The Future of DFID’s Programme in India

Written Evidence Submitted by Rosalind Eyben, IDS

Summary

1. To justify the continuation of UK aid to India, DFID needs to re-evaluate how it works in India so that poverty reduction becomes its central goal, not only on paper but in practice. I submit that DFID could make a greater impact with a smaller budget, provided it does not cut back on its programme staff - its front line workers.

2. The current volume of aid expenditure in India is distracting DFID from learning how to work effectively. Too big a budget may be counterproductive to the impact DFID could achieve in a middle-income country with deeply entrenched inequalities. DFID needs to focus more on how it works in India, including ensuring that its experience in India is used to benefit its aid programme elsewhere in the world, as well as back home in the UK.

3. This submission is based on my research into power and relations in international aid and also draws on experience as a social development adviser and consultant for the UK aid programme in India between 1985 and 2004.

Influencing pro-poor change in non-aid-dependent countries

4. The argument against aiding a middle-income, non-aid-dependent country such as India is that the amount we provide is relatively a drop in the ocean in relation to the country’s domestic budget, that the Government of India should take responsibility for its equitable development, and that our money is therefore better spent elsewhere. The argument in favour that one third of the world’s poor live in India and that we can and should help is however subject to criticisms, including from within India, that our assistance has been ineffective in reducing poverty or actually harmful, and that it should be better stopped.

5. I start from the premise that we should continue an aid programme in India. The intolerable persistence of deep poverty and inequality in a country with a growing and prosperous middle class indicates the challenge to Indian society. External agencies such as DFID have the potential to facilitate and support fresh perspectives and approaches to this challenge.

6. India is striking for its high levels of inequality and resultant chronic poverty as well as for the diversity and wealth of social movements that are struggling to deepen India’s democracy and enable all its citizens to realize their rights. DFID has had some successes in this regard. For example, as part of its rural livelihoods project in Madhya Pradesh it supported vulnerable and exploited migrant workers, seeking to change the power relations of poverty in many different ways: mobilising workers to assert rights and respond to injustice, creating a ‘voice’ and a constituency for the workers, but also recognising their immediate need for social protection and welfare. The agencies and levels involved local NGOs, unions, government authorities and donor require careful relationship management by all concerned. [1]

7. Such small-scale local-level action may have the potential over time to change the wider system more effectively than significant financing of central or state level government budgets and programmes. A recent study of donor support to the education sector in India [2] found that when switching from supporting local innovation through experimental projects to funding government sector-wide programmes, many of the innovative elements were lost – along with the donor-added value. Yet part of the reason for this switch has been the pressure to disburse large sums of money, despite these being relatively trivial amounts in relation to the Indian government’s own budget.

8. The problem was compounded by the decision made some years ago to ‘do more with less’. The reduction in advisory staff numbers made it increasingly difficult to find the time and develop the contacts and relationships for identifying possibilities to support and strengthen local-level efforts to change the power relations that keep people in poverty as well as spread the news of such efforts to central government departments and others.

9. Has DFID’s impact on poverty reduction and social exclusion declined as a consequence of it simultaneously increasing the amount it spends and decreasing its staff numbers? High levels of spending may distract from the construction of effective relationships that are informed and tested by their capacity to support poor people’s empowerment. When the purpose of aid is to reduce inequalities, a donor may need to be there for the long haul with a commitment and preparedness to invest staff time in developing and maintaining institutional relationships. DFID’s own evaluation of its India programme in 2006 noted that substituting long-term staff by short-term consultants could undermine capacity to build and sustain such relationships.

Supporting social innovation

10. Current approaches to effective aid assume that we are in control and that change is predictable. Neither assumption is true: and these assumptions are blocking donors from responding effectively to a largely unpredictable and dynamic policy environment. To make aid more effective, new ways of thinking about it are needed. For example, it may be worthwhile to finance simultaneously two or more different approaches to solving a problem, facilitating variously-positioned actors to tackle the problem according to their different diagnoses and consequent purposes, and thus supporting a diversity of actions.

11. Relatively small interventions through small grants and technical co-operation assistance may have disproportionately significant impacts. For example, a DFID-financed project offered two-week training programmes for rural bank branch managers in two districts in Andhra Pradesh, addressing personal, institutional, social and economic issues connected with working with poor people and poor clients. It is now run in Pune with totally local financing as a regular training programme for rural bank managers from all over India. That a relatively small investment (under £200,000) led to a nationwide initiative is attributed to the synergies in the relationships established between the key people involved. [3] Another submission to the Committee has already demonstrated how with Community Led Total Sanitation quite small fine-pointed sums can have big impacts and large sums can sometimes paradoxically do harm.

12. Because such interventions often cost little money they often pass under the evaluation radar screen and DFID fails to learn about and communicate the conditions for success or failure of these initiatives. My 13-year experience as a DFID Social Development Adviser has lead me to conclude is that success is more likely when DFID staff:

- have a good understanding of local context,

- invest time in relationships,

- are open to a diversity of views, and

- are allowed to experiment, take risks and learn to alter their approach accordingly.

13. All this however requires a significant re-thinking of how DFID should work in a middle-income country such as India. The advantages of what I recommend are that DFID could make a greater impact with a smaller budget, provided it does not cut back on high quality programme staff, its front line workers.

Relationships matter

14. Understanding the context and investing in relationships are the two interconnected and iterative activities that are the primary means for supporting locally-generated processes of innovation. Country office staff are a key resource for DFID in that respect, equivalent to the front-line workers in UK domestic line ministries. DFID’s slogan needs to be ‘Trust the front line’. Fixing their number in relation to the size of the budget they spend ignores the fact that staff, not money, is the key driver of effective aid .

15. The figure on the next page attempts to summarise this approach. The solid uni-directional arrows represent appropriate behaviour from DFID employees (staff/ consultants) vis-à-vis other organisations and institutions whose appropriate behaviour leads to real-world positive changes in the lives of poor people. The dotted, two-way arrows represent the iterative, non-sequential process of understanding, learning and reflection. Note that the evaluation of DFID’s India programme in 2006 found that staff were paying insufficient attention to this process of learning.

16. The principles of this approach are:

- Any investment in relationships should be informed and tested by its capacity to support and not undermine poor people’s empowerment;

- A recognition that empowerment is political and is about changing the inequitable power relations which keep people in poverty;

- DFID must see itself not as the director but as one of the actors on the stage in a script not yet written. DFID’s role may be not much more than the "second gentleman" who delivers a crucial line in just one scene.

- Societal change is neither sequential nor linear and DFID needs to design its aid accordingly.

17. There are implications for how DFID assesses and reports its impact and on what it requires in that respect from those it is financing. Although unintentional, the current emphasis among all donors on ‘results’ can undermine recipient organisations’ capacity to tackle India’s poverty challenge. The organisations more capable of making a difference might actually refuse to partner with DFID for that reason. I recently received an email from the director of a small Indian NGO stating:

Sometimes the big donors are themselves ok, but the systems they have set up and the people they have employed to manage their funding have put in a lot of "reporting" initiatives that takes up all the time. We have just had a big transformation within our organization shifting from big to smaller donors so that we can focus better on the needs in the communities.

18. Sheela Patel of SPARC, the Indian NGO that supports slum dwellers federations has written that when SPARC was founded in 1984

‘ Donors gave money to us because there was a sense of trust. These funders did not set our priorities; communities of poor people did..... we were given all the space we needed. Consequently, SPARC and its partners now operate in nine states of India and help some 750,000 households..... I cannot imagine donors in today’s world granting an organization like SPARC the kind of latitude it required in its early years. Instead,[they] have become more focused on developing portfolios of projects, managing risks, and producing outcomes rather than on listening to communities, healing deep inequities, and supporting innovation’ . [4]

Wider benefits from a UK aid programme in India

19. DFID and the UK gain more widely and directly from working in India. The strong poverty reduction focus of the UK aid programme in India since the 1980s has led it to experiment with, learn from and influence participatory approaches to support poor people’s empowerment. The innovations first adopted by DFID in India and then spread to the rest of the aid programme include:

- The process approach to project planning, of the kind described by Patel;

- Indicators of success identified by partners and beneficiaries with joint monitoring and evaluations

- Participatory rural appraisal and other empowering methods for involvement of the beneficiaries

- Methods for assessing effectiveness of participation

- Locally-owned development communication methods, such as ‘theatre for development’

- Developing the capacity of those citizens with less voice and influence

20, More recently, DFID’s ‘citizenship approach’ to poverty reduction has also benefited from innovations in India which DFID has learnt from and in a small way contributed to. Furthermore, lessons from India are proving to be useful back home in the UK. In 2007 the Institute of Development Studies organised an event for local and central UK government staff and the voluntary sector to learn from developing countries about supporting active citizenship. The conference was opened by the Indian Minister for Local Government, whose speech inspired UK participants to reflect on what still has to be achieved in the UK, including the greater participation of women in local government, in which we are lagging behind India.

30 th March 2011