|
Page 5 of 5
Jim Harvey
Head of Profession, Livelihoods and Environment Groups, Department for International Development (DFID), London
Keeping in touch means “getting out of the office and talking to people who know the story”
Nater: What risks do you see in the trend towards direct budget support?
Harvey: The main risk is detachment. Donors — to be good development partners — have to hang on to some first-hand knowledge and experience of what I call the retail end of the system. To make a comparison with industry, could a component manufacturer of engines afford not to know about developments in the end-market for cars? No — they have to be aware of what’s actually happening in the market place. Already, some donors are starting to work with developing country governments to get systems into place to track outcomes and impact, in order to justify sustained budget support. If recipient-country governments can show donors what’s happening with their funding, if there’s a clear audit trail, then many donors will go with them. But if not, donors have to ask some very serious questions and look for alternative routes.
How can donors pursue rural development if, at the same time, they are withdrawing from rural areas?
In the 1970s I lived in Aleppo, working for the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, ICARDA. My job was to study farming systems. It made me understand just how good so-called poor peasant farmers are at what they do. The Syrian farmers I got to know were incredibly innovative, with a great depth of knowledge of their environment and how things worked. Of course, by the 1990s, participatory and farmer-led approaches had made great strides. But at the time, that sort of knowledge was often systematically ignored by development experts.
Now we’re in danger of losing those insights all over again, as the whole aid business moves upstream and works at a more strategic level. There’s a disconnect between talking about development and delivering aid on the one hand, and actually understanding what rural peoples’ lives and needs are like on the other. That gulf has always been there — especially between people and their governments — and the risks are still with us.
“If recipient-country governments can show donors what’s happening with their funding, if there’s a clear audit trail, then donors will usually go with them.”
Can that disconnect be prevented?
DFID has just been peer-reviewed by the  OECD Development Assistance Committee. They were generally complimentary about us but also said we should — and I quote — “encourage staff currently working in headquarters to spend more time visiting the field and encourage country office staff to spend more time out of capital cities. Greater effort should be made in getting key staff closer to the development realities they support.”
As donor people, we need to keep in touch. This means getting out of the office and talking to people who do know the story — in ministries, amongst NGOs, with the private sector. That means not just programme staff, but senior management, as well. That’s Kevin Cleaver’s viewpoint too, I believe.
But it’s no longer the job of donor staff to spend long periods in rural areas – or slums or hospitals or schools, for that matter – to see first hand what’s going on. People of my generation — at least — are very aware of the ‘development tourism’ criticism. It’s more a matter of putting in place the mechanisms whereby poor people can act for themselves and strengthen their voice in policy debates. It’s about building systems of accountability by governments to their people. And it’s about getting much better impact data and addressing some of the big capacity issues.
 More on the Department for International Development
Photos: Timothy Nater
Want to respond to this interview?
Send your comments to
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
. We will do our best to publish your response here, but may edit it for reasons of clarity and space.
More interviews
IFAD head views food crisis
Lennart Båge, IFAD
Adapting to growth
Sonja Bartelt and Miriam Heidtmann, Platform Secretariat
Counting what counts
Nwanze Okidegbe, World Bank
Seeing donors from both sides
Mushtaq Ahmed, CIDA
Opportunities in decentralisation
Philip Mikos, EC-DG Dev
Listen to people in the field
Willi Graf, SDC
Towards a more flexible approach
Michael Wales, FAO
“A race against time”
Christoph Kohlmeyer, BMZ
“We have been part of the problem”
Kevin Cleaver, World Bank
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next > End >>
|
