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Kevin Cleaver, Ph.D.
Director of Agriculture and Rural Development, World Bank, Washington DC
“We need to rally our people at the country level around the idea that they’re all working for the same client.”
Nater: Why is coordination so difficult?
Cleaver: We, the managers of rural development and agriculture in the donor agencies, need to rally our people at the country level around the idea that they’re all working for the same client, the partner-country, and not just for the World Bank, or the GTZ or DFID, for example. And, in so doing, we all need to work together as a team. In the end, we’re all going to be better off, because our joint programmes will be more sustainable after initial financing ends.
How to do that? I’m now of the opinion that we, the donor-agency directors of rural development and agriculture, will have to get involved in countries personally and directly. What I saw in Nicaragua in February this year has convinced me of that.
I went there at the behest of the Global Donor Platform, so I was wearing a multi-donor hat, not the World Bank hat. Now, the Platform picked Nicaragua because it’s a very poor country and because, or so we were told, it had relatively good donor cooperation. This looked like low-hanging fruit to us, something we could set up as a model for good donor collaboration.
“We, the donor-agency directors of rural development and agriculture, will have to get involved in countries personally and directly… The need is very great and is only going to be met when senior managers go to these places and knock heads together.”
The truth of the matter is, the donor representatives in Nicaragua do talk to each other very nicely and have lots of personal contacts. But in terms of action, it’s business as usual. Everybody has their own little project — the Germans, USAID, the World Bank, and so on. They’re not acting in a coordinated, collaborative manner, but very much as donor agencies did in the past. I’m very concerned about that.
Who are the worst offenders?
The best-behaved donors are the smallest ones, like the Swiss, the Finns or the Danes. The Finnida representative in Nicaragua was disarmingly honest about why: she told me that the smaller donor countries like hers didn’t have much of a history in Nicaragua. They worked together with other donors because they had nothing to lose, whereas the Germans and Americans, for example, had been there a long time and had big projects on the ground, meaning they had a lot to lose by ceding sovereignty and sharing collective control of projects with other donors.
It’s a problem of size, too. The Finnida representative benefits back at headquarters in Helsinki if she can announce collaboration with the World Bank, whereas the Bank representative’s manager back home is likely to ask, “Who the hell is Finnida?”.
It struck me that the need is very great and is only going to be met when senior managers go to these places and knock heads together. And that’s what I did. I admitted to the Nicaraguans that the donor agencies were part of the problem. I said to them, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have to behave differently. Otherwise the evaluators of our new strategy will say the same things about us donors that we are saying about our fathers, that we’ve botched it because we were unable to see past our own narrow institutional and personal needs and unable to work together as a team, assisting our client.”
How successful have country ownership and direct budget support been so far?
If you want ownership by both the government and the civil society it represents, then the old donor-driven projects have to become a thing of the past. We have to ask the government, with maximum participation of the private sector and NGOs and the farmers themselves, to come up with their own programme. In an ideal world, all the donors would have to do then is to send a cheque to fund their programme, hence the notion of direct budget support. But there are problems with this approach.
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