How can South Africa promote citizenship and accountability? A conversation with some state planners

How can states best promote active citizenship, in particular to improve the quality and accountability of state services such as education? This was the topic of a great two hour brainstorm with half a dozen very bright sparks from the secretariat of South Africa’s National Planning Commission yesterday. The NPC, chaired by Trevor Manuel (who gave us a great plug for the South African edition of From Poverty to Power) recently brought out the National Development Plan 2030 (right), and the secretariat is involved with trying to turn it into reality.

I kicked off with some thoughts which should be familiar to regular readers of this blog: the importance of implementation gaps, the shift in working on accountability from supply side (seminars for state officials) to demand side (promote citizen watchdogs to hold the state to account) and the challenge from the ODI-led Africa Power and Politics Programme that accountability work needs to break free of such supply/demand thinking and pursue ‘collective problem-solving in fragmented societies hampered by low levels of trust’, which seems a pretty good description of South Africa, according to the NPC. I gave the example of the Tajikistan Water Supply and Sanitation Network as an example of how this can be done through ‘convening and brokering’.

Once I shut up, it got more interesting (funny how often that happens). Some of the most interesting questions (and responses from me and others)

Lots of ‘convening and brokering’ is little more than talking shops – when does it lead to concrete results?

• Depends who’s in the room – do they share a common interest in finding solutions or are they there to fight turf wars, defend ideological positions etc?
• Can you build forward momentum by identifying some quick wins that make people realize what is possible?
• Individuals matter – is there a charismatic leader (as in Tajikistan), who can bind the forum together and keep it moving forward?

How to move from dependency to agency? At least some people see a real problem of acquired dependency. Poor people in South Africa have become dependent on free housing, state welfare etc, and have lost their sense of agency. Instead they oscillate between passivity and protest. The government conducts large scale consultation set pieces to try and encourage participation, but what is lacking is the day to day accountability the allows citizens to get action when public services fail.

The civil servants in the room happily disagreed with each other – fascinating to see an internal debate like this – Oxfam colleagues also contributed, so what follows draws on the points raised by people from both organisations. Some saw this as a supply side problem: the lack of public sanction when teachers don’t show up; officials are corrupt etc undermines citizen action; the teachers’ union resist reforms; moreover, ‘politicians only listen when something burns’, turning violent protest into a sensible change strategy.

Others focussed on the demand side, pointing out the problem of time poverty – women in particular just don’t have time to take part in exhausting exercises in citizenship on top of all their other tasks. One of the effects of the fall of apartheid has been an exodus of aspiring socially-motivated black and coloured people both from the teaching profession, and from poor communities, aggravating the problem of sink schools that the middle class, whether black or white, can ignore (especially if they go private). Others questioned this and pointed out that there is actually a lot of protest on the state of public services, and plenty of accountability structures such as school governing bodies, although coverage is patchy.

Which led us to compare the lack of progress in improving the quality of education with the great strides made on tackling HIV and AIDS. Why have the social movements on HIV had so much more impact than in other areas such as education or landlessness?

Here people pointed to the importance of starting with long term awareness-raising, designed both to inform andempower, but also to shift social norms, in this case from seeing HIV as an individual shame to a collective responsibility. This kind of ‘conscientization’, in the language of Paulo Freire, seems ill-suited to state action, so who might be able to do it in the case of education, for example shifting attitudes to seeing poor school grades as a collective, as well as individual, challenge? Social movements? Faith organizations?

HIV was a cross-class, cross-race issue, touching everyone in South Africa, so the movement found it easier to overcome social divisions. By contrast, poor education is tied closely to class and race, so coalitions are harder to build. And of course HIV was also, literally, a life and death issue – motivation was not a problem. In contrast the ‘slow death’ of bad schooling doesn’t galvanize the citizenry to the same extent. How to change that?

Some final thoughts from me:

-          What about trying to shorten the accountability chain in education to make it possible for citizens to get quick action rather than become bogged down in interminable bureaucratic process? How about an education ombudsman with power to investigate complaints and impose sanctions?

-          One of the weaknesses of the National Development Plan is its approach to gender. The half a page on ‘Women and the Plan’ in the NDP Overview fails to mention two major obstacles to citizenship: women’s time poverty and the lack of support for their role in the care economy; and the need to change the role of men. I’m pretty sure that on average, women are more concerned about the state of education, but as free time remains a male concept, they will struggle to do much about it.

Great discussion. This is what makes trips such fun.

At last, a sensible suggestion for post2015

After my ‘bah humbug’ paper on post2015, I’ve been largely avoiding the subject as a monumental timesuck. However, a combination of Sabina ‘multidimensional’ Alkire and Andy ‘bottom billion’ Sumner is an unstoppable force, so I’m making an exception for their new paper, Multidimensional Poverty and the Post-2015 MDGs, which is worth a skim.

What Sabina and Andy do is use her previous work for UNDP on multidimensional poverty indicators (MPIs) to square an important circle. They suggest building an ‘MPI 2.0’ based on whatever combination of issues is finally agreed in the post2015 discussion. This would produce a single number that summarizes a country’s overall progress towards the post2015 goals.

That in turn would allow the post2015 process to generate more traction on national governments (the lack of which is the subject of my paper) through league tables. Imagine if every year, all countries (including the rich ones) are ranked on a comprehensive human development table that (unlike the Human Development Index and other similar efforts) has buy in and recognition from across the international community. Each annual report would pick out the countries that have risen/fallen relative to the others. Regional tables could compare India and Bangladesh, or Peru and Bolivia, to generate extra public interest and pressure on decision makers. Within countries, an MPI could highlight regional disparities (see map).

A particular advantage of the approach is speedy feedback for policy makers: The MPI reflects effective social policy interventions immediately. With measures of income poverty, a positive social change – for example in schooling or clean water – may not be reflected for a number of years.

One of the lasting institutional legacies of the MDG process is the investment in better quality data needed to assess progress – this proposal would build on that.

One suggestion though – MPI 2.0 is a dreadful name. Why don’t we just call it ‘poverty’ and argue that it should replace $1.25 a day as the international standard?

And here’s me at a recent IDS seminar explaining why I’m so underwhelmed by the general post2015 debate.

The World Bank’s new chief economist on redistribution, taxation, economists, climate change and, errm, multi-player sudoku

The World Bank’s new chief economist, Kaushik Basu (right), came through London last week and had a good initial exchange of views with some NGO wonks. I went to a similar exercise with his predecessor, Justin Lin (blogpost here), and the comparison was interesting. Whereas Justin focussed on industrial policy and structural upgrading, Kaushik talked a lot about governance, inequality, taxation and growth. Justin focussed more on the economics; Kaushik on the politics – how to get governments (and his World Bank colleagues) to do the right thing. That probably reflects their different backgrounds (China v India; Kaushik just crossing over from a period in the Indian Ministry of Finance where he learned to understand ‘the hierarchy of government’) more than any great change in public debate in the last four years.

Kaushik suggested a change of tone was needed among the Bank’s economists and researchers – paying as much attention to policy-makers’ need for narratives and big ideas as to demonstrating your mastery of whizzy maths. Damnit, not only have they nicked our killer facts techniques, but now they’re going to start telling good stories too! Throughout, he stressed the importance of the battle of ideas, ‘consciousness’ and ‘raising awareness’. Gramsci on 18^th Street? He was also keen to push climate change and environmentalism, which he thinks is probably still insufficiently prominent at the Bank.

He received some good, pointed questions from the wonks. Peter Chowla from the Bretton Woods Project (the premier Bank watchdog in the UK, maybe anywhere) pushed him on the role of the Bank’s researchers in ‘paradigm maintenance’ – Peter argued that the Bank has a good varied set of research outputs (it probably allows a freer exchange of ideas than the UN, or for that matter, most NGOs and Kaushik is determined to protect that), but there’s some kind of institutional filter in place which squeezes out the heterodox fringe, and amplifies the neoclassical core, especially as ideas start to reach Bank country programmes. Everyone got a kick in on the Bank’s notorious Doing Business report, which Kaushik defended (he says it, along with the World Development Indicators, were the two documents he found most useful in government). He did however acknowledge that there might be some ideological ‘Trojan horse agendas’ being introduced.

Kaushik acknowledged that ‘if you begin in neoclassical economics and you don’t have enough imagination, you get locked into things like rational expectations’, but argued that lots of economists have quite sufficient imagination to think outside these reductionist stereotypes.

Where I started to get worried was on his apparent acceptance of the ‘race to the bottom’ on corporate taxation. This reflects his experience in his home state, West Bengal, where despite a Communist government committed to poverty eradication, the demands on industry were so severe that industry fled the state and poverty and unemployment remained high. But surely a key role for the Bank is to take up these kind of collective action problems?

However he does support redistribution. ‘I am not a trickle down believer, you need direct action on inequality’. He thinks that while we have to be mindful of the risk of capital and skill flight, there is scope for more efficient and redistributive forms of tax. There ought to be some inheritance tax, he believes, because to allow people to be born poor and destined to poverty as happens in today’s world is akin to a caste system. He reckons that with current levels of wealth ‘basic food should now be a fundamental right and access to healthcare is close to that.’

I think he could prove to be an interesting and innovative voice at the Bank, introducing an Indian sensibility on rights, human development and governance – he recently suggested an approach on bribery rather similar to decriminalizing cannabis: make it legal to pay bribes, but not to receive them, so that people forced to pay bribes would no longer be deterred from denouncing graft. You can follow him on twitter at @kaushikcbasu

One final revelation from the meeting – a diligent wonk had uncovered Kaushik’s true claim to fame, as inventor of a multiplayer version of Sudoku, clunkily named Duidoku (left). If that catches on, he may end up explaining to the Bank why he has single-handedly destroyed decades of global progress on productivity…….

India’s fight for the right to education

Still processing my recent visit to see Oxfam India’s work – posts continue next week with the great debate on India’s middle classes.

Education is fine example of the strengths and weaknesses of judicial activism in India. The Right to Education (RTE) Act was passed in 2009, arising out of constitutional amendment in 1999 that redefined the right to life as including education (!). Private schools challenged the act, especially its requirement that they reserve 25% of places for lower castes, but the Supreme Court upheld it.

To see what all this means on the ground, I duck out of my boring conference and head for Madanpur,  a colony for slum dwellers ‘rehabilitated’ in 2000 – i.e. their previous homes were steamrollered and they were shunted to the margins of Delhi. Its current population of 145,000 earns income from construction, domestic work etc – almost entirely in the informal economy.

Oxfam India’s partner, the slightly ungrammatical EFRAH (Empowerment for Rehabilitation, Academic and Health) is an RTE activist NGO working with schools to implement the Act – part support, part watchdog (‘they like us, and they are afraid of us’). There is plenty to work on, as the gap between the Act and reality is great: it mandates school management committees with equal teacher/parent representation, but there are none to be seen in Madanpur.

We visit a primary school (up to grade 5, hundreds of kids milling in a tiled playground – right) and catch the headmaster trying to beat a retreat on his motorbike. He reluctantly returns for a few minutes before heading off again, pleading a meeting. We meet the teachers in a hot staffroom with stationary fans – the electric’s been off for 12 hours. They teach 2,500 kids in two shifts – girls in the morning, boys in the afternoon; the teachers claim 80-90% attendance rates, but today it’s more like 60% (they blame the upcoming festival season).

The teachers’ big beef is not wages, but the ‘PTR’ – pupil teacher ratio. There are no classes with less than 50 kids, and many are standing room only. But they acknowledge it was worse before – at least there are more notebooks now.

An aside on service delivery v Oxfam’s ‘rights-based approach’: ‘You keep coming and asking these questions but our lives don’t improve with all these foreign visitors’, say the teachers. ‘Plan India gives us water tanks – but what do you give us?’ But EFRAH says the local government promptly diverted money elsewhere when it heard about Plan’s plan. Service provision certainly makes rights-based work more difficult. ‘Fine, you can come and talk about rights, but what are you going to give us?’

A few streets away, we meet a women’s savings group (left), arrayed in their best saris in a tiny but tidy, sweltering one room house. Their main complaint is that they don’t teach their kids anything at the school. ‘Any time you go there, the teachers are not in the classrooms, they are ‘doing paperwork’. The kids are just wandering around. We know there’s not enough teachers, but the ones there are don’t even try to teach. We have to get private classes on top’. All the women are paying for at least some private tuition – $5 per month per subject, all in ‘unrecognized’ private schools which are often no better than the public ones. The women’s big complaint is on the lack of a school management committee or any other source of accountability: ‘they never call us, never call meetings. Teachers and parents need to work together.’ Some parents are filing Right to Information cases to find out how many PTA meetings have been called and who was invited. Another recent RTI case asked how many teachers had been budgeted for, after which the school hired an extra teacher.

Next stop is a group of fifty 13-18 year old girls, in grades 7-10. When we ask what they like about school, there is a resounding silence. Instead, they have complaints – on the lack of toilets, electricity, having to sit on floor. They do like the morning shift though, because it reduces risk of ‘eve teasing’ (sexual harassment). When we ask them how much actual teaching they receive in a 5 hour shift, the average is about 2 hours.

They all want to work (doctors, teachers, police inspectors ‘so I can hit the boys when they harass the girls!’, media) and aren’t under pressure to get married, but ‘We are getting educated, but we can’t work.’ Male relatives stop them going out to work because they’re ‘afraid our character will be put into question’. They insist it’s still better to be a girl ‘we can handle households, children and outside work – but maybe we need to learn karate!’

So it all comes down (doesn’t it always?) to governance and institutions. A combination of increased spending, accountability via school management committees and improved teacher training (it’s largely privatized and ineffectual – recently only 6% of trainee teachers were able to pass a basic test) could turn things around. But that approach is under challenge by contending ‘solutions’ in the shape of private public partnerships and the pulling in of the private sector, whose consequences could include increased inequality and exclusion.

Meanwhile the government looks set to kick the RTE can down the road by postponing the deadline for its implementation from 2013 to 2015, underlining the point that in India, getting the law passed is just the start. Implementation is the real battle. Still, the week after my visit, Shashi Tharoor (right), who helped launch the new Indian edition of From Poverty to Power, was made education minister, so let’s hope he takes matters in hand.

How can a post-2015 agreement drive real change? Please read and comment on this draft paper

The post-2015 discussion on what should succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is picking up steam, with barely a day going by without some new paper, consultation or high level meeting. So I, along with Stephen Hale and Matthew Lockwood, have decided to add to the growing slush-pile with a new discussion paper. We want you to read the draft (see right) and help us improve it. Contributions by 5 November please, either as comments on the blog, or emailed to research[at]oxfam.org.uk.

The paper argues that there’s an urgent need to bring power and politics into the centre of the post-2015 discussion. To have impact, any post-2015 arrangement has to take into account the lessons of over a decade of implementing the existing MDGs, and be shaped by the profound global change since the MDGs were debated over the course of the 1990s and early noughties.  We’re hoping that this will be at the centre of this week’s discussions in London linked to the High Level Panel and in Berlin at the Berlin Civil Society Center on Development post 2015.

The most significant shift is that the new arrangements have to be designed to influence governments, whereas the main impact of the MDGs was on the aid system. Why the shift? Because aid is becoming less important, both because it is likely to decline in volume over the next few years, and because governments’ dependence on aid as a percentage of revenues is falling even faster than aid itself. In any case, aid is a pretty ineffective way of influencing government behaviour, beyond the actual expenditure of donor dollars.

So if influencing governments is the goal, what can we learn from the experience of the MDGs? The first thing to note is a startling lack of research. Many reviews blur the distinction between ‘MDGs’ and ‘MDG policies’/’MDG planning’ (in effect, social welfare). Analysis of the data on improvements in health, education, and other key sectors largely ignores the vital question of how much of that improvement can be plausibly attributed to the MDGs, rather than to other factors such as national politics, economic growth, or technological innovation. Given the substantial political and financial investment in the MDGs, and the need to design an effective post-2015 framework, being unable to attribute – with any certainty – progress due to the MDGs is a truly lamentable gap in our knowledge.

There is even less research on (and less anecdotal or circumstantial evidence for) the impact of the MDGs on the policies and behaviours of rich countries, beyond changes in their aid budgets. There is scant evidence that MDG 8’s commitment to a ‘global partnership for development’ has had any impact on rich country behaviour. Understanding this failure is vital, given that many proposals for the post-2015 regime seek to place more obligations on rich countries in areas such as climate change and resource consumption.

What we know is that some governments have adopted the language of the MDGs and have customized them to fit national priorities, while civil society groups have increasingly used them as advocacy tools.

Beyond that, many post-2015 participants seem to think it is not possible to give a more complete answer to the traction question because of the missing counterfactual (how can we know what would have happened without the MDGs?). Not so. It is certainly possible to know much more than we do about attribution through more rigorous qualitative research. For example, in-depth interviews with policymakers could investigate the traction exerted by a range of external and domestic forces on their decisions (avoiding any leading questions on the MDGs). We have yet to locate such research.

So much for the MDGs, what about whatever comes next? International instruments can exert influence in three key ways:

1. By changing national norms in areas such as women’s rights. However intangible, norms matter, leading to long-term changes in what society considers acceptable or deplorable, which then leads to changes to laws, policies and behaviours.
2. By directly influencing government decision making, through any of a number of possible carrots (aid, contracts, acceptance, approval) or sticks (sanctions, disapproval).
3. By giving civil society organisations and other domestic actors more tools with which to lobby, campaign, and secure action by their governments.

In most cases, the main drivers of change will be domestic – the result of national politics and culture. But international initiatives are second-order factors that can nudge things along. We identify six kinds of instrument at global and regional levels.

Big global norms: rallying cries intended to influence the underlying attitudes of decision makers and citizens, such as ‘zero poverty’ or ‘zero hunger’.

Global goals and targets: as encapsulated by the MDGs.

Regional goals and targets: the African Union has been particularly energetic in agreeing regional targets, setting out what its member governments should be aiming for on the Rights of Women (AU Protocol, 2003),or their allocation of spending to agriculture (Maputo Agreement 2003), health (Abuja Declaration 2001) and similar commitments on social protection, and water and sanitation.

Global league tables: the international community and/or civil society can simply collect and publish data allowing a comparison between different countries’ absolute situation and rate of progress, as in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Anecdotal evidence (and long NGO experience) suggests that league tables can be effective both in attracting public and media interest, and in goading politicians into action – there is nothing a leader likes less than to be seen to lose out to a rival nation.

Data transparency: according to some architects of the MDGs, perhaps their greatest legacy will be the improved quality, collection and dissemination of social data. One option would be to make this the centrepiece of a post-2015 arrangement, and leave it to others (national or regional bodies, international institutions) to ‘mash up’ the data into different indices and use it to advocate for progressive policies.

International law: Most governments are already signatories to dozens, if not hundreds, of international conventions and the role and influence of international law appears to be on an inexorable upward curve, steadily encroaching on previously untouchable areas of state sovereignty.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of these options in influencing norms, decision making or civil society activism? Here we are basically into guesswork/gut feeling, captured in the table below. We’d be interested to hear your views, and very grateful for links to any relevant research.

Possible options for international instruments to drive change post-2015

Over to you for comments, links etc

What can opinion polls tell us about well-being and revolution? Quite a lot, actually

I’m on a plane to Delhi today, to the big OECD conference on ‘Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making’. In preparation, I dropped in on the scarily smart (in both senses) young pollsters from Gallup. Fascinating, and also vaguely relevant to today’s ‘blog action day‘, on the theme of  ’the power of we’ – few organizations are better placed than Gallup to tell us what ‘we’ actually think.

Gallup is moving increasingly into working in developing countries, picking up on issues like food security and water and sanitation.

But it was their work on well-being that really got my interest. Since 2005, they have been developing their wellbeing survey methodology, and now run it annually in 161 countries. They divide up the poll questions into two bunches:

Evaluative: Evaluate your life on a scale from 0 to 10 today. Where do you think you will be about 5 years from now?

Experiential: how did you feel yesterday? (well-rested; treated with respect; smile or laugh a lot; learn or do something interesting) What about negative feelings? (physical pain; worry; sadness; stress; anger)

That produces a well-being snapshot across a lot of people (something like 200,000 in the last poll), and the results are a real mix of the expected (Greece and Spain top the list of most worried nations) and the unexpected.

In which latter category I would put their findings on gender and well-being. Globally, women say they have roughly the same degree of life satisfaction as men. The best countries to be a woman (i.e. those where women are most likely to say they are ‘thriving’) are Denmark, Canada and Australia. The worst are Afghanistan, Nepal and Madagascar.

So far, so unsurprising. But when we get onto gender gaps, it gets much more interesting. The biggest gender gap, in terms of men reporting more positively than women are in Ukraine and Vietnam. The list of countries where women are significantly more positive about their lives than men is led by Qatar, Angola, South Korea and Iran.

If you’re skimming, read that list again. Maybe the cartoonist (left) is onto something? (OK, I’m heading for the bunker right now).

Even more baffling: South Korea has the worst gender pay gap in the world – women earn 38% less than men, and 10% more women say they are thriving than men. Any theories?

Other fascinating findings from the Arab world: Across the Arab world, men’s support for women’s equal legal status and right to hold any job they are qualified for was positively linked to men’s life evaluations, employment, and other measures of economic and social development. Gallup also found that there is no link between men’s support for Sharia as the only source of legislation and antagonism toward equal rights for women.  If the economy continues to suffer, women’s rights may as well. This suggests that economic trouble may be a greater threat to women’s rights than public support for religious legislation.

Now the standard NGO response to reading something ‘counterintuitive’ – i.e. we would rather it wasn’t true – is to question the methodology. But unless you really are an ubergeek, I would strongly advise against taking Gallup on. Like I said, they are scary, as is their readiness to get down and dirty on methodology.

I recommend an idle wander through gallup.com – a real treasure trove. The Middle East leads the world in negative emotions – but how about Somaliland having the lowest level of negatives (maybe just not being Somalia gives you a boost?)

Finally, as they talked about measuring anger and rage across the world, I asked the obvious question – could you have predicted the Arab Spring? There answer was ‘not yet’ – ‘we know when something is ripe for chaos – you can see Spain and Greece are really brittle right now’. Their polling showed that despite high GDP growth, well-being was ‘plummeting’ in Egypt and Tunisia for some years before the uprising. Hope they don’t manage to crack the predictive thing, or I imagine some rather unsavoury customers will be lining up to buy their services.

Here’s some more links for potential browsers and data geeks, c/o Gallup’s Andy Rzepa

“Income, Health and Wellbeing across the World”, paper by Angus Deaton

“Women and Men Worldwide Equally Likely to Be “Thriving”” Lymari Morales and Kyley McGeeney

Gallup WorldView, data visualisation portal

And a footnote from Oxfam wellbeing guru Katherine Trebeck. The Oxfam Humankind Index for Scotland will be broken down by gender next year so we’ll see how women and men compare according to the 18 priorities our consultation revealed (the Scottish Government have promised us access to unpublished data that allows us to do so).

Day of the Girl (and a small revolution in the birthplace of humanity)

Guest post from Carron Basu Ray, (right) who coordinates Oxfam’s ‘My Rights, My Voice’ programme

The Ngorongoro area of Tanzania is regarded as the birthplace of humanity, a vast, strikingly beautiful part of the world. The Maasai pastoralists who live there are among the most marginalised people in the country and their children, especially the girls, have little access to quality education. I was in Tanzania a couple of weeks ago, meeting representatives from partner organisations and Oxfam colleagues who are implementing a dynamic education project that works with marginalised children and young people, their allies (parents, teachers, community leaders, etc) and many others on education issues and youth empowerment. The work is part of Oxfam’s eight country My Rights, My Voice global programme, funded by the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

I was lucky enough to spend some time with one incredible young Maasai woman who is trying to do something about the educational challenges facing her community. Rose (not her real name) is from the Ngorongoro area and is determined that every Maasai child, especially the girls, has access to a complete (primary and secondary) quality education, as she herself did. Rose works with one of Oxfam’s partner organisations, raising awareness about the importance of educating and empowering girls among members of her community – including the girls themselves, supporting their school attendance, and promoting gender equality.

Inspirational. Smart. Funny. Compassionate. Rose is a young woman who overcame the odds stacked up against her, who is now – what we in the development sector would refer to as – an ‘agent of change’ or ‘active citizen’. With supportive parents who fought many power struggles with her and through her hard work, perseverance and some lucky breaks along the way she completed her primary and secondary education, got a good job, chose whom she wanted to marry, and is now leading change and transforming the lives of girls and young women.

Most poor and marginalised girls and women in low income countries are not so lucky in completing a decent quality education and in having their rights respected. Girl’s primary school completion rates are below 50% in most poor countries and globally one in three girls is denied a secondary education. This has serious ramifications not only for every young girl’s life, but also for her family.

Rose and many other girls and women I have met and know are in my thoughts today, as they are most days. From the 16-year-old community carer looking after children who’d lost their parents to AIDS in Orange Farm, South Africa; to the eight-year-old girl I sat with one morning in Andhra Pradesh, India, who just wanted to go to school so she could write a letter to her father who was working away from home; to my 11-year-old niece in London whose passion for school and life knows no bounds.  Every day is a day to reflect on the rights, needs, and aspirations of girls (and of course women).

But today (11^th October) is also the first official UN Day of the Girl, which hopefully means a lot of people who don’t ordinarily think about some of these issues, will be made aware and take some time to reflect. A single day is fine, but not enough – we should be thinking about gender inequality and girls every day of the year. We can’t overcome poverty and suffering if we don’t fully address gender inequality, look at power relations and support women and girls in claiming their rights, working with men and boys to also fully realise, champion and safeguard these too.

Ending child marriage

The first Day of the Girl focuses on ending the practice of child marriage. About 10 million girls are forced or coerced into marriage before their 18^th birthday every year. As the UN webpage explains, the theme of this year’s day was chosen because it is ‘a phenomenon that violates millions of girls’ rights, disrupts their education, jeopardizes their health, and denies them their childhood, limiting their opportunities and impacting all aspects of a girl’s life.’ Enough said.

To mark the day, Plan is launching its fantastic ‘Because I Am A Girl’ (BIAAG) campaign, which will bring to life the diverse and complex experiences girls face the world over. We are all aware of and (no doubt) fully signed up to the idea that a complete quality education transforms lives, leading to empowerment, opportunities and choices that would not otherwise have existed. Universal education can break the cycle of poverty in a family, community, society. The significance of this for girls is stark. Those who complete both primary and secondary education are more likely to be literate, healthy and survive into adulthood – as are their children. They are more likely to marry and have children when they themselves are no longer a child, are more likely to reinvest their income back into their family, community and country, and better able to understand their rights and be a force for change. The BIAAG campaign will work with girls, communities, traditional leaders, governments, global institutions and the private sector to address the barriers that prevent girls from completing their education. Thinking and talking about girls’ education seems particularly apposite in the week that 14-year-old activist Malala Yousafzai was shot in Pakistan for standing up for girls’ right to education.

As Rose and many, many other girls and young women I have met around the world have shown, empowered girls and women are transforming their lives, communities and countries. The world will be a better place for it.’

Duncan: and here’s Plan’s great BIAAG video (declaration of nepotism interest, it’s made by my sister-in-law, Mary Matheson)

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.

Paradigms, lock-ins and liberations: Robert Chambers on rice and shit

 Following my review of his new book, and Robert’s thoughts on immersion programmes (which generated some great comments), here is a third and final piece from Provocations for Development

A lock-in is a paradigmatic syndrome in which there is strong mutually-supporting inflexibility. Let us examine two examples of paradigmatic lock-ins which have been comprehensively turned on their heads to create new counter-intuitive, counter-commonsense, syndromes of startling potency. They raise questions about what Donald Rumsfeld famously described as ‘unknown unknowns’. Looking back at the lock-ins which they have transformed, they can be seen as liberations. The first liberation concerns rice cultivation and the second rural sanitation.

The rice plant can tolerate flooding, but grows better in mainly aerobic conditions. Farmers flood their fields to control weeds, substituting water for labour. Scientists have taken this as a norm. Conventional paddy growing practices are relatively management sparing. Seedlings are grown in a flooded seed bed, uprooted quite roughly when 21-40 days old and transplanted by being pushed down in clumps of 3, 4 or more into flooded, puddled soil, either in lines or at random and close together. Fields are then kept flooded throughout the growing cycle.

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) simultaneously changes all these practices. Seedlings when still very young and small, 8-12 days old, are transplanted carefully (the principle is TLC – tender loving care), 1-2 plants per hill and widely spaced in a square pattern: this reduces plant population by two-thirds or more. The paddy soil is kept moist with mostly aerobic conditions, with intermittent applications of light irrigation. Manual push-weeders control weeds and churn up and aerate the soil. There are many benefits and few disbenefits from this set of practices: plants are supported above ground by more extensive longer-lived root systems, are stronger and healthier and more resistant to pests and diseases and to drought and storms, and produce many more tillers (each of which bears a head of grains) which also give better outturns in milling.  Across many rice varieties, on-farm evaluations in eight countries found yields raised by an average of 47 per cent, with water savings averaging 40 per cent. Costs of production per hectare were reduced by 23 per cent and farmers’ net income per hectare was boosted by 68 per cent.

Traditional rice research, notably that of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has been locked into a paradigm of crop improvement through breeding higher-yielding varieties, responsive to chemical fertiliser, and dependent on large amounts of water for flooding. This genocentric strategy led to the Green Revolution. There have been other successes particularly with some disease resistance, and recently with developments in GM breeding for beta-carotene (for Vitamin A). But despite huge investments there have been no broad improvements which work with all varieties equivalent to those with SRI management. Nor which bring such multiple benefits. SRI is a green revolution of a different sort.

Turning to rural sanitation, the conventional approach worldwide has had two thrusts: first, to teach and educate, seeking to induce changes in behaviour (software); and second, to subsidize the installation of facilities (hardware) designed by engineers. The reasoning has been that poor people need to be taught the importance of hygienic behaviour, and that they deserve decent sanitation but cannot afford it. However, didactic strategies of behaviour change have had rather limited effect, and the commonsense approach of hardware subsidies has not worked: the experience in many countries, with both Government and NGO programmes, has been that many of the toilets constructed are not used or are used for other purposes.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), like SRI, turns conventions on their heads, with radical, simultaneous, mutually-supporting changes. Instead of teaching people, there is facilitation of people’s own appraisal and analysis of their own open defecation and its effects. Instead of subsidies for hardware for individual households, people dig their own pits and construct their own latrines. Instead of being handed down engineering designs, people make their own designs. Instead of outside interventions for those least able to construct their own latrines, community members are encouraged to help them. Instead the number of latrines constructed, the focus is more on how many communities have been verified as open defecation-free.

Students learning SRI the hard way

SRI and CLTS have met with similar resistances from the respective professions. Both confront the stasis of accepted commonsense conventions: these stem from and are locked in by professional training and norms – of rice research scientists and of engineers and others who promote rural sanitation. The lock-ins are reinforced by funding.

Both SRI and CLTS entail multiple simultaneous changes of concepts, principles, methods, behaviours, relationships and mindsets. Both are, in a full sense, shifts or flips of paradigm taking us into new spaces with dramatic new potentials. Neither cost much to develop. Both were evolved by doing, hands-on, in local conditions. Both are close to the lives and realities of poor rural people. Both were discovered by remarkable innovators – Father de Laulanié with SRI in Madagascar in the mid-1980s, and Kamal Kar with CLTS in Bangladesh in early 2000. Both have been spread internationally by champions fired with well-informed enthusiasm – Norman Uphoff with SRI, and Kamal Kar himself with CLTS, both of them quickly joined by many other champions energized through the wonder and excitement of ‘seeing is believing’ personal experience of dramatic transformations.

These two movements are unstoppable and spreading on a remarkable scale. The governments of China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, where together two-thirds of the world’s rice is produced, are promoting SRI methods, based on their own evaluations and results. Worldwide, the number of farmers benefiting from SRI practices in over 40 countries is in the range of 2 million and growing rapidly.

In mid-2011, CLTS practices are also found in over 40 countries. Spread has been most extensive in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, with other African countries following hard on their heels.  It is increasingly endorsed by governments as policy or approved practice. As of mid-2011 well over 10 million people lived in communities that had been declared open defecation free, while millions more should be benefiting in communities which are not yet ODF.

Both SRI and CLTS have discovered principles with wider applications. SRI principles and practices have been applied to sugarcane, wheat, finger millet, teff and other crops. Some have renamed it SCI, the System of Crop Intensification. CLTS principles and practices have been applied also to solid waste management, for example in Cairo, and to sanitation in urban slums.

SRI and CLTS raise acute questions. I pose these as challenges to you and to all development professionals:

• Are we disabled by lock-ins to paradigms and mindsets which narrow, focus and frame our vision so that, as with traditional rice research and rural sanitation, we fail to see and find breakthroughs?
• Are there other development liberations from lock-ins waiting to be discovered and promoted?
• If there may be, how should we set about looking for them? How in other words can radical, revolutionary, innovators and disseminators – de Laulanié’s, Uphoffs, and Kamal Kars – be found, supported and encouraged?
• Do we need to take more risks and to celebrate failures in development, as Engineers Without Borders do? Should we judge harshly any organisation that cannot boast of the risks it takes, and of its failures to prove it? Is lack of failures itself a failure?

There may be clues in the commonalities of SRI and CLTS. Both were counter-intuitive. Both confronted and upended unquestioned commonsense and conventions of deeply rooted neo-Newtonian best practice. Both originated from grounded hands-on innovation, observation and awareness. And both followed many years of applied experimental experience – de Laulanié’s growing rice and Kamal Kar’s in participatory facilitation and development. Does this mean that such people and such conditions should be sought out and supported?

So finally – are these transformative international movements of SRI and CLTS one-off phenomena? Or are they forerunners of much else waiting to be discovered and spread? Are there similarly paradigmatic flips lurking latent in other improbable domains? And will future generations look back and marvel at how we could have been so timid, unimaginative and lacking in hands-on creativity, that none of us discovered them earlier?

See also Robert’s guest post on CLTS , or this three minute intro video featuring Kamal Kar

Campaigning on education and the Robin Hood Tax (and wise counsel from Dilbert)

Keeping it visual and campaign-y today. First a nice 10 minute video on the role of civil society organizations in lobbying for better education (see previous education wonkwar debate if you want more analysis)

They certainly know a thing or two about campaigning in Germany, recently getting major German banks to drop commodity funds and (contrary to the stereotype) they even use humour, albeit in a rather disturbing way. Check out this new Robin Hood Tax video for a taster 

But if you think campaigning is just about ’speaking truth to power’, it’s probably worth pondering this Dilbert cartoon.