Tackling rural poverty, together

Philip Mikos

Head of the Environment and Rural Development Unit, DG DEV, European Commission, Brussels

Our next job: bringing rural development down to the local level

Nater: What are European Commission priorities in rural development today?

Mikos: Following on from our 2005 report, EU Strategy for Africa, we’re developing a specific agricultural strategy for Africa, working with the World Bank, DFID and others. This will build on what some donors and Member States are already doing, and it should be ready in time for the 10th European Development Fund cycle, which gets underway in 2008. Another extremely interesting topic is the actual, practical implementation of rural development. Much of the work we’ve done on it so far has been theoretical. That’s been helpful in gaining a better understanding of rural development, but it hasn’t greatly increased the actual impact. We know rural development is very complex but we’re not very good at simplifying and implementing it. We need to pass the message down to our economists, desk officers, programme managers and others that there are simple ways of tackling rural development, without investing in complex strategies that try to cover all eventualities. That’s our next job, bringing rural development down to the local level.

Other donors seem to be doing the opposite, trying to pull rural development know-how up from the local level into headquarters.
The problem for me is not listening to the rural development experts in our offices and delegations. It’s more about increasing their relative weight and importance in the eyes of their colleagues and, of course, in the eyes of the partner-government contacts with whom they discuss policy. The changes going on now in donor-government practices offer us a new opportunity.

There’s one area where developing-country governments have changed substantially, and that’s decentralisation. But although a large number of countries in Africa are now decentralised, their tax collection is not. The result is lots of new local administrators with no resources. That’s a recipe for disaster, because staff quality stays low and there is temptation to take money from whomever you can get it.

This is where we need to work. We can reinvent rural development here, based on this new scenario. What we must do is to help cultivate systemic links between local administrators and their intended local beneficiaries, to work out together how local administration will plan its activities and spend its budget. Until local administrations have a transparent system for allocating funds based on priorities agreed with local communities, they will get no substantial budget from the national finance ministry or treasury, and there will always be failure at the local level.

But how can donors help local administrations, when the trend is to go the other way, withdraw from the field and work with central government on top-down planning and general budget support?
This isn’t an area where donors can intervene directly, because it’s at micro-management level. But we can help local and international NGOs to play a huge role here, building the awareness of local communities about decentralisation, helping to ensure effective communications between civic groups, local administration and central government, and training local officials in effective administration.

What we donors must ensure, through our work with central government, is that planning, financing, accounting and monitoring are reliable at the local level. This way, we’d create significant new absorptive capacity for funds. And by reinforcing decentralisation, we’d also be giving local administrators a real role in the construction of civil society. And, by the way, this change will allow donors to provide systemic funding through the central budget to local territorial development. That’s a financing tool which is expanding rapidly and which, for the moment, cannot be applied to support rural development.