Tackling rural poverty, together

Jim Harvey

Head of Profession, Livelihoods and Environment Groups, Department for International Development (DFID), London

Variety in Platform membership makes common advocacy a challenge

Nater: What should be the focus of the Global Donor Platform’s advocacy?

Harvey: To my mind, the Platform's greatest strength is getting people around a table to discuss and resolve issues. I personally feel most comfortable with the Platform’s harmonisation and lesson-learning objectives.

Different organisations, whether bilaterals or multilaterals like the World Bank and European Commission, have different operating cultures and core preoccupations, and these are reflected in their approach to the Platform. We’re all looking for slightly different things. Among Platform members, the relative importance of ‘agriculture’ and even ‘rural’ varies from organisation to organisation.

Obviously, an organisation with ‘agriculture’ in its name, such as the FAO, finds it easy to advocate for agriculture. And the World Bank — at least under its former President — seemed to encourage competition between departments and open lobbying for attention and budget.

But it's different for bilaterals?
Bilateral donors are government agencies. There is a corporate ‘line’ that must be followed. Some bilaterals may still tolerate sectoral lobbying by their own staff, but others, including DFID, don’t.

This doesn't mean I don't welcome the Platform's advocacy role. This is how the world works. Some people lobby for ‘urban’ as if ‘rural’ was the competition. But we need to show that ‘rural’ is in the interest of poverty reduction and not just sectoral pleading.

We’ve done a lot of work in DFID on rural-urban linkages — in part to break down the artificiality of working on ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ in separate camps. This doesn’t mean that the particular needs of rural and urban poor people — which are different — don’t each need special attention. But getting that attention shouldn’t be a competition for who has the best brochure or the best ‘statistic’.

You say bilaterals do their own lobbying. But don’t they share many of the objectives of the wider development community?
Of course they do. DFID is very much signed up to The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, March 2005 and the primacy of the country-led approach. In fact, I’d say that the country-led approach is DFID’s main driver in 70% of all cases. But bilaterals have to live with the tensions that can exist between a fully country-led approach on the one hand and, on the other, the imperatives of our own domestic political constituencies, as expressed by through ministers, Parliament or general public interest.

For example?
Our Minister [Editor's note: Secretary of State for International Development Hilary Benn] became very concerned a year or so ago that DFID wasn’t doing enough about water. The answer that came back from our country offices was that they were pursuing a country-led approach, following what the respective governments had said they wanted to do. They said they were harmonising with other donors, and water (and sanitation) wasn’t something that DFID had a particular comparative advantage in. Minister Benn came back right away and said, in so many words, “When I was in Ghana and Tanzania and spoke to poor people they told me very clearly that water is one of their highest priorities. But this isn’t reflected in our plans. We need to do more — especially in Africa”. This has seen DFID commit to a further increase in our spending on water.