Tackling rural poverty, together

Kevin Cleaver, Ph.D.

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

“All major donors will eventually join the Platform.”

Nater: What’s dangerous about sending a cheque?

Cleaver: The first danger is that the cheque gets spent on something else, like a new airport, military hardware or a presidential palace. Or maybe it just gets stolen. I have seen this happen. Cheque-writing is a hazardous practice.

My view, quite controversial here in the World Bank, is that cheque-writing in support of locally-owned poverty-reduction strategies works best in middle-income countries that are true democracies with real transparency and good governance — Estonia or Bulgaria, for example, where I’ve seen it work very well.

The cheque-writing approach works least well, or not at all, in the least-developed countries that, ironically, most need the money. The institutions and structures are simply lacking.

In Nicaragua, too, the safeguards need more work, along with their whole new sector-wide process. It’s a very ambitious, mainly public-sector driven approach called PRORURAL and I have some serious concerns with the plan as it was presented to me last January.

However, on the positive side, the Nicaraguan government has recognised that they need their own comprehensive, coherent productive rural sector programme, and not just a hodgepodge of whatever the donors want to finance. Together with many of the 22 donor agencies on the ground, they’ve begun to take initial steps towards significant changes in their productive rural strategies, and a more coherent sectoral expenditure programme. That makes them an ally of the Global Donor Platform. But achieving these ambitious goals needs concerted, demonstrated commitment by both the Nicaraguan government and donors to change the way they do business, and a more central role for the private sector.

How about the Global Donor Platform’s plans for a Code of Conduct for rural development?
We need some broad guidelines with relevance and application for all countries, but we’re just at the beginning. Yes, there are some universal principles we can put down on paper, not just for our staff and colleagues but also for partner-countries, our clients. But we have to walk a fine line here. Many colleagues complain that principles are too abstract, that they can’t cover the full variety of existing conditions. Critics will ask, how can you develop guidelines or a code of conduct with relevance for countries as diverse as, say, Nicaragua and Russia? General guidelines will need a great deal of adaptation to specific situations on the ground. And guidelines must make apparent to field-based donor staff, especially those that don’t yet have wide experience in different countries, that a good, agriculture-sector programme is not just for the Ministry of Agriculture.

What is the future of the Global Donor Platform?
The Global Donor Platform will eventually include all major donors. Together, our knowledge and experience base is huge, and we can now tap into that, as opposed to just into our own institutional bases. The first fruit of this is the Platform’s joint donor narrative paper The role of agriculture and rural development in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. We did this together. It’s a very broad framework, not a blueprint for getting things done but a common global vision of how agriculture and rural development play into the livelihoods of people, what the broad objectives are and how they could be met. That has given me confidence that we can now take the next step, which is to look at the modalities, at best practices, at the ‘how-to’, and even agree on how to adapt and apply these things at the local level, on a case-by-case basis.

How much more will it cost to do rural development right?
The total amount of all worldwide aid spending in 2004, from all sources, amounted to a little more than $75 billion. A good chunk of this goes to rural development. But we could make much, much better use of this money. Better coordination between donors, a reduction of waste and more transparency in the ways that we and our partner-countries operate would all have a big pay-off, while staying within the $75 billion ceiling. I know that many, including Jeffrey Sachs and the UN Hunger Task Force, on which I have served, are calling for vastly expanded aid. I don’t think it is very wise, or even very useful, to vastly expand our aid amounts. I think we have to show efficiency gains first. We have to show a reduction in waste and an increased project success rate. We must first make sure these various aid budgets are being used well and that there is hard evidence of that, in independent evaluations. Only then should we ask for more money.

More on the Agriculture and Rural Development Department of the World Bank Group

Photos: Melissa Williams, ARD, World Bank

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Response by Mr. Vagn Mikkelsen, Consultant, Directorate-General for Sectoral Policies, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAGFOR), Managua, Nicaragua

Kevin Cleaver emphasizes the need to involve the private sector, NGOs and farmers more directly in sector strategy and plan formulation. He also made comments to that effect during his visit to Nicaragua earlier this year. This is a very relevant point, but we must remember that Ministries of Agriculture are generally ill-equipped and unprepared to manage consultation processes.

Thus, the first attempt at consultation carried out in Nicaragua during 2004 may appear to have lacked content and coverage. But it was still a first attempt and others are now underway, focused on particular themes in the context of the Nicaraguan PRORURAL SWAp. In other countries, for example Bolivia, the Ministry of Agriculture faced the same problem, but things got better in the second round. As confidence is created, the consultation process improves.

One issue not raised by Kevin is the political context. The road to a SWAp is very much a political one. Even producer organisations have to get used to discussing political objectives. Hence the need to widen the consultation process to other organisations, including co-operatives and NGOs. We also need to reach down further to the local level, because some national producer organisations are not necessarily representative.

Finally, Kevin says that the best-behaved donors are the smallest ones. I think that among the smallest ones, some are better than others, and there are some small donors who do not at all behave as we would like. They are as bad as the large agencies, though obviously they have little clout. But they do create a lot of problems for the Ministry of Agriculture, for example within the context of harmonisation and alignment, budgeting and financial procedures.

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