The reason for the negative feeling is not far to see. Apart from the romanticism surrounding rural life, discussions on urban issues makes development workers immediately think of slums and the problems of people living in those – poor sanitation, lack of access to roads and water, (over)crowding leading to intra-community tensions and risk of disease outbreak, insecurity for women and criminal gangs.  These problems are exacerbated when the slums are unauthorised, yes not all slums are illegal; some are recognised by governments. Unauthorised slums or informal settlements means that the inhabitants are invisible to planners, though they become remarkably visible before every election. Control over resources is exercised by a few powerful people and cartels (gangs). These powerful people also decide who gets to stay and where. ‘Rents’ are regularly collected by enforcers, often dwellers in the same slum. Most residents have little option but to pay up for everything. It is little wonder that, all over the world, a slum dweller pays more than those living in apartments for water, rent, ‘licence’ to do business and electricity (which is illegally tapped but has to be paid for by the end-user). Further the residents are vulnerable to eviction at any time, with almost no legal recourse, after all they are squatting illegally.

This is the scenario that the development worker sees. Little wonder then that migration from rural to urban areas gets tagged as ‘negative’.

However, slums are merely manifestation of a different problem – unsustainable livelihoods in rural / marginalised areas. This unsustainability is due to a variety of reasons including land fragmentation, climate change, poor access to technology and credit, unfair trade practices etc. It is this failure of rural livelihood systems that has actually caused the migration and proliferation of slums as skill-less and semi-skilled people pour into cities. After all “Why would anyone willing choose to live in slums in pitiable conditions and face enormous risks if they had an option?” The poor, when faced with despair, find the lure of urban areas irresistible.  They know it is difficult but are forced to pin their hopes on migrating and improving their lives; in many cases they reason, that their lives could not get worse.

Urban areas offer improved chances of obtaining work, health facilities and eventually education for children. They improve access to media and hence information that can be useful to improving lives. Research has shown that migration can reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth.

In the aftermath of the horrific drought in 1972-73, thousands of poor migrated from rural parts of Maharashtra and settled in slums of Mumbai. Some got employment in private sector or government. Some started small businesses. They had come seeking relief but a large number ended up staying in Mumbai. Over time their children went to school, got higher education and were able to break out of the poverty trap in the space of one or two generations. I have met a number of such families in Mumbai. I remember being unequivocally told that though the drought was bad and destroyed lives as they knew it, people were actually thankful for it, eventually. It forced them to move out of rural areas where their livelihoods were going nowhere in particular.

Global trends show a clear move towards increased urbanisation. This is through increase in number of urban centres and also expansion of the older centres. A city typically grows in two directions, the rich move up vertically in high-rise buildings and the poor in slums spreading horizontally.

With urbanisation come the issues of environmental sanitation, strain on natural resources and crime.  In the coming decade, these issues will grow. Eventually in sheer numbers the poor in urban centres will outnumber those in the rural areas.

Given this, “Are NGOs prepared to meet the development challenges in urban areas?” My answer today is “Sadly, not to the extent needed, not yet anyway.”

Development efforts in the urban areas are already seriously lagging the requirements.  Most NGOs round the world still focus on rural areas almost exclusively. Their orientation and thinking is suited to rural issues. When it comes to urban areas, sadly, I find a lot of NGOs clutching at straws. The clarity of purpose that can be seen in rural work is somehow missing when it comes to urban programming. Urban issues are hugely different from those in rural areas.

• ‘Communities’ cannot be easily defined as sum populations shift constantly. Mobilisation becomes very difficult.
• Identifying the powerful becomes difficult since, many a time, they are behind the scenes.
• Livelihood mechanisms are not settled as people constantly change what they do to put food on the table. A vegetable vendor today may be a porter tomorrow and a guard the next month.
• Rights of people remain very limited – almost no one owns the land or the house they live in. The very illegality of their existence makes demanding any rights difficult. After all they don’t exist on records, do they?

Same is the case with donors. Donor funding in urban areas is limited. A severe drought sees immediate influx of funds in the affected rural areas. However, almost nothing reaches the urban poor who are also as badly affected when food prices go up.

Over the last few years I have seen an increasing tendency for NGOs to start programming in urban areas. That is indeed a welcome sign. However, for them to succeed, they will have to learn and learn fast. The game is different. The rules are different. The power brokers are different. The pressure points are different. Therefore the theories of change must be different to make any impact whatsoever.

Are we going to see that happen? Time will tell.

Makarand

“….to have a sustained and strategic impact, philanthropy must be conducted like business—with discipline, strategy and a strong focus on outcomes. Organizations receiving your support should be as accountable to you as a company’s board is to its shareholders. You are a stakeholder. And that means, above all else, that you have to know your return on investment.”

Let us unpack this position:

• Sustainable & strategic impact: No one denies that charities need to deliver sustained and strategic impact. The nature of ‘sustainability’ and ‘impact’ will however differ on whether one is evaluating ‘life saving humanitarian’ interventions or the more longer-term ‘development interventions’. Humanitarian interventions deliver outcomes for shorter-term impact over a time horizon measured in weeks or months. For instance, reduction in risk of disease through sanitation and clean drinking water interventions, alleviating starvation through food interventions etc. The sustainability of these outcomes is limited;  take away the food intervention without an improvement in the underlying conditions and the risk of starvation returns.  Development interventions are expected to be more robust and bring about changes in behaviour and policy. The impacts live well beyond intervention phase but also take time to materialise, often years.  
• Discipline / strategy / focus on outcomes – I know of no good charity which meanders along in an undisciplined, ragtag manner aimlessly doing some activities. Most charities are built on the foundation of a strong vision and have systems in place to ensure its progress towards the goals. There are of course charities whose internal governance systems are weak. They are poorly run and work opportunistically. Thankfully, their influence on development thinking is rather limited.
• Accountable to donors – There is absolutely no doubt that this accountability is required. However, let us be clear that it is not a question of accountability only to donors who are seeking return on investment. Charities have a larger accountability to their stakeholders namely the communities they work with, the local organisations they partner and the governments in host countries. These are at least as important as the donors. In an ideal world the priorities and demands of all these stakeholders would be aligned and life would be easy for the charities. In real life  it seldom works that way. Many a time charities struggle to align priorities of communities, governments and donors with their own vision, and to design sensible programmes where every stakeholder sees an advantage.

This is not all it takes to ‘operate like a business’. There are other things that charities do like businesses.

•  They lobby governments – A key difference is that most lobbying by charities is to help the underprivileged and the voiceless. Rarely do charities lobby for themselves or for appropriating profits of shareholders, sometimes at the expense of the stakeholders. How often does one hear of an agitation led by a charity asking for favourable tax breaks or waiver of oversight or curtailing competition?
• They manage people – The pool of people that charities can access is severely restricted. Being an aid worker necessarily means that one is forced to choose between making a difference and making money. There are few challenges to businesses on how much they pay their staff and CEOs, at least so long as they are making profits. However most donors, individual and institutional, expect charities to operate on shoe string budgets, not pay staff well and yet deliver fantastic results.  This creates a different kind of challenge in recruiting and retaining staff.

In my view the question whether “Charities should operate like businesses” is a pointless one to keep raising.  Charities do run like businesses. Or rather in a ‘business-like’ manner. At least the good ones do.

The only issue is that it is a different business. The rules of the game, the objectives and the priorities are different.  For instance, a business may outsource its business operations to off shore entities so they can be more economically delivered. Charities have no such option. In fact the worse the situation in their ‘business environment’ the more the need for the charity to work there.  After all aid to the starving Somali people cannot be delivered in India just because it is easier to operate there from the security point of view.

It is important not to confuse ‘operate like a business’ with ‘follow the rules of businesses’. If the playing field is not the same, the rules of the game cannot be the same. In this case it is not even the same game. That means metrics for measuring success need to be different.

From my experience of 18 years as a development professional in India, Afghanistan and Africa, I find that

• Most good charities know what ‘business’ they are in.
• They know that they need to deliver on sustainable change in lives of people.
• They know they need to be accountable to stakeholders.

It is time that the ‘business’ proponents understood this too.

Makarand

A common factor in all analyses about causes of poverty in the developing world is corruption, systemic corruption.  In my view there are five, often interconnected, factors that lead to widespread corruption.

1. When the economy, or at least a part of the economy, starts growing rapidly: this  opens out opportunities, often to a select few, to take advantage of the growth to make profits for themselves. Scandals in the telecom industry in India are a classic case of this happening.
2. When economic space is limited or restricted: When that happens, the only way to make money is the political space and chance of self- aggrandizement that power offers. You can see this happening in a lot of the underdeveloped countries in Africa. Since the economy is not robust, the country gets lot of access to international aid which can be siphoned off by the politically powerful.
3. Where a country / region has resources that are desired by the rest of the world: once again control over these resources are way to making money for one self. This can be observed in almost any country that has abundance of minerals (the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana) or oil (Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea) resources. Many a time the scramble for power in these countries is accompanied by prolonged conflict. None of the parties involved in the scramble are keen on alleviating poverty. They just look for control over resources. Often foreign players enter the scene and promote their ‘favourite’ players as ways of controlling resources in the future. This too increases corruption.
4. Where civil society is weak:  This invariably accompanies restrictions on media. A weak civil society and weak media means reduced pressures on governments to be accountable and transparent. With opacity of governments comes a system of patronage and empire building leading automatically to corruption. A strong civil society and media in themselves cannot stop corruption but can create adequate awareness and pressure for the perpetrators to not act with impunity.
5. When there is a lack of mechanisms to deal with corruption: By mechanisms I mean institutionalised legal frameworks to punish the corrupt. There is no point in establishing Anti Corruption Commissions or appointing Ombudsmen, as is being promoted in India, to address corruption issues if the citizens can see the powerful acting with impunity.

The anti-corruption measures that suggest themselves are, in my view, as under.

1. Strategic leveraging of resources to engender more equitable growth: when a wider cross section of people get personal growth opportunities, systemic corruption reduces.

You can see this in Botswana. Practically no one would have given this landlocked country in Africa any chance of climbing out of poverty at the time of independence in 1966. However, since that time, the Botswana economy has been steadily growing. It started off as one of the poorest countries in the world but is now a middle income country with a per capita GDP equal to Mexico or Turkey. Botswana, contrary to most other African countries, has managed to use its mineral resources well and has backed them with strong governance systems.

2. Promoting strong civil society & freedom for media:

3. Strengthening accountability and governance systems.

Both factors go hand in hand. No authoritarian government is going to be keen to allow this. However, unchecked systemic corruption and poverty go hand in hand. Most of the countries that suffer from corruption are also recipients of international aid. This means foreign donors have a power over these counties. They need to be able to leverage their ‘power over’ these countries and push for reform. This is something that international agencies / donors need to push for. Sadly this has not happened to the extent required. Realpolitik has traditionally triumphed over reform. However, there is now a growing realisation that without improved governance, aid is going to be of no use. The pressure on authoritarian and corrupt governments to open up and reform is increasing

4. Rule of law

At the end of the day, nothing can improve lives of the poor and powerless as establishment of rule of law. Mechanisms to punish the corrupt not only need to be in place but also be implemented.

These measures may seem too idealistic and fanciful. Perhaps there is a valid cause for this feeling. Frankly, though there are no easy solutions in any case. Even armed revolutions have not helped. For instance, almost all coups in Africa have had the ostensible reason of replacing a  corrupt government with one that is more ‘democratic and equitable’.  Nowhere has this actually happened. Only the faces and names of the corrupt changed, matters remained as they were, if not actually worsened.

None of these measures I am suggesting are easy. None are definitely going to show results in double-quick time. The issue of corruption is often very deep rooted and assumes cultural dimensions. Making a dent in corruption requires behavioural change in a wide range of stakeholders. That is never easy. Further there is no guarantee of success.

Should they be tried though? Unequivocally yes.

Large parts of the region are structurally food insecure. Structural deficit means that even in a good year, the country is unable to feed its entire population. Please note that I do not mean grow enough food to feed its population. I mean create enough wealth to feed the population. Food security issues in the region are chronic. Rising population, environmental degradation and climate variability are exacerbating the problem.

Development actors including governments, INGOs, donors and international agencies respond to these crises in two stages. The ‘relief’ stage sees interventions like food aid, unconditional cash transfers, food/cash-for-work, boreholes and water-trucking.  These responses, all lying in the humanitarian space, do a lot to help address immediate needs of the people, thereby helping save lives.

The ‘recovery’ stage also includes cash transfers and water trucking, but extends to livelihood support. Could be providing seeds and other inputs to farmers, livestock to pastoralists and working capital support to help the asset-less start enterprises.

The question in my mind is “Do any of these interventions actually address the root causes of the problems?” Sadly. No.  Not to any degree of sustainability.

What realistically happens is that the immediate problems are addressed and the need to do something pushed to the coming year(s). sadly, trends show that the frequency of the need for these responses is increasing.

Consequences (unintended) of short term thinking

1.  Aid ensures that the localised economy is artificially propped up :  there are provinces in the Horn and East of Africa where aid contributes anywhere between 40-60% of the local economy and over 90% of the population is classified as food-insecure and thus permanent target of food/cash aid.

• Animal destocking (paying people to slaughter their livestock when there are fodder and water shortages) and restocking (paying people to buy livestock when the immediate crisis passes) create a sense of artificial viability in (small-holding) livestock business.
• Agriculture inputs does the same to sub-subsistence agriculture.
• Injecting cash in the economy invariably leads to local inflation making it even more difficult for those who do not get cash aid to survive. One of the ‘solutions’ that has come up for this is blanket cash transfers which could be a potential nightmare from the logistics point.
• Knowing that aid will be available, there is a very distinct possibility of communities & households not exerting that bit more to dig themselves out of the hole of unviable livelihoods. There are communities in Africa who have been recipients of aid for years and years.

Surely this cannot be viable in the long run?  With the growing economic crisis round the developed world, there is going to be a day when humanitarian aid will get severely constricted leading to problems of unimaginable proportions. Even if there is no economic crisis, there is a possibility of donor fatigue  setting in

2.   Settlements are formed in fundamentally unviable areas. This is how it happens. An important response in emergencies is establishing water points (boreholes & tanks say) on pastoral migration tracts.  When water points are created settlements grow around them as households from the neighbouring dry areas move closer to the source of water. This leads to increased demands for support – food aid, health services, education etc. This also leads to reducing the availability of water to the migrating livestock – the original reason for establishing water points. These emergency water sources, which were never meant to provide permanent support for large numbers of people, dry out. Since people are now settled there, in what perhaps was fundamentally an unviable area for a settlement in the first place,  the only options left are to dig more bore-holes depleting underground reserves or trucking water. Both options are extremely expensive and unviable in the long run. Once a settlement happens, it is politically very difficult to move people again. This leads to a need for continued and increasing ‘humanitarian’ support in the years to come.

3.  Governments no longer feel the need to invest in long term measures to address food insecurity. They know that the humanitarian imperative will ensure that international agencies (World Food Programme for instance) will respond every year as they have been for decades. This has led to a faintly ridiculous situation where WFP is repeatedly called on to support with food aid in the same area for years.

4.  Funds needed for repeated humanitarian relief constrict the scope of raising substantial development funds.  It is no brainer to understand that investment in the appropriate long term solutions now would significantly reduce the need for humanitarian relief in the future. It does not happen though simply because the crisis sucks ups all available funds. Long term measures are pushed to the side and any efforts in this direction are rarely at a scale that would make an impact.

Point is that almost annual responses to crisis are not changing the situation on the ground at all. I am forced to ask myself, “are development actors, (in)advertently enabling unviable livelihoods to survive?”

I think that to a very large extent they ARE doing so.

In some cases it is probably because

• they are not strategizing enough and / or
• it suits some of them to keep a mass of people in this condition – politically or financially or for justifying their own existence (yeah you can call me a conspiracy theorist but there are enough examples of this going around).
• The solutions they are using are necessarily short term and simplistic when radically different thinking is required. As Einstein had once famously said “We cannot solve a problem by using the same type of thinking we used when we created it.”

Most development actors have been present in these areas for decades. It is necessary to see for themselves whether they are now part of the solution or actually part of the problem.

What, if anything, can be done?

Even as I say all this, I know that it easy to critique and even easier to just criticise. What, if anything, can be done? Should be done?

I don’t profess to have solutions but maybe it is time to try something. Perhaps development actors could (should?)

• Weave humanitarian responses into long term strategies so that they don’t work in cross purposes – a genuinely integrated approach to programming rather than looking at each in isolation.
• Cash or food for work helping build long term infrastructure like the then path breaking Employment Guarantee Scheme in Maharashtra (India) had envisaged rather than creating ‘work’ by digging holes for 20 days and filling them up over another 20.
• Using cash transfers instead of food aid and using the cash injection in the local economies to boost markets. At the community level we have experiences of households using part of the cash transferred to set up small enterprises.
• Plan humanitarian interventions with a little more analysis of the unintended consequences under the principles of Do No Harm.
• Make strategic investments in long term development – ‘borrow’ from funds required for future humanitarian responses to invest NOW. Easier said than done I know but frankly all it needs is genuine political will not ‘feel-good’ blah blah.
• Invest in improving governance and accountability so that citizens can have the space and voice in demanding long term development interventions from government. Amartya Sen had once famously said that droughts are natural but famines are man-made. India is a classic example of this. There have been many droughts but no famine, not since 1943.

Will these work? Frankly, I don’t know.

Should we try something different? Hell yes. Cos it is clear that what we have done in the last 40 years has clearly not worked well enough or we would not be talking about the problem now.

Makarand

In the humanitarian emergencies space, inputs and services that can help save lives.

In the longer term, (1) improving people’s awareness of their rights,  (2) innovating and establishing poverty alleviation models that can then be scaled up and (3) acting as democratic watchdogs to ensure that rights of people are not trampled by the State or multinational corporations.

In order for NGOs to effectively deliver on their longer term roles, they need

• Dedicated staff and volunteers who understand the context in which the work is being done.
• Governments which are not completely uncaring about the opinions of their citizens. They may not be genuinely democratic but they should afford some space for engagement. A tyrannical government will rarely allow or hear dissenting voices leaving coups and popular uprisings as the only way of ushering in any change.
• An environment (policy and infrastructure) in which they can innovate & experiment.
• Support from donors who have a vision of long term development and are not looking only at ‘quick wins’.

Over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to engage with communities and development workers from what are called  fragile states. The more exposure I get, the more I realise how similar these states are. They are all marked by

• Abject poverty amongst a majority of the population.
• Sense of haplessness.
• Poor to non-existent infrastructure.
• Weak (even absent) governance mechanisms and structures.
• Poor social capital as the intelligentsia has either fled or been incarcerated / decimated.

I could go on but surely you get the picture.

International NGOs with a humanitarian mandate are operational in most of the fragile states around the world. They are trying to stick to their mandate of sustainable development. However, I am increasingly getting the feeling that NGOs working in fragile states are just setting themselves up to under-perform if not actually fail.  From the very outset. Let me explain why. Programming in these states presents enormous challenges.

• The total lack of any infrastructure makes it very difficult to move people and material around causing additional expenses and delays.
• Not having adequately qualified local staff necessitates over-dependence on expatriate staff at all levels. Needless to say, expatriate staff are much more expensive. Further, the more difficult the country, the more difficult it is to attract the necessary talent and the more expensive it gets.  The tough work conditions saps morale of even the most optimistic, leads to huge turnovers and therefore instability in programming.
• It is difficult to determine where to begin addressing the myriad problems that stare at the assessor. For instance, can (should) we really talk of ‘participation in governance’ when there are no structures in place? Focus on sustainable livelihoods programming, private sector engagement and enterprise friendly policies when their needs are food on the table and basic inputs like ox-ploughs, goats and seeds?

It is like trying to undertake development programming in a purely humanitarian context. The truth also is that in fragile states, most of the demands from donors, governments and communities are for services and inputs.

The problem with this is that while providing services and inputs does meet the immediate needs, it is rarely sustainable in the long run. Lasting changes in lives of people are difficult, if not impossible with this type of support. Providing aid in this form has been known to lead to a dependence on aid as we have seen in a number of fragile states & contexts.  Providing inputs and services also lets government off the hook – it sees no immediate need to beef up the systems for input and service delivery for its citizens.

Another aspect is that the cost of delivering these services is enormous simply because of the programming challenges. Delivering safe drinking water in a remote location in South Sudan or Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of Congo for instance, costs double or treble as compared to doing the same in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Tanzania. It is the same for almost everything one does. It is not easy to explain this to donors – individual or institutional.

Costs, human resources and infrastructure dictates that NGOs can reach very small pockets in the fragile states – thereby being unable to reach any critical mass for development results to shine through.

Programming in fragile states is like being in a Red Queen Race.  Tremendous energies needed just to prevent the poor from falling off the edge. This situation begs questions :

“Given the limited resources, would it not be strategically appropriate, to spend the funds differently? Perhaps even in other poor countries where one could make a lasting impact on poverty?”

Viewed from a purely economic and strategic point of view, it would appear that it makes no sense for INGOs to work in fragile states, especially on service / input delivery.

The costs and logistical nightmares are just not commensurate with the benefits delivered. Plus the weak systems make any form of accountability difficult. In my opinion, input / services are best left to bilateral and multilateral donors and the governments of these States.  The earlier governments take responsibility, the better it would be for all concerned. INGOs providing services provides a false sense of security to governments.

There is the counter argument though – the humanitarian consideration. The primary mandate of NGOs to alleviate avoidable suffering many a times prevents NGOs from taking these hard stances.

There is no doubt that the inputs provided do help the vulnerable especially when the State is absent. Also the mere presence of INGOs and expatriate staff provides a signal to the suffering communities that they have not been abandoned by the rest of the world -  a small beacon of hope I guess.

However, at the end of the day, I feel that the meagre resources of INGOs are probably best spent elsewhere within the context of fragile states : say working on promoting stronger governance structures, community led peace building (conflicts and insecurity are a common characteristic of fragile states) and advocacy with donors for more concerned and co-ordinated action.

• Should this be the strategy?
• Should INGOs not get involved in service delivery and look at strategies that can make a difference in the longer term?
• Should the funds saved be applied to more stable states where they can do better?

This could be a controversial, even disturbing question which has no easy answers.  However, there is no doubt in my mind that there is at least a case for giving this idea a great deal of consideration.  

Makarand

The 18 minute talk got me thinking. In my line of work, Theories of Change are an important tool. These theories or models of change are meant to inform programme strategies aiming to effect change in lives of people. Of course, having a model does not automatically lead to change. Constructing models takes time and effort. Very often, we all fall into the trap of looking at change in a linear fashion – we do THIS and THAT will happen. Effecting Change is not simple, as evaluation after evaluation of development programming has shown us.

Using change models is complex business. Often, a model may be applicable for a time but as circumstances change, it loses validity necessitating a shift to another. It requires nimbleness of response to the change in circumstances. Sadly however, this does not happen often enough. A lot of us development sector professionals have the insouciance to think that we have control on the way social change will happen just because we have change models that show it happening.

The reality is that very often we become too theoretical and make absurd assumptions. Or we do not factor in the complexities adequately. This, inevitably, leads to unintended negative consequences.

In the political space enough has been said about the American covert support to the Afghanistan Mujahideen support in the 1980s which ultimately lead to, with other factors thrown in, the rise of Al Qaeda that proved to be a major policy headache for the United States.

In the development sector too, I can think of some experiments, that in my opinion, had unintended negative consequences.

1. Micro credit / Micro finance as means of poverty alleviation in most parts of South and East Asia :  The grand ‘success’ of the Grameen Bank micro-credit programme spawned replication but research now shows that it did some good but ultimately did not raise people from poverty. This could be seen as a programme failure but there were some unintended consequences. (a) governments and NGOs took micro-credit / micro-finance as the panacea for poverty alleviation and ended up over (and wrongly) using it without making a dent on poverty, (b) innovation around poverty alleviation dried up and policy makers refused to see reason and programmes beyond micro-credit, (c) spurious micro-finance / micro-credit agencies (businesses) sprang up all over the place leading to over-reach and people having multiple debts from different competing agencies, (d) increased competition for the space, led to underhand actions and corruption (definitely in South Asia). All of this while the fundamental causes of poverty were sidelined.
2. Banning use of DDT intended to prevent harm to humans who consume DDT (used to prevent pest attack on stored paddy for instance) crippled the fight against malaria leading directly to millions of avoidable deaths around the developing world while, perhaps, having limited impact on human health.
3. Food Aid and unconditional cash transfers over a long period of time in chronically food insecure areas in Africa have been known to deliver short term gains but resulting in long term dependence of the poor on aid. Local economies in large parts of Africa are known to be dependent on aid.
4. Continued use of Reservations for socially marginalised communities in academic institutions and employment in India has just led to more and more groups ‘demanding’ to be classified as oppressed. Interestingly the architect of the Indian constitution himself had recommended that this measure be used for a short time only. Sadly it has proven to be like catching the tail of a tiger. No political party has had the courage to let go.
5. Non Formal Schooling in South Asia which has been touted as a huge success. But what does it actually do? It lets the State off the hook when it comes to responsibility of delivering quality education. We end up with sub-standard teachers imparting useless ‘education’ to uninterested students. This ‘education’ barely keeps the kids off the ‘illiterate’ list and yet leaves them with no skills to compete and earn a livelihood.
6. Responding to drinking water / irrigation crisis by drilling bore-holes deeper and deeper (all over the developing world) – leads to draining of ground water reserves that cannot be recharged. This ‘availability’ of water also leads to human settlements where none should be.

I do not wish to, even for a moment, imply that all of these were foreseeable. No. Most of them probably weren’t. That, however, does not alter the fact that they did do and are still doing a lot of damage.

So what is the solution? Should we follow Krishna’s advise to Arjun in the Bhagvad Gita?

Karmanye Va Adhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana which roughly and loosely translates as You should only be concerned about doing your duty to the best of your ability. Don’t worry about the results of your actions for those are outside of your control.

I would not like to go so far.

We still need to think about

• HOW change will happen.
• What model(s) may get us there.
• What assumptions are we making regarding the context.

However, we need to

• Keep alert to contextual changes.
• Constantly revisit the assumptions underpinning the model to see if they are still valid.
• Make changes to strategies as demanded by the circumstances and finally
• Keep alert to spotting any negative unintended consequences.

Difficult?

Yes, but then no one ever said that making a change in lives of people was easy.

Makarand

• Why does this happen?
• Is it a management issue? Incompetence?

Nope. I think is it by design, though I wish that it were as simple as incompetence which would have made it easier to fix.

Why do I think that? Cos I feel that a country that has innovation (jugaad too), entrepreneurial actions and out-of-the-box management thinking at all levels, should be able to manage this issue. It is not even new. Economists have been talking about it for decades.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that the food wastage is by design.

What happens when food rots or is wasted?

1. Supplies dwindle leading to scarcity thus driving up prices.
2. Increased prices naturally reduce access to food for the poor.
3. The poor respond by using what development workers call ‘negative coping strategies’. Stripped of the jargon it means any or all of cutting down food consumption (disproportionately within the family), borrowing at usurious rates, selling assets at distress rates etc. Other extreme strategies include crime, early marriage of the girl child and commercial sex work.
4. When the situation becomes critical, government steps in with regulation, release of food from ‘strategic stocks’, social protection schemes like food for work or employment guarantee schemes.
5. To support these schemes, more food has to be procured, from within the country or abroad especially to replenish strategic stocks.

Who would deliberately want a food crisis?

Can we find out. I think we can. When the police investigate murders, the first thing they do is try and identify who benefits from the death. That strategy may be useful here too. So the question we need to answer is “Who benefits from food wastage / shortage?”

1. Traders – if food rots, supplies reduce and prices go up.
2. Importers – acute scarcity leads to imports, often done at the last moment leading to relaxed conditions (read oversight).
3. Bureaucrats – who then get to design food-aid or other safety net schemes and get huge budgets for implementing them. We all know what huge budgets mean don’t we?
4. Politicians in the ruling party – nobody loves a good food crisis more than politicians. It gives them a great chance to fulminate at the ‘nasty opposing party’ which, naturally is the root of all evil (it used to be the ‘foreign hand’ in socialist India) and then making tall promises of controlling prices and providing food.
5. Politicians in opposition – well obviously.
6. Development agencies – who get a chance to either implement government programmes and / or raise funds.
7. Media – which can splash stories, show pictures and generally create a shallow racket that gets them the TRPs.  I must admit though that there is some serious coverage too but that is often lost in the overwhelming shrillness of the majority.
8. Grain exporting countries – linked with importers (above) who get a chance to unload some of the sub-standard and / or overprices grain that they have. Remember it is an emergency and there are limited oversight mechanisms in force?

The only people who get short-changed are the poor producers and hapless consumers. One would think that in the larger scheme of things, they are only ones who matter.. Of course not. They are mere pawns in the larger game that the biggies are playing. In India, a number of influential people wear more than one of those first seven hats.

So is collusion possible? Yes. Is conspiracy too far-fetched? Not really.

Can this be stopped? Of course. Ok, maybe not completely, but it can definitely be curtailed. All it takes is some old fashioned political will. India needs to

• Invest in infrastructure – roads, all weather stores, cold storages, refrigerated trucks etc.
• Support research in longer lasting varieties of grain, fruits and vegetables – get private sector involved in this. Agriculture universities are a joke. They don’t move outside their campuses. No serious breakthrough has come from the Agricultural Universities. Definitely not enough to justify the budgetary spends.
• Encourage private sector investment (small, medium or large) in retail and food processing – ease out the entry barriers for this. For a small producer, getting an FDA licence to make and sell tomato ketch-up can be a nightmare.

As population rises India is going to need more and more food. The pattern of food consumption & hence demand will also change. Unsustainable & rapacious agriculture has led to reducing yield.  Climate change is not helping any. I am afraid that we are looking at a crisis where per capita food supplies will dip further over the next few years. It is going to be more and more difficult to feed ourselves.

Increasing yield, research, improved technology, climate change adaptation will all take time. Till the time that this works, we need to work on other solutions.

The more obvious one is, at the very least, to NOT waste food – at all levels.

Waste not want not.

On a personal front I have had issues with that stand. I have always believed that democracy, while not the perfect system, was probably the best we had as on date. I never believed in the concept of a ‘benign dictator’ a term which, to me, is oxymoronic. I have been, and to a large extent even now am, a great believer in freedom of expression and right to dissent, which authoritarian rules proscribe.  I have been very rigid on this position for as long as I remember.

However, in the recent past I have had reason to question the rigidity of my stand.  Random thoughts kept swirling through my mind. Perhaps,

• Not all Authoritarian rules are bad!
• Sometimes a country does NEED strong leadership!

Why the questions, you may ask?

Well, what happened was that I spent a few days in Rwanda. Had occasion to travel around a bit and talk to Rwandans. My travels in other East African countries had created a mental image of what Rwanda would be like.  But what I saw was a shock to my system. It was nothing like what I had imagined. What I saw was remarkable and perhaps unique in the developing world; decent roads, disciplined traffic, absolutely no litter anywhere, tin-roofed homes in rural areas, latrines in every rural home, Rwandans engaging in voluntary service ½ day each month.

I don’t know what I expected but it was definitely not this. I knew that the country had been destroyed after the genocide, just seventeen years ago. That may be a long time for a human life but insignificant in the life of a nation.

Most Rwandans ascribe this remarkable metamorphosis to the very strong rule of the current President Paul Kagame (who was the vice-President in the new government that took over after the genocide).  The man is brilliant and has a clear vision of where he wants Rwanda to head to. At the same time, make no mistakes – he is very authoritarian. This has been amply demonstrated a number of times in the last seventeen years (where he has been at the near top or top of government) whether it was

• Forced closing down the internally displaced people camps on the grounds that they were fomenting trouble.
• Doing away with thatched roofs and making tin roofs compulsory, often at huge costs to the poor.
• Levying punitive fines for littering or drunken driving.
• Enforcing ‘voluntary’ work (umuganda) through an elaborate system of fines for those who don’t participate.

Then there have been excesses, like the massacre  in the Kibeho camp, that have blotted the copybook. Nevertheless, these cannot take too much away from the brilliant nation building that has been accomplished.

Would a democratic, participatory system of government have been able to do this in such a short time?

Let’s look at the situation seventeen years ago when the government took over. The country was in ruins. There had been four years of civil war preceding the genocide. Almost the entire population had been displaced. 20% of the population had been killed in less than 100 days.  There were no resources, industry, agriculture ongoing. Infrastructure had collapsed. There was no national pride left and there were even doubts on whether the nation would continue to exist given the mistrust and enmity that had come to fore amongst the people.

Somehow I think democracy would not have done as well. It needed decisive, bold and uncompromising leadership and that is what Rwanda, luckily, got.

However, can this continue? Should it continue? I think not. In the long run, as Amartya Sen and others have argued, democracy is the best system to foster growth and alleviate poverty.

In governance, as in life, timing is everything. There is a time and place for a particular strategy to be implemented and a time and place for it to die out. For instance, I think it was right for Nehru to adopt the commanding heights model of development in independent India. That ensured attention to infrastructure development and safety nets for the poor. Sadly, the Indian government did not have an exit strategy. The eventual move to a more liberal model had to be forced on the country when it could have been phased out 10-15 years after independence. Indians are still bearing the brunt of socialist days.

I feel that Rwanda and President Kagame have reached a critical point. A base has been created from which Rwanda can take off and claim a place in the developed league of nations. No doubt that problems of poverty and income inequity still remain to be addressed. However, the need for a totalitarian state seems to have abated. History, and more recently the Arab Spring, has shown that authoritarian regimes have a limited shelf-life.

It is time for President Kagame to show foresight and wisdom and voluntarily relinquish some of the power his government has. Open out the space for dissent. Promote a genuine multi-party democracy. Reap the benefits of a democratic state. Live with the disadvantages.

It takes enormous strength for anyone anywhere to voluntarily relinquish power. We have had very few examples of this in the recent past. Nelson Mandela did it and by that act elevated his stature immensely.

Will President Kagame be able to do it?

This is no doubt true but there are even more fundamental reasons why this region has been chronically food insecure for the last 4 decades. Here are my top 5 reasons, in no particular order and all are inter-connected.

1.      Lack of global political will : As far back as 1970, donor nations pledged spending 0.7% of their Gross National Income on poverty alleviation. 40 years hence, few do so. Jeffrey Sachs, the head of the UN Millennium project has argued in his book ‘The End of Poverty‘ that poverty alleviation will take only a fraction of the resources that are today spent on military misadventures. Sadly military expenditure rarely achieves its publicly stated ends be they installation of democracy, elimination of terror etc.

2.      Deliberate marginalisation : A number of African leaders, and I use the word ‘leaders’ very gingerly, deliberately marginalise whole communities for their own political ends. This no doubt happens all over the world. In Africa it is not even subtle. This marginalisation takes many forms –

• denial of education, health and other services
• deliberately disparaging the contributions of these peoples to the economy,
• poor investments are made in infrastructure,
• denial of voice
• stifling leadership

It is no surprise then that these are the very regions & peoples that repeatedly bear the brunt of a food crisis. These are also the people that take up arms when the oppression gets too much. Once there is nothing left to lose, there is no fear either.

3.      Conflict : Nothing is as draining as conflict. Livelihood systems get destroyed. Fields remain fallow. Pasture lands are destroyed, imperiling livestock. Youth lose their lives leaving the aged to care for the very young. Market systems don’t come up. Governments don’t / cannot invest in infrastructure or services. Poverty becomes endemic and conflict zones become chronically food insecure. It is no coincidence that the areas that are facing the present crisis are also conflict zones. Many of these conflicts can be ameliorated if not stopped. Political will, or lack thereof, comes into play.  This is not just national – happens all the time at international level. For instance, let us look at South Sudan which is also in the midst of a food crisis. That however, is paling into insignificance compared to the security crisis it faces just as it is about to become an independent nation by seceding from the North, on the 9^th of July. South Sudan needs international attention and peace keeping. It needs it NOW. Alas the United Nations Peace keeping Mission has no money. All they can do is keep a token and totally ineffective force and wring their hands in frustration. Why do they not have the money? Is there none? Just look at these figures and make up your mind. In 2010 the five permanent members of the UN Security council spent US $ 996 Billion on military expenditure. The budget for the UN Peacekeeping force, globally, for the same period was US $ 9 billion.

4.      Corruption : Leaders often look at acquisition of power as their ‘turn to eat’ rather than an opportunity to develop their nation. Corruption permeates through the bureaucracy and reaches the poor who ‘need’ to bribe to survive. Valuable development funds are lost in this process as a few rich & powerful get richer and more powerful.

5.      Stranglehold of the international food lobby : most food crises are artificial. There are adequate food stocks, sometimes even within a country but they don’t reach those who need them. Farm subsidies in developed countries, trade barriers, diversion of cereals to bio-fuels and hoarders create shortages leading to rising prices and empty markets. The poor then end up selling productive assets at distress rates leaving them even more vulnerable in the future.

These are all human made conditions and therefore can be addressed. Nay, they should be addressed. Without alleviation of poverty, wars on terror are meaningless. Each day I see reports of Kenyan youth being attracted to Al Shabab (the terror outfit based in Somalia), not necessarily out of political conviction but out of frustration and because they look at it as a livelihood option. I have seen similar stories in Afghanistan.

The need of the hour is to intervene in the affected areas and support the affected with cash, food, water and health interventions in the immediate term. It is also clear that livelihood recovery support will be required in the medium term. However, to even aspire for a longer term solution, we need to address the issues that lie at the core of the problem or else in a couple of years, we will be spinning the same old story.

A quote from Mahatma Gandhi sums it up for me ‘The world has enough for everyone’s need not for everyone’s greed’. Malthusian predictions notwithstanding, I believe this to be true 70 years after it was first said.

Interestingly even within an insecure country there are pockets of relative safety. One would think that the people there get a good crack at an opportunity to  climb out of poverty and suffering. However, quite often the safer territories suffer – yes suffer

they get lesser aid: for instance, in 2001-8 USAID spent more than half of its budget for Afghanistan on the four most insecure provinces leaving the rest for the remaining 30.

they get even lesser media attention (which in itself leads to lesser aid) – just think about it : almost everyone has heard of Kandahar and Hilmund provinces of Afghanistan. How many would have heard of Badakshan or Kunduz or Takhar?

I do not, by any means, want to claim that donors ‘reward’ insecurity by pouring in aid. No. Far from it. People living in high conflict situations need lot of support and a lot of the support is deserved. The point is that it does not mean that stable areas are to be ignored or under-supported. That is dangerous. There is always a possibility the lack of support may leave youth disenchanted and hence prone to joining the conflict. I can see this happening in parts of Afghanistan that have traditionally been very safe. Further, it is also possible that administrators of stable provinces get hamstrung – governments heading conflict countries are very often incapable of intervening and reduced donor support does not help. In extreme cases it may even tempt administrators to ignore incipient insecurity.

Why am in reminiscing about this? Well I am just back from South Sudan and discussions with the locals there triggered these thoughts. Why? You may well ask..

What I saw in Afghanistan is what I am seeing in South Sudan as well. I spent a few days in the South Sudan State of Western Equatoria. This area was significantly affected by the civil war. Being placed deep in the conflict zone the population did not have the relief from being on the international border from where they could escape. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 saw a semblance of peace return to South Sudan.

In the referendum earlier this year, the South voted overwhelmingly for secession from the North.   This referendum, contrary to all expectation, passed off very peacefully and in July 2011 South Sudan could well be the newest nation in the world. There is hope and expectation reminiscent of the situation all over post-colonial Africa in the early 1960s.

The country has emerged out of a bloody civil war going back decades. There are some internal troubles still in play – conflict over resources & continued presence of the Lord’s Resistance Army in some pockets. The infrastructure needs serious revamping. Political leadership, governance experience, civil society structures are weak.

The saving grace is the huge reserves of oil and minerals. These represent hope. They are the means that could be successfully harnessed to build a nation & pull its people out of grinding poverty.

This is the perfect point at which development interventions must be planned. I believe that it is at the point that insecurity ends or even reduces significantly that most development efforts and aid is needed.  My mind goes back to the last few minutes in Charlie Wilson’s War when Charlie asks for more money to pour into Afghanistan and the bemused secretary of state says “Afghanistan? Is that still around?”. Looking back one gets the feeling that the vacuum left by the retreat of the Soviet forces in 1989 just led to mis-governance and the start of a fratricidal conflict that is taking its toll on Afghanistan and the rest of the world even now.

South Sudan is at the cusp of destiny. They have the wherewithal to rise from conflict into a state where they can hope for peace and prosperity. That is if lack of leadership, inexperience of governing, corruption and rapaciousness does not prevent the poor from enjoying the benefits from the resources. This is not as farfetched at it first seems. It has happened in the past and may happen again. That would tip the poor into opposing its government. These starving poor took up arms in the past. They still have them! It won’t take much to push them back into conflict. This time against their own. Surely no one would want that to happen.

To prevent that, they need hope and that can only come about with long term development interventions. The international community has to show serious commitment to help the new Government of Southern Sudan to build a nation. This is not an opportunity that comes up too many times in history.

Will that happen? Is anyone listening?

Only time will tell..