Building Active Citizenship and Accountability in Asia: case studies from Vietnam and India

Last week I attended a seminar in Bangkok on ‘active citizenship’ in Asia, part of an ‘Asia Development Dialogue’ organized by Oxfam, Chulalongkorn University and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. It brought together a diverse group of local mayors, human rights activists and academics, and discussed a series of case studies. Two in particular caught my eye.

In India, Samadhan, an internet-based platform for citizens to directly demand and track their service entitlements under national and state government schemes, is being piloted in two districts in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. The pilot is supported by the UN Millennium Campaign and implemented by the VSO India Trust. Here’s the blurb from the case study:

‘The way Samadhan works is simple. Citizens can file a complaint into the Samadhan system through phone calls, SMS, or the web about any delayed entitlements owed by the government. Once their complaints are filed, the computer registers it by location, time, date, type, and other classifications. A local administration official then reads the complaints and deems an appropriate course of action. Citizens can then track these complaints through their registered number via website or SMS. Once it has been resolved, the citizen receives a message indicating that action has taken place.

The key contribution of Samadhan is that it saves time and increases efficiency for both the citizens and the district administrations. Traditionally, the process of grievance redressing was a lengthy and tedious undertaking. Citizens were required to submit a written application in person at the district headquarters during weekly public hearings. The onerous cost of travel alone can be burdensome to citizens who often have limited resources and time. Now, through Samadhan, citizens can file a complaint with a click.’

It’s early days yet – the complaints are coming in, but the investigations are just getting going (see screengrab from the website). The obvious question is ‘why should officials take more notice of an online complaint than they do of poor people turning up in person?’ There is a huge assumption inherent here that the state wants to hear and redress complaints. When asked about this, Praveen Kumar G, VSO’s India programme manager, said that the primary pressure is political – the fact that the complaints are in the public domain fosters scrutiny and pressure, because bureaucrats are pulled up by their elected bosses if they’re underperforming. But he conceded ‘If we have district leaders who want to do this, it’s easy. If they’re opposed, it’s very difficult.’ Quite. I also assume there is UN dosh funding the government staff required to read and respond to the online complaints, which raises issues of replicability.

The other project is the Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI), from Vietnam (why does everything interesting always seem to come from Vietnam?). This is a public index that ranks local government performance. It piloted in 3 provinces in 2009, but now covers the whole country.

The methodology is rigorous (a lot of international experts are advising). Local researchers are recruited and trained to interview a carefully selected sample of 13,000 people all over Vietnam on their experience in dealing with local government in areas such as health and education, the level of petty corruption, and participation.

According to Giang Dang, of CECODES, one of the organizers:

‘The researchers arrive at the village and show a list of names to the village head and say ‘we want to talk to these people’ – they insist on those names, even when the leader says ‘he lives a long way from here, why don’t you talk to this guy who lives closer and is more knowledgeable’.

‘When Vietnam opened up, the two things that arrived first were beauty contests and Coca Cola. So we decided to organize beauty contests. Most opposition came from the contestants in the beauty contest – the public servants.’

Besides the rigour of the research methodology, the secret of PAPI’s success lies in the way it actively recruits champions inside thesystem. Its advisory board has representatives from the National Assembly, ministries, government inspectorates and academia. A key role is played by the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF), a mass organization of the Party which supports the project, and ‘opens doors – the VFF goes all the way down to commune level’.

The results are already impressive: ‘higher ranking provinces are keen to keep their position and feature their ranking in all their documents. Some of the lower ranking provinces are starting to set up task forces, and asking us for advice on how to improve performance.’

USAID in Thailand visited PAPI last month and are interested in replicating the project in Thailand (an interesting transfer from a less to a more open political system).

Dr Dang thinks another key to PAPI’s acceptance is that it is run by local researchers, and so is not subject either to the whims of the aid industry, or accusations of foreign meddling in Vietnam’s internal affairs (the project was initiated by UNDP, which is seen as fairly neutral). He thinks this kind of intra-Vietnam comparison between provinces exerts more traction than cross country comparisons, which can be dismissed on the grounds of Vietnam’s unique conditions.

‘There has been a positive response from the public, but we do get some hostile phone calls from officials – ‘who the hell are you to do this!’. At the end of the day, it’s about pressure, and the naming and shaming gets media and creates pressure. We have to make a wave big enough to move the province.’

The interesting question here is why hasn’t this model replicated more? According to Dr Dang, China has something similar, but run by the Party, and Mexico has a comparable project, but that’s about it. He says it took two years of piloting to get the methodology right, find out what way to ask the questions etc and that that approach would have to be repeated in any new country. Funding may be an issue – in this case it comes from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which seems particularly good at these kinds of long term experiments. Given the response from local government, I wonder if PAPI could become self financing, offering to help the laggards catch up in exchange for a consultancy fee? That raises issues of neutrality/money contaminating the research, but I imagine these could be resolved.

Is there a global crackdown on civil society organization and if so, how should we respond?

I’ve got a nasty feeling that we could be heading towards a strategic train wreck on the role of civil society in development. Let me explain. Increasingly (and not just among NGOs), development is understood in terms of politics, power, and struggles to redistribute the latter. That has produced a shift in resources towards advocacy and influencing, as a complement to more direct programming and humanitarian work, and in the best cases, a fusion of the two.

That’s great (indeed it is the central argument of my book, From Poverty to Power), but it is predicated (in our case at least) on support for ‘active citizenship’ at local, national and international level. Yet a recent discussion with Netsanet Demissie Belay (right), the Policy and Research Director of CIVICUS, the international citizen action network, highlighted just how threatened ‘civil society space’ has become, particularly for the more political influencing work. I could do with some help in thinking through the implications of this.

First a summary of Netsanet’s presentation, based on a synthesis of various analysis and research carried out by CIVICUS including Bridging the Gaps and State of Civil Society 2011 (reviewed here), which draw in turn on the work of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which rigorously documents legislative processes around the world, and has just published the excellent ‘Defending Civil Society‘ report. Conclusion? Civil society organizations (CSOs) worldwide face an increasingly sophisticated and varied range of restrictive measures. These include (examples are from CIVICUS and ICNL):

Old fashioned repression: in the words of Russia’s Vladimir Putin: ‘March without permission and you will be hit on the head with batons. That’s all there is to it.’

Restrictions on international funding (pretty essential in the poorest countries): Under Bangladesh law the Oxfam office can’t bring a penny into the country without government sign-off on what partners we fund, what we/they use it for and where it is spent. Government is looking at reducing regulation slightly (for example, dropping the requirement that we notify them of every foreign-funded trip our staff make and why they are making it) but not the overall premise.

Funding restrictions particularly target advocacy work: in Ethiopia, advocacy organizations are not allowed to use foreign funding; Equatorial Guinea restricts NGOs from promoting, monitoring or engaging in any human rights activities.

Deterrent red tape: Uganda’s draft Public Order Management Bill 2011 includes a requirement to inform the police seven days in advance of holding public meetings

Vague and blanket regulatory powers for the state. In Tanzania, an international NGO must “refrain from doing any act which is likely to cause misunderstanding”. In Turkmenistan, having a goal that is ‘impossible to achieve’ is grounds for dissolution (wonder how that works for faith organizations, let alone Oxfam’s mission of ‘building a future free from the injustice of poverty’ ….)

Barriers to registration: In Turkmenistan (again) national-level associations can only be established with a minimum of 500 members; in Russia (again) a gay rights organization was denied registration on the grounds that its work “undermines the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation in view of the reduction of the population.”

The most recent addition is a crackdown on communications technology, epitomized by Ethiopia’s recent move to restrict the use of Skype and other forms of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) communications and the 18 year jail sentence handed down last week to blogger Eskinder Nega.

And in case you thought this was just a southern phenomenon, CIVICUS points to some pretty draconian legislation in Switzerland (up to $110,000 penalties for unauthorized demonstrations) and Canada (prior notice of any demonstration of more than 50 people).

The first question this prompts is ‘why now?’According to Doug Rutzen, who runs the ICNL, it’s actually been going on for a while – “between 2005 and 2010, over 50 countries considered or enacted restrictive measures constraining civil society.  The drivers of this crackdown include the Bush Administration’s “democracy promotion” agenda combined with the decline of US soft power after the Iraq war and the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib; the patina of political legitimacy provided by Putin and others; the sharing of “worst practices” by governments; both legitimate concerns over development effectiveness and even the unintentional support for constraints arising from the concept of “host country” ownership; and the “war on terror” paradigm, which was used to constrain civil society in the US and globally.”

To some extent, CSOs are also victims of their own success – the ‘colour revolutions’ in the countries of the former Soviet Union in the last decade, or the Arab Spring events of this one, both alerted governments to the threats posed by an active civil society. In addition, there may be a perception of impunity – governments like Ethiopia and Rwanda remain donor darlings despite their draconian attitude to any kind of opposition, because they deliver on growth and poverty reduction. That must send some kind of message. On similar lines, there is an increasingly widespread perception among developing country elites that the ‘western model’, both economic and political, is losing out to other development models, such as that of China, that entail a much more constricted role for civil society.

Finally, there is also the tricky question of whether some of the ‘crackdown’ is actually legitimate government oversight, both because of slow progress on transparency and accountability by CSOs and NGOs, but also because of the use of ‘soft force projection’ by the US and others to achieve foreign policy goals by selectively supporting protest movements.

The next question is ‘why are the INGOs so quiet?’ We shout about everything from land grabs to arms treaties, but often stay quiet when it comes to the ability of our preferred partners to go about their business (Netsanet himself was jailed for over two years in Ethiopia for his work as national coordinator of the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP)). Some evidence-free guesses as to why that might be the case:

Fear of ejection from the countries in question (well-grounded fears too, in many cases)

Fears over the safety of staff (but our partners often run much greater risks)

Professionalization – maybe staff in country have come to see their role as more project administration than ‘speaking truth to power’?

Does campaigning for CSOs seem too much about process and the right to have meetings, and so too remote from the lives of poor people (and a tough sell as a campaign issue)?

Have we at some level bought into the ‘economistic’ understanding of development that sees growth as more important than human rights, portraying Rwanda’s Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia (both hostile to civil society space) as the heroes of African development?

There are some formal international processes we could plug into. The UN has Special Rapporteurs on ‘the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ (Frank Larue) and (since 2010) ‘the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association’ (Maina Kiai). Under the auspices of the Community of Democracies, a group of concerned governments has established a Working Group on “Enabling and Protecting Civil Society” to monitor and respond to developments concerning civil society legislation around the world. Also, 14 governments have jointly pledged financial support for the “Lifeline: Embattled NGO Assistance Fund” to help civil society activists confronting crackdowns.

So should the development community be doing more, and if so, what? Working at multilateral government, lobbying our home governments to make it a foreign policy priority, defending CSOs (and/or supporting those who defend them) on the ground? What is most effective in different situations? I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Fighting for food security in India

Biraj Swain (right) is Oxfam India’s Campaigns Manager and Co-Editor and author of the IDS-Oxfam India Special Bulletin “Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in India”, launched in Delhi this week

In India, over the past 15 years the debate about food, under a rights-based perspective, has become increasingly complex. Earlier concerns about famines, emergency relief and technology-driven green revolutions have given way to discussions on the state’s failure to deliver public distribution programs, the discriminatory biases these programs perpetuate, legal entitlements to land use and ownership by men and women farmers, climate change, domestic and international price volatility and the role of non-governmental and social actors – from the media to INGOs, farmer’s networks and social movements. In other words, the debate has shifted from starvation and subsistence to dignity and justice.

2001 saw the scandal of the country bursting at the seams with 60 million metric tonnes of food grains as starvation, death and distress migration afflicted six states of India. The People’s Union of Civil Liberties, one of the first groups to organize, sued the government, arguing that it must open its grain reserves to feed the hungry. The writ also demanded that the government provide jobs to people in drought-affected villages and support those who could not work.

Eventually, after over 150 judgments and interim orders, India’s Supreme Court agreed that the state was indeed responsible for providing nutrition and public health. The most persuasive argument to the court is that the right to food is directly related to the constitutional guarantee of a “Right to Life”. The court expanded the original writ – which covered Rajasthan only – to the entire country. When the government said it simply couldn’t afford to provide every citizen with the right to food, the court replied that lack of money was no excuse and even ordered the state to extend some of its local food programs.

The National Food Security Bill is an outcome of the 11 plus years of litigation, street protests and the continued media and public scrutiny of the Right to Food case by 2500+ civil society organisations and a trade union coalition called the Right to Campaign. In response to such pressure, the current government, when it came to power in 2009, made universalisation of food security one of its electoral promises. The draft bill was finally tabled in parliament on 22nd December 2011.  While much could be said about the omissions in the draft bill, it still marks a great step forward  and food rights champions hope that when it does get passed into legislation, it will be far more progressive and inclusive than its current avatar.

To discuss the background to this path-breaking legislation, 21 prominent authors and commentators have joined hands with Oxfam India and the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex to put together the special Bulletin ‘Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in India’. This will be launched at a dedicated two-day event at New Delhi’s Constitution Club on the 17th and 18th of July.

From the father of India’s green revolution, MS Swaminathan, to public intellectual CP Chandrasekhar and Supreme Court Commissioners on Right to Food NC Saxema and Harsh Mander, the contributors agree that the approval of the National Food Security Bill is an important step forward for India, but a law, alone, can do little. India is still in the top 10 for child malnutrition, infant mortality and land grabbing – a gloomy picture produced by complex institutional failures, gaps in legal frameworks and a lack of political will at the central and state level as much as the weak monitoring mechanisms of existing public distribution programs.

If India’s second green revolution is to contribute to an accelerated reduction of poverty, hunger and malnutrition, it undoubtedly has to be a state-led project: far from being old-fashioned, the state’s pricing policies, legal entitlement system, public distribution and natural resource management programs are key to reaching the poorest of the poor. There are currently no quick-fix alternatives to a desirable good-quality universal Public Distribution System (PDS) and Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). What’s more, the current food, nutrition and agriculture programmes are failing to tackle deep-seated discriminatory practices (in society as much as within state institutions), but rather re-inforcing them. Stronger, transparent monitoring by accountable state agencies is an absolute must.

If food security is about having certainty about the future, the common goal must also be that of a gendered growth in agriculture and food security that gives the same rights on the land to men and women farmers. A complete halt on any new land acquisition is required until a way of calculating and compensating social, economic and environmental costs is in place, particularly with regards to tribal communities for whom the right to the land is still particularly uncertain. National mainstream media also have a crucial role to play: the most common references to food by them still revolves around restaurant reviews, food festivals and cooking and dieting (!) books.

Finally, India must realize that any global climate policy will be shaky without solid domestic foundations, reflecting the concerns of poor people, including farmers and fishermen, in India as elsewhere. In sum, putting access and equity at the heart of debates on climate, natural resources, institutional accountability and agriculture must be a priority. In this regard, India could play a pioneering role, as it has in areas such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or the Right to Information legislation.

The future will belong to nations with grains and not guns. We have enough grains for all  – we need to open and expand our thinking on what can be done, and how to build a future where everyone on the planet always has enough to eat.

And edited version of this blog also appeared on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters site today

Why is migration a Cinderella issue in Development?

Last week I had to speak on ‘Why is migration not a bigger development issue?’ at an IPPR/CGD seminar. The seminar (and the question)

US Coastguard intercepts Haitian migrants

really got me thinking. The main speaker was Michael Clemens, CGD’s migration guru (as well as part-time bête noire of the Millennium Villages Project). He was brilliant – going well beyond the standard arguments (migrants contribute more to an economy than they receive in benefits etc) and the huge benefits that flow home (remittances are about the most resilient form of capital inflow, barely dipping during the global financial crisis, and run at three times the volume of aid). ‘What percentage of poverty reduction in Haiti is owed to migration?’, Michael asked. Answer ’All of it.’

He reinterpreted the fall of apartheid as the abolition of borders between white South Africa and the Bantustans, and showed that everyone benefitted from this sudden upsurge in migration – the incomes of blacks and coloureds increased rapidly, and whites lost nothing. Effectively, he was making the economic case against borders of any kind. Sometimes ’seeing like an economist’ can be mind-blowing.

So back to my question – if migration is that good (and is being stifled by politics), why isn’t it top of the development agenda? Here are a few thoughts (helped along by another guru on migration and development, Gonzalo Fanjul).

‘Sedentary prejudice’: Development organisations cherish a mental image of happy peasants, tilling fields or resting of an evening in a flourishing village with schools, water and the like. I think many people in development therefore see migration as a failure – the talk is all about people forced to migrate, rather than choosing to. At least that point of view is reinforced by European history (think of the forced and miserable emigration of the Irish famine), but makes even less sense for New Worlders in countries built on migration.

Radioactive politics for campaigners: the gulf between politics and economics is probably wider on migration than any other issue. It’s always at the top of public concerns, and politicians know what’s in store if they’re seen as ‘soft on immigration’. Campaigning organizations

That was then.......

are also keenly aware of the public mood, so the issue stays with the thinktanks like CGD until that mood shifts.

But I also wonder if there’s a more subtle political problem – supporting migration sets you up to oppose poor people in the UK. Lining up with a bunch of liberal economists to inform your fellow citizens that they are wrong (and quite possibly racist too) is not a comfortable exercise for any progressive spirit.

Brain drain: despite plenty of arguments to the contrary, a lot of people still see ‘stealing their doctors and nurses’ as an act of neocolonial plunder.

So what might shift the impasse?

Firstly, I think time is on our side, in the sense that it’s young people and those living in the areas of the highest migration who have the least problem with it. It’s odd, but the most passionate anti-migrant views appear to coincide with the places were fewest are to be found.

Second, an aging population in many Western countries, and the need to staff the proliferation of care homes over the coming years, is surely likely to lead to demands for more migration – young people could become a scarce resource over the next few decades. Migration might also move up our agenda as an issue that truly transcends old North-South divides. The flow of people binds us together even more fundamentally than the more anonymous flows of goods, services and capital.

Unfortunately, in today’s development organizations, I see little sign of movement on this, although we are increasingly engaging with

..... this is now

Diaspora groups on humanitarian work, which may start to influence opinions. But DFID has wound up its migration team, and discussions among the NGOs get nowhere (I’ve more or less stopped raising it in the UK, although Oxfam affiliates in the US and Spain are more engaged). Maybe we could shift public opinion on some wedge issues, such as refugees, but first we would need to be clear about why we currently don’t see migration as a development issue, and decide that that has to change.

That’s as far as I’ve got, but I still feel pretty baffled about why migration never makes our agendas, so any help is very welcome. Over to you.

But last word (for now) to another frustrated economist:

‘Migration is the oldest action against poverty. It selects those who most want help. It is good for the country to which they go; it helps break the equilibrium of poverty in the country from which they come. What is the perversity in the human soul that causes people to resist so obvious a good?’
J.K. Galbraith, The Nature of Mass Poverty, 1979

Family Planning Summit: dilemmas of UK exceptionalism, private v public and population control

Are we now in a period of global British exceptionalism in aid and development, and if so, what are the implications for the work of British-based NGOs and their allies? That question has been niggling away at me during the run-up to the big UK government + Gates Foundation ‘Family Planning Summit’ tomorrow.

Why exceptionalism? Because the UK is pretty much alone among traditional donors in sticking to its promises to increase aid despite deep public spending cuts, and is simultaneously pushing ahead in the multilateral arena, with a Hunger Summit scheduled during the Olympics, tomorrow’s Family Planning Summit and David Cameron as one of the three co-chairs (with the leaders of Indonesia and Liberia) of the UN panel to look at what comes after the MDGs.

That leadership places organizations like Oxfam in an extreme ‘cup half full/empty’ quandary. There are strong arguments in both directions: should we join in as a cheerleader, building UK public support for the government’s brave (and among some of the right wing press, deeply unpopular) stance, bigging up its leadership to try and shame other governments into following suit? To do that means biting our tongue on some unpalatable aspects of the government’s policies we just don’t think will be effective (see below).

Or should we opt for the role of critic, stressing our areas of disagreement, or what still needs to be done. That may be truer to our convictions and analysis, but it risks undermining public support for aid, losing the chance to influence other countries, and, let’s be honest, landing ourselves in a big row with the government. The standard NGO default of chucking in a congratulatory first paragraph, and then starting the second para with ‘But…..’ doesn’t fool anyone because, as a civil servant once informed me, everyone knows that ‘everything above the ‘but’ is bollxxks’.

So back to the summit. First the stats, which you will see endlessly rehearsed if the organizers get their media work right. 215 million women and girls in developing countries who want to delay, space or avoid becoming pregnant are not using effective methods of contraception, resulting in over 75 million unintended pregnancies every year. This puts women and girls at serious risk of death or disability during pregnancy and childbirth, including from unsafe abortions, particularly where quality of care is inadequate.

If those 215 million women and girls used modern methods of family planning, unintended pregnancies would fall by more than 70 percent, and each year there would be nearly 100,000 fewer maternal deaths and nearly 600,000 fewer newborn deaths. 

In response, the Summit is launching an effort to ‘make available affordable, lifesaving contraceptive information, services, and supplies to an additional 120 million women and girls in the world’s poorest countries by 2020.’ i.e. halve the number of women excluded from family planning systems. That’s amazing, especially in times like these. Hats off. Get out there and support this.

So (and carefully avoiding use of the word ‘but’) why the lingering discomfort? Let’s pick three issues: supply v demand; private v public and population. Of these, I think the first is debateable, the second substantive, and the third is a framing issue that I hope we can sort out quickly.

It's about systems, not just contraceptives

important question of balance. Solving the shortfall in sexual and reproductive health services (this is about much more than contraceptives) is as much about systems as stuff. I’m not completely clear from the documents I’ve read, but the concern is clearly that the summit is skewed towards stuff, although Andrew Mitchell, the UK Development Minister, clearly backs demand-side rights when he says the summit is about “poor women who want contraception but can’t get it. We’re trying to ensure that women have the opportunity to decide for themselves.” 

Private v public: on health issues, this is probably the most genuinely divisive topic. To what extent are health services like family planning best delivered free at the point of use via a public health system, or should the preference be to involve private sector delivery mechanisms. Oxfam’s reading of the research suggests the benefits of the latter approach are unproven, but the organizers clearly want to involve the private sector to a significant extent – is the underlying driver ideology or evidence?

Population: The Summit is being held on World Population Day. Depending on your viewpoint, that is a brave attempt to take on the ‘too many Africans’ school of population controllers, and reassert what really matters in this debate – women’s ability to exercise control over their fertility (and to be fair, the population lobby have moved a long way towards women’s rights in recent years). Or it’s a dangerous conflation of two issues that are related, but not nearly as closely as some controllers make out. My colleague Ricardo Fuentes has been crunching the numbers on one aspect: how important is population growth in poor countries to climate change (see previous post on this)? The answer is not very much. In the 25 years to 2005, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for almost a fifth of the growth in the world’s population but only 2.4 per cent of the increase in CO2 emissions. By contrast, North America was responsible for 4 per cent of population growth but 13.9 per cent of the rise in emissions (i.e. nearly 6 times as much as Africa). Attacking climate change through population control would mean reducing the number of Americans, not Africans (not a policy I would espouse by the way – some of my best friends etc).

So there’s my ‘cup half full/empty’ summary. It’s fine for the blog, but too complicated for soundbites. That’s where the trouble starts.

What else to read? Here’s the increasingly impressive Melinda Gates making the case in the Guardian and voicing over (voiceovering?) a youtube animation setting out the economic rationale

How can an NGO campaign against rape in armed conflict? An inspiring case study from Colombia

I recently ran a fascinating workshop with colleagues at Intermón Oxfam (Oxfam’s Spanish affiliate) at which the different country programmes brought examples of change processes at work. One that particularly struck me was about our work in Colombia on sexual violence and conflict. Here’s the write up, jointly authored with Intermon’s Alejandro Matos.

The campaign began in 2009, jointly agreed by Intermón Oxfam and 9 national women’s and human rights organizations. The main aim was to make visible, at national and international level, the widespread use of sexual violence as a tactic by all sides in the armed conflict, and the gaps and failings in the responses of the Colombian state, in terms of prevention and punishment, the end of impunity and the care of women victims.

The main problem we faced was the lack of a strong advocacy tool. Many individual cases of sexual violence within the armed conflict had been recorded and publicised in recent years, but that wasn’t enough – we needed a single national ‘big number’ that would alert people (decision makers, public, media) to the true scale of the problem.

We therefore decided to carry out a national survey to produce up to date, rigorous information for use in advocacy work. The work was carried out by respected academics and researchers of Casa de la Mujer (the survey design alone took 4 months), and opted for the more difficult terrain of testimony (‘have you suffered sexual violence?’) rather than perception (‘do you know of cases….’)

At the start of the campaign, Intermón Oxfam invited Jineth Bedoya Lima, a Colombian journalist, to be the public face of the campaign. In 2000, while working as a journalist for El Espectador, she was kidnapped, tortured and raped by paramilitaries, while investigating the involvement of high military commanders in arms trafficking. Her public profile and courage gave a human face to the research and the campaign’s demands for truth, justice and reparations.

With the survey results and the testimony of Jineth, the campaign launched the results of the first survey with huge media impact. Here’s a quote from the report:

The rate of sexual violence, for the period 2001-2009, in 407 municipalities with an active presence of the armed forces, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and other armed actors in Colombia was estimated at 17.58%; this means that during these nine years 489,687 women were victims of sexual violence (…) every hour 6 women were victims of some type of sexual violence in these municipalities.

We followed this up with an international tour, including Belgium and a meeting with Conservative women in the UK. In March 2011, the campaign met in New York with the UN Special Representative on sexual violence in conflicts, Margot Wallström. In Washington, it met with the number 3 official on security of the White House, and with Melanne Verveer, a close adviser to Hillary Clinton. That visit led to the topic becoming a priority issue in US-Colombian relations. For example, Jineth’s case involved, among others, a Police General  Leonardo Gallego. In 11 years, the judicial case had failed to puncture impunity and key documents had been ‘lost’. Within two months of the campaign’s visit to the US State Department, the General was called to testify and Colombia’s first female Attorney General personally committed herself to take forward the case, which has advanced considerably since then.

The results of the survey continue to be widely disseminated by the Colombian press and various state bodies have started to use the data in their official reports. One result of the campaign’s scrutiny of the Santos government has been a document ‘Summary of the actions taken by the government of President Juan Manuel Santos in its first year: prevention and elimination of sexual violence within the armed conflict and care for women victims.’ This generated large amounts of media coverage in Colombia and beyond.

On 9 March 2012 the US State Department awarded Jineth Bedoya its ‘Women of Courage’ award. This was personally presented by Hilary Clinton and Michelle Obama (see pic), and in the presentation the work of the campaign ‘Take My Body out of the War’ was recognized. On 16th March, Melanne Verveer visited Colombia and asked for her first meeting to be with the campaign – a 2 hour breakfast in which she said ‘I am meeting the Minister of Defence and the Presidential adviser on Women – what message would you like me to transmit?’ The messages were duly transmitted.

At the beginning of May, after overcoming opposition from the Colombian presidency and the foreign ministry, the UN special representative visited Colombia to interview victims and social organizations, and investigate the response of the Colombian state: ‘one of the great challenges that the country has is overcoming impunity, and establishing political responsibility in the face of this crime and the implementation of the measures required’ argued her subsequent report, and she promised to take the message to the UN Security Council and keep Colombia as a priority country in her reports, given the seriousness of the situation.

In terms of the campaign’s theory of change, the Colombia experience contains some fascinating lessons:

Power Analysis: The “Zero Tolerance” of sexual violence is a consensus issue, unlikely to produce overt opposition. It therefore offers an ideal basis around which to build broad national and international coalitions.

Change Hypothesis: That giving the issue public visibility would lead to a range of solutions, including helping end impunity, and increasing state support to victims

Change Strategies:
• A single ‘killer fact’, based on rigorous research, would galvanize public debate
• A prominent champion would ensure greater profile at both national and international levels
• Oxfam’s international connections could act as a catalyst for international solidarity, increasing the external pressure on the Colombian state
• A broad coalition could be built around the issue, bringing together social organizations and local , national and international media, public defenders and some members of the congress and others politicians

There is still much to do, both in combating impunity and in alerting public opinion, but we are sure that after two years of campaigning. Sexual violence against women in the context of armed conflict in Colombia and its high levels of impunity are visible and publicly recognized by State´s representatives and civil society, as is the urgency in taking effective steps to end this crime, overcome impunity and protect and care for women and women victims.

For those of you who want to practice your Spanish, here’s Alejandro Matos in a two minute video describing our work in Colombia

Yemeni women rise up – the untold story

This guest post is from Olga Ghazaryan (right), Oxfam GB’s Regional Director for the Middle East

The stories from Yemen that break through to the media are those about the Al Qaida insurgency, political turmoil and occasionally about the shocking levels of hunger and poverty.

However there is another story unfolding in Yemen that has gone largely untold – the rising up of the Yemeni women.  Emboldened by the revolution that brought down the 30 year rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the women in Yemen are taking a stand to gain a voice in a society that has systematically oppressed and discriminated against them.  Tawakul Karman (left), the Yemeni woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, is the recognisable face of this struggle, but she is one of many.

Women’s spontaneous support of the revolution was a powerful challenge to the traditional perceptions of women’s’ roles and how they should or should not behave in public.  They did something unseen and unheard of before – they went out to Change Square to protest side by side with men, staying out at night, interacting with people outside of their own family and tribe and daring to express their opinion vocally in public.  Suha Bashren – an Oxfam colleague – says “I was in awe seeing how women suddenly seemed to stand tall, dared to grab the microphone and share their aspirations in public for the first time.  I also saw women praying in the front row, rather than in the back, as was the custom“.

To understand the significance of the challenge one must understand what it means to be born a woman in Yemen.  Women have a less than 20 percent chance of working outside of the home or holding a job of any kind, an 80 percent chance of being illiterate, and a 1 in 19 chance of dying in childbirth.  There is also an extremely high likelihood that they will be married before reaching the age of 15.  Most women in Yemen, fully veiled from head to foot in black, are anchored to their homes, out of sight, out of work and out of public spaces and institutions.

Early marriage, restrictions on mobility, denial of basic education and economic opportunities are justified by a conservative interpretation of Islam, are engendered in the tribal and customary laws, and deeply entrenched in all aspects of the social fabric and cultural beliefs.

My Oxfam colleagues in Yemen, educated, articulate, confident women, were treated as perpetual minors, unable to get a passport,

Women queue for cash transfers. Credit: Wolfgang Gressman

travel alone or rent a house without the permission of a “khafir” or male guardian.  One of my colleagues told me how even her marriage contract was signed without her.

Over the years travelling to Yemen I have met women in situations that I find difficult to forget.  A 16 year old girl in Taiz prison brought there by her own father to serve years of sentence because she dared to go out with a young man and “disgrace the family”; a group of women who shared with me their most cherished dream – to be able to write their own name; a 12 year old girl – the age of my own daughter – in Hadramout, on the eve of her wedding day.  The Yemeni Parliament has on numerous occasions gone back on attempts to pass a law on the age of marriage, and sadly previous demonstrations for early marriage have been far larger than the ones against.

Oxfam is privileged to work with amazing organisations in Yemen that are supporting thousands of women in seeking legal justice in prisons and in their communities, training hundreds of girls to become midwives and providing women with cash and loans to start small businesses.

In a country where every step a woman takes is circumscribed by rules and restrictions, the revolution has created a “once in a generation” opportunity to address the gender gap – one of the main drivers of Yemen’s chronic underdevelopment.  The new transitional government led by Prime Minister Basindawa is championing women’s representation and has on numerous occasions talked about 30 percent representation of women in transitional institutions such as the National Dialogue Preparatory Committee and the Constitutional Reform Committee.  This is good news.

The bad news is that the threats of a backlash against women’s advancement by more conservative elements is real and strong – some of it driven by ideology, religious interpretation and culture, some of it mere political bargaining and willingness to compromise on issues that are not deemed “important enough”.  When I met a group of women activists last week they talked about the formidable challenges they face.  The women’s movement is fragmented; party politics undermines the unity of women.  Young women activists are not included in the traditional networks.  The newly emerging activism has not truly connected with the majority of the population in rural areas.  The government is failing to follow through on the commitments made on women’s participation – for example there were no women in the Yemeni delegation at the recent Friends of Yemen conference. The international community itself has not focused on women’s advancement in ways that give it the priority and the profile it deserves.

Credit: Abbie Trayler-Smith

The true friends of Yemen need to support the leaders in the women’s movement and learn from successful examples that show that women’s rights can be upheld and needs met within Yemen’s religious and cultural frameworks.  The true friends of Yemen need to also broaden the awareness of what the gender gap does to Yemen among stakeholders, including the government, the business community, the religious leaders, the parties and civil society.  The true friends of Yemen need to support women to put aside their differences transcend party politics and individual feuds and rally around issues that really matter, but only Yemeni women and men themselves have the power and the opportunity to make this happen.  I very much hope they will seize it.

Update: This week’s Economist also has a piece on Yemeni women

How can aid agencies promote local governance and accountability? Lessons from five countries.

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s ‘People, Spaces. Deliberation‘ blog

Oxfam is publishing a fascinating new series of papers today, drawing together lessons from our programme work on local governance and community action. There are case studies from Nepal (women’s rights, see photo), Malawi (access to medicines), Kenya (tracking public spending), Viet Nam (community participation) and Tanzania (the ubiquitous Chukua Hatua project), and a very wise (and mercifully brief) overview from power and governance guru Jo Rowlands. Here are some highlights:

“Governance is about the formal or informal rules, systems and structures under which human societies are organised, and how they are (or are not) implemented. It affects all aspects of human society – politics, economics and business, culture, social interaction, religion, and security – at all levels, from the most global to the very local.

Most people experience the most immediate impacts, fair or unfair, of governance at a very local level. It is where women experience gender inequalities most keenly, for example in the way that issues that particularly concern them tend to get de-prioritised and their participation obstructed. In most political systems, it is also the place where ordinary people should, in theory, be best placed to participate in governance, for example by voting for their local councillors, taking part in local committees or protesting against laws or actions that they don’t think are fair.

Local people may face barriers of language, ethnicity, gender, class, poverty, access to information, or simply lack the confidence to speak out. They face the visible formal and informal structures of power, such as village or neighbourhood committees, service user groups, tribal councils, dominant families or castes, and formal structures of local government. They also face power dynamics such as business interests or patronage relationships based on debt and obligation.

It is essential for anyone working on governance to make a thorough analysis of local power relations, drawing on history and culture, specific economic realities and the interests of different groups of people. This analysis can then shape the options and approaches that a development programme uses, informed by how change has happened in the past and might happen in the future.

Oxfam differentiates between three key aspects [see diagram, below]: people claiming rights, institutions willing and capable of delivering rights, and people in positions of power with the will to make it happen.

When you deliberately address these relationships and processes, i.e. the arrows in the diagram, interesting things happen to the way issues are tackled in practice. For example, in Kenya, very high levels of mistrust existed between local community members, local councillors and local authority officials. Although there were institutional structures of decentralisation for local decision making, neither community members nor local authority officers knew enough about them to successfully implement them. The tools of social auditing provided a mechanism to address the knowledge gaps and rebuild damaged relationships.

All the case studies show how it is essential to work with both citizens and people in authority in order to achieve positive change in local governance. This might be about finding or creating spaces for constructive engagement between people and authorities, as in the ward meetings organised by women in Nepal. It could involve working with citizens to raise awareness and knowledge about their rights and about how local governance works, so that they can make relevant demands and monitor effectively how resources are used and accounted for, as in Malawi and Kenya. It may require working with officials and elected representatives to increase understanding about how to work accountably and transparently and to understand the benefits of actively involving citizens in planning and monitoring, as in the Tanzania example. Or it might be about working with officials to understand how particular legislation or regulation should work, as in Kenya.

A recurring theme across the individual stories is the importance of focusing action about local governance on the real, tangible interests of local people – health, education, livelihoods, water and sanitation. Women in Nepal moved into participation and leadership in committees and user groups on these issues; in Tanzania, communities became organised around setting up new market spaces for local women to sell produce, or around land rights.

Anyone working on local governance needs to be aware that in many contexts where there is not a culture of speaking out, individuals may be putting themselves at risk if they confront authority.  It is vital to ensure first that individuals who want to take that risk are supported, both from inside and outside the community, and that ideally the demands come from a group that has built the strength, skills and confidence to demand the changes they want to see. In Nepal, women did take a number of risks – facing opposition from husbands, and senior community members – but the support they received allowed them to prove themselves and to join with others in becoming change-makers within their villages.

Accountability and transparency are proving useful entry points for engaging the various actors and processes to help navigate the minefields of power relations. It is also clear that people who take on official responsibilities do not necessarily have the competency to carry out those roles. Therefore, well-targeted support and training for office-holders can go a long way in building better governance relationships.”

Jo identifies some particular ‘issues and challenges’, including:

Culture change: Making change in local governance often requires culture change as much as a change in structures, processes and representation. (particularly true on gender rights and women’s voice).

Access to information: As Maimuna says in the Tanzania case study, “Ignorance is a killing machine”.

Things can take time: Some changes can happen quickly, but the changes in culture and in deeper attitudes required to ensure system and process changes stick can take much longer (decades).

Risk management: Local and national governance are both about political processes, and carry significant levels of risk. This risk can include violence, fear, crack-downs on individuals or groups and a closing of space to operate for particular actors.

Areas where we need to do more thinking? How to deal with patronage systems, corruption and decentralization; improving our understanding of urban governance (the examples are all rural).

Final (very sensible) voice of experience:

“As well as being informed by good analysis, [future governance work] will also be informed by serendipity – watching for the chance combinations of the right person/people, the right moment, the right focus, the right alignment with other events – requiring good judgement and probably inevitably, whatever the expectation about how change will happen, a certain amount of sheer luck.”

Femicide, anger and struggle: stories of women’s activism in Honduras

Guest post from John Ambler, right, Oxfam America’s ‘Vice President, Strategy’ (ooo, can I be one of those?) on his recent trip to Honduras

I woke up early in the morning to the sound of gunshots.  Two, then three more.  I expected to hear sirens, but did not.  The police were taking their own sweet time.  Over 80% of the murders in Honduras go unsolved.  And when the trail begins to get close to the killers, as it did with the murder of the son of the president of the National University of Honduras, the drops of blood often lead to the doorsteps of the police themselves.  In such cases, where the blood stops, the impunity begins.

The murder rate in Honduras is 82/100,000, one of the worst in the world.  San Pedro Sula, in the north-east part of the country is the third most dangerous town in the world, after Kandahar and Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexican side of the American border.  Tegucigalpa, with its plethora of shotgun-armed private security company itself is not a city for walking. 

Women here are particularly vulnerable to all forms of violence and afraid to go out of the house in many rural areas.  In fact, many are not even allowed to go out.  The houses are not sequestered behind fortress-like mud walls, as I saw in Afghanistan, but from listening to the stories of women in Santa Maria de La Paz, three hours’ drive to the north off Tegucigalpa, the isolation, mistreatment, and humiliation women in conservative households endure is strikingly similar to the stories I heard in Ghazni, Shomali, and Kunar in Afghanistan.

The murder rate with female victims has been rising, leading to a small campaign against femicide by women’s groups. Churches (Catholic and Evangelical) sometimes talk about rights, but according to the women I talked to, they never do anything concrete.  Jehovah’s Witnesses were singled out as being particularly patriarchal and unfriendly to women’s rights.  The women in Santa Maria de La Paz complained of the Church suppressing reproductive health information.  One woman had left the Church because of it.  I was really disappointed in the Catholic Church in particular.  There seems to be no new equivalent generation of “Liberation Theology” pastors to champion women’s empowerment, like the leftist firebrands of the 1980s.

Talking about their feminist activism in Santa Maria de La Paz, three of the women mentioned raising their 6, 6, and 11 children, respectively, in addition to being on 4 or 5 committees—the water board, the municipal audit committee, the transparency committee, the school committee, the PTA, the health committee, a savings and micro-credit group, the municipal women’s committee, self-help security group, a blackberry jam enterprise, and others I can’t remember.  There is even a club where pregnant women learn to sew.  They monitor government expenditures on things like the 2% that is supposed to be set aside in the budget for women’s issues, like the “Healthy Floors, Decent Roofs” program. 

Their stories were painful and powerful.  The first woman, the one with 11 children, said in a loud and confident voice that growing up her house had been plagued by incest.  Tears welled up in her eyes and another woman handed her a tissue.  She composed herself and in an even stronger voice said that when still a young teen she married a man who treated her as a slave, as did her mother-in-law, into whose house she moved.  (The scenario sounded eerily similar to the situation one finds in South Asia, where the son is the lord of the house, and his mother terrorizes the poor young bride, making her do all the grunt work, harassing her into submission, or suicide.)  She told of getting only a first grade education (she later learned to read and write); of having to put up with her husband’s wasting their hard earned money on drink and women.  She was often forbidden to leave the house.  She said that women could get no justice, that the police only support the big companies.  “They are not here for the people,” she said.  “They know the law, but they know money better.”  She said that someone had once come to her house with a gun, but she was not afraid.

Another woman said that she was 49 and had been married 35 years already.  She, too, got only a first grade education, but she is interested in politics and is now running for mayor.  She recounted how at the beginning of her engagement with politics she was told to sit in the back and shut up because what did a “dirty woman” know.  But she said that at least there had been no violence in her household, and her husband did not forbid her to go and join women’s groups and committees.  She talked of cleaning up the corruption in local politics.  When I said that politics is dirty, she rejoined, “Only if we are dirty!”  Good answer.

Everyone in the room was a member of the municipal women’s committee, except for two young women who just happened upon our meeting.  They had come to make a denunciation about domestic violence.  In this community of 11,590 people and 34 hamlets, the committee receives about 60 such formal denunciations a year, just the tip of the iceberg, I suspect.  One woman said everyone present in the room wore different colored clothing.  By that she meant that each of their stories had a different twist and turn to it, but that they all shared the basic plot structure:  intimidation, humiliation, exclusion, abuse, violence, exploitation, and sorrow.  Very deep sorrow.  And, many women were from the indigenous Lempa community, which faces even further discrimination from the government in terms of services and expenditures.

But the sorrow is now turning to anger.  The training they have gotten through Oxfam and its partners is helping them to organize and to raise their voices. 

“I am nothing, but all together we are something,” one woman said. 

“We were not organized to make a space for ourselves,”  said a second.

“We are not the shy women that we used to be, thanks be to God,” said another. 

After a rocky start, the women’s audit committee on public budgetary transparency and expenditure gradually gained the trust of the men.  They saw that the women, even though their level of literacy was limited, were actually asking good questions about the budget and following the money like bloodhounds.  The women were gaining real power and influence.

“In the past we were not even taken into consideration.” 

“When we are honest, the men can say nothing against us.”

“We can do this!  The men trust us.” 

This “struggle” (the word lucha was frequently used, the same word that was used during the wars of “liberation” of the 1980s) is not only one of networks and organizational tactics, but also of personal growth and sacrifice. In Santa Maria de La Paz, accompanied by nods and the thin smiles comrades at arms reserve for each other, one woman summed it up, “I am changed.”

And here’s an animation from the femicide campaign

What’s the connection between power, development and social media?

This post also appears on the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation governance blog, although sadly, without the neanderthal

I recently gave a talk about ICT and Development at the annual Re:Campaign conference in Berlin, organized by Oxfam Germany. Anyone who knows me will realize that this is a bit odd – despite being a blogaholic, I am actually Rubbish At Technology. In front of 300 trendy,

So let me explain how Facebook works.......

young (sigh) i-thingy wielding activists, I felt like a Neanderthal at a cocktail party. Still, at least the fear of being shamed up finally got me tweeting two weeks before the conference.

I decided to make a virtue of necessity and set out some core processes in development, and then reflected on what ICT does/doesn’t contribute. Why take this approach (apart from being a techno-caveman, that is)? Because there’s too much magic bulletism in development –microfinance, GM crops and now ‘cyber utopianism’. What all of these have in common is that they are too often presented as ‘get out of jail free’ cards, delivering development without all the messy business of politics and struggle. At best, new technologies shift power balances, sometimes favourably, sometimes not, but they don’t replace the process of struggle in development.

The core of my talk was to take the ‘four powers’ model of power within, power with, power to and power over and see how the spread of IT affects each of them in turn.

Power within – that lightbulb ‘get up, stand up’ moment when an individual becomes aware of their identity and rights – is often the first step on the path of social and political change. It can come through conflict, education, conversation or through old technologies such as community radio for indigenous minorities – Quechua, a language spoken by some 10 million people in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, is rarely heard on television and is completely absent from the Internet. By contrast, 180 radio stations offer programmes in Quechua. What I haven’t yet seen is much link between social media and power within (do correct me if I’m wrong – this really is a first draft piece). Possible future avenues include distance learning, but often what is needed is low tech education – trained and paid teachers, chairs, textbooks, ending user fees.

Power With – newly awakened people finding common cause with their fellows through social movements, faith-based organizations, trades unions, political parties etc etc. In this effort to build collective organization, IT can play a role, whether by facilitating access to information, or lowering the costs and barriers to organizing (think twitter and FB in Tahrir square). It can also help bring dispersed communities together in new and powerful ways – for example the truly impressive diaspora networks of Somalis and others that rely heavily on social media, or one of my favourite Oxfam projects – pink phones in Cambodia.

Power To/Power Over involves aware, organized people expressing their needs and demands, and exercising some form of control over those in authority, first by putting the right issues on the table, and then getting the decisions and resources that are needed. Overall, I think this is where IT has most to offer. Some examples:

Getting news of human rights violations out fast, when urgency is vital, can alert national governments, international organizations and others.

Crowd-sourcing information so the authorities can’t deny what is going on, e.g. the Stop Stock-outs campaign, or Ushahidi: “Ushahidi”, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then, the name “Ushahidi” has come to represent the people behind the “Ushahidi Platform”.

Markets: The biggest gains for farmers and fishers have come in access to credit and to agricultural market info.

Feedback and Accountability: Gaining access to official information in a comprehensible format is a core aspect of accountability, but IT can also increase the accountability of northern NGOs and campaigns to those in the South – e.g. the great work by Al Jazeera on the Kony2012 video.

All well and good, but IT is emphatically not a magic bullet. Malcolm Gladwell’s distinction between strong and weak ties is really helpful

Now that's what I call transformational technology....

here. Strong ties are those deep bonds of trust and comradeship that allow you to ‘walk towards the guns’. Weak ties are the shallower, broader bonds that convince you to join the demo or sign the petition. IT undoubtedly helps with the latter, but no-one ever decided to risk their neck because of Twitter.

And let’s not forget ‘Bad Power’. IT can move everything in the wrong direction – strengthening elites, enhancing a culture of surveillance and control, excluding poor people and communities. Here’s a nice 10 minute RSAnimate talk by Evgeny Morozov on the dark side of IT as a corrective.

In the rich countries, ICT undoubtledly has huge potential for transforming two key aspects of the North’s role in development: Do No Harm and Aid. ‘Do No Harm’ covers everything from climate change to intellectual property restrictions to the arms trade. In all of those IT can improve the speed and scale of campaigns, link up citizens in the North to the consequences of their governments’ or societies’ decisions in developing countries, and challenge pervasive ‘hegemonic discourses’ on everything from resource-intensive growth to privatization of social services.

On Aid, there’s clearly been growing interest in transparency and accountability (e.g. IATI), but the EITI (aargh, acronym-poisoning) provided a cautionary lesson that supply (of information) doesn’t simply create demand (for accountability). IT plus growing disenchantment with institutions, is also likely to drive interest in ‘disintermediation’ in aid, linking punters directly to poor people (GiveDirectly) or budding entrepreneurs (Kiva). At the business end, fast money disbursement via mobiles can massively improve disaster response. IT can also help us plug the realtime data gap after shocks hit.

Final thoughts? For the technophiles like those gathered in Berlin, the key thing is to remember, however platitudinous it may sound, that ICT is a means not an end – are you clear what the end is? What is your theory of change, beyond scattering new kit everywhere?
In developing countries, the key is how poor/excluded people adopt, adapt and use technology: start there, and you’ll find exciting possibilities (see Twaweza in East Africa). Be too tech-led, and you may well end up in a dead end.

As you’ve probably realized, I have a long way to go in linking up the power analysis and IT worlds, so any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

And if you have 30 minutes to spare, you can see me here