Social inclusion is not a donor agenda

Foreign aid is under scrutiny worldwide in both the receiving and giving countries over its uses and abuses. In Nepal, too, the UN and other bilateral and multilateral organisations have made news in recent times, most notably, when the National Planning Commission objected to the language used by the UN in its assistance framework. To get a better understanding of the role aid plays, the Post’s Dewan Rai and Gyanu Adhikari spoke with Robert Piper, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator. Originally from Australia, Piper arrived in Nepal just before the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections to lead the UN country team. Excerpts:

 

Can you give us an estimate of how much aid Nepal’s development partners bring every year?

 

It’s about one billion US dollars a year. About half comes from the two big banks—the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The rest is bilateral or from the UN.

 

Do the donor’s priorities change when the government changes?

 

The underlying priorities haven’t changed in the five years I’ve been here, despite the fact that we’ve had five governments. It helps that there’s been a three-year plan. And that many of the underlying issues are legislated, in a way, in the [Interim] Constitution, in the peace agreement and so forth.

 

There’s a lot of discussion on development and “aid with strings”. What kind of conditions do donors put on the Nepal government?

 

Increasingly, the government is asking donors to put their money through government-managed systems. This has been the big push over recent years. And about 70 percent of aid, according to government estimates, is coming through government systems. This assertiveness of the government to manage the money themselves can only be a good thing. So the biggest condition today is on the financial management of resources because donors are entrusting so much money to the government to manage directly. Fifteen years ago, most of the money was being managed directly by donors with different partners.

 

There’s no policy conditionality?

 

Once upon a time, around the ‘Washington Consensus’ there was a lot of conditionality about opening up markets, floating your currency and so on. Today there’s much greater convergence between government’s macroeconomic policy and the consensus position of the World Bank and others. There isn’t the kind of gap that you once had, where the donors were hitting the table to try and push the government to change policies.

 

Talking about the UN, there was controversy about the language used in the new UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF). Comments?

 

The new UNDAF departed from how earlier UNDAFs had been formulated. Instead of being organised around the traditional areas of work of the UN system—agriculture, education, health—the new UNDAF follows an analysis of who the most vulnerable groups are in this country and why they are vulnerable. This approach leads us naturally to some highly sensitive issues.

 

The National Planning Commission didn’t want to include the phrase “structural discrimination” in the UN document. What was the controversy over this particular phrase?

 

The government’s point was that it recognised there is still discrimination but that the challenge now is in implementation of measures, rather than questioning whether there are structures that are still deliberately continuing the discrimination. They wanted us to focus on implementing measures that the government has already identified to reverse these trends.

 

You were also asked to reduce the number of vulnerable groups.

 

There was only one group that was cut out of the UNDAF, a group we’d identified in our analysis as people at risk of statelessness. These are basically Nepali citizens unable to secure their citizenship papers. We believe there are a significant number of such people. The government told us it did not seek our assistance on this issue. They recognise that there’s a problem but for them, it is a question simply of access to citizenship papers. They were particularly unhappy for these people to be characterised as ‘stateless’. The government also didn’t want us to focus on religious minorities, particularly the Muslim community. They asked us to leave it more open to capture these and other groups.

 

What happens when there is a difference over priorities between the government and the donors on where to invest the money?

 

If you think money is the main problem, you haven’t understood Nepal’s development challenges. Even if you think technical expertise is the main problem, you’ve missed the point. That might have been the case 20 years ago but the story today is different. There’s plenty of money around, and there’s lots of expertise. Nepal has moved on, and we’re coming down to a much shorter list of complex development issues that are often political, social or cultural.

 

Are you saying Nepal doesn’t need aid money or expertise anymore?

 

You still need donor aid targeted to the right issues. The task is to match Nepal’s needs and the donor’s expertise. The role of the Ministry of Finance is to find that match. If you take UNICEF, for example, it’s good at some things and not at others. So you want to channel UNICEF’s expertise, for example, to water and sanitation, nutrition, education and child protection.

 

But you just said Nepal doesn’t need money or expertise from donors, so why does Nepal need UNICEF?

 

You need organisations like UNICEF to deal with some of the issues beyond just cash and technical expertise. These include quality of services, coordination among different parts of the government, social issues—the situation of Muslim girls, for example, and their access to education. These are difficult policy issues for any country, and there’s a lot an organisation like UNICEF can offer.

 

Let’s follow the money trail a little. A lot of aid goes back to the donor country through consultancies and contractors. True?

 

This is an outdated criticism that stems from an age when most aid money was delivered through companies or NGOs of that donor. Seventy percent of Nepal’s aid money is now going through the government budget. So unless the government is purchasing those services from the donor country, that money is not finding its way back.

 

In your experience, is the donor money driven by humanitarian concerns, or are there economic and strategic interests involved?

 

Bilateral donors, governments, are naturally there to promote the interests of their country. But it’s also in the interests of these countries, for example, to reduce poverty and reduce infectious diseases around the planet. There’s a range of motivations behind every aid dollar but plenty of mutual interest between donor and recipient.

 

What do you think about the recent criticisms of the donor community?

 

I hear the growing criticisms of the development community on social inclusion. When I arrived five years ago, it was very much a Nepali project to tackle social exclusion and discrimination. It’s only in the last six to twelve months that this has apparently become an ‘international project’.

 

How did inclusion come to be seen as a foreign project, as you say?

 

You need to ask some of these people who are throwing these accusations around about why suddenly it’s the UN that is introducing concepts such as ‘structural discrimination’ to the debate. These ideas are all over the government documents. It’s a small but vocal minority of people who seem to be backing away from these ideals. Much of it may be coming from an understandable anxiety about the risks involved in tackling such sensitive issues like identity and social inclusion. But accusing internationals of pushing these issues is misplaced.

 

The critics say the donor community is good at pointing out problems but poor at helping solve them, that they are aggravating the fault lines in Nepali society.

 

Here’s the long term vision statement for the current three-year development plan for Nepal. “All forms of discrimination and inequality [Piper reads] such as legal, social, cultural, linguistic, religious, economic, ethnic, physical, gender and regional will be ended from society.” This is not my idea. It’s not a foreign agenda. When your leaders sat down and wrote the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, they offered a profound analysis there as well of what led Nepal into 10 years of unrest and mapped the journey out. Again, social inclusion figures prominently. And if you talk to Tharus, Madhesis or Janajati leaders, they would be deeply offended by the proposition that it took the donor community to come, identify their problems, and become their champion. So the idea that we’re aggravating fault lines is absurd.

 

The argument goes something like this: hypothetically, if Australia had lots of foreign donors, and they advocated federalising it along identity-based states, how would Australians take that?

 

I don’t know. But you show me evidence of any development partner, certainly not the UN in Nepal, promoting the idea of identity-based federalism. We have never, ever, taken a position on what specific form of federalism is right for Nepal. We all accept that moving to a federal model is enshrined in the [Interim] Constitution. Whether you like it or not, the idea is here to stay.

 

Do you think it’s fair to say that donor aid empowers some groups relative to others?

 

If you look at the history of aid Nepal, you’ll find examples of projects that empowered the poor, Dalits, women, people in the Far-West, and yes, projects that empowered indigenous groups. You won’t find too many projects aimed at empowering Brahmins. It’s explainable by a shared understanding of who are the disadvantaged communities of this country. Frankly, if the government is going to execute policies that are sincere about addressing disadvantage, it too has to make these kind of targeting choices.

 

How do you see the future of aid in Nepal?

 

Development partners are in a hurry to see Nepal graduate from its LDC status. The UN has been here for 60 years. How long are we planning to be around as development partners? Is it another 60 years? At this stage, we really should have a clear exit strategy.


http://ekantipur.com/2012/10/01/interview/social-inclusion-is-not-a-donor-agenda/360976.html

How much of this is utilised and benifited by Nation & it's citizens?