Tackling rural poverty, together

Kevin Cleaver, Ph.D.

Director of Agriculture and Rural Development, World Bank, Washington DC

Cleaver: Donor coordination at headquarters must also find expression at the country level

Nater: What had gone wrong?

Cleaver: We started examining the 60% of projects that we got right to see which ingredients were missing in the ones that went bad. Along with other donor agencies engaged in the same self-examination, we discovered that we had been much too focused on government services.

Agriculture is a private business, and farmers, however small, are private businessmen. Input suppliers and processors, too, are private. We in the donor community, perhaps because we’re all bureaucrats ourselves, had treated agriculture as if it were an affair of governments. We were setting up our programmes as public-sector affairs. Of course, it’s not about taking government out of agriculture, but about ‘right-sizing’ the role of government. Government programmes can’t just serve government bureaucrats with nice cars, computers and air-conditioning. Their purpose is to serve farmers and farming.

The other thing we decided to do differently was to stop ignoring or criticising the agricultural revolution in rich countries and start asking how we, as donors, could adapt some of its technology and supply-chain management techniques to benefit poor farmers. This, and the drive to reinvigorate public investment in rural infrastructure and improve land administration in many developing countries, was the main focus of the World Bank’s new agriculture and rural development strategy in 2003. Other donor agencies soon followed suit with new strategies of their own.

But were the new strategies coordinated?
We started in 2003 presenting the World Bank’s new agricultural and rural development strategy in various forums, mainly to my counterparts, the directors of agriculture and rural development in other donor organisations. And what struck us was the sheer number of major players in this field. There were some 30 donor agencies doing the same thing, not just the bilateral bodies but also the international financial institutions — the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the IFAD, the European Commission, the Canadians, the Japanese — not to speak of major NGOs like CARE and Oxfam.

What I and my colleagues realized is that we had been part of the problem. Kenya in the 1980s was a good example. Each donor would come in with its own strategy for agricultural extension, its own agricultural credit system, its own view on what local government policy should be on subsidies and taxes. The French, the British, the Americans, all had different views, based on their different cultures and historical experiences. Each of us, the World Bank included, introduced our own separate approach, and the net result was havoc and confusion and waste. Most of the donor projects couldn’t be sustained after the donors left. Many recipient countries wound up hopping from one donor to the next, becoming cemeteries for failed projects.

Are donors becoming part of the solution now?
My counterparts and I got together and said, given that we’re inventing new agricultural and rural development strategies, let’s admit our past errors and do something better. We needed a new mechanism, an alliance not only to coordinate our overall approach to the new strategies we had started to work on, but also to make sure that, this time, our desire to coordinate at the top would find expression at the country level. This led to the creation of the Global Donor Platform.

And that’s how we identified our four pilot countries, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Tanzania and Cambodia, where we could act immediately and make sure our colleagues and subordinates who work there on the ground actually implement a coordinated work programme, jointly finance projects and encourage government programmes that are sustainable after the donors have left.