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Michael Wales, Ph.D.
Co-Chair, Global Donor Platform for Rural Development
Principal Adviser, Investment Centre, Food & Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO)
Good management of public spending leads to bigger MoA budgets
Nater: Do the new aid modalities mean less work than before for donors in the field?
Wales: Not less work, different work. The rules are changing. One new challenge for donors is how to package technical support. More than ever, developing countries need the transfer of specific skills. Whereas before technical support was wrapped into each project, now it must be delivered separately from the budget-support dollars. Another challenge is the ability of our Ministry of Agriculture partners to obtain funds. We as development institutions should now focus on increasing their capacity to do so. In the past, they had the local representative of, say, the World Bank or DFID go and lobby the Ministry of Finance on their behalf to claim their share of the budget to support an agriculture project. Now, they have to do that themselves, in competition with the Ministries of Health, Education, Public Works and others. Our experience is that the Ministries of Agriculture are often the weakest at this game. They do need our support.
Why?
Ministries of Agriculture have the most difficult stories to tell, and the most complex types of investment to make. They don’t do tangible, measurable things like build roads or schools or health centres. Instead, they perform a whole complex of economic, social and institutional tasks that are difficult to account for and deliver. Unless they are better able to account for the way they use their resources, they will face scepticism and budget cuts by the Ministry of Finance. Hence the vital importance of good public expenditure management. Under the new aid modalities, there is no guarantee that agriculture will even get as much money as it is getting now. This is a major concern.
Are you saying that the new aid modalities are bad news for the rural sector?
No, but the implications of the new aid modalities for agriculture are huge. They will highlight the weaknesses of what we have always known to be a weak sector. Typically, the best and brightest civil servants haven’t gone out to rough it in the bush and talk to farmers, but rather into health or engineering, where there’s more social prestige and money to construct hospitals or dams. So we have to invest in people and training, and incentives have to be created. We need to help provide an environment in which people can set up companies that deliver agricultural knowledge to farmers.
“Ministries of Agriculture have the most difficult stories to tell, and the most complex types of investment to make.”
How, for example?
Recently we had a consortium of British consultants visit the FAO Investment Centre to enquire about doing more business with us in Africa. They said they were having great difficulties finding ex-colonial, shorts-and-white-socks British experts to do the work. These men have either retired or they’ve made their money and aren’t interested. There isn’t a generation of young people doing agricultural extension any more. Instead, the young ones are out working with NGOs and needy children, or doing tsunami relief. So the consulting companies are having to develop that cadre of people at the national level. Instead of looking for Brits to work in, say, Uganda, they’re looking for the Kampala taxi-driver with a nose for business and a decent education.
How could the donors help?
Well, if the donors made some capacity-building resources available, we could put that into an experienced Western consulting company to work out a business plan with African entrepreneurs who could form a company to train providers of home-made extension services. That would be exciting. If you could do that, you could really scale it up, and at a fraction of the cost it takes to hire and deploy consultants from Western countries, even if they’re volunteers.
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