The Practice of a New Paradigm: Development Cooperation among Fragile States

Time and time again, the debate on aid and cooperation receives the news of paradigms being changed, of new actors entering the field, threatening or heralding the breaking of the old rules and the instatement of new ones. “Traditional” donors, especially those that seek to place (or keep) themselves in the leadership of either financial donations (such as the World Bank, OECD-DAC,…) or development thought (here again the World Bank and OECD-DAC but also countries like the US and the UK) have recently devoted resources into academic research to better understand the role of the Rising Powers in Development.

In the shade, however, an indeed revolutionary way of cooperating for development is taking shape. Stemming from the OECD-DAC’s acknowledgement that development aid to “fragile states” was facing unsurmountable challenges and successive failures, given the specific nature of these countries and under the leadership of the fledgling country of Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone and Liberia, a new group was formed. The G7+ group of conflict afflicted countries started from their own acknowledgement of fragility. It started also with the affirmation that such specific status, never experienced by the almost totality of donor countries, made the G7+ countries the “experts” in their own development path. This was a powerful statement! It also made each G7+ country a solidary peer of the others and potentially, given its own capacities, history and learnings, an actor of development cooperation. This, even if eventually borrowing inspiration in the Non-Aligned Movement, is, indeed a different paradigm in development cooperation! In the last months, Guinea-Bissau experienced such cooperation from a fellow G7+ country, Timor-Leste.

G7+ cooperation in practice

In the 12^th of April 2012, democratic legitimacy in Guinea-Bissau was disrupted by a military coup. Most of the international community that promptly reacted (including the UN, African Union, US, Brazil, Russia, China and Lusophone Community) did not recognize validity to the exposed arguments for the coup, nor to the “transitional government”. However, ECOWAS did recognize it, creating a diplomatic stand-off. Only in January 2013 and in what was probably the first coordinated act of the Lusophone Community (CPLP), ECOWAS and the “transition regime” were driven to accept former Timorese President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate José Ramos Horta to lead the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Guinea-Bissau. Arguably, the Timorese experience of transition into regular political functioning after a 2006 civil strife that almost victimized Ramos Horta himself, was one of the reasons for his nomination.

Just recently, in the weekend of May 18^th 2014, two years after the coup, an intense, peaceful and with record participation period of parliamentary and presidential elections was completed, returning Guinea-Bissau to institutional normalcy, without significant political contestation of the results. Throughout the preparation, most of the public narrative mimicked that of Timor: the need for openness between parties; the right to peaceful campaigning, highlighting contending parties’ rallies that occurred simultaneously, at close distance… and in peace; the need for transparent electoral process but also to an acceptance of the results by all parties and the military. During the same period, a Timorese blog, linked with the Timorese Presidency reflected on the governance aspects of regimes led by military juntas, using Latin American countries as case studies. Timor-Leste was probably reflecting on a process it was trying to assist.

A true diplomacy of solidarity

The process is just in its beginning. Meanwhile, Timor-Leste will lead CPLP from mid-2014 and is already intensifying the diplomatic and cooperation ties with other Portuguese Speaking Nations in Africa and even Portugal, the former colonizer, to which they offered to buy some of its rampant national debt (in a humbling turn of events for the European country). This small country’s diplomacy of solidarity, an expression that Brazilian President Lula da Silva used so many times, is taking shape. It is not a proud display of “successes” to share, like Brazil is doing, be it Bolsa Familia, ProSavana or the new project World Without Poverty, “a joint initiative focused on learning from the implementation of and innovations in poverty reduction programs in Brazil and sharing lessons from Brazil’s experience with the rest of the world”. It is not a “mutual benefit” Chinese model that invests in economic infrastructure such is recovering and widening railway routes linking original sites of raw natural resources to main ports (a model as old as industrial era colonialism). It isn’t conditional, paternalistic, nor seeks to impose the “right process of development” as so many times the “traditional” “Northern” aid model still finds itself being. It stems from shared challenges, the recognition that only positive collaborative relations can strengthen countries “in development” and the willingness to assist when need occurs, as the Timorese Resistance was assisted, namely by the African Portuguese Speaking countries and later Portugal and Brazil in the fight for independence.

At that time, some of the poorer countries in Africa assisted a weak and silenced effort of resistance that ultimately won. That ethos of cooperation and solidarity widens now the bonds between Timor, other CPLP countries and the G7+ countries. Maybe, this is a paradigm worth to learn more about… and foster.

Ricardo Goulão Santos is a PhD candidate working on education and employability in a post-conflict setting within the IDS Conflict, Violence and Development of the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction research team. He is also a visiting researcher at the National University of Timor Lorosa’e (UNTL).

Reflections on the CSP Conference on Graduation and Social Protection in Rwanda

This is the ninth in the Graduation and Social Protection blog series 

Last week I attended the Centre for Social Protection conference on Graduation and Social Protection, co-hosted by the Ministry of Local Government of the Government of Rwanda, with support from Irish Aid, UNICEF and DFID. I would like to share some of my personal reflections on the conference. They are by no means representative of the number of issues that were discussed, and I recommend reading Stephen Devereux's  comprehensive ‘Learning Insights and Action Points’ on the conference website.

Graduation describes the moment when beneficiaries of a transfer programme (cash, food or assets) pass a threshold  and manage to sustain a certain level of wellbeing over a period of time after exiting the programme. The rationale is that the transfers and complementary interventions (skills training, microloans) will allow beneficiaries to move out of poverty by increasing and maintaining their income generating potential and productivity and become resilient to shocks. The concept was pioneered by BRAC in Bangladesh and has been adopted by programmes such as the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia and Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP) in Rwanda.

Here are my take-away points  from the conference:

1. Beneficiaries are often still poor after graduating

Despite some success stories, most 'graduates' are still poor after graduation. Maybe they managed to move from extreme poverty into moderate poverty, or from food insecurity into food sufficiency. But they are still poor and in many cases they might fall back because their context hasn't changed. They are still vulnerable to shocks, they might still have limited access to markets and basic services and in most cases after leaving the programme they no longer have access to a social safety net.

Taking into account the limitations of any single programme to address the multiple causes of poverty, maybe we shouldn't punch above our weight and claim that livelihood promotion programmes can achieve sustainable graduation?  Maybe we need to be more realistic, and call programmatic thresholds 'exits from the programme', rather than 'graduation thresholds', as the VUP programme in Rwanda already does.

2. Systemic approach: yes, but let's not overburden social protection

The challenge seems to lie in drawing a line between where social protection ends and where 'other' interventions start, e.g. supplying basic services, facilitating access to labour markets, promoting inclusive economic growth. As one participant said, "social protection cannot become the solution for all of governments' failures".  It is one part of the graduation puzzle and incomplete without the rest. We need to figure out how the different pieces fit together.

This line however should not in itself represent a point of no return, when people graduate permanently out of social protection. It rather demarcates responsibilities and highlights complementarities  between programmes and sectors.  Social protection is required on a permanent basis to help people manage the range of risks they encounter throughout a lifetime.

3. Learning lessons..

...across actors: The presentations covered a range of different approaches, from small NGO-led pilots to nation-wide government programmes across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Important lessons can be drawn from these cases on what works and what doesn't. NGOs can test different models, provide more extensive, individualised support to beneficiaries, even if only on a short-term basis. Governments are looking at more long-term and scalable approaches that are financially sustainable and reach a larger group of beneficiaries. Pooling the experiences and evidence and sharing lessons will help to design programmes that improve the chances of poor households to climb up the ladder.

...within programmes: As one participant said "Let's focus on doing it well. Let's focus on getting programme delivery right, on time, as promised." Delivering a transfer programme in itself is already quite challenging. One consultant working on the PSNP in Ethiopia told me that at the higher policy level people are discussing a comprehensive social protection framework, whilst at the district level there isn't enough capacity to allow the programme to work as it is. Comprehensive approaches are important, but  maybe we need to focus on delivering well first, before jumping ahead and complicating things?

...from beneficiaries: One panellist said "No offence to all you academics, but we do a lot of thinking for people who live poverty 24 hours a day". Much of our discussions focus on how and who to target, what kind of support to give and where to set the benchmark. Whilst these are all important issues that are part of the reality of programmes, it often distracts from focusing on the beneficiaries and understanding the range of challenges they face every day to 'graduate out of poverty'.

Thanks to the organisers and participants for sharing their experiences and making this conference possible! 

Martina Ulrichs is an independent consultant based in Ottawa, Canada.  This post was originally published in the IDS Alumni blog.

Generation Nutrition: We have the knowledge to stop children dying from Acute Malnutrition NOW

Last week, a new campaign, Generation Nutrition, was launched in the UK parliament calling for an end to child deaths from undernutrition.

Currently, child deaths from undernutrition represent 45 per cent of all under five deaths, something this campaign aims to address. There is no doubt about the overwhelming progress made in terms of child survival. The under 5 mortality rate has almost halved in the last 25 years, from 12 million children dying before their 5th birthday in 1990 to 6.6 million in 2012 (WHO). However progress to reduce child deaths from undernutrition, especially severe acute malnutrition, has stagnated in many countries. Undernutrition is different from hunger, and requires a separate and targeted approach. 

Using community based management to treat acute malnutrition

One in 12 children in the world suffer from acute malnutrition, which is a potentially life threatening condition caused by a number of factors acting together including a lack of food, poor sanitation, and disease. However, recent years have witnessed major progress in terms of our ability to treat severe acute malnutrition. Using community based management of acute malnutrition, most children can be treated as outpatients, affordably and effectively. Despite this, treatment is still not reaching most children.

Director of Food and Nutrition at the Ministry of Health, Sierra Leone, Aminata Shamit Koroma spoke about the high levels of severe acute malnutrition in Sierra Leone. In Sierra Leone 7 per cent of children under five suffer from severe acute malnutrition. She hopes that Generation Nutrition will support the country to reach the goal they have set for themselves, to reduce rates of undernutrition to 2 per cent by 2020. She talked about how community management of acute malnutrition programmes were initially introduced in only 20 health centres in four districts but now they are operating in 423 centres, out of 1200 health centres in the country and they are hoping that by the end of this year they will be able to increase that number to 600.

Power of political will and civil society in pushing this agenda forward

At the campaign launch event, we heard from Jean-Michel Grand, Executive director of Action Against Hunger UK. He highlighted that despite the fact that we know what needs to be done, and that treatment has been shown to have an 84% per cent success rate, only 1 in 10 children are who need treatment can access it. Grand emphasised the importance of political will in addressing undernutrition and called on governments to move away from viewing acute malnutrition as only a humanitarian issue.


Jane Edmonson, Head of Human Development at the Department for International Development (DFID), spoke about DFID’s investment in programmes to prevent and treat severe acute malnutrition in many countries (including Malawi, Ethiopia, and Kenya). On this subject, she talked of the importance of civil society for holding DFID to its promises in reducing acute malnutrition worldwide.

Augustin Flory, head of Nutrition at the Child’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) highlighted the long-term consequences of malnutrition for an individual. Ultimately, a malnourished child will likely attend fewer years of school, earn less as an adult and will be less lively to escape poverty. This not only impacts an individual, but also the family and even a nation.

Almost a million children die each year from malnutrition, we can be the generation to end this, if we act now. Learn more and sign the petition.


by Kat Pittore

The Graduation and Social Protection conference: What did we learn?

This is the eighth in the Graduation and Social Protection blog series

The Graduation and Social Protection conference closed in Kigali on Thursday 8 May, with a series of 46 ‘Learning Insights and Action Points’ distilled from the 10 sessions.  (These will be posted on the conference website soon.)  Key conclusions included the following:

1. Graduation that is defined as exiting from a social protection programme after a certain time period, or after reaching a threshold level of income or assets, risks having people falling back into poverty when the support is withdrawn and the next shock hits them.
2. Graduation that is achieved by combining social protection and livelihood development (such as asset transfers and access to finance) has a greater chance of providing people with sustainable livelihoods after they leave the programme.
3. The most effective approaches require cross-sectoral coordination, so that households do not exit from social protection support into ‘no support’, but instead move from social assistance to accessing a broader range of social services and economic opportunities.
4. The linear pathway to graduation that is implied in many graduation model programmes fails to recognise that livelihoods are not linear, and that the primary functions of social protection are to provide life-long insurance and to build resilience over the life-cycle.
5. The achievements of successful graduation programmes should be put into context.  Most participants move from extreme poverty to moderate poverty – so they remain poor – they remain self-employed, and many ultra-poor people will never have the potential to graduate.
6. Stakeholders have different attitudes to graduation.  While some believe that graduation is essential to reduce dependency and maximise poverty reduction impacts, others believe that the focus on graduation distracts attention away from the core functions of social protection.
7. Political commitment is crucial for programmes to succeed, but too much political pressure can result in premature graduation, and can undermine the government’s commitment and responsibility to provide basic welfare and safety nets to all citizens and residents.
8. A disaggregated and context-specific approach to social protection and graduation is called for.  Social protection systems should provide a permanent safety net for some poor and vulnerable people, and an opportunity to graduate out of poverty for others.

An innovative feature of the conference was the addition of a one-day workshop on Friday 9 May, organised by the Social Protection Sector Working Group for Government of Rwanda officials who are engaged with social protection.  The Conference Directors interacted with these officials about the implications of the graduation conference for social protection thinking and practice in Rwanda.  This workshop provided a rare opportunity for the deliberations of an international conference to be taken forward into implications for policy and programmes, discussed with and by national policy-makers, immediately after the conference ended. 

Stephen Devereux is Co-Director of the international conference on ‘Graduation and Social Protection’, which was co-hosted by the Government and Rwanda and the Centre for Social Protection from the UK Institute of Development Studies, with financial support from Irish Aid, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and UNICEF. 

Stephen Devereux is inviting participants to comment on his closing remarks at the conference: Learning Insights and Action Points. Comments should be sent to s.devereux@ids.ac.uk
 

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Nigeria’s COPE CCT programme and its ‘premature’ graduation strategy, any hope for participants’ human capital development?

This is the seventh in the Graduation and Social Protection blog series

In recent weeks, Nigeria has occupied global headlines due to a number of good, bad and ugly events. Arguably, the ‘good’ event was the announcement that Nigeria is now Africa’s largest economy. Among the ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ events, the continued attacks by ‘Boko Haram’ insurgents in the Northern part of the country, not least the unfortunate abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno state, by suspected members of the Islamic fundamentalist sect.

Yet, underneath these good, bad and ugly headlines, there lies extreme poverty and underdevelopment. With rates of extreme poverty estimated to be as high as 60%, the vulnerabilities experienced amongst extremely poor households continue to rise. This is despite attempts by state and non-state actors to address these vulnerabilities through social protection programmes (SPP), such as the ‘In Care of the People’ (COPE) Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme. While several factors contribute to this unfortunate reality, the practice of prematurely ‘graduating’ participants out of programmes like COPE that is a major factor that keeps extremely poor people in their vulnerable conditions. 

Where did COPE come from?

Nigeria’s debt relief agreement with the Paris Club and World Bank in 2005 came with concerns about what the country would do with the ‘gains’ from the debt relief. The creditors were adamant that Nigeria should make ‘pro-poor investments’ towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Thus, following the ‘success’ of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America, the Nigerian government established the COPE CCT programme in 2007, aiming to reduce vulnerabilities and intergenerational poverty in extremely poor households in Nigeria by targeting mostly female-headed households with children of school age.

The COPE CCT programme pays a monthly Basic Income Transfer (BIG) of approximately $10 per child with a cap of $33 for four or more children for 12 months to a designated family member. This transfer is based on the condition that participating households ensure their children maintain at least 80% attendance in school and take part in routine health immunization programmes provided by the government. Participating households are only enrolled in the programme for one year and are expected to ‘graduate’ afterwards – that is, exit the programme and live (above their vulnerabilities) happily ever after. A Poverty Reduction Accelerator Investment (PRAI) fund of approximately $560 is given to each household at the end of their one-year participation. The PRAI fund is for establishing a business or trade with the intention that it will generate income for households and subsequently sustain them upon their graduation from the programme.

COPE’s ‘premature’ graduation strategy and human capital (under)development

Based on findings from fieldwork conducted in Nigeria on COPE’s implementation in three communities in Ibadan, Oyo state, Southwest Nigeria, between May and October 2013, one can argue the programme assists households in purchasing basic household items in the short-term. However, with respect to long-term development of the human capital of children in particular, COPE is unlikely to make any significant contributions. This is because the programme only lasts for one year and the structural problems of poor education and health infrastructure exists in many parts of Nigeria. The PRAI fund is also too low to effectively establish and operate an income generating trade in Nigeria owing to the high cost of production and challenging macroeconomic environment in the country. Some of the households who participated in the programme therefore remain exposed to the same, or even worse, vulnerabilities regardless of their participation in the programme.

I suggest that by extending the participation period and providing better support to households over and above the payment of the PRAI, COPE can hope to provide better human capital development outcomes. As it stands, the design and implementation of the programme has predominantly negative implications for the long-term human capital development of participating households whose vulnerabilities to various shocks remain high within the Nigerian context. Therefore, the government and its development partners need to urgently rethink COPE’s graduation strategy.

Olabanji Akinola is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and International Development Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

This blog post is part of a series for the international conference on ‘Graduation and Social Protection’ which is co-hosted by the Government and Rwanda and the Centre for Social Protection from the UK Institute of Development Studies, with financial support from Irish Aid, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and UNICEF. The content of this blog series reflects the opinions of each individual author, and not necessarily those of IDS, UNICEF, DFID, IRISHAID or the Government of Rwanda.

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