Transformative Graduation?

By Stephen Devereux
In social protection programmes, “graduation” refers to participants crossing an income or asset threshold, after which they are no longer eligible for support. In January 2013 the Centre for Social Protection (CSP) hosted an online discussion event on the topic of graduation, under a partnership agreement between Irish Aid and IDS on ‘Hunger Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation’. The debate was lively and helped clarify my ideas on graduation (which are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of CSP, IDS or Irish Aid).

I discovered that I am a graduation sceptic. Of course graduation might be possible for some households at some times in some contexts, but probably only a minority under very specific conditions. It bothers me greatly that graduation is increasingly driving social protection programmes, because this is not what social protection is all about.

 A basic distinction should always be drawn between three functions of social protection. In the “3 Ps” terminology, social protection should “protect” the chronically poor, “prevent” the vulnerable from being decimated by uninsured shocks, and (thirdly and lastly) “promote” the livelihoods of the entrepreneurial poor.

The first function is social assistance for the "ultra-poor", such as social pensions and disability grants. Pensioners and people with severe disabilities are not expected or required to "graduate out" or exit from this social assistance after a few years – nor should they be.

The second function is the original (now regrettably much maligned) safety net role – ensuring that people who are vulnerable to shocks (because they lack savings, insurance or social security) don't collapse into destitution or worse when their livelihoods are disrupted by drought or unemployment or AIDS. Again, nobody – poor or rich – graduates out of the need for safety nets. No-one who can afford insurance cancels it after 5 years.

The third function does not have a "social something" label, because it actually isn't social protection; it's livelihood support for poverty reduction (the "promote" P). The people who are likely to graduate from grants and subsidies to micro-credit and eventual self-reliance are not the labour-constrained "ultra-poor", they are low-income smallholder farmers and self-employed workers in the informal economy – people with labour power whose livelihoods need a boost. They are the “entrepreneurial poor” – but, as we know from the microfinance experience, not all poor people are entrepreneurs, so even in this category, 100% graduation is 100% unrealistic.

Nonetheless, this is the poverty reduction agenda into which social protection has become co-opted. It is politically sexier than social grants and it is massively popular with donors and governments who fear the cost and commitment of permanent programmes, who want an "exit strategy", “value for money” and a "return on their investment", and whose vision of success is driven by the MDGs. So graduation looks like a "win-win": programme participants get their poverty reduced, programme implementers and policy-makers hit their poverty reduction targets. No wonder some social protection programmes are holding graduation ceremonies.

But what if you don't hit your graduation targets? I was disheartened to hear an Ethiopian policy-maker in a conference in 2011 describe the Productive Safety Net Programme as a “failure”, because “we are expecting most of the beneficiaries to graduate but instead the numbers just go up every year”. If political support for programmes that are fixated on unrealistic graduation targets starts to dwindle, it isn’t just the “Productive” components that will be closed down; the “Safety Net” will go too.

Graduation is not social protection. Although "promotion" was included In the "transformative social protection" framework it was never intended to stand alone. Our argument was that some forms of social protection provide transfers that simultaneously alleviate poverty ("provision") while at the same time invest in useful physical infrastructure (e.g. public works = wages for subsistence + economic assets for income generation) or human capital formation (e.g. conditional cash transfers, or school feeding = cash/food today + education for enhanced livelihoods tomorrow), which have the potential to generate future streams of income and thereby reduce poverty sustainably (i.e. poverty alleviation + poverty reduction).

The danger is that seeing social protection as a poverty reduction instrument loses sight of its primary functions – to provide social assistance to alleviate the poverty of the labour-constrained "ultra-poor" who have no livelihoods (and negligible prospects of graduating); and to install effective and reliable safety nets or social insurance mechanisms against downside risk for people with low and/or unpredictable incomes. In both cases social protection is a permanent commitment; it is not a 3-5 year project. You don't put a safety net in a circus until you believe the trapeze artist won't fall, and then remove it. We must not replace the critical core functions of social protection with objectives drawn from other agendas.

But I am not a total graduation sceptic. I do believe that social protection can build resilience and self-reliance, but it might take a decade or longer – maybe even a generation, which is why many social protection programmes invest in the human capital of children, in an attempt to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. We should surely aim for ‘sustainable graduation’ over time, rather than ‘threshold graduation’ based on income or asset ownership at a point in time. This requires a broader assessment of the problem that social protection is trying to address.

The impacts of a social protection intervention will always be heavily influenced by the context into which it is introduced. There needs to be a favourable economic “enabling environment” – good infrastructure, strong public services, well developed markets, financial services, vibrant economic activity, complementary linkages to other economic sectors – for graduation outcomes to be achievable and sustainable. The problem with naive forms of graduation thinking is that is tries to propel people out of poverty simply by throwing cash and assets at them, while leaving them trapped with the adverse personal characteristics (illiteracy, etc.) and structural constraints (weak infrastructure, imperfect markets, etc.) that constructed their poverty in the first place.

Beyond these economic “enablers or constrainers”, if the socio-political context is unfavourable to the extent that it is driving poverty, then no injection of cash or assets is going to lift people out of their poverty trap. Social exclusion of minorities, discrimination against stigmatised groups, xenophobia – these are all social rather than economic drivers of poverty and vulnerability, and they require interventions at the social and political levels – social transformation, not income or asset transfers.

“Transformative social protection” recognises that social change and political interventions can remove the structural barriers and trigger virtuous cycles of income generation and poverty reduction. Progressive legislation or anti-discrimination campaigns could be enough on their own to “graduate” entire sections of society. One example is abolishing discrimination in the labour market against persons with disability or HIV-positive job applicants, thereby “graduating” those who can work, from social grant recipients to wage-earning employees. We could go further and argue that, where socio-political constraints are significant drivers of poverty and vulnerability, transformative social protection is the only assured pathway to “transformative graduation”.

Readings

• Stephen Devereux and Rachel Sabates-Wheeler (2004) Transformative Social Protection. IDS Working Paper, 232. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies 
• Rachel Sabates-Wheeler and Stephen Devereux (2011) Transforming Livelihoods for Resilient Futures: How to Facilitate Graduation in Social Protection Programmes. FAC Working Paper 023; CSP Working Paper 003. Brighton: Future Agricultures Consortium & Centre for Social Protection.

India needs justice for all

It is a month since a brutal gang rape in Delhi shot sexual violence to the headlines and brought the need for reform of India’s ramshackle criminal justice system into sharp relief. India is a successful economy, a powerful player in the BRICS group of countries, a nation of scholars, a country with admirable social policies for social justice. Civil society organizations are active in rights and development. An electoral quota system ensures that 33 per cent of local governance is reserved for women. This has brought millions of women into the public decision making arena. Women occupy political leadership at national and state levels – Sonia Gandhi is considered by some the most powerful politician in India. Against these seemingly progressive trends, reported violence against women and their exploitation continues to increase.

In 2011 alone, the police reported 228,650 crimes against women, 24,226 of which were rape cases and 35,565 kidnapping and abduction. As in any country, far more cases remain unreported and, usually, little happens as a result of a complaint.

However, the brutal gang rape of the twenty-three year old physiotherapy student in Delhi shook India´s complacence. For the past month, hundreds and thousands of women and men have been braving winter weather, administrative hurdles and police brutality to protest crimes against women. Unlike the many earlier incidences of violence against women, and against socially excluded groups, the Delhi case has triggered a movement which spans different social groups and economic classes, and includes both women and men.

The middle class has come forward. This is a sign of hope. The protest has shaken the apathy of the administration as well as the middle class itself, which has began to look at misogynist violence and, to some extent, patriarchy in their own lives. The government has set up a committee headed by a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Verma, to examine legal reform and other strategies to address violence against women. The Indian Penal Code was drafted in 1860; it codifies colonial patriarchy. Marital rape is therefore legal, sexual assault is called ‘outraging the modesty’ of a woman, the minimum punishment for rape may be reduced to below seven years as long as the judge gives reasons. The Verma Committee received over 20,000 recommendations. However, even if new legislations is put in place, women, transgenders and male subjects of sexual violence may find it no easier to access justice.

Pervasive oppression

There is a need for much deeper analysis of social norms and values; a need for a radical mindset change. Can social change happen with the current patterns of social exclusion, exploitation and injustice? These invisibly permeate all pillars of the Indian democracy, be they the political system, administration, civil society, the media, law enforcement and even the judiciary. Gender oppression is internalised within the basic social building block of the family; female foetuses are aborted, young girls are not given medical attention, girls are forced into marriage while rape in marriage is not a crime.

Moreover, throughout India, violence against girls and women, their exploitation and oppression is reinforced because of caste, religious, ethnic identity. Equally, the response of politicians, the media and the judiciary are biased by these identities.

For example, during October-December 2012, over 20 cases of rape and gang-rape were reported in Haryana, the state adjacent to Delhi. Seventeen of the 20 women attacked were from the Dalit community – traditionally regarded as the lowest caste. One of the victims, a sixteen year old Dalit girl, committed suicide after being gang-raped. The father of another Dalit girl committed suicide when he could not register the case.

Violence against ethnic minority women perpetrated by the armed forces in India´s north east has been well documented. Soni Sori, an Adivasi teacher in Chattisgarh State, who was arrested under dubious allegations and remains in prison since 2011, has been called a prisoner of conscience by civil rights bodies.

Recognising social exclusion

Can India put in place a just legal justice system when the moral justice norms do not support it? Can the highly hierarchical socio-economic structure install a foolproof system as long as those communities considered to be “low caste” are relegated to provide cheap labour, without dignity, to benefit the dominant communities? Will we continue to neglect and not acknowledge the struggles of the Dalit and Tribal women and communities against violence and exploitation?

What is needed is an honest recognition of the underlying social exclusion and systemic economic exploitation on which mainstream India has built its economic success. What is needed is a political, social and economic system based on the constitutional values of equality, liberty, and fraternity, with justice for all. 

The question is now whether the movement will be strong and enduring enough to attack sexual and other violence regardless of social hierarchy, and demand justice for all those women and children who have been abused, regardless of whether they are urban or rural, middle class or from socially excluded castes, live in cities or remote forests, are assaulted in public or in their home.

Annie Namala, Director, Centre for Social Equity and Inclusion, Delhi;
Karuna Nundy, Advocate, Supreme Court of India, Delhi;
Gabriele Koehler, Development Economist, Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex

China – an economic miracle built on sadness

by Gabriele Koehler

China is admired as an economic miracle: it has produced double-digit GDP growth every year, for the past decade, and achieved the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty (measured at 1.25$ per person per day, PPP) ahead of time. In fact, given China´s population size, its progress on economic poverty alleviation has enabled the international development community to celebrate the achievement of its Millennium Development poverty goal, set for 2015, in 2010. Over the past decades, China has completely restructured its economy, raising rural and manufacturing productivities, and positioning itself as a leading global exporter.

But: there are many buts. Despite the country’s enormous economic growth, circa 200 million people in China remain under the $1.25 poverty line – which is, after all, extreme poverty, in a country that had once vowed to eradicate all poverty and class differences. Income inequality has increased visibly; statistically, the Gini coefficient is now around .48, compared to less than 0.3 in 1978.
While the high-powered well-heeled upper income quintiles enjoy a cosmopolitan life style, manual workers in rural areas and urban agglomerations are losing out. In the hutongs (old districts) of Beijing, for example, the simple one-storey courtyard flats lack any family privacy and have no plumbing or proper heating.

The Chinese economic miracle is largely owed to the approximately 250 million labour migrants. As has been well-documented, migrant workers in the special economic zones have only recently begun claiming decent wages after years of massive under-payment and dire work and living conditions. They still have no right to remain in the cities once their employment ends, because of the registration (hukou) system which ties a citizen to their place of birth.

China's children  
One less-reported facet of China’s economic miracle, directly related to migration, is the increasingly complex situation of children. On the one hand, stunting (low height-for-age) which is an outcome of chronic malnutrition, decreased from 33 per cent in 1990 to 11 per cent in 2005;  for urban children, it  dropped from 9 per cent in 1990 to 3 per cent in 2005, and among rural children from 41 per cent to 13 per cent. This is one strong indicator that children’s situations have improved – materially. The success can be attributed to a combination of improved health, water and sanitation, as well as to the higher rural incomes resulting from migrants´ remittances to their home towns and villages.

On the other hand, emotional deprivations are intensifying. Recently released data suggest that more than 25% of the country’s children are affected by migration. An estimated 55 million children are “left behind”: one or both parents work and live in another location. The child is left in the care of relatives, usually the paternal grandparents. The number of such children more than doubled between the year 2000 and 2008 – the years of enormous GDP growth. (see graph). Another 27 million children are migrants, accompanying their parents or migrating on their own.

These children are, on average,  better off financially than preceding generations. But equally importantly, they are affected by the absence of their parents, and often develop a severe sense of loss. Moreover, most are single children because of China’s draconian one-child policy. These are emotionally stunted, lonely childhoods.

Legislation for equality
China now needs to equalise its economic accomplishments. Several governmental efforts for this are underway. In the economic domain, they include wage increases and new regulations on limiting weekly working hours. They include policies, such as the “Go West” initiative in place for a decade now,  to attract domestic and foreign investment to the inner provinces so that jobs would travel to people rather than people having to migrate for jobs. There are job creation strategies, such as new types of “industrial parks”  which nurture the lucrative, professionally rewarding and less draining creative industries – IT, consumer goods design, the arts.

In the social policy domain, there is a minimum income guarantee allowance (dibao), and an effort to introduce universal health insurance. The registration (hukou) system is under review, so that urban health and education facilities might become accessible for the families of migrants; and there is also some reflection on liberalising the one child policy. Child poverty, acknowledged as distinct from adults’ poverty, is incorporated into the National Rural Poverty Reduction Strategy 2011-2020.
Both in policy circles and the country’s many impressive research centres, there is increasing recognition of the need to urgently address income poverty, in terms of population under the poverty line, as well as the growing differences between the richest and the poorest in terms of incomes and assets.

However, China’s main policy orientation  is still towards  “more growth”, with an ambition to  double per capita income by 2020, compared to 2010 levels (Hu Jintao statement at the November 2012 Communist  party congress). This will not solve China’s problems. What is needed is radical income and wealth redistribution. What is needed is transparency, political participation and open debate, and the guarantee of human rights (apart from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch reports, see Liao Yiwu´s interviews with activists from the  1989 Tian An Men. And what is needed is an environment where it is economically viable, and socially the norm, that children grow up in the care of their parents. In other words, it is imperative that economic growth is not bought with a young child’s sadness.

Gabriele Koehler is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies.

Failed ICT development projects: Sweeping it under the carpet and moving on?

by Inka Barnett

The use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has become increasingly widespread. Even in remote villages in developing countries there are more and more people who have access to a mobile phone. ICTs have the potential to make development projects more efficient, lower costs and improve the quality of service delivery. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the development community and national governments have enthusiastically embarked on ever more ICT projects in health, agriculture, e-governance, education and many more. There are certainly a number of very successful projects (see for example m-pesa). However, when I speak to development practitioners, I get the impression that there is an equal (or perhaps considerable higher?) number of failed projects. Unfortunately, only very few share their experiences of a failed ICT project publicly.

Last week I attended a talk by Ben Taylor from Daraja, a NGO in Tanzania, in which he bravely presented the lessons learned from his failed ICT project. Ben and his colleagues founded the Maji Matone (water drops) programme in rural Tanzania in 2010. The aim of their programme was to encourage citizens to put pressure on their local authorities to maintain and repair broken-down water pumps by using mobile phones. Using a simple SMS-message local communities were asked to report on the state of their water supply to the authorities. Local radio stations were simultaneously informed and followed-up the action the local water authorities would take in response to the text message.

 

The programme received a lot of attention nationally as well as internationally before it had even started. Unfortunately, the anticipated success did not come after the initial pilot phase of the project. The team had anticipated more than 3,000 text messages but received only 53! After Ben and his colleagues overcame their disappointment, they decided to actively investigate what went wrong.

They found the following reasons for failure:

1. Political reasons: The relationship between local communities and authorities is sensitively balanced in Tanzania and citizens are reluctant to report on their government.
2. Gender-specific reasons: Water collection is generally the responsibility of women and children who often do not have access to a mobile phone
3. Lack of electricity and limited mobile network coverage

Ben and his team decided to openly share the reasons for the failure of their project in talks, on the web (including social media such as Facebook and Twitter) and in leaflets.
Openly admitting failure is a relative new but very important development in international development. The annual failure report by the Canadian NGO engineers without borders is another admirable example.

The application of ICTs in development projects is still novel and there are a large number of new and additional variables that need to be considered in comparison to traditional development projects (e.g. challenges of private/public partnerships, development of sustainable business models, negotiations of complex intersections between technology and development). Given the current often slightly uncritical excitement about the potential of ICTs for development, expectations of donors and limited funding, reporting failure is a challenging subject. However, without through investigation of why and how an ICT development project failed and without honestly sharing these experiences, we will continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Social protection: asking too much of the individual?

Keetie Roelen (left) and Martina Ulrichs (right)

By Keetie Roelen and Martina Ulrichs

Social protection is now considered to be an integral part of the response to an array of different development issues. These range from reducing poverty and vulnerability to improving education and nutritional outcomes to increasing the levels of resilience to deal with droughts, unemployment and other shocks.

The toolkit for addressing these different problems includes social transfers, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) and public works, amongst others. The large majority of programmes, however, share a similar characteristic; they are designed based on the assumption that poverty is largely a result of individual constraints, such as low levels of education or physical assets, rather than due to structural factors. Social protection programmes address these individual constraints, thereby providing the poor with the necessary means to pull themselves out of poverty and improve their living conditions. But is this a safe assumption to make?

In a newly published Centre for Social Protection (CSP) working paper ‘Equal opportunities for all? – A critical analysis of Mexico’s Oportunidades’, we argue that despite the many positive contributions of social protection, too much of a focus on individuals or households might overlook the structural causes that keep them in poverty. If someone achieves higher levels of education, this could potentially help them to get a better job and higher income. But what if there is no school nearby? And if there is one, what if the quality of education is so poor that higher levels of education will not translate into skilled employment? The power of the individual in moving out of poverty only reaches so far, and social protection programmes need to be accompanied by more structural and macro-level changes that address the underlying causes of inequality.

The Oportunidades programme in Mexico and its impact on indigenous people is a case in point. Oportunidades is one of the most long-standing and reputable CCT programmes, providing poor households with cash transfers when they fulfil particular criteria with respect to education and health. Indeed, the programme has been found to have many positive impacts such as reducing poverty, increasing school enrolment and improving children’s nutritional outcomes. Its long-term objective is to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by incentivising parents to send their children to school and thus increase their employment opportunities and wage earning potential. Indigenous people in Mexico have consistently belonged to the poorest of the poor and are strongly represented among the programme beneficiaries. One out of four Oportunidades beneficiaries is indigenous.

The case of indigenous people in Mexico illustrates how the emphasis on the individual’s responsibility in moving out of poverty may be misplaced. Firstly, the educational services that indigenous people have access to are generally of low quality, limiting the extent to which they can build ‘human capital’. Secondly, low social mobility of indigenous people limits their employment opportunities. Finally, persistent wage differentials between indigenous and non-indigenous people limit the extent to which indigenous people can really benefit from paid and formal employment. For indigenous people to benefit from Oportunidades to the same extent as non-indigenous people, and as intended by the programme, structural changes are required that go beyond the individual’s level of responsibility or reach.

Programmes like Oportunidades have been milestones in providing social protection to the poor. They can however only be effective in combating poverty in the long-term if they go hand in hand with more comprehensive social policy agendas that go beyond the individual and address the root causes of inequality and poverty.