UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 534-ii

house of commons

oral evidence

taken before the

International Development Committee

The 2010 Millenium Development Goals Review Summit

Tuesday 26 October 2010

Myles Wickstead and Andrew Shepherd

Evidence heard in Public Questions 55 - 82

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the International Development Committee

on Tuesday 26 October 2010

Members present:

Malcolm Bruce (Chair)

Mr Russell Brown

Richard Burden

Mr James Clappison

Richard Harrington

Jeremy Lefroy

Pauline Latham

Anas Sarwar

Chris White

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Myles Wickstead, Visiting Professor (International Relations), Open University and Andrew Shepherd, Director, Chronic Poverty Research Centre gave evidence.

Q55 Chair: May I say good morning to both of you? For the record, could you could introduce yourselves.

Myles Wickstead: I am a visiting professor at the Open University. I was head of the secretariat of the Commission for Africa and I spent my career doing both development and diplomacy in DFID and the Foreign Office.

Andrew Shepherd: I am a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute across the water. I am the Director of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, and that is the capacity in which I am here today. I was previously director of programmes for the rural part of ODI.

Q56 Chair: You both were at or around the MDG summit physically?

Andrew Shepherd: That’s right.

Myles Wickstead: Yes.

Q57 Chair: We had the Secretary of State in front of us last week-normally, we do these things the other way round. I don’t know whether you’ve seen the transcript or heard what he said, but are there any particular comments? Obviously, we will ask you questions about some of the things he said anyway, but do you have any particular comments or observations on what he said to us? Neither of you were there.

Myles Wickstead: No, I watched it on YouTube and I very much agreed with what he said, the presentation he gave and the interpretation he gave us.

Andrew Shepherd: Yes, I was impressed by how confident he was and how many good stories he had. I probably have a slightly different take on the MDG process and summit, but I guess we’ll come to that.

Q58 Chair: We will indeed. Just to pick up on that, I think it’s fair to say that the Secretary of State is very enthusiastic about the job he’s doing. His whole approach to the MDG summit was that this was an opportunity to get everything back on track. As he put it, it was a path for renewed momentum in the global fight against poverty. There was obviously some hesitation about looking beyond 2015 as if that was a cop out and he wanted to see if we could use the next five years to try and deliver what we set out to do in 2000. To what extent do you agree with what he says? Was it a significant event that gives us a renewed attack on trying to deliver them over the next five years?

Myles Wickstead: Yes, I was a little worried about what was going to happen in New York about a year ago. It seemed to me that all the enthusiasm and some of the momentum had gone out of the process. I felt it was important to try and reignite that momentum, and I think that did begin to happen from around the first quarter of this current year. One of the reasons we decided to reconvene the Commission for Africa was to try and inject some momentum into the process. I had a strong feeling from the events in New York that that had indeed happened. There was a lot of energy around, a lot of events happening, and I think some proper and serious commitments.

Andrew Shepherd: Yes, I didn’t have the access that Myles had to the main events of the MDG summit. I was a little bit around the edges, as it were. I was there to present the report on poverty that the Chronic Poverty Research Centre produced a couple of years ago and an update on that report. The event at which I presented that also saw two other reports on poverty presented, from the UN Research Institute for Social Development and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, so it represented quite a substantial amount of work on poverty and progress in reducing poverty.

There was, I would say, quite a consensus between the three reports on a number of issues. One point is that we do not have the diagnosis and the policies absolutely right yet; that includes the diagnosis and the policies for achieving the MDGs, even the targets, by 2015, let alone the goals. Secondly, taking what you might call a developmental approach, as opposed to a target-driven approach, seemed to be what underlies the successes in achieving the MDGs, at least in many cases. Thirdly, what happens at national level-and this was reflected in your discussion with the Secretary of State the other day-is probably much more significant than what happens at international level: aid can help, but it’s really only a very small part of the story in many cases. I think there was broad agreement on those three issues.

My perception of the summit, the process leading up to it, and the outcome document, is that a lot of those things are recognised, particularly if you look at the outcome document, which is very comprehensive-a massive long list of good things that ought to be done––but they haven’t quite got to what the fundamental issues underlying making progress towards the MDGs are and perhaps we can spend a bit of time talking about some of those.

Q59 Chair: That’s relevant to our next question because the Secretary of State has very much focused on having measurable outcomes and measurable targets. He’s talked about results-based policy. He has talked about the donor countries and the recipient countries, the developing countries, setting targets and he mentioned one or two. He also mentioned an initiative between DFID and USAID to try and identify what specifically they might be. How realistic do you think it is that that can be done? It’s interesting, Mr Shepherd, that you’re saying national ownership is perhaps more important, but certain countries are falling off the edge and not committing, and there is quite a vigorous campaign in the UK to say, "Why on earth are we doing this?" against the backdrop of our own financial difficulties. How successful would they be in identifying those targets? More to the point, will they be deliverable? Indeed, is that a way to demonstrate to the people who are sceptical about the justification for aid that it can be shown to work?

Myles Wickstead: I think what’s important about the MDGs is that they are measurable and quantifiable, the ones that we currently have: they’re about numbers, they’re about proportions, they’re about percentages coming out of poverty etc. We can measure progress against those. What is more difficult to measure, perhaps, is what has created the conditions under which those things can happen because, of course, it’s not just primary education inputs or basic health inputs that lead to those outputs. There is a whole complicated story, which everyone on the Committee is familiar with, around governance, peace and security, economic growth, and all those sorts of issues.

I think perhaps, if we do revisit these things, as we must do, without getting in the way of the momentum behind achieving the goals by 2015, we perhaps need to look at qualitative issues a little more as well. For example, it’s easy to measure how many children-actually, it’s not that easy to measure, because statistics are notoriously unreliable in many developing countries, including across Africa. When you’re saying that there has been this progress between 2000 and 2010, and you only have statistics that go up to 2005, you have a problem. We can at least make a pretty good guess about Ethiopia having moved from two children in five going to primary school in 2000 to four children in five going to school in 2010. That’s a real step forward. What we don’t know so much about is how many of them have desks to sit at, how many have books to go, and what they’re learning at the end of the process. I think there is a challenge there about how we measure the outcomes rather than the inputs.

I think the second thing that we really need to focus a little more on in any subsequent MDGs, or whatever, is sustainability. Here we are with a very clear set of targets up to 2015; we may come up with another set of targets that take us another 10 years on or whatever, but what we’re really interested in is what the planet is going to look like in 50 or 100 years, and what sort of planet our great-great-grandchildren are going to live on. It’s the sustainability-and I don’t just mean climate change and the issues around that-but what sort of economic growth is it that improves the quality of life and not just the quantity of life.

May I just make one final point before I pass on to Andrew? It is the issue that you touched on Chair about whether attention on a new set of goals, a new set of outcomes, might distract attention from reaching 2015. The truth is that the key overarching target for 2015 is to halve the proportion-and this is an important point-of people living in absolute poverty by 2015. We still have the other half to worry about. This is not talking about going for the whole 100% and then not making the target, perhaps; we still have that other 50%.

Q60 Chair: And it’s 50% of a rising population.

Myles Wickstead: Absolutely, so even if we’re completely successful about getting to 2015 and achieving all the goals, we still have a lot of work to do. We still need something like the MDGs to follow on.

Andrew Shepherd: Yes, I think the goals are fine; they’re wonderful. They’re very basic, however, so as Myles has just said, there is a lot more to do, but they’re fine. Obviously, governments set priorities and targets and it is to be hoped that populations hold governments to account; that process is absolutely fine and capable of delivering results. I suppose my disappointment around the MDG process––I’m thinking now of the next five years as well as the longer term––was that we do know certain things and we’ve known them for some time, but we haven’t yet adapted the MDG framework towards them.

I’ll just give one example and concentrate on one policy area where there is something very concrete that can be done. It’s within reach, but the MDG discussion didn’t quite move in that direction and there was, I think, a general reluctance, to take on new issues at this point. One of the things that we know is that, although people progress out of poverty, they’re often very vulnerable in making that progression; they can be easily set back by all sorts of hazards. Poor people face a much greater number and intensity of risks than we do. They’re very ill-protected in facing those risks; many of the old systems that used to work, the family clan-based systems and so on, no longer work in the same way that they used to. You can have a country that is making reasonably good progress and a number of people in that country may also be making progress, but it’s going to be very hesitant and they can keep getting set back.

With relatively modest amounts of public expenditure and even a relatively modest amount of political will, we know that it is possible to put in place social protection measures to protect people against those setbacks as they are desperately struggling to climb out of poverty. There is lots of evidence for this. I can leave you with a report and we have lots of other researchbased evidence indicating that fairly simple, straightforward cash transfers, pensions, public works programmes and other similar sorts of schemes can produce a whole variety of benefits, but, in particular, can protect people against that process of being pushed back.

If you look at the percentages, you might have, in any given period, let’s say 10 people moving out of poverty. Of those 10, perhaps five of them will not actually be able to get out of poverty because they’re getting set back along the way. In one country, it might be eight people out of those 10 set back; in another country, it might be two people out of those 10 that are set back. That process is very well known, there is a lot of evidence around it, and there are fairly straightforward policies that can be introduced. We know that they work, there is plenty of evidence about that, and they’re not going to cost the earth. All of what I’ve just mentioned is well recognised by many of the UN agencies and in the outcome document, but there is no plan of action going forward. It’s completely left to countries. There isn’t a strong international thrust in that direction. That’s the one concrete thing I would pick out that would make a huge difference; not just to people escaping poverty, but to children attending school. Why are children withdrawn from school? The enrolment rates have gone up fantastically-so a big round of applause, on that score, for many, many countries-but children, girls in particular, still drop out far too soon. Cash transfers, either conditionally or unconditionally linked to children going to school, can make a fantastic difference.

Q61 Chair: Our focus is obviously on how the United Kingdom can engage in the international arena. I’m going to bring in Anas Sarwar.

Andrew Shepherd: Yes.

Q62 Anas Sarwar: That’s point I was going to raise. What was the UK’s actual role at the summit and how much of an active role did our own representatives play? What do you think the UK’s contribution was at the summit, for example, in terms of leadership and securing outcomes by focusing on offtrack MDGs? One of the things that we’re all really proud of is that the UK always seems to be one of the leading forces for international development, and I just wondered whether that was still the case at this summit.

Andrew Shepherd: I think it’s very much still the case, from my perception. I think the UK was very heavily involved in the initiative on maternal and child health, which was the one big financial initiative to come out of the summit. Behind that, the UK has also been focusing very strongly on gender equality issues, over a very long period of time, and has been a fantastic leader on that. If I can just go back to what I was just saying about social protection, it’s the UK that has led internationally in pushing the social protection agenda, so I think the UK occupies a fantastic leadership position. I think it’s wonderful that we have, more or less, a consensus across the political parties on international development and clearly you, as a Committee, have a very important role in that.

Q63 Anas Sarwar: What about in terms of the dynamics with countries that perhaps aren’t fulfilling their obligations as promised? Did you get the sense that the UK was putting in a little bit extra to make sure these countries are trying to forge relationships and trying to encourage them to come forward?

Myles Wickstead: Perhaps I can come in and just make a couple of points. I was at two events where I was struck by this leadership role; one, of course, was the event chaired by the Secretary General around mother and child health, where the Deputy Prime Minister spoke very strongly, very firmly, about the UK’s political commitment. This is, at the end of the day, about political will and leadership and I think that came across very strongly, and people from other countries-the G8 and elsewhere-I was talking to informally afterwards were very impressed about the strong political consensus around this agenda in the UK.

The other event that I was at was the private sector forum, and Richard Branson spoke strongly at that. Michael Hastings, in the other House, chaired part of that event. This is not just about Government leadership, but also about the role of the private sector and the potential for that to help on this agenda, because, after all, the MDGs, if you look at them, don’t say how to achieve them. They don’t say governments have to do this; they talk, in MDG 8, about this consensus and, importantly, that includes the private sector. In building that consensus and creating this sense within the UK that the Government is taking this leadership role, with the support of the other political parties, with the support of the private sector, with the support of this very vibrant NGO and the community that we have. I think this gives us a fantastic nexus of influence so that we can influence this agenda over the coming years.

Q64 Anas Sarwar: Mr Wickstead, you said in a recent article that all roads lead to the MDGs. Do you still feel, post the summit, that the MDGs are the beall and endall in terms of our development project, or do you feel that we are already starting to think post2015? If we aren’t thinking post2015, do you think we should start thinking post2015?

Myles Wickstead: I do think we should start thinking post-2015, of course we do because, as I said earlier, even if we completely achieve the MDGs, we will still be stuck with nearly a billion people in the world who don’t have enough to eat who are still stuck in poverty who need that. We still need to think about the post-2015 paradigm. What I was getting at is that the MDGs, although they appear rather simplistic and easy, are enormously complex and difficult. You do need good governance; you do need peace and security; you do need strong economic growth; you do need-this perhaps something that others might want to address and we might want to come on to-sensible international trade rules. If developing countries in Africa and elsewhere do build up the standards of their products or their agricultural industry, they can then export the results. What I’m getting at is that, if we did everything we need to do to get to the MDGs, we would be doing the right thing.

Q65 Anas Sarwar: Just on that point, you summed up perfectly: there’s a lot more than just committing the money in making the MDGs successful. Did you get a sense that the summit was focused primarily on trying to get people to match their commitment in terms of a financial commitment? Was there real discussion in terms of trying to improve governance, institutions, tax systems and things in countries that are going to lead to real and longterm development that are not going to lead to a dependency culture?

Myles Wickstead: I’m sure a lot of those discussions happened around the edges of the summit; because summits are not just about what happens in the formal parts, but around the edges. I’m sure there would’ve been a lot of that discussion. The summit itself was about giving this a high profile and generating political will. The hard work, in a sense, comes afterwards. What is it you need to do to get that? You’ve hit on one point that I think is really important: building tax systems. All the indications are that for every dollar you invest in building a tax system, you get $10 out. What is not to like about that? It’s kind of obvious.

Q66 Richard Harrington: If we could just go back to maternal and child health campaign, which obviously, from what we read, was the focal point or one of the great breakthroughs in Nick Clegg’s speech. We made our own commitments, as some of the other countries did. To what extent do you feel that this campaign represents a breakthrough in reaching the millennium goals or is it something, but not something as special as it sounds?

Myles Wickstead: I think it was special because what has been very evident is that we’ve made good progress against a number of these goals, but there’s a risk of missing out around these important ones of maternal and child health. They’re the ones that are furthest behind in terms of achievement. It was important to get that very strong political push in order to regenerate interest specifically in those, to show how far we were behind and to get some political momentum behind the need to make progress towards them. I think we all recognise that, if you work on these issues-on maternal health, on women’s health-then that has a huge impact across the board on economic activity. It’s not just a charitable thing; it’s also economically the sensible thing to do.

What is difficult sometimes about these vertical silos of things is that it’s quite difficult to know, for example, when we say that all these new commitments have been made, what is new and what is not new in that. I think there was a sense that people had put more resources, more money, more input into this, but quite how you measure what is new about that is a more difficult thing to do.

Q67 Richard Harrington: That leads me on to this. Obviously the classic example, the one we’re most interested in is DFID, but if you take all the programmes that DFID has, how feasible is it for them to change the programmes or reorient them towards the maternal and child health campaign, so women’s and children’s issues have top priority, particularly the reproductive health side of it? Can programmes be changed so that that becomes central or is that taking things away from the general population in those countries?

Myles Wickstead: DFID has always had quite a strong focus on these issues anyway. The great advantage of a programme that’s expanding is that you don’t quite have to make those difficult choices that you have to make when you have a programme that’s static or declining. It is possible therefore to do new things; to put additional resources into areas that you think are particularly important to focus on, without having to do less in other areas. For example, you know as well as me, the Secretary of State has said that 30% of the programme in future will go on supporting work in fragile states etc, but you can do that without necessarily having to withdraw resources from other areas on which DFID is already focusing.

Q68 Richard Harrington: Sorry to harp on about this, but there are a lot of countries in which gender equality, to use the trendy phrase, is not only not a priority for the governments of those countries but in many ways culturally, or possibly religiously, is actually discouraged. How do we deal with that with the aid programme?

Myles Wickstead: I’m sure Andrew will say something about this as well. You can only do a certain amount if you’re dealing with a government where the cultural or other norms have not yet-we would say-developed to a degree where gender equality, getting girls into primary education, is seen as having equal priority to boys. These are all things that take time and historical development. I’m very confident that it’s moving in the right direction and that, as families and countries become economically better off, they will see increasingly the value of getting girls into school, for example, and that gender equality follows. I see this all over Africa, and all over the world really. .

Andrew Shepherd: I absolutely agree with what Myles said. There is a sense in which-this goes back to whether the MDGs address the underlying causes-gender equality is often seen as an underlying cause of poverty and deprivation of women, and women’s status in society. These are the difficult issues that you were talking about. If you look for evidence, in terms of what can be done on these underlying issues, there is also a lot that can be done and many developing countries are doing these sorts of things and DFID, generally speaking, supports them. It is not always done by Government; it may be done by civil society organisations or the private sector in terms of employment and so on. We’ve just done another report called Stemming girls’ chronic poverty in which we tried to assemble a mass of good examples of what can be done in this very difficult area. So my message would be that it’s a difficult area, it’s culturally sensitive and so on, but there is a lot going on, there is a lot that can be done, and there is a lot that an organisation like DFID can do.

Q69 Chris White: Going on to reaching the vulnerable and ensuring equality, it’s clear that, in the rush towards achieving the development goals, some of the vulnerable have been left behind. I would be interested to know what your view on that is, and on whether donors and countries have just been looking at picking off some of the easier fruit first?

Andrew Shepherd: The big change in the set of orthodox mainstream development policies between 2000 and 2010 is the advent of social protection on the scene. Social protection is not a panacea. It doesn’t deal with everything, it’s not a magic bullet, so it will help kids into school and through school, but the schools need to be in place, they need to be good quality schools. You can’t solve all problems with one measure. The big change is that vulnerability has been recognised both by many governments, developing country governments, and by the international community as an important component of the poverty problem. There is a response, or set of responses. there, that are on the table. So, I think we’re in a much better position.

We have a lot of evidence about how those responses work in practice. We’re in a much better position in 2010 than we were in 2000 on that vulnerability issue. What we need is a bigger, more concerted push behind that evidence to generate action, particularly in low-income countries, where governments struggle with the issues like, "Do we have the budgets to make the long-term commitments to fund these programmes over five years, 10 years, 15 years?" There are things that DFID and other development agencies can do to support those long-term budget processes.

However, the major vulnerability that poor people face is ill health. We’ve been talking about measures that largely look at preventing ill health or put in place very basic health systems to help people deal with malaria and respiratory diseases and so on. What sets people back in their attempts to escape poverty is the ill health of a breadwinner, somebody who has to go and get work but cannot get work because of either recurrent or acute ill health, often over long periods of time. The mechanisms to deal with ill health in those sorts of situations are often not there. The health services are often not there, so, yes, build up the health services certainly. Health insurance is almost non-existent for most people in developing countries, let alone poor people, but we know, from small-scale experiments at least that health insurance can work, can be relatively inclusive, and there are some larger scale experiences on that too. It is not just a matter of maternal and child health. Dealing with ill health across the board is something that has to be recognised. The cost of medicines, the whole issue of patenting of medicines, and the constraints that countries face in producing generic medicines or buying generic medicines is another issue.

Q70 Chris White: You’ve come up with some solutions, but in talking about the most vulnerable, with the solution of health insurance, there seems to be a big gap between those two. Do you think we should be changing our emphasis towards how aid is put to the more vulnerable in our societies?

Andrew Shepherd: Thinking about the UK, DFID has gone quite a long way where there has been space for it to do so in countries; Bangladesh would be a good example of where it has shifted its programme very much in the direction of focusing on the poorest and the most vulnerable in Bangladesh. I would that that could happen more widely. I will just very briefly mention one international agency that has adopted an equity focus for its entire programme recently-that is UNICEF, under its new chief executive, Anthony Lake. Take a look at what UNICEF is doing because I think it’s a model.

Q71 Chris White: You used the words "space" and "programme" in your answer. I had the fortune or otherwise of being interviewed by Rod Liddle for The Sunday Times, and the question was, how can you contrast a space programme against the poorest people in India. Sorry, but again it is coming back to how you identify people in India that need that support, need that aid, while at the same time we’re watching videos of space shuttles and things. That’s really the issue that I’m trying to get to the crux of.

Andrew Shepherd: India is a very good example. It’s very clear who the poorest are in India. They’re largely in something like six of the biggest and poorest states of India. They are often from the bottom of the caste system or the Scheduled Tribes. The Scheduled Tribes are the poorest people in India and I think that’s about 85 million. It is pretty clear who the poorest are. What is not absolutely clear is how to bring them into the mainstream. The Government of India has initiated over the last five years what you would have to call a rights-based approach to development, starting with the right to information, the right to employment, the right to education. This is, I suppose, allowing people to claim the rights that, in a sense, they’ve had all along, but just making it more specific-giving them a few more tools to do that-and I think creating a lot of energy in society to make sure that those vulnerable people at the bottom of the heap are included.

Now, a rights-based approach, and again thinking about the post-2015 agenda, is not a magic bullet because you still need to have the services supplied; you still must have the mechanisms which make those services accountable to people; you still must have demand for those services. The Scheduled Tribe family is unlikely to have a very high demand for education because they all have to go out and earn their daily bread. If there is a right to employment, and if that right to employment is effected by a Government that provides people with a backup employment scheme if there is no employment in the market, which is often the case, that’s going to help with the kids going to school and staying in school and eventually with the long-term progress of those households. So putting rights in place, putting mechanisms for people in place to claim those rights, and making sure that the services to back those rights are available are all very much part of that picture.

Q72 Chair: Can I bring in Richard Burden? We had a very lively discussion, Myles was there, when we had our informal briefing about the fact that more and more poor people are in middle-income countries and I think that’s something that we want to explore a bit a more.

Q73 Richard Burden: There are three areas on the question of equity that I’d like your comments on. First of all, around this issue of middle-income countries; the second will be around how far it is legitimate to and how far we can influence in-country thinking; and the third is about DFID’s role. On the first of those, Malcolm made the point that the estimate is that three-quarters of people live in middle-income countries and yet the focus, and if you look at the MDGs, up to MDG 8 everything talks about people-it doesn’t talk about countries. When it gets to MDG 8 it starts to talk about countries. Do you think the summit did address the fact that you can’t easily cut reducing poverty in all its definitions by defining it in terms of countries and, if not, should the summit have done a bit more about addressing poverty in middle-income countries and, if so, how?

Myles Wickstead: Shall I have a first cut at that? I’m not sure that the summit did really get to grips with those difficult issues that you’ve identified, and I think perhaps that DFID’s role is different, depending on what sort of country we’re talking about. In the poorest countries, I think DFID’s role is essentially about supporting government, about helping create economic growth, which is the necessary, if not sufficient, precondition to development. What our Commission for Africa report last month showed was that Africa made significant progress in economic growth over the last five or 10 years, but that the benefits of that had not yet been sufficiently doled out to people at grass-roots level, the very poorest people.

Probably in middle-income countries you need to take a slightly different approach, which is not about creating economic growth, which is very large in China, particularly, and in India and other southern and eastern Asian countries. What you need probably is a much more targeted approach on the very poorest people in those middle-income countries. Of course, there is a very strongly decentralised system in India, so it’s not about central government but working probably with the governments of the regions, the poorest regions, that Andrew mentioned, in developing policies and also helping with financial resources to create the social protection schemes, the basic health and education services, that can help bring those very poorest people out of poverty. A different kind of policy input is needed. Of course, fragile states as well; some people are nervous about this whole notion of fragile states and DFID putting more resources into fragile states. Actually, we do need to be engaged in those states because they are full of very poor people and while you have that bad governance they’re not going to get any sort of development, so we really have to address these and use different instruments in the different countries and different circumstances. I think DFID is quite good at doing that.

Q74 Richard Burden: Just going back to the international scene and the summit-perhaps we can return to DFID in a minute-do you think that there should have been a new indicator put on that tackles the issue of equity and narrowing the gap between rich and poor? Should that be a central objective internationally, rather than a kind of implication that hangs around in the background?

Myles Wickstead: Andrew knows more about this than I do. I think that that is quite a difficult policy discussion to get into. Take this country for example: we talk about having full primary education; actually, it’s probably about 95% isn’t it? You always have that 5% who exclude themselves because they play truant. In the discussion about reaching the most vulnerable, the difficult-to-reach groups at the end of it are always going to be more and more difficult. I think that we do need to take seriously this issue of pockets of poverty in countries that are very well off. We talk about India a lot. Brazil, we know, has the highest Gini coefficient in the world: the difference between the top 10% and the bottom 10%. I think we do have a role, which may not be a financial role but more of a policy role, in helping to address these constraints. It’s certainly something that we should be looking at in the post-2015 MDG substitute, whatever that is going to be.

Andrew Shepherd: Can I just say one or two things on equity in middle- income countries? We’ve done some work at ODI which looks at progress that countries have made and compares progress as it’s measured for the MDGs with a measure of equitable progress. You can at least do that now that that the data are available to do that for the health indicators. You do see some quite interesting differences when you compare across countries, so, if you brought equity into the indicators, you would see some differences. From a technical point of view, it can be done, and it would be great if it could be done. I agree with Myles that it’s a very sensitive topic for member states in a UN context because they feel that it is a degree of interference in their internal affairs too far. So, I suppose the discussion is often around proxies for equity.

In middle-income countries, they have the capacity to deal with the problems they face in general. Brazil has been making progress in reducing its inequality over the last 10 years. It is a fairly outstanding example of where that has happened. It has happened because of good social policies, very largely, and very substantial investment in social services, but also as a result of a more employment-intensive economy. It’s a highly political issue. Your other question was how external actors influence these difficult political discussions. It’s quite hard for an agency like DFID to do that in a very direct way, but perhaps it can do that indirectly through supporting research and by supporting civil society actors in those countries, which it does a lot of: there are social movements behind many of these progressive causes such as women’s movements, and movements of the lower castes and tribes in India, that are very active and, in some cases, well organised. I think particularly in contexts like India and Brazil, you have governments at least part of which are well capable of taking on board the results of research and making use of them in policies. So there is a move towards evidence-based policy making. I think the longterm support for research-as a researcher, I would say this wouldn’t I?-in developing countries that DFID has been providing over the last 10 years can be really useful in addressing some of these issues.

Q75 Richard Burden: My last question just follows that. DFID to some extent is doing a lot of these things and you’ve acknowledged that, but is there more DFID could do on that area of promoting equity? Whether directly or indirectly, are there any areas you say, "We’re doing well on that" or "We could do a bit more of that same thing" or "We could do something slightly different"?

Andrew Shepherd: I certainly think that there is more to be done in the area of reducing vulnerability. With climate change at the back of everybody’s mind, and certainly in developing countries, African countries and South Asia are beginning to get their act together on climate change. Why? Because it’s a threat. Climate change is a coming issue, or an issue that is already there, that is going to give a greater emphasis to vulnerability and building resilience. I think there is more to be done on that side. This is the area that I would really pick out. If you’re talking about inequality and inequity, you’re talking principally about bringing the people who are 75% of the poverty line, who are hungry an awful lot of the time, up nearer the poverty line. You’re providing a springboard for them to begin to make progress. If you’re going to do that you have to address vulnerability in a very, very serious way, in agricultural policy for example. Ministries of Agriculture don’t tend to think about risk and vulnerability very much; they need to. So, it’s not just social protection, it’s across the whole board.

Q76 Mr Clappison: You’ve said quite a bit about social protection, which I found very interesting, about how to help people who are scrambling out of poverty from falling back into it. Can you boil that down to some policy ideas as to how we could promote that through our own aid policy?

Andrew Shepherd: DFID already is, and has been promoting it for a number of years. It has been supporting quite a large number of what you might call pilot schemes or experimental work across Africa, particularly in low-income countries where governments have been quite reluctant, for understandable reasons, to push too far too fast on this. DFID has both been talking to governments about the value of social protection and providing the resources with which to make experiments and has been willing to provide the large-scale resources over significant periods of time to get a programme up and running; sometimes that has been enough to convince a government to take that risk and develop a national programme. In many countries, we’re still at a stage where these experiments are a little bit embryonic; they’re being evaluated, people are thinking about them, there is discussion about them in the media and in parliament, and so on. The issue for the coming years is taking it to the next stage, learning the results of that experimentation and beginning to develop national strategies policies and programmes in whatever form.

Q77 Mr Clappison: You felt there wasn’t enough emphasis on this at the summit?

Andrew Shepherd: You are right. I think there wasn’t enough emphasis. This is something that is known, it could be done, and it could greatly improve performance against these targets by 2015. It’s not something that has to wait for the post-2015 discussion; it can be done now.

Q78 Mr Clappison: Very much as a lay MP asking you as experts, may I go back to the question that Mr White put to you on the political context in which we’re operating, particularly with the economic changes that we’re going through and the pressures on public expenditure? I find as an MP that it’s not that difficult to make the case for international aid where a humanitarian disaster is in progress or with a very poor country that is well below the standards of healthcare and education that we enjoy in this country. For middle-income countries, which Mr White was asking you about, that are clearly moving ahead economically and choosing to spend their resources in particular ways, how would you make the case for helping poor people in those countries to a member of the public who says, "Look at India and the way it’s spending its money, or look at China and the money it’s spending on acquiring natural resources in Africa itself and its growing economic strength."? How would you justify to the man on the street spending money on international aid in countries like that and others?

Myles Wickstead: I think it’s about global equity. That’s the argument that one comes back to in the end. We live in a complex world, where a country like India has its own space programme and its own development programme, and is getting money into poor countries. Its influence in Africa is huge, as of course is China’s, which you mentioned, in different ways. China is interested in Africa’s natural resources and helped to sustain Africa’s economic growth in that difficult period 2007-08 because it continued to buy in its natural resources. India is much more an exporter of information technology and communications skills; a huge amount of technical expertise from India is going into Africa. Its a very complex world and all sorts of different countries have all sorts of different relationships and you can’t boil it down to a very simple north-south, south-south, east-west-it’s a much more complex world that we live in post-1990.

Ultimately, what you need to say to your constituents is, "Look, the world is changing; it’s becoming a better, a more equitable place. It took us hundreds of years in our country to get to a stage where we have greater equality, where children have the opportunity of getting into school, getting an education, and making choices about the way they live their lives. We have a real opportunity to boil down that process to a few decades. If we put in resources and help now into these very poor areas in middle-income countries or into fragile states, we have a real opportunity first, to help those people directly; second, to create a more secure and stable world, which is in all our interests; third, to discourage refugee flows and whatever because people’s states are becoming unsustainable because climate change is influencing those countries in ways that will make living there unsustainable and create refugee problems. It’s a globalised society and it’s therefore really important to address those issues. Actually, it saves us money in the end; it means that we don’t have to do these military interventions or whatever; it means that we can, through exercising our soft power and our moral leadership in the sort of way I think we would all recognise was important, we do ourselves good, we do good, and we can really help to achieve a good outcome for the planet."

Q79 Mr Brown: Mr Shepherd, you said in respect of MDG 7, and I am sorry if I’m quoting your words back to you that when dealing with the environment, the whole issue needs to be updated and re-thought. Climate change is a further challenge here. This question is to both of you: how can a post-2015 framework help integrate poverty and climate concerns so that developing nations can harness the benefits from international efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change?

Andrew Shepherd: I think I said that MDG 7 was a bit of mess in the sense that it was an odd collection of targets that had somehow been clubbed together. It’s fairly obvious to me that, with the kind of global negotiations that are going on around climate change, we need to begin to rethink some of the ways we address poverty and deprivation. Some countries are beginning to recognise that; there has been a thrust in a number of countries towards very serious approaches towards sustainable development. What we need to do in relation to MDG 7, or in relation to bringing together the MDGs framework post-2015 with whatever is negotiated internationally on climate change, is to look at how these things mesh together. I don’t have ready-made answers on that, partly because there are two communities pursuing these two issues, and they don’t interact very much. There is a need for a process, and an organisation like DFID can be quite important in bringing those discourses together, and a need for time to work out the implications of reducing poverty in ways that are also environmentally sustainable.

I don’t think there is any problem with everybody agreeing with that, but the question is, how can that be done. I will just give you a couple of examples. At the moment, there is a lot of talk about agriculture and food security, as there was at the MDG summit, and there have been a number of initiatives-the commitments made at L’Aquila and so on. So, it’s a high-profile issue, but if you look at what’s happening as a result of that high profile on the ground, it’s often a matter of getting fertilisers to farmers. Now, if you take a sustainable agriculture approach, you would be looking at a much wider range of interventions; fertilisers might well play a part in that, and are not to be ruled out by any means, but probably a lesser part than they play in the current quick-fix strategies that are being pursued on agriculture. That’s one way in which adjustments would be needed. Neither of these things feature in MDGs in the current targets or indicators framework, particularly.

There is another set of very important issues around energy. We have a fantastic range of decentralised green technologies available in energy, but are we getting the investment behind those? Are they important in terms of poverty reduction? They’re incredibly important because you need to energise your agriculture; most poor people are still in agriculture in terms of occupations. If you’re going to move out of agriculture, which poor people often see as a poverty trap, where are you going to move? You’re going to move into the non-farm economy. Again, it needs energy. Neither of these two are getting energy from the grid. There is a process of matching up. There should be something probably in a post-2015 poverty-reduction framework around energy, which will link to a climate-change framework.

Myles W ick stead: Can I just make a very high-level comment on what you say? I think it really is important, as Andrew says, to bring these two agendas together and to strengthen the link between poverty and climate change. What many climate change campaigners will say is that what is clear now-which wasn’t so clear 10 years ago when the MDGs were put into operation-is that human creation of climate change is now an undisputed fact. It wasn’t even 10 years ago. It’s humanity that has created this momentum behind climate change. It’s essentially a small group of countries who have created that in the industrialised world: the US, Europe and Japan. In a sense, their economic growth therefore, has come about as a result of them using a global good in a way which has taken that global good away from poorer countries. In other words, it’s been on the back of poor countries that they have been able to grow their economies to industrialise and to create economic well-being. The consequences of that in the form of climate change are being visited on the poorest countries in a way which has a hugely detrimental effect on their development in terms of global warming, in terms of sea level rises etc. In a sense there is a kind of feeling that rich countries owe it to the poorest people in those poor countries, almost as a form of retribution, which is a word that I’ve heard bandied around in these circumstances. They are looking for retribution or a payment back for the harm which the developed world has done to the developing world in creating its own development process.

Chair: Jeremy Lefroy. We have a couple of quite big questions, but lack the time.

Q80 Jeremy Lefroy: In the new Commission for Africa report you talk about the average growth rates of 6% plus across sub-Saharan Africa, and yet at the same time sub-Saharan Africa is going to miss all the MDGs. Now, I think you’ve both hinted at one link between the two which could be strengthened, which is the tax system. First, are both those scenarios accurate? Second, how can the MDG framework be used to drive economic and financial success as well as human development? Again, I think you’ve talked about health being very important and that’s clearly a very important input into economic development, but are there others?

Myles Wickstead: On your first question, of course Africa started a long way behind in 2000 in universal primary education and maternal and child health for example. One of things we did find that I thought was very interesting and that we reported in our report is Africa has made progress against every single indicator. It has improved against every single one of the MDGs, including the maternal health one-it’s only a tiny little blip but it’s in the right direction. On all the other indicators there has been a much more significant shift in the right direction, not-as you rightly say-fast enough to get to the MDGs, but making very significant progress towards them. That should be a cause for celebration, considering the low point. That is a result of better governance and of better peace and security. The fact that there are no wars between states in Africa is one that’s widely unreported, I’m afraid.

Jeremy Lefroy: No news is good news then?

Myles Wickstead: Absolutely. I’m afraid the media still have this idea that Africa is completely falling apart, is hopeless and full of corruption. Of course there are elements of all that stuff, but actually Africa is making huge progress. We quoted, for example, from the McKinsey report, which says, "If you have money to invest, invest in Africa." That came out just in the middle of the year, which was very timely for our work. If a private consultancy firm is saying that and foreign direct investment is going in as a result of that, then that’s great. That brings me on to your second point, really. If you get that sort of investment going into Africa, if you do get companies there creating employment and creating wealth, then it will have the same effect as China and India’s progress towards the MDGs. You would pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty because of that economic growth. Now what we also say is that you also need more targeted government interventions to make sure that the poorest people benefit from that growth as well and more work needs to be done on that.

Andrew Shepherd: I agree with you, Myles, that there is a lot of progress around Africa; particularly if you look at absolute measures rather than the relative measures, which the MDGs focus on, you’ll find that Africa is often making more progress than countries elsewhere. If you go to the ODI MDG report scorecard, you will get lots of evidence on that. However, growth is often not very well distributed. The results of the benefits of growth are often not very well distributed-often concentrating on minerals and not enough on agriculture. Agricultural growth is what is going to give you your broad-based growth and it’s going to help the rural non-farm economies grow. In addition to minerals, it’s services that have grown and these are urban services. Very often, it is big city urban services that are growing, as opposed to well-distributed services around the small towns which will bring benefits to their hinterlands. So there’s something about the pattern of growth that varies hugely from context to context, but is very important.

Secondly, there’s something about the way in which poor people can participate in growth. You really need to have a process that gets you away from just being able to offer yourself as cheap labour. What does that mean? It means that the quality of your labour needs to be enhanced. Now a question for you: does primary education, which is the commitment in MDG 2, take you far enough towards greatly enhancing the quality of your labour in the labour market? I think the evidence suggests that it isn’t. The international community and many governments are still stuck on getting everybody into primary school. We have to go beyond that, and that’s one of the areas where I think the world as a whole desperately needs to begin to move on and to look at post-primary education. Kids need 10 years of education at least if they’re going to bring their households out of poverty, if the next generation of that household is going to have a better life. Looking at education again is something that perhaps we ought to do, in relation to growth and in relation to people participating in growth.

Q81 Pauline Latham: I particularly agree with that last comment. With regard to population growth now, neither the MDG framework nor DFID’s policy priorities explicitly address the issue of population growth. Why does the international community engage so little with this issue and should DFID be giving more focus to it?

Myles Wickstead: I think those are very interesting issues that you’ve touched on. What all the historical evidence demonstrates is that you have a graph that relates economic growth and population. Now we’re at a point on the graph where people in Africa and in many developing countries are continuing to have very large families, because traditionally that has been what has kept at least a small number of children alive even when many have died. We should welcome this as a time when more and more children are surviving into adulthood and when adults are living longer and longer. So we’re at a blip, as it were, before the next generation will take rational decisions. They will realise that actually they only need a couple of children because they know that those children are going to survive and go on to primary school-and I completely agree they then need to go on to secondary school and tertiary education and into valuable employment.

The population projections that we were looking at from 10, 20, 30 years ago are not as dramatic as we thought then. People were talking about 10, 11, even 12 billion people living in the world. That’s come down quite dramatically. We’re now talking about 8.3 billion, I think. A lot of those people are going to be living in cities: 95% of that additional population will live in cities and 95% of that additional population in cities will be living in urban slums. That, I think, is another issue that we need to be looking at in so far as the MDGs are concerned. We need to be helping with the population issue, but it is a function of economic growth and if we stimulate that economic growth and if the world is becoming a better-off place to live, then I think we will address that automatically.

Andrew Shepherd: You are hitting on something that’s quite deep here. There are very difficult cultural, religious and social issues tied up in this question. It was originally there in the International Development Targets in the 1990s, it didn’t get into the MDGs-it was in and then it was out and in and out. It’s now back in as a target for universal access to reproductive health services, which is a fantastic achievement against all the political odds back in 2006, I think. It’s a big achievement, largely for the women’s movement. These issues are connected with the discussion we were having earlier about gender inequality and women’s status. There are things that can be done and even in quite politically difficult situations, ministers of health can get together with religious leaders and have rational discussions on these issues. We can expect economic growth and general progress to do some of that work, but there’s a lot more that can be done, and sometimes has been done in quite unpromising circumstances.

Bangladesh is a great example. It is a Muslim country with a very pro-natalist culture, but the simple provision of services at the grass-roots level over sustained periods of time both by NGOs and by government has enabled women and families to have greater choice about the number of children that they have. I think if you can find mechanisms to get those reproductive health services out there, people will make their own decisions and birth rates will come down among poor households more rapidly than they would otherwise. There is a fantastic case for public action there by governments in co-ordination with civil society and religious leaders and so on.

Q82 Pauline Latham: Can I just come back on the agricultural side? You talk about there being so many people living in urban slums. Maybe if we can make agriculture more attractive and wealth creating, you’ll stop so many people going into the urban situation because they all think, "It’s much better in the cities." It isn’t actually. If we can encourage them to stay in the rural communities and make money there, we won’t have the same problems in the urban slums as we might do if we don’t do something with agriculture.

Myles Wickstead: I think that’s a very good point. However, at the moment 70% of Africa lives in rural areas. By 2030 that will be 50% and all the indications are that agricultural labour in developed economies accounts for somewhere between 2 and 5% of the population, so people are going to have to be doing other things in those areas as well as agriculture. Maybe the ICT revolution can really help with that, but I completely agree with you: the grass is not greener in the city.

Chair: May I thank both of you? I think you’ve given us quite a positive flavour and perhaps demonstrated that the MDGs are perhaps delivering a little bit better than people think, and that you feel it has been given a renewed boost by the summit. You have also engaged us with James Clappison’s question about who you should be helping and where, and what is the right priority for us, which is something I think the Committee will clearly want to focus on quite a lot over the next Parliament I would think. Thank you both very much indeed for both your written submissions and for coming in. That’s been really helpful and positive.