Is taxation better than aid for state-building? The case of Somaliland

Domestic taxation is one of those absolutely crucial development issues that too often drop through the cracks. It’s important not just because, at a time of huge pressure on aid budgets, it is a vital source of ‘financing for development’, but also because taxation has been at the heart of politics and state-building, ever since the creation of nation states in Europe and the ‘no taxation without representation’ cry of the American Revolution.

That neglect seems to be ending– increasing numbers of development actors are picking up on taxation (see this recent report of a meeting at ODI); DFID has funded one of its big five year development research centres on Tax and Development, led by the excellent Mick Moore; NGOs are campaigning on international tax issues like multinational tax evasion, tax havens and the Robin Hood Tax, but are also starting to think through the potential of domestic tax campaigning in developing countries.

So I’m sure the day will come when NGOs are lining up with their partners to campaign in favour of progressive taxation, denouncing domestic tax evaders etc etc (OK, this may not work in the US…). Weird that it isn’t already happening (do tell me if it is, and where, and whether it’s just about bashing transnationals or something more comprehensive).

If you want to understand why this matters, a good place to start is a fascinating recent paper by Nicholas Eubank, a PhD student at Stanford, about the role of taxation in an unsung development success story – Somaliland. Eubank’s thesis is controversial – that Somaliland’s ineligibility for aid forced the fledgling government to rely on local tax revenues, especially from customs and business. That in turn forced it into ‘revenue bargaining’, accepting a series of checks and balances that laid the basis for political stability and democracy.

Somaliland was formed out of northern Somalia, seceding from the Somali state that collapsed in 1991. As international bodies dislike secession (it encourages the others), that means Somaliland never got official aid (although it receives a fair bit of aid through non-government channels). After secession, several years of struggle and conflict ensued that could easily have led to a typical fragile/failed state result with a vicious circle of political instability, conflict and suffering. Instead, Somaliland’s rulers got their act together, and through a series of negotiations and national conferences, developed a stable set of institutions combining modern (presidential and parliamentary systems) and traditional (a council of clan elders as the second chamber). A new constitution was agreed in 2001 with broad public support. Since then there have been multiple peaceful turnovers of power.

The place is still poor, and health and education are patchy, but the country is progressing, opening up an ever wider gap with the dire situation across the border in Somalia. Human Rights Watch sums up its achievements as ‘both improbable and deeply impressive.’

How did this happen? According to Eubank, the absence of aid flows played a crucial role. It meant the government had to rely on local sources of finance, and to gain access to them, had to negotiate with those (other clans, businesses, an extensive diaspora that generates more dollars than all the country’s exports) who controlled the main areas of economic activity, like the ports. The result of this revenue bargaining was an inclusive political contract and enduring stability.

So is this an anti-aid argument? Eubank says not (or not totally, anyway):

‘This exploration is not meant as advocacy against foreign assistance. Recent studies have shown that foreign assistance has both costs and benefits, and if the international community wishes to best serve the countries it is aiming to help, it is imperative that it strive to understand the possible negative effects of its efforts so that it can design better policies that minimise these effects, and properly balance aid’s benefits against any unavoidable downsides.’

Aid has to be aware of its impact on the social contract between citizens and states. It can undermine that, by freeing a government from having to listen to its citizens. But it can also strengthen it, as with the current UK government’s commitment to allocate 5% of any direct funding to governments for accountability exercises by parliaments, civil society organizations etc. It’s also worth mentioning some striking counterexamples - good pro-aid stories such as its central role in the take-off of Africa’s other unsung success story, Botswana.

I’ve never been to Somaliland, and the paper appears to have been written entirely from secondary sources, so I am fully prepared to hear that things aren’t as rosy as Eubank paints them. For example, the paper only discusses intra-elite bargains and gives no impression of the extent to which poor Somalilanders (men and women) have benefited (beyond the important gain of not having to live in the middle of a civil war). Nor the costs in the shape of the foregone public services that aid might have paid for. Over to you to fill in the gaps.

Poverty reduction v well-being: a cash transfer experiment from Malawi

What difference does it make to development interventions if you worry about well-being rather than income poverty? A rather neat example has just come through from some new research by Sarah Bair, Jacobus de Hoop and Berk Özler for the World Bank Poverty and Inequality team. They looked at the impact on girls’ mental health of cash transfers in Malawi (why do so many researchers work on Malawi? They must be reaching plague proportions – a researcher poll tax would probably solve the country’s problems overnight).

The researchers used a randomized control trial (no surprise there, then) involving nearly 4000 girls to compare the psychological impact of unconditional cash transfers with making them conditional on school attendance and uncovered some striking differences.

“The provision of monthly cash transfers had a strong beneficial impact on the mental health of school-age girls during the two-year intervention. Among baseline schoolgirls who were offered unconditional cash transfers, the likelihood of suffering from psychological distress was 38 percent lower than the control group, while the same figure was 17 percent if the cash transfers offers were made conditional on regular school attendance.”

The researchers concluded that the main psychological benefit stemmed from improved family income, rather than school attendance, and that making them conditional on school attendance put sufficient stress on the girls to undo a lot of the benefits. ‘When an important source of income for the family depends on the actions of the adolescent girl, it might place a heavy burden on her and to cause adverse effects on her mental health’ eroding over half the psychological benefits of the cash transfer.

Conclusion?

‘Overall, the results presented in this paper indicate that mental health among adolescent girls can substantially improve when they experience positive income shocks. However, if these income shocks are administered as part of a cash transfer intervention such as the one examined here, these mental health benefits can also be quickly eroded if sufficiently large payments are made to the parents conditional on the actions of their adolescent daughters.’

So if you focus on income poverty, conditional cash transfers offer you a double bonus – direct poverty alleviation, and greater school attendance leading to lower poverty in future generations. But if you focus on wellbeing, the equation becomes more complex. Interesting.

New international rules on domestic workers – will they make a difference?

It’s probably just because I’m getting more right wing in my old age, but The Economist seems to be getting better. This week’s issue covers a new ILO Convention on domestic workers. A quick skim of Google News suggests it was the only magazine from the mainstream UK media to do so.

“Without them many an economy would grind to a halt: the global army of between 50m and 100m domestic workers, most of them women and children. Yet tucked away in kitchens and nurseries, mainly in the Middle East and Asia, their wages often go unpaid, they are rarely granted any time off, and many face physical and sexual abuse.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) hopes to change all this with a new treaty adopted on June 16th at its annual conference. The Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers has been three years in the making. Its goal is to limit working hours, guarantee weekly days off, ensure a minimum wage and protect domestic workers from violent employers.

Only a few delegates—government officials as well as national representatives of employers and workers—voted against (Swaziland and a couple of employer groups, including the Confederation of British Industry), but there were some notable abstentions. Predictably, they included Malaysia. A series of abuse cases led Indonesia to ban its citizens from going to work there as maids from 2009 until May this year. More surprisingly, the British government, too, preferred not to vote either way. It said the treaty would be too onerous, particularly the parts regulating working hours and health and safety.”

Apart from the apparently shameful performance of the Brits, why does this matter? What difference does a convention make? I was pretty sceptical until I saw their impact on the ground – like the indigenous activist in Bolivia who told me that ‘ILO Convention 169 [on indigenous and tribal peoples] changed my life – when I read it, the indigenous part of me woke up’. An unusual conversation, true, but conventions can act as a kind of normative nudge, capturing where international sentiment has got to on a particular issue, pushing it further into domestic politics and moving the debate on a bit (not too far, or the convention won’t get passed or ratified).

I saw this osmotic effect on both laws and attitudes when researching for a book, ‘Hidden Lives: Voices of Children in Latin America and the Caribbean’ in the 1990s, when the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was rapidly trickling down into new child protection legislation across the region, and a new awareness of child rights. Let’s hope the same thing happens on domestic workers – a particularly complex situation of isolation and invisibility that can become very nasty indeed, for example in the case of the restavek child domestics in Haiti.

But I’m sure many such conventions have no impact at all – anyone seen any analysis of why some get traction and others don’t?

India’s first Dalit solar engineer; resource nationalism resurgent; results agenda; extreme weather pics; rich people bounce back; rational self interest in Somalia: links I liked

‘Santosh Devi, a 19-year-old, semi-literate woman from the backwaters of Rajasthan has broken through India’s rigid caste system to become the country’s first Dalit solar engineer.’

‘African countries are not profiting enough from the surge in prices, while oil and mining companies make windfalls. Activists and non-governmental organisation are demanding better terms. Officials largely agree.’ Resource nationalism is on the rise again, according to the FT. Good thing too.

Lawrence Haddad reports on what sounds like an intelligent discussion on the results agenda.

Extreme (and extraordinary) weather photos from the Boston Globe [h/t Richard King]

The world’s richest people are already richer than before the crisis, up 10% in the last year – now that’s what I call resilience .

“Where the police, roads, and navy are maintained by rational self-interest” [h/t Texas in Africa]

Verdict on G20 food summit? Dismal, please try harder

Agriculture is a hot potato (sorry…) in most countries’ domestic politics. Think rioting French farmers, US agribiz lobbies or the long death-by-agriculture of the WTO Doha round. So perhaps the most notable thing about the G20 agriculture ministers’ meeting that ended yesterday was that it took place at all – it was the first ever meeting of its kind. It shows just how globally important the topic of food prices and production have become.

Cling to that, because the actual result was dismal – the classic vacuous summit fudge of empty rhetoric, calls for more transparency

tadaaa......!

(who could oppose that?) and kicking the can down the road through buck-passing (asking the finance ministers to look at speculation) and ‘needs more research’, with a few baby steps in coordination. No regulation, no obligation, no new money.

Below is a more detailed verdict from Oxfam’s G20 geeks, and you can read similar damning commentaries from the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Food or the Guardian’s Felicity Lawrence. We launched the Grow campaign in part because we feared that the discussion of how to feed the world over the next 40 years would ignore issues of power, inequality and sustainability – this meeting fully confirms those fears.

Biofuels: Verdict – Poor
There were high hopes that Ministers would tackle flawed biofuels policies after calls for action by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and others. However, while Ministers agreed to look at the links between biofuels production and food price volatility they failed to take any concrete measures aimed at reforming biofuels policies or adjusting biofuels targets when food supplies are endangered. Countries suspected of blocking progress include the US, Brazil, Canada and France. The US Government’s biofuels laws meant nearly 40 per cent of US corn crop went into ethanol production rather than food production in 2010 – as the second food price crisis in the space of 3 years began to hit.

Food reserves: Verdict – Poor
Agriculture Ministers agreed to look into bolstering emergency reserves which provide food to people in crisis situations. This is a small step forward however this approach only deals with some of the impacts of high and volatile prices and fails to address the causes.  G20 Ministers failed to recognise that strategic food reserves or buffer stocks also have a critical role to play in helping poor countries cope with extremes food price volatility. A global grain reserve of just 105m tonnes would have been enough to help avoid the food price crisis in 2007-8. The cost of maintaining this would have been $1.5 billion or just $10 for each of the extra 150 million people who joined the ranks of the hungry as a direct result of the last food price surge. 

Speculation: Verdict – Inconclusive
This is the top priority for the French Presidency. The G20 Agriculture Ministers agreed to explore the links between speculation and food price volatility and to look at mechanisms for regulating excessive speculation on the commodity markets.  This is an issue which Finance Ministers will take up when they meet in July.

Transparency: Verdict – Pass
Agriculture Ministers agreed to set up system to provide information on agricultural production and food stocks held by countries around the world. This will help ensure countries and the international community has some of the information they need to analyse the global food situation and take action to avert a crisis. Unfortunately Ministers stopped short of requiring agribusinesses – which dominate the trade in many staple foods– to disclose information on the stocks they hold.  According to one estimate Cargill, Bunge, and ADM control nearly 90 per cent of global grain trading between them.

Insurance Mechanisms:  Verdict – Poor
France pushed forward market based proposals for hedging instruments that would enable vulnerable countries to insure themselves against future food price shocks.  Because the proposals fail to address the causes of price volatility they are unlikely to succeed.   Without action to regulate and increase the transparency of global commodity and futures markets the measures are more likely to benefit the financial institutions which provide the insurance rather than poor food insecure countries which are purchasing it.  In addition, poor smallholders who will not be able to access these mechanisms. Oxfam believes resources would be better directed at other instruments to manage risk such as buffer stocks.

Investment in agriculture: Verdict – Fail
Agriculture Ministers agreed that more investment is needed in agriculture. However, they focused on the need to support private investment in agriculture, rather than agreeing any concrete measures to support poor producers in developing countries who offer the greatest potential to sustainably increase global agricultural yields and tackle hunger. Investing in women farmers could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 per cent. 

Climate change: Verdict – Fail
Rich counties failed to even acknowledge that climate change is major cause of food price volatility. Climate change is estimated to have increased the amount we spend on food worldwide by $50bn a year.

Hard to exaggerate just how disappointing a response this is to the kinds of impacts of the food price spike that we are seeing on the ground. Official communiqué here [h/t Glen Tarman].

Trains v markets; Dalai Lama jokes; feeling lucky?; farewell Gil Scott Heron: clips I liked

OK, it has been pretty heavy going on the blog so far this week, so how about some time out for a few videos? Let’s start vaguely on topic, and then drift towards the random (kind of describes my typical day):

This is the Maeklong market in Thailand. It answers the age old question: “Just how close can I put my vegetable market to the train tracks?” [h/t Chris Blackman]

How not to tell a joke about the Dalai Lama. To the Dalai Lama……

Feeling lucky? Watch these guys – best bit is at the end [h/t Richard Cunliffe]

And finally, one of my musical heroes died last month, Gil Scott Heron. Check out this performance of his wonderful ‘B movie’ critique of Ronald Reagan – part biting satire, part astute commentary, part proto-rap, and all cool class. Album lyrics are even better than this clip.

Living on a spike – how are high food prices actually experienced by people living in poverty?

The G20’s Agriculture Ministers are meeting for the first time today and tomorrow, in Paris, a sign of the rising importance of food security and related issues, following the recent chaos in global food prices (see graph). Oxfam is focussing its lobby efforts on biofuels (in many cases, a bad thing, diverting food to fuel and not even helping reduce carbon emissions) and food reserves (a neglected way to smooth the spikes in prices). The FT curtain raiser says the ministers are divided and set to duck the big challenges on biofuels and export bans, but also covers their efforts to improve data on food stocks - a potentially useful way to reduce price volatility.

Oxfam (or at least some of our research partners) has also done something rather radical. When a shock hits, all the development wonks rush for their models and start calculating the impact on ‘the poor’, based on how many millions slip into poverty when prices rise by X or GDP falls by Y. What’s extraordinary is how seldom researchers think to go and talk to poor people themselves. When you do so, you get answers full of depth and surprise, as we found out in ‘Living on a Spike’, a new report on the impact of the 2011 food price crisis, published today by Oxfam and the Institute of Development Studies. Naomi Hossain and I had a piece in the Guardian yesterday summarizing the findings.

The researchers returned in March 2011 to eight community ‘listening posts’ in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, and Zambia, that were previously visited in 2009 and 2010, building up an increasingly valuable time series of how food prices and their impact have varied over time. Using focus groups and other participatory techniques, they asked: What has happened to prices and wages since last year? How are people adjusting to these changes? What do people think causes food price volatility, and what do they think should be done about it?

The overall impact of the 2011 food price spike has been to ratchet up inequality, producing a pattern of ‘weak losers and strong winners’. The losers – those already struggling in low-paid, informal sector occupations such as petty trading, street vending, casual construction work, sex work, laundry, portering, and transport – are doing worse. Many have seen stagnant or only slightly raised rates of pay, which have been swallowed up by higher food prices, combined with more erratic access to work or customers. Small-scale farmers and small market and food traders have not generally done well, despite the high price of food. High input costs and the squeeze on people’s purchasing power has meant that profits from growing and selling food remain low for those with least scope to diversify and spread their risk.

These people are clearly worse off than last year. They strongly believe that the government is not on their side in their efforts to eke out a living. Regulations on where people can run their businesses or provide their services, police harassment, and unfavourable new laws mean that making a living has got harder, not easier, for many in this group over the past year.

But some groups – usually those who were already relatively better off – have done better than last year. Commodity producers and export sector workers have largely benefited from the global recovery, as have some people in other occupations linked to these groups.

People are adjusting to high food prices in complex ways. While some people are eating less and going hungry, the more usual pattern is for people to shift to lower quality, more boring food and less diverse diets.

The effects differ greatly by gender: women come under more pressure to provide good meals with less food, and feel the stresses of coping with their children’s hunger most directly. Often women go without. As one labourer from Bangladesh explained, ‘The women make the ultimate sacrifice. They take their food after everyone is done. We have completely forgotten the taste of beef.’

These stresses push women into poorly paid informal sector work, competing among themselves for increasingly inadequate earnings. Men also feel the effects: the food price rises severely undercut their ability to provide for their families, leading to arguments in the household and fuelling alcohol abuse and domestic violence. As one Kenyan woman complained, ‘They come home drunk and even feed on the leftovers for our children.’ In the worst instances, couples split up or look for better-off partners to cope with the tough times.

Talking to people living in poverty reveals just how multi-faceted the impacts of the food price spike are, touching on almost every aspect of life. People are spending less on personal items like clothes and cosmetics, and scaling down their social lives. A rickshaw driver from Bangladesh graphically explained:  ‘With my income, I don’t have any money after buying food, so how can I have the luxury of buying more underwear?’… People can see my ass. And the thing is, as I wear the same underwear for the whole week, people get a bad smell from me. What can I do?’

Government has provided some support, but this has generally failed to protect people from the effects of rising prices. The result of these adjustments is not generally starvation, but an overall increased level of discontent and stress. Poor people are having an even more difficult time getting by.
 
The extent of people’s discontent with the situation becomes clearer when asked about their opinions on the causes of food price rises, and what should be done about them. Few people think international food prices are an important cause; some even dismiss such factors as merely convenient excuses made by their ineffective governments. Governments are held responsible for protecting their people from price spikes, but are generally seen as having failed to do so. There is a belief that governments can act to keep prices low if they want to. In Zambia, for instance, some people credited the imminent elections with putting political pressure on the government to keep staple prices low.

Poor people’s explanations of why governments have generally failed to act on food price rises revolve around two key perceptions: that governments do not care about poor people’s concerns; and that corruption at different levels of the system ensures that prices cannot be controlled – either because market inspectors can be bought off, national politicians owe big businessmen favours for help with election expenses, or cartels are permitted to operate.

Young urban men appear particularly angry about governments’ failure to act. According to one group in Kenya, ‘It is high time Kenya went the way of Egypt way. We need a leadership change!’

With revolutions in the Middle East and other protests against governments in Europe, the stress and discontent fuelled by high food prices merits close attention by the G20 agriculture ministers. Hope they’re listening. 

With three years of visits under the researchers’ belts, we’re keen to keep going back to the communities in the next few years, maybe adding on a few other countries and introducing some quantitative methods to complement the qualitative. I’d be interested in links and references to similar research efforts at this kind of  qualitative longitudinal work on particular issues.

What does a theory of change look like?

I’ve been working on ‘how change happens’ for a few years now, as regulars to this blog will know, but in the last few months, ‘theories of change’ has gone viral as a new development fuzzword. In meetings and documents, people earnestly enquire ‘what’s your theory of change?’ and you’re in trouble if you don’t have an answer. (Quite a good answer is ‘could you just explain what you mean by theory of change?’ – people often have no idea).

So it’s time to ride the wave and speed up the ‘theories of change’ work programme, and last week I spent some time at IDS and with Oxfam big cheeses thinking through what a joint IDS-Oxfam work programme might look like. Here’s what I’m currently thinking, with a plea to others to comment, send sources and otherwise give me a hand. Hat tips to Thalia Kidder and Jo Rowlands for their suggestions.

Firstly it’s ‘theories’ not ‘theory’. When people talk about a single ‘theory of change’ (ToC from now on), alarm bells should ring – in the worst case it’s just a new jargon for old-school linear change, impact chains, logframes etc. Instead of a deluded search for a single grand theory of everything, we need to learn to recognize and manage a range of theories, throw them at a problem, and see which ones are helpful (see my recent experience of doing this in Tanzania). Yes folks, we’re talking practical post modernism….. Surfacing our deeper, buried assumptions about the motors of change can also help us understand why we keep disagreeing with each other, a crucial skill in coalition-building.

Being able to acknowledge your own ‘preferred ToC’ and yet have the ability to stand outside it and understand those of others is really hard to do – an emotional and intellectual stretch – but it’s an invaluable skill. I think a lot of the practical impact of any ToC workplan is going to lie in helping build such capacities.

To do that, you need some rules of thumb – NGO types are mainly doers and activists, impatient to get on and change the world. They need practical tools to help them apply ToCs in their work. So I’ve been building on some work on ‘archetypes of change’ by Chris Roche and ‘meta-theories’ from Ros Eyben, to come up with this rough typology.

There are three categories, with some overlap between the categories, but broadly they are:

1. ‘Systemic meta-theories’ (apologies – please suggest a less pretentious alternative!), describing the underlying way you see the world and its motors of change. They may lead to particular change strategies, or simply underpin the overall analysis.

2. Archetypes – more specific snapshots of how change happens in a given place and moment. I’ve provisionally grouped them into four clusters: active citizenship, elite-driven change, cross-class coalitions and what I’ve called ‘dynamics’ where the focus is on the rhythm of the change itself, rather than specific drivers. Not sure if the dynamics actually belong in a separate column.

3. Change strategies, adopted by would-be ‘change agents’ to bring about good change/ prevent bad change

Category 1 is free standing; while categories 2 & 3 go together, i.e. the change strategies follow from the archetype of change in the same row. None of these lists are exhaustive, and some overlap with each other – I hope to reduce the level of messiness as the work proceeds, but here it is, warts and all.

Systemic meta-theories

• Rational Choice: change is unintended outcome of individual choice
• Environment/techno determinism
• Long term shifts in deep underlying  norms, values and beliefs
• Purposive individual/ collective action
• Marxist/Structuralist: changes in relations of production and economic power structures key
• Evolution (variation/selection/ amplification)
• Shocks and wars drive change by transforming social, political and economic relations

And here are the more specific archetypes and their associated change strategy:

Clear as mud? I’d welcome all thoughts, especially on clarifying and improving the typology. Next steps are to start identifying case studies, plan some desk reviews, design some training modules and raise some research funding (do get in touch if you want to fund it!) I’ll keep you posted as plans develop.

How can research funders work better with international NGOs like Oxfam?

I spoke recently to a meeting of the UK Collaborative on Development Sciences. It’s a great initiative, bringing together 13 UK funders and stakeholders with an interest in international development research, but is ‘collaborative’ really a noun? Anyway, the topic was how research funders (mainly state funded) can link up more effectively with large INGOs like Oxfam. Let me talk you through the powerpoint……

First, why do INGOs do research? Above all, to improve impact of programmes and advocacy in three broad areas, according to a nice distinction made by my colleague Kimberly Pfeifer at Oxfam America: ‘tactical research’ (reactive to broader events and policy agendas); formative research (setting new agendas and directions) and evaluative research (MEL, learning lessons). INGO people are doers and activists, with little time for theorising – they think in terms of guidelines and toolkits. That is probably why UKCDS wanted to talk to me, because government is increasingly demanding that researchers demonstrate the impact of their research, rather than the beauty of pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

But what do we mean by the word ‘research’? For INGOs it is often much more about a clear narrative than about data. The risk is doing violence to a complex reality, but the upside is that we tell stories that stick in the heads of policy makers and others. There is also a priority on case studies and bearing witness – exploring how large scale phenomena (climate change, food prices etc) affect the lives of people living in poverty. What some academics dismiss as anecdotes are for INGOs (and most normal people) closer to reality than some massive number-crunching exercise (though we still need to be careful about correlation v causation and attribution). For some examples, check out the Oxfam publications website.

What does good policy research look like, from an INGO standpoint? A clear story, bringing together a decent review of the academic literature with those real life stories; preferably relevant to what is on the agendas of decision-makers over the coming months; drilling down into the issues of power, inequality and social relations that often go missing in conventional research. For impact it also needs a sprinkling of killer facts, an answer to the inevitable ‘what’s new in this research?’ question, and clear and convincing recommendations and solutions.

Are INGOs any good at research, thus defined? Generalizations are perilous, but here goes:

Strengths: at its best INGO research is rooted in real life, the experiences of partners and communities (e.g. our work on the impact of the global financial crisis, or forthcoming stuff on food prices); INGOs have been pioneers on participatory methods; the research packs a punch both in content and in the ability of INGO media teams to make a media splash that gets it noticed. And they have a global constituency and reach that many academic researchers can only dream of.

Weaknesses: often stronger on qualitative than quantitative; sometimes a bit cavalier on methodology (although we outsource a lot of research to academics which, if they’re any good, should fill that gap); weak systems of peer review (and some confusion over what constitutes a ‘peer’); suffers from short INGO attention spans, so few examples where research builds up over time; patchy links to developing country research institutions and always short of cash and capacity compared to the formal research institutions.

How can funders improve the relevance and use of research by INGOs? Well, they could fund it directly of course, but that is often going to be difficult given the way they are set up, so here are some other ideas. Insist that research institutions work with INGOs to co-design research programmes (the norm is alas, for an institution to decide on a largely irrelevant agenda  and then approach the INGO as an afterthought to help with the communications, or ‘do the voices of the poor bit’.) Sure, we could (and do) take the initiative and approach research institutions with our own ideas, but the timescales, interests and approaches are often just too different to find common ground. Funders could provide incentives to help bridge the gap.

That means understanding what research INGOs are going to need over the next few years. Luckily the level of intellectual herding is pretty high, so if you get a bunch of them in a room, they will probably all come up with a similar set of priorities (current ones would probably include climate change, scarcity, food security, theories of change, measuring impact, multipolar world and the absence of gender and disaggregated data from most research questions).

And a few more specific suggestions for the higher education researches themselves, (and where prodding by funders can probably help):

If you want access to communities, the research had better be relevant to the people and partners (e.g. testing new approaches through action research). It needs to be properly discussed at draft stage and disseminated and discussed locally on publication. INGO staff time and direct costs (and those of their partners on the ground) should be properly funded. Finally, you need buy-in at country level, where harassed staff may have very different priorities from INGO HQ.

What is at stake is, I think, pretty important – building a regular and productive interchange between funders, higher education institutions, thinktanks and INGOs. Funders could help by creating incentives for better links between these groups, requiring researchers to demonstrate impact and relevance. They could also help create a space for collective reflection on research priorities among INGOs (that only happens in a very ad hoc way at the moment, for example by everyone commissioning papers from Alex Evans……) and build INGOs’ capacity to understand, commission and use existing research (as well as do a bit themselves).

Any other suggestions?

Are pro-poor renewables approaching a tipping point? Guest post by John Magrath

I was at the annual conference of the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy this week in London to hear presentations by this year’s award winners, watch films of their work and listen to a panel debate that included Matthew Lockwood and Mike Mason (of which more below). As always, the winners – both from the UK and internationally – were fascinating and inspiring. In the international field perhaps just as interesting were the emerging trends. It was webcast with the UK winners in the morning and international winners after lunch. Madeleine Bunting has also blogged (on the international part) in The Guardian.

First the international winners. They were: ToughStuff International (robust, cheap solar systems for light and phone charging in East Africa); Toyola Energy Ltd (hugely successful sales of clean cook stoves in Ghana and West Africa, which also scooped the Ashdens “Gold Award” top prize); Husk Power (electricity generation using rice husks and distribution of the power through mini-grids in Bihar, India – see pic); Abellon Clean Energy Ltd ( biomass pellets replacing lignite in big industrial plants in Gujarat, India) and Aga Khan Planning and Building Services (house insulation and energy efficiency in northern Pakistan).

To find out more and to see the excellent films (from Rockhopper) – which may not be uploaded yet but should be within the next few days – go to the Ashden website.

Now for those international trends. First, all these winning organisations and their programmes are demonstrably big – each is reaching hundreds of thousands of people. They are expanding rapidly, including across borders, and are successful businesses (with the partial exception of the Aga Khan Foundation programme, which is a rather different sort of animal). Those characteristics have been increasingly evident in Ashden winners over the last five years or so.

The second I detected was a new “buzz” around this year’s conference – it was noticeable how many representatives were there from finance institutions and foundations, trusts and investment funds. They were asking questions keenly about  capital and business models, barriers, opportunities and solutions, and clearly sense business opportunities.

One of the biggest problems for renewable start-up businesses has always been lack of capital, and notably, the reluctance of capital providers to take risks on what they see as relatively untried products (often being sold to very poor people). That is still true, but maybe it is beginning to change. For one thing, renewable technology is getting better and better (cheaper, more robust); for another, successful business models, sales systems, distribution networks and so on are getting established. But clean energy investors themselves are also “maturing”. E + Co for example – who have backed Toyola – have been going for 17 years now, they’ve learned where and how to invest (including by making mistakes), they’ve shown it is possible to get good returns on investment, and they are now scaling up further. So perhaps we’re on the cusp, and we’ll see investors move en masse to follow the leaders…

So to the debate which, perhaps surprisingly, ultimately found much common ground. Mike Mason, founder of Climate Care and now advisor to the government of the Maldives, which has declared it will become carbon neutral within a decade, was typically provocative. He noted how hard it will be to become carbon neutral, as opposed to just shaving 10, 20 or 30 per cent off emissions. People want and need electricity, for example, and want – and demand – more of it the more they get. A myriad of individuals installing their own house-by-house systems isn’t enough. You need to connect them all in a grid, because grids allow the manipulation of inputs from a diversified mixture of energy sources as conditions vary. (Furthermore, by bulk-buying solar panels for the entire nation, the government could get enormous discounts from Chinese manufacturers). Or taking Kenya as an example the problem is that the energy sources, whether biomass or geothermal, are not where people are. “You have to shift electrons in very large quantities from where they are generated to where they are needed, in Kenya the problem is you can’t make it in the place you want to buy it”. But the problem with big grids, in Mike’s experience, is that national institutional structures generally get in the way of them working properly.

Matthew Lockwood, on the other hand, pointed out that  national grids don’t and can’t supply everyone who wants electricity (except maybe on a small island like one of the Maldives). When they are supposed to, as in much of India, they are hopelessly unreliable. But, you can do as Husk Power is doing and set up mini-grids (65 so far and aiming for over 2,000 by 2014), each operated locally, but also networked and centrally monitored by computer; a combination of almost 19th Century gasifier and 21st Century IT.

In the end Mike and Matthew agreed on two key areas. Modern mini-grids can deliver most of the economies of scale needed along with most of the required lack of interference from bureaucrats in the middle; and for grids, as solar and other renewable generating technologies get cheaper and better, much the biggest issue is the need to develop cheaper and more reliable means of storage, and that is where global R and D should be directed.

Finally, here’s an advance plug – Oxfam, Christian Aid and Practical Action have been working together to create a web-based “toolkit” about renewable energy, aimed at people in NGOs and CSOs anywhere who are thinking of using renewables in their programmes, but are unsure where to start. This toolkit will tell you much of what you want to know, and where to go to find out more, with a clear and simple narrative, inspiring video and audio clips and encyclopaedic links. It will be hosted on the “Practical Answers” website of Practical Action, and also be available on CD for those whose connectivity is poor. It should be ready and launched in about three to four weeks – watch this space, as they say….

John Magrath is an Oxfam researcher currently working on renewable energy 

And while you’re waiting for the winner videos to go up, here’s a 4 minute retrospective on the first 10 years of the awards