quite as high as we think. Yes, Dalits and girls still have less access than others and it is not uniform across the country. If we look at the top 25% of districts in terms of primary school enrolment there is very good gender parity, almost 100% gender parity, but if we look at the worst then it goes down to between 0.6% and 0.7% in terms of gender parity. It is not geographically equally dispersed and neither is it equally dispersed across caste groups.
Professor Costello: My impression, and this is just having been there and visited, is that there is huge demand for education, and I am sure the supply has met some of that demand, but there is a huge issue around the quality of what goes on in schools - class sizes, availability of teaching materials, motivation, supervision of teachers - and I think that is a massive issue, but I do not have the statistics to hand about it or to what extent there have been quality evaluations.
Q60 Mr Hendrick: On the quality issue, like a lot of other countries it is slate and chalk for writing with, which takes you back to my parents' generation in this country.
Professor Costello: Yes.
Q61 Mr Hendrick: In the English class we saw the teacher had trouble conversing with us, never mind teaching the kids English. I think there is a serious issue around quality.
Mr Brown: Again, the School Sector Reform Programme, so the Ministry of Education, is recognising that. It is a programme that is funded through DFID and others and is one that is very positive. They recognise that it is about getting children into school and not only into class one, into primary school, but also into pre-primary school, that is a very important foundation, and we need to get into the quality of teaching, that it is learning by rote. ECD facilitators, until recently, only had 15 days' training. 15 days from nothing to then being eligible to teach or facilitate 20-25 pre-primary children day in and day out. They are recognising there is a lot of work to be done on training, on qualification, on in-service training, on infrastructure, both in terms of building new schools and new classrooms but also within the classrooms in making them more child-friendly. All of these things are in the School Sector Reform Programme. That is a very stretching, hugely ambitious programme, but at least there is the recognition that it is more than just getting the kids through the door, it is getting the quality of the institution, the teaching staff, the support staff and the school governors increased to provide a quality education.
Q62 Mr Lancaster: Some of the evidence we have received has suggested that DFID should be doing more to support capacity building in civil society and, indeed, I think VSO's evidence said just that. A simple question: what should DFID be doing and in what areas? What specific programmes should we be doing more to support?
Mr Brown: I think it is more about
finding a balance. In the submission,
some of our civil society partners - in fact a lot of our partners - felt that
organisations like DFID had moved away quite significantly from supporting
civil society to almost uniquely supporting the government. It is about finding the balance, to go from
there to there - it is something quite aggressive. It is finding somewhere in the middle. All countries need very strong governments,
very capable governments, to provide services, essential services. Equally, all countries, particularly
developing countries, need a very sovereign and strong civil society movement
to advocate for people's rights, to hold the government to account and, where
appropriate, to support the government in the provision of some of the
services, whether they be HIV services or education services or whatever. I think it is more finding the balance, and I
think, particularly in the case of
Professor Costello: Our research has been on looking at the impact of working with
women's groups in quite poor and remote populations, and some of this has been
DFID funded. We published a paper a few
years ago showing that if you just mobilise women's groups to help themselves
on issues around reproductive health and particularly new born care, we showed
a 30% reduction in new born mortality rates, just through that process over a
two-year period, and that most of those women's groups have actually sustained
themselves after we withdrew funding. We
have just repeated this in Jharkhand and Orissa in
Q63 John Battle: I would be interested to look at the kind of wider question. You refer to the balance of civil society and the institutions of the state, really. It does not only apply, of course, in Nepal. I wonder, as someone who does believe that you have got to have really strong advocacy groups championing it and trying to get to the parts the state never reaches - to lift up the poor and, as we said in the first questions, building up from the base - whether we need to question civil society groups, organisations and NGOs as well, and ask whether they have got it right, whether they really are reaching the parts that other groups are not and whether, in fact, by providing services as well as championing they do not act as a displacement of local government, for example, or even undermine the possibilities of local government. One of our witnesses has suggested that in Nepal, in particular, some of the groups could be highly exclusionary of both the extreme poor and the socially marginalised. I would be disappointed if that was the case, because I look to NGOs, civil society groups and the community to be the very groups that must be with the people building it up from the base. Is there a tension there? How do you respond to that challenge of not really reaching the parts that it should and that they are undermining local government?
Professor Costello: One thing, forming an NGO has been a route to corruption. When the Maoist government came in they clamped down a lot on NGOs and certainly a number of my friends said a lot of people were on the make here; they would set up an NGO as a way of getting money and then cream it off. What the extent of that problem was is difficult to quantify, but certainly it is the case that people were using the format of NGOs, and so when they had to be reregistered I think a lot of them were put out of business. You could say, also, with the international NGOs, that if they are going in and trying to set up their own management systems it undoes some of the other, local systems, and, also, you may have differential salaries. So the huge UN problem is always there; that you are taking out the really creative, talented people from the national systems and sticking them into international organisations and producing lots of reports. So I think these are important issues.
Ms Doull: I cannot really say for
Nepal, per se, but I think there are examples from other fragile states -
Afghanistan being quite an interesting one - where the role of civil society
and local NGOs has very much been promoted, certainly within the health sector
in terms of delivering and partnering.
One of the stipulations of an international NGO in that country
delivering services is that you do partner with national NGOs and build
capacity over a period of time with de facto then handing over whatever service
delivery or advocacy role within an agreed time frame. That is agreed from the top down as part of a
kind of overall national strategy. We
certainly had experience of that in terms of delivering basic health services
in
Q64 John Battle: I do not even think we have got it right in Britain, because I am worried about the trickle down theory. Sometimes, as NGOs, you get involved in the mezzanine floor and really to reach the poorest of the poor in difficult circumstances is just too hard; the spark, the ideas and imagination come and you have to train people to even get to there. Would you, in your NGO, for example, make it a policy priority to regularly be checking and asking yourselves: "Are we really reaching the poorest of the poor", and then, perhaps, encouraging local NGOs to ask the same question, so they have a responsibility to really try and reach those that government systems do not reach, local authority systems do not reach and even NGOs do not reach? Would you think that was one of your policy priorities as an NGO?
Mr Brown: Absolutely, yes. We are doing that right now in terms where we have been questioning ourselves: are we reaching the people who are the most poor, the most in poverty and the most unequal in society, and really questioning ourselves. Do we encourage our partners to do the same? Absolutely, through their own strategic planning processes, to really understand who are the people who are wanting this help. As Linda said, and I think it is a very important point, it has all to be joined up; there has to be some plan there.
Q65 John Battle: Just to push the logic a bit further, would you push that question at DFID, with whom you have a partnering relationship, to make sure that they are aware of and asking that same question?
Mr Brown: Are they working for the most poor?
Q66 John Battle: Are they working with NGOs that are working for the most poor? DFID can get caught into the idea: "We have gone with some NGO" and then they find out later that that NGO is corrupt - to use the worst example - or are they find they are working with an NGO that is in the mezzanine floor and not really reaching the parts we need to. Maybe DFID needs to be focused as well as you are so focused.
Professor Costello: I was just going to state
the importance of measurement here. For
anything you do now, measuring the impact across poverty quintiles is very,
very important. So the example of the
incentive scheme, like so many things that you try and supply from the top, is
that the better-off groups tend to benefit over the poorest - the inverse care
law. The thing we found with women's
groups, because you are setting them up across all communities, in
Q67 John Battle: Following on then (and I am grateful for that emphasis on measuring because we can move away from that), is DFID doing enough to support measuring and investing in it?
Professor Costello: I would say one thing, and I have said it previously in
Ms Doull: Can I just add to that? Again, you are not going to know whether you are reaching the poor unless you have got some robust monitoring and evaluation and that requires resources to do that, both financial, technical and human. I think an example that we are experiencing now from Congo not Nepal is where DFID has made gestures to support that research but seems quite undecided whether that is something they should or want to do or not. We have gone through a very difficult negotiation with them; this is actually to be measuring the impact of the abolition of user fees and it is not helpful when the goalposts keep changing throughout the programme and process. I think, again, it is understanding right at the beginning what is it you are trying to achieve and that all partners are engaged in that process, that resources are applied and that you stick with that for clear outcomes. I think to change policy halfway through programming does not help monitoring and evaluation.
Mr Brown: Also, patience; patience and simplicity. Do not overburden with too many measures or a collection of indicators; get it simple and be patient.
Chairman: Thank you for that. The Committee's question always is: "What
works?" and that is actually what interests us.
What we are finding out about
Memorandum submitted by Dr Mary Hobley & Associates
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dr
Mary Hobley and Professor Mick Moore, Research Fellow, Governance Team,
Q68 Chairman: Thank you very much for waiting. Just for the record, could you just introduce yourselves, please?
Dr Hobley: Yes. Hello, I am Mary Hobley. I have worked on and off in
Professor Moore: I am Mick Moore; I am a
researcher/political scientist from the
Q69 Chairman: Thank you for that. I guess as a case study Nepal must be an interesting political study. One of the things, of course, that DFID has stated in its recent White Paper is that it is focusing more attention on fragile states, and by any definition Nepal has to be classified as a fragile state; very much, hopefully, in a post-conflict situation but one that is still full of tension. We were discussing in the previous evidence sessions the extent to which things have actually happened in terms of poverty reduction in Nepal, but the interesting question is to what extent do you think Nepal is a country where DFID can make a difference? What are the particular features, circumstances or characteristics of Nepal that possibly offer that compared with other post-conflict countries? That seems to be what is coming back.
Dr Hobley: I think there are several
characteristics about
Professor Moore: I think, Mr Chairman, the
central paradox is the one you mentioned earlier, that on paper nothing much
should work in Nepal but, in fact, an awful lot does work. As you say, it is such a fascinating country
to study. I would add, I think, to what
Mary said that we have a very small formal government in
Q70 Mr Lancaster: It is fascinating. I have got a long history with the place, for reasons I will not bore with you, but it is very hard, is it not, to actually put your finger on how it works, particularly at a local level. This, really, I suppose, begs the question whether or not you feel that DFID has the expertise to be able to deal with that very complex situation, not least because, as we have talked about, local government does not really exist. I was impressed at the number of local staff that DFID were employing, which I think is very encouraging, but do we have the expertise to be able to deal with this very complex society in-country? If not, what do you think we should be doing?
Dr Hobley: My feeling is that because
Professor Moore: My sense is that relative to
other countries where DFID works they are rather good in
Q71 Chairman: Could you put it the other way round, just to probe you on that (I take your point entirely): is it difficult to get people who are prepared to make that kind of commitment, or is your argument that if they went out and changed that practices they could get people who would make that commitment?
Professor Moore: Under the current remuneration system it is difficult to get people to do it and people will commit for three years, but sometimes people will leave in less than three years because they get another posting. However, there are no rewards to spending longer in-country and learning the local language. I believe, although this is only on the basis of what people have told me, that there may be problems in the remuneration structure for local employees such that after a few years it is no longer very remunerative for them to stay with DFID, so experienced people will then move on to the World Bank, to give a recent example. I do not know the details but I do think this is something that DFID should look at very seriously.
Q72 Mr Lancaster: Whilst you were talking the lovely little Nepali word which they use to describe this has come back to me, which is Ghajimaji (?), which means mixed up, which I think sums the whole thing up. (I have just realised I am going to get a note from Hansard. I will write it down, do not worry.) It perhaps then goes back to your quote earlier. Do you think, given the situation as you have described it, given the need for local expertise and given how Nepal is unique as a fragile state, as indeed all fragile states are (I think that was the point you were making), and given that in broad terms the current government White Paper is saying that 50% of all bilateral spending should be on fragile states, do you think the skills that we are learning in Nepal are potentially transferable to other fragile states, or is your quote highlighting that what we are doing in Nepal is simply so unique that we cannot take those skills elsewhere, and vice versa?
Dr Hobley: I think at a certain level,
of course, they are transferable, but at another level they are not. Obviously, at the very local level it is very
particular. Just having been in
Professor Moore: Two or three things. I think, in general, the type of people that DFID recruits and employs are around right - I do not think they are radically wrong - because they are, on the whole, pretty much generalists. DFID is no longer recruiting lots of medics or engineers or people like that, and even if they do they end up with fairly broad portfolios. So we have got people who are generalists, which is in a sense what we want. There is quite a lot of overlap in practice, I think, with the people who will work in the Foreign Office, which is another issue but that is probably what we would want, but I think the issues are incentives. Also, and this is a very difficult issue to tackle, the whole question of can they take risks? On the one hand, in fragile states you want people to play a long game and you want them to be able to take risks and be rewarded, or not punished. On the other hand, the system that DFID has, the targets, the country assistance plans, etc, are not terribly conducive to that kind of thing. This is one of the big contradictions, I think, of all aid agencies (I am not sure we can crack this very easily), but I think in certain fragile states we need some shift away from, as it were, the programmed approach to the more flexible approach.
Q73 John Battle: I wonder if I could switch to a policy area of security and justice because DFID, in their White Paper, suggested that they want to treat access to justice and security as a basic service, really. I wondered if you could give us your impression of what has been described to us when we were there and in other submissions as a culture of impunity in Nepal, and a lack of sanctions. Do you think it is a fair impression, and how is it manifest?
Dr Hobley: I think it is a fair
impression. I think there have been a
lot of abuses at different levels that have not been brought to justice, and
there is a real sense, when you talk to people, particularly in the villages,
of fear. It is a growing fear
particularly in the Tarai, and people are afraid to step out of line or to
challenge because of what might happen.
It is not just people living in villages but it is district staff who
are being put under huge pressure to deliver particular services to particular
groups and if they do not they are threatened regularly on their mobile 'phones
that awful things will happen to their families. So there is a sense of fear that pervades a
lot of areas in
Q74 John Battle: Fear of whom? Who does the 'phone calling?
Dr Hobley: Fear of criminal gangs; fear of the youth elements of the political parties - obviously, the Young Communist League - but it is not just that. There is this very growing fear of the youth elements of the parties and not just in the Tarai; it is also come across quite a lot in the hills now. Again, people are beginning to say they are afraid to speak out; they are afraid to challenge somebody from one particular political party because of what might happen to them. So, in a sense, impunity has come down to a very individual level in that way that there is a real fear that there is no clear recourse to justice, and if you stand out and challenge, even at the most local level, you will be put into trouble for that. This comes back to this whole thing, because it is not that there is a political vacuum at the local level; there is not; there are political parties operating there and controlling the political level, but because there is no formal local government institutions and a lot of what goes with that it is much more difficult for people to see how they move themselves round the system to get access to services, to get access to benefits and to get access to justice. So a lot more informal and difficult systems are evolving and have evolved during the conflict around patronage and who gets access to what and how. These are, in a sense, becoming reinforced by the ongoing local government vacuum where political parties are really now struggling to get down to the very local level and to control resources as much as they can. So, yes, at the higher levels I do not have so much experience, but at this very local level I feel there is a greater sense of insecurity.
Q75 John Battle: So it is the pressure of political parties bearing down on people and it is affecting their everyday lives. I get the impression the situation is getting worse and more oppressive.
Dr Hobley: Yes, it is.
Q76 John Battle: What, then, would you see the main obstacles in the way of actually improving security? Where would you go to change things? Where would you start?
Professor Moore: To me, yes, Mary is absolutely right, there are these problems, but I do not see that trying to intervene here at any sub-national, local level is going to be very helpful. What we have got is a government that, even with a good will, cannot reliably call on the armed force that any government, ultimately, needs to defend its borders and keep its criminals out. The army are in barracks; the Maoist Army are, effectively, in camps. Bring one of those out and you will know what would happen. The police are not very large; some of them, particularly the armed police, have a very compromised reputation as a result of the civil war, and to me the answer is something has to be done pretty quickly about an agreement over the army and recruitment into the army and some kind of compromise between the two sides over this. If a government is in a position it can call the army out of the barracks then you can get the police to work, because if the police do not do it they can call the army.
Q77 Andrew Stunell: You have mentioned the police and, obviously, in a peaceful society you would expect that that would be the force. Poor people in the villages, how often do they see the police? What is their perception of the police? There also seems to be quite a bit of evidence of direct political interference with the police, not perhaps at national level but, maybe, the local political parties, or whatever, and manipulating outcomes. Do you see a way of moving forward on that?
Professor Moore: To me the way to move forward is that you have a cabinet and a government that does reach an agreement over the military and the police and then that the leaders of the political parties can begin to discipline their own people. That is part of the problem here, that the political party leaders have good intentions (many of them do have good intentions - they do not want to see Nepal fall apart) find it very difficult to actually discipline their own cadres, their own people lower down. I am afraid I do see this as the army being the central issue here. I do not see how it is going to be resolved otherwise.
Q78 Andrew Stunell: Okay. In some other countries DFID has programmes working with the police at local levels to develop community policing, if you like, to change the culture within the police force. Are you saying that that is going to be a waste of time until we have got the central political and constitutional issues resolved?
Professor Moore: I do not think it does any harm to have small programmes like that that send a signal that says: "We are interested in doing this and if you sort out your other problems we will give you more resources", but I do not think in terms of real impact on the ground you are going to see anything for years from small programmes for the police.
Q79 Andrew Stunell: The justice system - magistracy, or whatever it might be - the local justice system? Is that redeemable prior to a constitutional settlement?
Dr Hobley: I do not think I have got enough experience. The things that I have seen that have worked quite well are the paralegal committees, where they really do help at the very local level. It is back to small, local stuff does make a difference. No, I am not sure the justice system is redeemable until some of the bigger elements are in place, most particularly the constitution. Until you see some of these big planks in place I do not see how you are going to get the right types of pressures on to the justice system and the political parties starting to pull back from the way they are using the justice system. So, no, I think there is a way to go. As I say, I do not have enough experience to be able to give you clear guidance on that area.
Q80 Andrew
Stunell: If you were in charge, you would say that the
UK's collective input - not necessarily DFID's - should be on getting that
constitutional settlement
Dr Hobley: Absolutely. Definitely. Also, helping to inform that settlement by getting very, very clear vision and understanding at the more local levels about what forms of governance do people really want; just trying to get that understanding at the district, whatever level it is. However, that dialogue is not sufficiently in place, so what you are getting instead is these political parties trying to control those spaces without a bigger decision about what local government, local governance, local structures should be. For me, I think this is a real role for something like DFID, and, particularly with their support to the local government community development project, this is an opening. However, there is a real lack of vision at those lower levels about what this could be, and an informed understanding and challenge to the parties to help open up that space at the local levels. I would be very, very keen to see that happen.
Q81 Andrew Stunell: Does that suggest that DFID should be investing some time and effort in educating or, at least, conversing with the political parties?
Dr Hobley: Yes, but at lower levels as
well as at the
Chairman: Corruption is also a problem, which I guess requires a settlement.
Q82 Mr Lancaster: Yes it is endemic in Nepalese society, so I suppose the obvious question is where do you think it is at its worst, and how can donors such as DFID engage to try and tackle it? Certainly when we went on our visit there was a stated political will to try and deal with it, although whether or not that has actually seen much action in reality is a different matter. What can we do to try and help tackle it?
Professor Moore: I have rarely seen as corrupt
a country as
Dr Hobley: I think that is probably a
very sad reflection on the truth. It is
very interesting and you often hear - and I do not know true this is - some
people say that corruption has been important in maintaining the peace and, in
a way, it buys off particular groups and people who may cause more
problems. I am not sure I subscribe to
that but maybe there is a short-term period in which corruption has to be
accepted but managed, and it is only when some of these other, bigger parts of
the state are in place that it can really be dealt with. For me, when corruption hits at the lowest
level and for the poorest people I do find it very difficult to say: "Yes, let's
just turn a blind eye to it". We are
back, again, to these issues of how you begin to build more accountable systems
at the local level. Again, I think, even
though the political settlement is not properly in place, there is still a
moment now to be building the right types of accountability at the local level
in order to start addressing some of these issues around corrupt practice so
that it is not allowed to embed. I have
seen in other countries where corruption has been allowed to foster and to
build that it embeds itself so deeply in the system (
Professor Moore: Could I just add one thing there, Mr Chairman? I think a very good short-term target would be that more of the corrupt money actually goes into the central coffers of political parties rather than into the pockets of individual politicians, because the more parties we have with a decent amount of resourcing, who can actually employ staff and campaign, the better politics will be. One of the very unpleasant features of so much that goes on in Nepal at present is that corruption really does go into the pockets of individuals; politics is very "fashionalised"; people join parties and leave parties very quickly.
Q83 Mr Lancaster: Just picking up on one thing you said, can we be confident that British taxpayers' money is not involved in this? You are smiling, which I sense means that we cannot be confident. When DFID is running its programmes, you hinted that you thought that, perhaps, DFID money was - not intentionally but as part of the culture - being siphoned off and heading elsewhere.
Professor Moore: Mary, you should answer this in more detail, but I know that this is a major concern, at least it has been in the DFID office. I talk to people, and a lot of effort is going in to trying to make sure it does not happen, in terms of auditing - I had descriptions of attempts at intimidation on tenders for DIFD projects and how they tried to circumvent that. So this is something that DFID are concerned about for very understandable reasons.
Q84 Mr Lancaster: So the short answer is yes, or historically yes.
Dr Hobley: And very, very difficult to know exactly where every single bit of money is going; really difficult to track it. As Mick says, a huge amount of effort is going in to making sure that money is being correctly used and is going to the right places, but it requires an enormous amount of monitoring to do it. All the donors are really concerned about this and I think DFID has done a huge amount to try and address these problems, but you hear the Swiss, everybody - they are all looking at how they can better track the way money is being used. It is not just money; it is who the services go to, what the money is buying and who actually benefits from this? You see so much corruption in that way as well where money is supposed to go to the very poorest groups; you go down to the villages, they are not getting it, it is going to another group because of the way the patronage system works at that level. Unless you have incredibly able, independent and politically removed people facilitating these processes it is very difficult to erase those forms of corruption, where services are directed to a particular group of people away from another group. So, yes, I think you can do as much as is possible to protect but, again, unless at the local level you are building systems where accountability can really be built in a more democratic process then it is going to be very hard to challenge, at those local levels, who gets the services and who does not, and who is included and who is excluded.
Q85 Chairman: We have talked briefly about the lack of local government. Those of us who were in Baglam had a couple of examples - and those were really a positive feedback about the desire for it - first of all, I think, in the forest community where, particularly the women, were saying: "We used to have a jolly good local chairman of the local council who was a woman, who we could turn to and now there is nobody local". The agent who was effectively charged with delivering services locally commendably said: "I am here on behalf of the government to do this, but my problem is I am not accountable or responsible." So he was anxious to say: "I would like to have a locally accountably and a locally elected body". What are the chances of this happening and what can donors do to bring it about?
Dr Hobley: Unfortunately, a lot of it is
still dependent on getting the constitution in place by May 2010, and that will
then determine the structure of the state and then determine when the local
government elections can happen. In the
interim there is, at the very local level, a committee of political parties and
other interested people who are supposed to provide this initial form of
decision making, accountability and local development planning and
budgeting. There is, as you know,
through the local governance programme and now through government, large
amounts of money going down to the village development committees, which are
for planning local development activities.
So there is now an active process of trying to re-engage government and
citizens at that local level. In a
sense, the more that can be done to strengthen that and to occupy it in a way
that is not going to lead to greater patronage, I think, is a very important
thing, because this is what it is demonstrating to people what the future of
Nepal may be. This is now where they are
beginning to feel: "Okay, local government is coming back into place". I think the work that DFID is doing with the
other donors in the national programme around local governance and community
development is very important, but it does come back, again, to needing to
build this understanding of what local government should be like and not what
local government has been even during the civil war and was previous to the
civil war, where a lot of the local government experience was still around
highly patronage-based politics. So how
we reconstruct that understanding of local government at that local level, to
me, is critical to how people take
Q86 Andrew Stunell: Dr Hobley, you have given us evidence to show that, if you like, the community-based organisations are a somewhat ambiguous concept and you have mentioned the political parties' influence on them, and it is not all Age Concern and CAB when it gets down to the village level; it is perhaps something which the community based organisations convey that might not quite translate well. Can you say something about the balance of the provision that they make and the influence and advocacy that they have against the risks there are to having the kind of independent local government system you have got? If I could just press you a little bit on that, is it perhaps a little bit naïve to think that you could have a local government structure where the local politics was essentially removed?
Dr Hobley: It is impossible to have local politics removed, but what I think you would hope to see is some balance to the way politics are being used at the local level. Obviously, that is around, again, how you build people's ability to engage in these political processes. At the moment, in a lot of villages, not all, there are a lot of community-based organisations which do a variety of things. The forestry ones are interesting because they have a resource, they have money and they have a large number of members. Because of that they can actually act in a way like a local government; they can decide who gets access to the resource, they can decide who gets access to funds, and a lot of very positive things have happened from that process. Also, what they are tending to do now is to occupy what should be the local government space because they have funds, they have services and all the rest of it, which, during the period of conflict was important; they did deliver and they did maintain a level of social cohesion that I think was quite critical. Again, I think what we should be now looking at is how you balance those dangers and the positive sides of these community-based organisations with their relationship with an emerging local government and how you can balance the power of that so that the decisions that are being made about who gets access to services are not ones that just remain the very patronage-based ones which generally they are (particularly in the Tarai areas they very much are), but are based much more on careful exploration of who really requires the services and why they are getting them. So how that interface between over 400,000 more of these community organisations plus local government is developed is critical to make sure that local government itself has the power, the space and the authority to start making decisions for the whole citizenship and not for an interest group based on forestry or an interest group based on water or on mothers' health, or whatever else it is, but is looking across the whole populace. At the moment, there is a real issue of these different groups dividing up territory within the local area, and if you are not in a group you do not have a voice and you do not have access to services. For the very poor there are very high transaction costs to being involved in all these different groups to get access to services and often they both do not go into them because of the high transaction costs but, also, they are excluded because of their own social conditions. So local government should be sitting over this and should be able to take a whole overview of all the systems that are within that. The problem we have and the one we need to guard against is to avoid the community-based organisations remaining and the de facto way in which decisions are taken about who gets access to services and who does not. So it is redressing that balance that is going to be crucial in getting local government into a position and at a sufficiently high level as well as local level to be able to take decisions that are not influenced by politics or by patronage. Of course it will continue to happen but we need to be aware and understanding of how to try and prevent that.
Q87 Andrew Stunell: Can I take you just a little bit further on that? We visited a forest management project and we were given the impression that that, also, encompassed the fact that a school was being built, water and sanitation, bio-gas - a whole lot of projects seemed to be integrated there. Are you saying that that is a pretty unusual case?
Dr Hobley: It is not unusual. A lot of the forestry groups have, over the
years, taken on a local developmental role and not just a forestry role, for
good reason: they did have the funds and there was a real belief that this was
a way of trying to get local development going.
I do see considerable dangers in that becoming a reasonably
unaccountable form of decision-making about who gets what, and I am not sure
that for the future of
Q88 Andrew Stunell: I would just comment on that that if I was on the village committee or the forest management group and local government was set up in my area I would want to be on that local government. So I think, actually, you would see quite a transfer across. I would also comment that we were told and introduced to people who were members of the Dalit community who had apparently benefited from that. Could I possibly take you off in a completely different direction for a moment?
Professor Moore: Can I go back to an earlier point, Mr Chairman, before we go there, which was what can donors do? I would like to say I think there is one thing donors could do in terms of local government which is they could provide more active encouragement for setting up a reasonable urban property tax system to give at least urban governments and local governments a financial basis. They do not have one, at present. I think we are a long way away from ----
Q89 Chairman: We are back to this country, again!
Professor Moore: They also do not have a
system of central fiscal transfers from
Q90 Andrew Stunell: The point I was going to make is that drawing on the experience of visiting one project of about two our visit, obviously, I am a world expert on this! However, it seemed as though the provision of services was being reasonably well integrated; it seemed as though it was being provided or, at least, made available to all members of the community including Dalit members, and so on. Indeed they seemed to have census figures and a very clear perception inside the village of who were high-paid, low-paid, Dalits, etc, etc. So that looked like a good model. Can I just test you on another project that we visited, which was relating to the retired Gurkha village development project? You have expressed concern that, maybe, aid and projects are not getting to those at the bottom of the pile. Would it be your judgment that in the case of the retirement projects that is happening, or is there a selection of villages and, maybe, people within villages there which is not pro-poor?
Dr Hobley: I think it is quite difficult
for me to comment on because I do not know the project at all. It is very interesting if you do not look at
projects but you look at people, and you go and spend time with people and say:
"Okay, what are you doing? How are you
getting your livelihood together? What
services are you getting? What credit
are you getting?" They will reel off,
maybe, ten groups that they are members of to get access to water, to get
access to education, to get access to different types of credit, and they will
tell you how many hours they spend in each of these groups and different types
of meetings. For some people it is a
huge amount of time. Then you start
looking at who these people are, and what you find is that those who are more
capable are able to spend more of their time accessing these groups and
accessing services, and also what you find is that those who are generally the
wealthier or were former patrons within the village often control most of these
groups and control access to them as well.
So what it is is a very conditional way in which development is allowed
to people. If you go further down the
system to extremely poor or to particularly marginalised groups, the forestry
programme has been very good at trying to get the Dalits involved but this is
not the case across all projects. Even
though people talk about it, actually when you go down there and look what you
find is that a clustering of people who get access to services are generally
those who are more able, and a clustering of those who are extremely poor who
really get access to very little at all.
Often they would also be in the most dire situation and a lot of them
will have to migrate for the very poor labour services; there is very little
agricultural labour left because of the change to the Land Reform Act in 1997,
which meant that the tenancy arrangements there changed a lot. So, again, there is a lot of agricultural
land that is not being properly used now, so local labour opportunities are
very limited. In the absence of that
these people are looking for daily labour - that is what they spend their days
doing - and trying to get into these groups is very difficult for them; they do
not have the time, they actively exclude themselves and they are, also,
passively excluded by the groups because they cannot pay regular amounts of
money on credit, which is usually a requirement to be part of that group. So there are lots and lots of barriers, why
projects are causing further exclusion, and lots of reasons why they do that,
and it is not until you start looking at people, rather than projects, that you
start to see this. If you look at one
project it actually looks quite successful but if you look at the people in
that area and look at all the projects that they are involved with, actually
there is a large number who are not in any of these projects, and you start
seeing a very different story. It is
interesting, once we start getting these questions going, that lots of projects
have started asking the same questions and found the same answers across much
of
Q91 Andrew Stunell: Is there a way of dealing with that? Could the donors, and DFID in particular, take a different approach which would overcome that problem or mitigate it?
Dr Hobley: Yes, moving away from projects, obviously (and DFID has been good about trying to reduce the use of projects), and, again, looking into the future around how you get more sub-national budgeting which allows decisions to be made at the more local level for all the citizens rather than on a highly-projectised basis approach where you do X project delivering X services, where, again, the accountabilities are very clear. When you ask people where that money has come from and who are you going to hold to account, it is the NGO that has delivered the project or it is a donor that has delivered the project - it is not government. They are not putting pressure on local government or the district or central government and saying: "Why are you not doing this"; they are putting pressure back on to the project: "Why are we not having more of this? Why are we not having more of that?" Again, how do you reconstruct relationships where people are looking into the government, into the local government and into those that should be providing the services to push there for greater accountability? The projects, because of the conflict, have really got in the way of that.
Q92 Andrew Stunell: My point about Gurkha retirement villages?
Dr Hobley: I have only been to one and that was on a casual walk-through, so I cannot answer you. I am really sorry. If I had been there and looked at it more carefully I could answer.
Q93 Mr
Lancaster: I am going to embarrass you, actually, Mary,
and say that apparently you describe yourself as one of the main international
commentators on community forestry, which I am sure is the case, so can I ask
you, perhaps, to comment on the effectiveness of DFID's forestry
programmes? In particular, they claim
that for every £35 spent on the
Dr Hobley: I think they are being a
touch optimistic there. Currently, they
are about to do some longer-term evaluations in looking at exactly these issues
and to look at their poverty impacts. I
think, hopefully, those will provide a more systematic and more careful
analysis. That was a fairly quick
study. Actually, the forestry programme
is very interesting in DFID because this is an example of where DFID has
committed over a very, very long period to one sector (we are talking 20, 25
years) and what we are seeing in many ways is the good harvest of that
investment. If you are looking at it in
terms of forests, so environmental impact, it is massive: there are trees now
where there were never trees and there is huge change across the hills of
Q94 Mr Evans: How difficult is it to encourage more private businesses to set up in Nepal?
Professor Moore: One thing that was quite
striking to me was in 2008 when the Maoists were about to come into power and
came into power. The private sector
actually was not terrified, and you think they would have been, but they seemed
to be relatively happy. The biggest
problem the private sector face is not particular political parties or
particular policies, it is just the general insecurity and everything that goes
on around it - the extortion, etc. All
the surveys and talking to business people just give you the same answer: if
they had a government that could actually keep order and deliver on what it
said it was going to deliver, frankly, I do not think they would care which
party or which combination of parties was in it. The other very big issue over this is because
most economic activity in Nepal is in the Tarai, not far from the Indian
border, there is so much cross-border activity that it is very hard, often, to
say if you are talking about the Nepali economy or the Indian economy. There are lots of reasons for businesses to
shift both sides of the border. So I
think there is every reason to think that with a reasonable amount of political
order the private sector would be okay.
It is interesting, the rate of private investment in
Q95 Mr Evans: Is this something that you think donors can help in trying to support?
Professor Moore: My sense is that because the primary problem is the security there is nothing that donors can do directly about that. There are all kinds of little things that need to be done about the investment climate, but I think they are only secondary at present, and they are the kind of things - small changes in legislation - that could take place later. I do not think donors need to do more than give the right signals. I would also add on that that much to my surprise I do not see that the Maoist party, even, is anti-private sector. What is quite interesting about the Maoists is that they controlled enough of rural areas for long enough that they learnt how you tax people, and they realised that a thriving private sector is good for them and good for everyone else. So although there is a lot of rhetoric, of course, at one level, I think in reality there is no big problem here.
Q96 Mr Evans: What could they do? You mentioned taxing. What more could they do to strengthen the taxation system to get the revenues in and to have better public finance management?
Professor Moore: The Maoist finance minister
claims - I cannot remember whether it was in the first six months he was
finance minister - he increased tax revenues by something like 30%, I think (I
cannot remember the exact figure).
However, there is a tremendous amount of leakage, and that is partly because
the dominant source of tax revenue is the border with
Q97 John Battle: If I can ask a brief question about employment. You mentioned that the economy of Nepal is a function of the development and growth in India, but we met people that wanted to know where are the jobs for young people, particularly, and DFID, again, have made that a priority. There is some suggestion that jobs can be generated in agriculture, in tourism and, indeed, in renewable energy and water for the region. Are there realistic prospects there? Should DFID be involved in employment generation at that level?
Professor Moore: I think there are a lot of
realistic prospects. Agriculture in
Dr Hobley: No.
Professor Moore: There is just a sense now
that the country does not have the agricultural extension experts, the
researchers and everything else that they would really need. I do not see any kind of "big bang" here in
the agricultural sector. One thing the
other donors could do, we have in India now the National Rural Employment
Guarantee scheme, which does mobilise large numbers of people on public works -
roads etc. There is quite a lot of
expertise in that region, especially in
Q98 John Battle: What has come across very clearly in this session, as Mary puts it, is the need for these those bigger questions politically (in the full sense of political not party political) of governance to be right up there and tackled first or we are getting nowhere.
Dr Hobley: One of the things around
employment, one of the things I found really startling, going round the villages, is how few young
men there are between the ages 18 to 40; it is almost like an absent
generation. You ask questions where they
are; they are in
Q99 John Battle: It will be controversial to say it but I was quite strangely disturbed over the break when Gurkhas that can now come to Britain came to see me at my advice surgery in inner city Leeds to tell me they are very disappointed in Britain because their jobs and cars were not there. I said: "And you were expecting to get straight to a job?" Partly it was: had they got a licence, could they drive a car and what jobs could they get? So sometimes the expectation is part of the problem.
Dr Hobley: Very definitely. This is a new generation that has those expectations; they have different exposure now and they are not prepared to accept what was there before.
Q100 John Battle: Sadly, they were asking could they be arranged to go back having just arrived because they felt that they had been misled into expectations. So balancing the expectations and impressions (I think was the word you used earlier on) is very difficult, internationally as well.
Professor Moore: Could I just add one other point
on the private sector? The big thing in
Q101 John Battle: You control the water table.
Professor Moore: Yes. It could do extremely well.
Q102 Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed. We have found the whole experience of Nepal a bit different from other developing countries, fascinating and interesting. There are a lot of good stories but, obviously, the political settlement is key to the future. We are very grateful for the background experience you have and for sharing it with us. Thank you very much indeed.
Professor Moore: Thank you.
Dr Hobley: Thanks.