Drawing policy lessons from development experience

Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : Drawing policy lessons from development experience

© 2006 Canadian Council for International Co-operation The Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC) is a coalition of Canadian voluntary sector organizations working globally to achieve sustainable human development. CCIC seeks to end global poverty, and to promote social justice and human dignity for all. Permission to reprint any part of this publication must be obtained from CCIC. As some of the stories originate with members of CCIC, further permission from the organization responsible for the story may also be necessary. Canadian Council for International Co-operation 1 Nicholas St., Suite 300 Ottawa, Ontario K1N 7B7 Tel.: (613) 241-7007 Fax: (613) 241-5302 www.ccic.ca

Acknowledgements This collection of stories was developed over the course of the Building Knowledge and Capacity for Policy Influence project, a special initiative of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC). The project was undertaken as part of the Sectoral Involvement in Departmental Policy Development program of the Voluntary Sector Initiative, with the financial support of the Government of Canada provided through the Canadian International Development Agency. We would like to extend our thanks and appreciation to the CCIC member organizations and their Southern partners who engaged in this project, and in particular to the individual researchers, writers and collaborators who participated directly in the story-building activities and workshops. Many invested countless hours in their efforts to test some new methodologies and ways of working, putting their principles of partnership to the test. Their experiences and learnings have made a significant contribution to our understanding of the complexities of building knowledge in partnership for effective policy influence. We would also like to thank journalists Bob Carty and Jamie Swift for sharing their knowledge, editorial and writing skills, and their wonderful insights into the power of stories and the art of story-writing. And finally, we are grateful to Christine Harmston for her able coordination of the complexities of the Building Knowledge and Capacity for Policy Influence project and to Ann Simpson for her editorial abilities in pulling together this compilation of stories. For further information about CCIC’s policy capacity-building work, the Building Knowledge and Capacity for Policy Influence project and/or the stories please contact Sue Cass (CCIC Organizational Development Team) or Brian Tomlinson (CCIC Policy Team) c/o [email protected].

Contents Telling Our Stories: An overview of policy lessons ....................................................... 1 Brian Tomlinson, Canadian Council for International Co-operation

Challenging Afro-Pessimism: The Africa-Canada Forum story ................................... 8 Canadian Council for International Co-operation

Poverty Reduction Strategies and Donor Country Plans: Do they add up to aid effectiveness? .................................................................................. 16 World Vision Canada

Speaking Truth to Power: Serving people while advocating for change in Ethiopia ...... 32 Canadian Foodgrains Bank, Canadian Nurses Association and Canadian Council for International Co-operation

From the Sideline to the Front Lines: The campaign to change Canada’s policy on tying food aid ........................................................................................... 46 Canadian Council for International Co-operation

Coalitions for Women’s Rights and Citizenship: A collective force for action and influence ................................................................................. 53 Canadian Centre for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI)

Women Arise: A dialogue on gender implementation ............................................... 58 Gail Hochachka and Sandra Thomson, One Sky – Canadian Institute for Sustainable Living

You Can Fight City Hall: Together we will realize our rights! ...................................... 70 CUSO Bolivia Program

From Popular Participation to Democracy: As the village goes, so the country will go .............................................................................................. 82 Cardinal Léger et ses Œuvres, Yves Tremblay

Project Ploughshares: Learning war no more ........................................................... 88 Project Ploughshares

“The story is universal and it is really a deep part of our make-up. For most of our existence…on this planet we have conveyed the most important information of our lives through stories… The story was the primary vehicle for conveying knowledge, the most important knowledge, about love, about sexuality, about wealth, about morality, about law, about society, about sharing, about development, when to plant, when not. All those things were told by stories… By tapping into that natural power in our psyches, story-tellers can make greater impact with their material… Your job as good story-tellers is to use the power of the narrative and to hang good analysis on it.” Bob Carty,

Presentation to a workshop on “Crafting the stories and messages that can make a difference”, Canadian Council for International Co-operation, October 7, 2004.

Telling Our Stories: An overview of policy lessons Brian Tomlinson Policy Team, Canadian Council for International Co-operation

Canadian civil society organizations (CSOs),1 such as the 90 members of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC), have been immersed for decades in the challenges of international development. They are on the front lines in Africa, Asia and the Americas, connecting Canadians with cooperatives, community organizations, informal businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the South that are working to reduce poverty. These are long-term partnerships with an overall aim of improving the lives of the millions of people who live in extreme poverty. The goal to end global poverty is ambitious. Poor people must raise their incomes, have access to good-quality food and to health and educational opportunities for their families, participate in political decisions affecting their lives, and improve living environments in their communities and countries. Four decades of development efforts have produced results, but have also revealed that there are no easy or certain paths to achieve these ends. CSOs the world over are well versed in the challenges of this work. Many have responded as innovators, experimenters, and risk-takers – convinced that they must act together with people living in poverty in order to bring about change. CSOs have also confronted many obstacles and injustices along the way. Small and medium farmers have little support to assure a sustainable income from the marketing of their crops when they must compete, either locally or internationally, with highly subsidized imports from powerful companies in developed countries. Communities where poor people live seldom have access to officials and politicians in local government to press for good-quality education and a safe environment for their children. Women face discrimination, and often violence, at all levels of society when they seek to claim their rights as equal citizens and participate in the social, political and economic life of their communities. In recent years, the role of CSOs in the development process has been increasingly marginalized as donors, in the name of aid effectiveness, direct their aid more exclusively to governments in the South. Since the mid-1990s, Canadian international cooperation CSOs have confronted their own limitations in working effectively to reduce poverty. More often than not, barriers to development are the result of the policies and practices of Northern governments and multilateral institutions. Canadian CSOs are called upon by Southern partners to challenge these policies and practices. Northern CSOs are being urged to retool themselves – to take their specific experience in communitybased overseas work with partners (in such areas as health, education or agriculture), and combine it with the skills and knowledge to influence national and international policies. They need to be able to affect the policies and actions of other actors in development – donors, governments, international financial institutions, the private sector, other CSOs – to ensure that CSO activities on the ground have a wider and a more sustainable impact.

Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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How then should CSOs generate policy-relevant knowledge from their overseas programming experience, and direct this knowledge into policy messages? It is a challenge that CCIC has been addressing with its members over the past decade. In 2003, CCIC and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) launched a project called Building Knowledge and Capacity for Policy Influence. This project was undertaken as part of the Sectoral Involvement in Departmental Policy Development program of the Voluntary Sector Initiative,2 which aimed to improve the capacity of the Canadian voluntary sector to contribute to government policy development. One of the key objectives of CCIC’s project was to explore and test ways for the Council, its members and Southern partners to improve their capacities to distil policy-relevant knowledge from their experience of working on global poverty issues. The project accepted that few Canadian CSOs have the flexibility to develop major in-house knowledge management and policy capacities. Collaboration is essential, therefore, to pool in-depth program experience which is dispersed throughout the membership. Many members of CCIC work with colleagues through CCIC’s policy working groups (for Africa, Asia and the Americas), and a few have invested in their own capacity to undertake policy engagement with government. Over a two-year period, the project built on these current manifestations of capacity among CCIC’s members, while exploring credible methodologies for translating field experience into effective policy contributions. The principles of partnership enshrined in CCIC’s Code of Ethics provided the foundation for this work. CCIC and its members are clear that North-South partnerships must work in ways that embody equality, acknowledging that inequalities often exist as a result of power dynamics, especially in funding relationships. Ensuring such an approach to partnership for policy influence is both a methodological and practical challenge. Working in partnership, Canadian CSOs clearly depend on the knowledge of people in the South, particularly individuals within their partnerships and communities of beneficiaries. It is this direct contact with counterparts and with communities of poor and marginalized people in the South that gives credibility and importance to CSO policy interventions in the North. Northern CSOs can potentially undermine this credibility, while further marginalizing Southern development actors and beneficiaries, if they appropriate and interpret this knowledge on their own for policy purposes. Too often, people who are direct actors or beneficiaries of development efforts are silent – or silenced – in the policy influencing process. The challenge for Northern CSOs is to work with Southern counterparts and communities to build shared knowledge. This is no easy task. How do Northern CSOs gather and interpret knowledge for policy work with their partners – respecting, listening to and building from the experiences of local development actors (community development workers, organizations of poor and vulnerable people, and Southern CSOs)? What knowledge is valued in shaping the messages for policy influence in the North, and with whom are these decisions made? How do Northern CSOs respect the rights of Southern partners to participate effectively in drawing and developing the policy conclusions from this knowledge? Southern and Northern CSOs may have very different understandings of the priorities for influencing policy change. For many citizens in the poorest countries, the impact of the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as trade and investment agreements, is much


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greater than the effect of Canadian aid policy. But only a small number of Canadian CSOs undertake policy work in the areas of finance and trade, while many more are connected to aid policy issues because of their use of Canadian aid resources. Whose voice is valued in CSO policy dialogue with government and multilateral institutions? Often, the impact of CSO policy messages lies in the power of local knowledge and the circumstances of poor and marginalized people. Increasingly, Southern development actors are seeking their own platforms and access to decision-makers to influence policy – not only in their own countries, but also in the North and internationally. What, then, are the implications for Canadian CSO policy initiatives seeking to influence Canadian decision-makers on issues of international development? The Building Knowledge and Capacity for Policy Influence project tackled some of these dilemmas as CCIC worked with members on a range of skills needed for policy influencing.3 One of the innovative tools explored for converting field experience into policy knowledge was the “policy story”. The development of policy stories takes advantage of the programmatic skills and relationships of Canadian CSOs, in respectful partnerships with Southern organizations and communities. A story approach links policy-relevant field knowledge to the human dimensions of development, and communicates the uniqueness, drama and complexity of this human experience. It aims to treat beneficiaries as development actors in their own right, by telling their stories as well as identifying the forces that affect their lives and limit their capacities to move out of poverty. The approach builds upon strong Southern cultural traditions of story-telling among people living in poverty, who use narratives to communicate their knowledge and the lessons they draw from their experience. That being said, the use of stories to capture policy lessons from field experience is still an experimental technique. Only a handful of organizations around the world have made significant efforts to use storytelling as a fundamental policy methodology. Organizations that have been developing policy stories have been “learning by doing”, with all the highs, lows and unexpected outcomes that such learning entails. This book includes a variety of policy stories, including a number that resulted from the Building Knowledge and Capacity project. Some were written by CCIC members and their partners overseas. Others were developed by writers who used journalistic techniques to tell recent policy stories involving Canadian CSOs. CCIC members who participated in the Building Knowledge and Capacity project had very different levels of resources to devote to the effort. Clearly, effective story-telling, within respectful North-South partnerships, requires time, financial resources, and flexible processes of “learning-by-doing” with Southern partners that were not available to all who participated during the short time span of the project. Despite these limitations, the stories in this collection provide a rich background, highlighting the actual roles that CSOs play in influencing the directions of development – whether seeking improvements in their local community in Bolivia or changes in Canada’s policy on food aid. Each story is unique. In many, CIDA’s responsive funding mechanisms, either through bilateral programs or the Canadian Partnership Branch, provided a critical foundation for the Canadian CSOs involved. Observations from these narratives reinforce how important it is for the Canadian government to strengthen its response to innovative CSO programs that involve citizens – in Canada and in the South – in efforts to end poverty.


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In the late 1990s, CCIC’s Africa-Canada Forum brought together CCIC members who were programming in Africa, to discuss ways to improve the quality and relevance of these programs. The Forum came together at a time when Africa had been marginalized by donors and was widely characterized in Canada as the object of charity, in response to increases in extreme poverty and genocidal conflicts. The Forum’s members sought to understand how civil society partnerships and Canadian government policies could better address the substantial challenges facing African citizens’ organizations and African governments. The story of the Forum demonstrates the power of African civil society knowledge when it is drawn into collaborative policy processes in Canada. The Forum worked to create a more equitable dynamic of accountability to African civil society policy actors. These actors have accompanied the Forum through ongoing correspondence and have participated directly in the Forum’s policy development processes, including those that shaped its messages to the Canadian government at the time of the Kananaskis G8 meeting. The pooled resources of the Forum created opportunities for African CSO leaders to directly address their concerns to relevant Canadian government officials in the preparations for the G8 summit. Canadian CSOs have been very effective over the past 15 years in forming working groups to pool their limited policy resources – to create opportunities for policy dialogue with Canadian government officials that consistently bring Southern CSO policy voices directly to the table.

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World Vision Canada has welcomed CIDA’s greater focus on country strategies to end poverty. But along with other CSOs, World Vision is concerned that CIDA is adopting uncritically the assumptions of government/World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to guide its programming in countries where it is focusing aid. The story of World Vision’s research into PRSPs in several African countries raises important issues of accountability to poor people and their communities, access to information and the role of citizen participation in setting priorities and implementing PRSPs. World Vision worked with long-standing local partners in Senegal, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania to gather and analyze information about the PRSP process in their countries. In Tanzania, for example, local partners addressed the impact of their government’s focus on basic education, which was an important element in the PRSP. In Canada, this knowledge was applied to an ongoing engagement with CIDA. World Vision continues to urge CIDA to more effectively address the gaps in the PRSPs that guide donor programming in these countries. CSOs form ongoing global strategic alliances with Southern organizations, from which knowledge can be collectively drawn and analyzed. Local partners can work together to apply this knowledge to policy processes in their own countries, while Northern partners employ it to encourage donors to augment the role of citizens (particularly those who are poor or marginalized) in donor interventions in these countries.

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The Canadian Foodgrains Bank and the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) are working with local partners in Ethiopia to strengthen their capacities to represent, respectively, the interests of small farmers and nurses. A six-year program of collaboration between the


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CNA and the Ethiopian Nurses Association (ENA) has built the latter into an 800-member association. In a country facing mounting rates of HIV/AIDS infections, the ENA is now well placed to advocate with the government and with donors for increased equity in health services, especially for the poor. The Foodgrains Bank tells the story of its engagement with partner organizations in Ethiopia to identify the root causes of hunger and food insecurity, in order to better understand policies that might support “food justice” and sustainable agriculture. CCIC and the Canadian Food Security Policy Group, a working group of 12 CSOs under the leadership of the Foodgrains Bank, have been a strong voice in Canada encouraging CIDA to increase resources for sustainable agriculture – resources that will help to meet the needs of Ethiopian small farmers. An accompanying story tells how the Foodgrains Bank, along with Oxfam Canada and World Vision Canada, pushed the Canadian government to change its long-standing policy of tying 90 percent of Canadian food aid to Canadian food commodities. As rural Ethiopians periodically faced conditions that produced famine, the Foodgrains Bank had learned from its Ethiopian partners that the local purchase of food was often a cost-effective response. The policy success in Canada will give the Foodgrains Bank greater flexibility to respond appropriately to food shortages. Canadian CSOs are strengthening counterpart organizations across the South to be more effective advocates for equitable health, education and agricultural policies in their own countries. In doing so, they have become adept at translating the lessons learned with their counterparts about country-specific conditions of poverty into credible messages for focused policy advocacy in Canada with parliamentarians, Ministers and CIDA. One result has been Canadian government initiatives that respond more effectively with the right mix of resources to meet the needs of hungry people and support sustainable agriculture. n

Canadian Centre for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI) and One Sky tell two stories about approaches and issues involved in strengthening women’s efforts to claim their rights and reduce poverty. Over five years, CECI contributed strategic resources (Canadian cooperants and CIDA financing) to the Women’s Rights and Citizenship project. This initiative brought together 31 women’s organizations in Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea in a regional coalition to mobilize on issues affecting poor women in their respective countries. The coalition established learning opportunities for women to share experiences from different countries and to support each other, with real gains for women’s rights in the individual countries. One Sky, from a quite different optic, follows the story of village women in rural Nigeria. Its story highlights the slow and methodical ways in which women can advance their interests through traditional structures at a community level, and the very real long-term barriers to change in societal values. Local organizations and development practitioners sometimes face tensions arising from the demands of donors, such as CIDA, to demonstrate short-term results showing how their work is advancing the donor’s gender equality policy. One Sky’s story sends a strong message to development policy-makers that respect for “local ownership” requires that they start from local women’s understanding of the culturally specific context in which women can claim their rights. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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Canadian CSOs, working with their overseas partners, come face-to-face with critical issues – violence, legal barriers, limits to political participation – in advancing internationally recognized rights of women. They provide strategic resources, with linkages to Canada, in support of efforts designed and implemented by women’s organizations in the South. At the same time, programmatic links with Southern CSOs provide a needed “reality check” and feedback about how actual progress can be achieved in implementing donor agency policies on gender equality. n

CUSO and Cardinal Léger et ses Œuvres tell stories of efforts for change at the grassroots level. CUSO cooperants working with NGOs in the barrio cities surrounding La Paz, Bolivia tell of the difficult struggles of neighbourhood leaders seeking to bring urgently needed public improvements to their communities. The story reveals the complexities of local development in poor urban settings. It highlights the tensions between well-intended law (in this case the Popular Participation Act) and the capacities of poor communities to fund local improvement plans democratically determined by the community. Community leaders sacrificed much to overcome almost impossible barriers – lack of volunteer time among poor people, little trust in the motives of leaders, unfamiliarity with official channels, and lack of political will in local authorities. The story demonstrates the vital role played by a local civil society organization, Centro de Investigación Social y Trabajo en Equipos Multidisciplinarios, which brought technical skills and legal knowledge to work with leaders in fragile community organizations to overcome these barriers. Cardinal Léger et ses Œuvres and its partners in Mali are similarly involved in processes of community change, supporting the establishment of village associations that enable more democratic decision-making at the local level and encourage sustainable local development. Previously excluded groups, including women and youth, are gaining a voice in local decisionmaking, and are increasingly asserting their rights to participate in development decisions. The story emphasizes the value of civil society partnerships as a means of strengthening local ownership of development. Many Southern CSOs advocating for the rights of poor and marginalized people work in situations that are fraught with tension and conflict, as national programs intended for the poor are captured by local elites and political patronage. While donors work with governments at the national level to deliver resources for poverty reduction, they must also strengthen independent support for the capacity of autonomous CSOs, working at local and regional levels, to ensure that poor people benefit from these resources. CIDA’s various responsive mechanisms, responding to Canadian CSO partnerships in the South, are primary means to accomplish this goal.

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Project Ploughshares is an ecumenical coalition of the Canadian Council of Churches. Its mission is to advance approaches that build peace and prevent war, and promote the peaceful resolution of political conflict. Its policy story focuses on the creation of a global network of CSOs that have drawn international attention to threats to human security from the trade and use of small arms and light weapons. The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) now brings together 500 organizations from North and South. Ploughshares facilitated the founding of IANSA, taking advantage of a key moment of international CSO dialogue on the issues in Canada. Ploughshares accompanied this work for a global network with on-theTe l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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ground diplomacy that resulted in the Nairobi Declaration, a formal commitment to regulate and control the manufacture, import and export of small arms, light weapons and ammunition. This Declaration was signed by 10 countries in East Africa and the Horn of Africa and has become an important reference point for CSOs in those countries to hold their governments to account. Canadian CSOs play key mediating and facilitating roles internationally for North-South civil society networks, pressing governments and multilateral institutions to adopt measures to reduce conflict and construct peace. These organizations are particularly adept at combining mobilization of constituencies in Canada with formal and informal networks of like-minded organizations around the world, and strategically insert themselves in intergovernmental processes to advance their policy agenda. Canadians have played such roles on peace and security issues, the call for debt cancellation and issues around financing for development. The policy stories in this book depict some of the complexity of development as experienced by Canadian CSOs and their counterparts in the South. When constructed with respect to local realities and local voices, policy stories can reveal the human experience of injustice and impoverishment, as well as remarkable efforts to overcome these conditions. As a North-South process of engagement with partners, they offer a tool to break the “glass barriers” between community activists, programmers and policy-makers, bringing together sources of relevant knowledge inside and outside organizations. Nevertheless, stories are but one tool for CSOs to discern and analyze important facts that shape the possibilities for citizens to affect their conditions, whether the issue is poverty, access to life-saving medicines or creating peace out of conflict. CSOs are now important development actors who have tremendous opportunities to gather and process knowledge. Those in the North, in particular, have a responsibility to use this knowledge to shape and project powerful policy messages to Northern decision makers – while acting in solidarity with, and respect for, those in the South who helped to create this knowledge. As CSOs seek to attract the attention of country and global decisionmakers, policy stories can contribute – by capturing the energy of citizens around the world who understand that a better world is possible.

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A Note Regarding Terminology: CCIC uses the term “civil society organizations” or “CSOs” to describe a diversity of organizations that form and operate, within countries and internationally, to influence and practise development. The term is inclusive of membership-based church organizations, community organizations, trade unions, cooperatives, farmers’ and peoples’ organizations. CSOs also include institutions such as universities, colleges and research centres and associations as well as other not-for-profit voluntary organizations in Canada and the South. Excluded are governments, political parties, government-created organizations and the for-profit private sector. Not-for-profit voluntary organizations are often referred to as “non-governmental organizations” or “NGOs”, a term which some authors of stories in this book use as synonymous with CSOs. It should be noted, however, that social movement organizations, churches and trade unions often feel that the term “NGO” does not apply to them.

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The Voluntary Sector Initiative was a joint undertaking between Canada’s federal government and the voluntary sector that took place between 2000 and 2005. The initiative focused on strengthening the relationship between the voluntary sector and the government and enhancing the capacity of the voluntary sector.

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See Building Knowledge and Capacity for Policy Influence: Reflections and Resources (forthcoming) for more information on the project and its associated training and skill-building activities. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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Challenging Afro-Pessimism: The Africa-Canada Forum story Canadian Council for International Co-operation1

“There is no other continent like Africa which is so often spoken for by others, on whose behalf policies are so often made by others; where we have governments that are so compliant with others speaking for them. The work of Third World Network (Ghana) seeks to reverse that tradition. Not simply beneficiaries or partners in solidarity, but also one of a group of African people who are speaking with common voices around common problems, so that African people speak for themselves as African citizens, African people speak as global citizens, and African people act for themselves and act with others around common global problems.” Yao Graham, Third World Network – Africa, Ottawa, 2005

Advisers from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) continued to fly into African capitals, calling for limited government and offering the latest version of the gospel according to the global market. Yet if there was one place where market failure was evident, it was in Africa, where the whole development enterprise was, by the turn of the century, apparently dead.

During the years of the independence movement and into the early post-colonial period, a wave of optimism swept Africa. Forty years later, in the 1990s, apartheid had finally been eliminated with the help of a tenacious international solidarity movement. But the global activists who had helped dislodge the last of white rule in the South found little to cheer about. Social disintegration seemed rampant across the continent. Liberia. Sierra Leone. Somalia. Angola. Rwanda. Congo. Blood diamonds. Child soldiers. Land mines. Refugees. Epidemics.

At least that is what the Ugandan political economist Yash Tandon concluded in a 1996 article entitled “An African Perspective”. He described a situation in which school enrolment and real wages were falling, while preventable illness and ethnic war were on the rise. The great experiment with the lives of millions of poor people, called structural adjustment, had failed massively. Tandon concluded that an important reason for that failure was that Africans too often were not “in control of their own resources.... They do not own their own

For too many of Africa’s citizens, it seemed their lives would be as described in the cliché – nasty, brutish and short. Indeed, by 1996, Colin Leys, a Western scholar who had made international solidarity his life’s work, was sounding a despairing note. “Millions of people have already died from hunger, disease and violence, and millions more face Hobbesian existences in conditions of accelerating environmental and social degradation...”

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This chapter was written by Jamie Swift under contract to the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC). CCIC is responsible for any errors or omissions. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of CCIC as a whole. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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Though Ms. Gobeil described herself as a practitioner and not a policy analyst, she felt that Canadian NGOs needed to discuss both service delivery and the marginalization of Africa in the wider global context. Save for crisis images of hunger and disease, an entire continent was being ignored, at least as far as this thing called “globalization” was concerned.

land. Products of the land – cotton, coffee, cocoa, timber, biogenetic materials, minerals – are either directly controlled by transnational [corporations] or traded in the world market at prices far below their real value. Given this massive outflow of value, Africa has no hope in hell ever to realise sufficient income to sustain its populations.”

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“You work on a micro level and you can just see that it will not go anywhere if you don’t work at a global level,” she said.

Off the Map Against this background, it was scarcely surprising that a phenomenon called “Afro-pessimism” took root, not only among academics but also within non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Inter Pares, a much smaller Canadian NGO, had similar concerns. Molly Kane had had some experience with policy advocacy work before joining the organization, which saw at least part of its work as questioning social priorities both at home and abroad. For Ms. Kane, NGOs should always be mindful of the political implications of the work they do. This affects the projects and organizations they choose to support as partners.

In the course of Africa’s lost decades, these NGOs had become increasingly popular. They had won favour both with powerful multilateral agencies that were convinced that government was part of the problem, and with those who had a different vision of the world’s future – one rooted in justice for the millions left behind. Many of Canada’s non-governmental development agencies with projects in Africa have taken up this cause, often by emphasizing support for civil society organizations in the South.

“We can do projects until we all die and they’ll be nice projects. But as organizations we have the responsibility to look at the policy environment. Public policy. As citizens, what kind of society do we live in? What kind of influence can we have on governments that set the framework in which people live their lives?”

One of these is the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, the official development agency of Canada’s Roman Catholic Church. Development and Peace supports projects in 13 African countries. According to its Africa Team Leader Danielle Gobeil, by the late 1990s Development and Peace, together with many other agencies that sponsor projects in Africa, was suffering from “practitioner fatigue” – doing its best and but not making much progress. And there was nowhere people could go to discuss the issues they confronted every day in their work.

In 1999, she recalled, Africa did not loom large in public policy discussions in Canada: “It was off the map. Bono was not coming to Canada.” The desire to share their frustrations in dealing with African issues, and the need to have a place where they could do this in a constructive way, led to the creation of the Africa-Canada Forum (ACF) that winter. The idea was to invite Canadian NGO people to a three-day meeting with an open agenda, the general focus being a discussion of their work in Africa. The organizers, who also included the Anglican Church Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, Oxfam Canada, the Canadian Council for International Co-operation

“Rwanda had been a shock for all of us,” she explained. “We needed to talk to each other. We were telling ourselves that we must not be the only ones who would like to talk about this.”


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Ms. Vandergrift added that despite some initial scepticism within World Vision, “the acceptance of policy work as part of our core mandate has grown.” Policy and more traditional programming increasingly go hand in hand. She was proud of the leading role her agency had played in the corporate social responsibility campaign that focussed on the role that the Canadian oil company Talisman had played in war-torn southern Sudan. “One of the goals of the ACF,” she said, “is to do work on both sides – advocacy/policy and strengthening our programs, by working together.”

and the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, hoped to establish a place where people could consult each other, examine ethical fundraising and programming work and learn from each other’s experiences, while gradually crafting strategies that would shift Canadian government policy on Africa. Developing proposals and advocating policy change were key goals. The process was openended – to the extent that the people who initiated it had no set agenda for a next stage, though plans did include systematic engagement with African colleagues. They hoped to let the dialogue grow slowly, starting with where the participants “were at”.

That was a main conclusion of the initial Forum, held in May 2000 at Lac Macdonald in the Laurentians north of Montreal and Ottawa. Some 40 people from 20 organizations responded positively to an invitation to agencies that shared:

Where many Canadians “were at” with respect to Africa, according to some of the NGO participants, sprang at least in part from the images used in fundraising campaigns. Rather than portraying Africans as active citizens claiming their rights, some fundraising efforts still pictured people as passive victims and beneficiaries of charity. The goal for everyone was to improve the material conditions of people’s lives. What was in question was whether this was best accomplished by the classic “flies-in-the-eyes” image of poor, suffering children getting a handout from someone else (often a white person), or whether it was better to send Canadians messages that emphasized people developing their capacity to organize. Indeed, “capacity building” has been a watchword of the Africa-Canada Forum.

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a commitment to long-term development and social justice in Africa, as distinct from humanitarian assistance; experience in ongoing African programs in partnership with local civil society organizations or via international networks; and involvement in public education in Canada and an interest in policy formation and advocacy with the Canadian government.

Participants in the first Forum were aware that inter-agency collaboration had been waning for a decade, that there had been a drift away from development to emergency response and that, as the report on the Forum noted, “it is easier to raise funds for victims of emergencies and war than it is to support the work of popular organizations over the long haul.”

Kathy Vandergrift was also at the ACF’s founding meeting as Director of Policy for World Vision Canada, one of the country’s largest relief and development organizations. Policy advocacy was a newer mandate for World Vision than it was for some of the other participants, although the organization was quickly establishing a track record in questioning World Bank and IMF loan conditionality, promoting social justice in the international trade system and emphasizing the importance of human rights in poverty reduction.

Questions abounded: Are African partners content to be service providers where funding is plentiful? What, indeed, is “partnership”? How can agencies rebuild their ability to conduct policy analysis and advocacy, integrating policy into their organizational culture and capacity? “Are we contributing to ‘Afro-pessimism’ and


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The first Forum ended with the participants concluding that it had been a necessary first step. As organizations with common interests and common problems, the NGOs were better placed to move on to a second step, this time in company with African partners, whom they resolved to bring into the dialogue.

public indifference” by promoting stereotypical images of Africa in advertising and fundraising? “Have we succeeded in influencing policies in Canada? What impact have we had on official political and financial commitments?” Panel presentations underlined the gravity of the situation in sub-Saharan Africa. Micheline Ravololonarisoa of ACORD, a Nairobi-based inter agency consortium, argued that the emergence of war lords and criminal networks were signs of a generalized economic chaos that had resulted from the dismantling of local economies in the name of globalization. Kenyan activist Eunice Sahle, working as an academic in Canada, argued that rather than poor governance and a lack of accountability, the root of many African problems was an obsession with market-based solutions that she described as a “fetish.” Brian Tomlinson of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (which would emerge as the host for the ACF) noted that although Canada had made progress in bilateral debt cancellation, Canadian aid to Africa had dropped 34 per cent in the 1990s. This had been accompanied by a decline in policy analysis within CCIC’s membership and the rise in the perception that sub-Saharan Africa had fallen off the policy map.

The second session, in the late spring of 2001, helped to consolidate the Forum. This time a dozen people from Africa attended, not as guests, nor even as partners. Indeed, the organizers tried to avoid the latter term, insisting on referring to African “colleagues”. Given that the ACF is not a funding venue, this is an accurate characterization of the relationship. By this time its organizers had a formula. Getting people out of their offices into a woodland setting was crucial. The goal was an extended people-to-people encounter in an informal setting, with no specific task to accomplish and only a loosely-defined agenda, so that people could relax and step away from their institutional personae. “Everybody was participating as something they did on top of their really busy jobs,” recalled Claudie Gosselin, who had been hired as ACF’s part time co-ordinator working out of CCIC. “Not only did we really have to make it relevant to what people were already doing. But we also had to make it fun.”

ACF participants discussed the pitfalls of a new aid ideology. As the capacity of African governments to regulate their economies and provide services had declined, NGOs had been enlisted to step in as service providers, as an alternative to inefficient governments. So strengthening civil society, which sounded like a virtuous undertaking, had multiple meanings. Ms. Ravololonarisoa put forward the analysis that NGOs and civil society cannot substitute for the state, and that it is up to governments to guarantee the conditions in which civil society can mobilize. For her, the state had to negotiate with international financial institutions, and it was up to civil society to ensure the accountability of the state to the citizenry in that context.

The organizers soon found that people did not mind at all getting out of their offices and into the woods. “The first year we had a midnight swim in the lake, the next time we had a lot of dancing at night,” said Molly Kane. “We’ve tried to nurture that.” Uniquely, the Forum was a creation of its participating members. Although CCIC housed the co-ordinator, the ACF was not an undertaking of CCIC. Rather, it was a joint project of participating NGOs, who have paid for it themselves. Moreover,


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ties”. It was known to its critics – and they were legion – as the “Washington Consensus” or neo-liberalism. The consensus among these critics in the Canadian NGO community was straightforward.

many participants were programming people who rarely had the chance to mull over challenging policy issues, particularly on a sustained basis. The Forum was to become an essential “policy talking shop” for development practitioners who were not simply gathering to figure out how to better leverage funding from the government.

“‘Trade not aid’ is the American approach to Africa,” noted Development and Peace. “Increasing exports was the solution and in fact African exports rose by 30 percent from 1980 to 2000. The problem was that the value of these exports fell by 40 percent during the same period.”

According to Danielle Gobeil, “The idea was ‘Let’s get together to talk about two topics — practice and a more global analysis. Why are things like this?’ The marginalization of Africa, Africa not going anywhere in the global economy.”

The development policy analysts who had their roots in the liberation theology tradition of the Roman Catholic Church were echoed by their counterparts from World Vision, who insisted that trade-not-aid was merely a cover for “blanket liberalisation in the [World Trade Organization] and the cuts to many countries’ aid budgets over the past 25 years. But this ideological slogan rests on a vacuous, misleading dichotomy that has more to do with fiscal and political expediency and economic vested interests of [donor] countries than sound development principles.”

It was soon after this second ACF meeting that Africa was thrust onto the Canadian government’s policy map… and the front pages of the newspapers.

d The New Partnership for Africa’s Development At the 2001 G8 meeting in Genoa, South African President Mbeki presented the world’s most powerful governments with a New African Initiative. Within three months, African heads of state had launched a New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) to eliminate poverty and remove the continent from its “exclusion in a globalizing world.” The Canadian government was quick to grasp the nettle. As host of the 2002 G8 summit, the Prime Minister pledged that the African quandary would be front and centre at the upcoming summit in Kananaskis. An Action Plan would follow.

All of which, coupled with the fact that it was being championed by their government, led the Canadian NGOs of ACF to scrutinize the NEPAD closely. It also led them to invite their African colleagues to join them in some urgent policy analysis of an initiative that acknowledged that globalization “has increased the ability of the strong to advance their interests to the detriment of the weak.”

For the most active participants in the ACF, the urgency around NEPAD signalled implicit recognition that after over 20 years – since the World Bank’s 1981 Berg Report initiated the first phase of structural adjustment – the official development policies of Northern governments, and the international financial institutions they controlled, had failed. The entire menu of trade liberalization, deregulation and privatization went under the technical term “conditionali-

Canadian NGOs played a crucial role in launching a global discussion of NEPAD. Together with their African colleagues, some of whom had not even heard of NEPAD until they learned of it in e-mail exchanges with Canadian NGOs, the ACF crafted a comprehensive response. While welcoming an African initiative, their analysis drew out a critique of the neo-liberal policies assumed in NEPAD. Any partnership that claimed to be “new” would have to be democratic and transparent, with


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veteran of countless international gatherings. “It’s a very different kind of interaction, if not unique. Quite different from many NGO meetings in the North.”

African governments accountable to their citizens and civil society organizations. These latter features, after all, were the political hallmarks of World Bank and official donor rhetoric, characterized by so many stern admonitions about the need for T&A – Transparency and Accountability.

canadian ngos played a crucial role in launching a global discussion of nepad.

Yet, according to the politely-phrased ACF analysis of NEPAD, “the absence of prior discussion and debate with African citizens raises issues of commitment to democratic participation, and is also reflected in (its) content and priorities...”

The ACF was careful not to take positions that could not be followed up, seeking to build momentum backed by strength of numbers. Avoiding denunciation in favour of filling a political space in dialogue with government, the Forum was evolving into what one participant described as a sophisticated and mature political approach that involved an attempt to make Canadian decision-making more in tune with the big, glaring issues.

The heart of the ACF critique was that NEPAD was a top-down initiative intended for the consumption of Northern donors, not African citizens. The joint African-Canadian response took the emphasis on democracy on the part of the World Bank and donors such as CIDA at face value. It concluded that “the worthy goals of NEPAD (poverty eradication, democratization, human rights promotion) will not be achieved through technical and administrative measures. Rather, it is critical for the long-term promotion of democracy and for the equitable distribution of economic benefits that civil society actors be able to monitor their own government and demand accountability. Yet NEPAD is largely silent on civic engagement.”

Professor Bonnie Campbell, a long-time participant-observer of the development enterprise, also described the ACF’s novelty: “It has the beauty of having modest people involved who are very clear about their positioning. The discussions about Canada and NEPAD didn’t mean telling others what to do. It’s working – I hate the word partnership – with others to address common problems. It’s listening respectfully to what people from other parts of the world had to say about trade issues, mining issues, or security issues and looking for the policy implications. It’s also making sure you are also talking with people involved in government policy decision-making when possible. It’s being clear where it may be possible to move the issues in the policy-making process, rather than (remaining in) a fringe position.”

Of course, this sort of understanding is familiar fare in NGO circles. What made the ACF response significant was the way in which it had emerged. Tetteh Hormeku of Third World Network – Africa, based in Ghana, valued the opportunity for far-reaching, comprehensive debate between Canadian civil society organizations and their colleagues and partners in Africa. This led to the adoption of shared analysis and positions which both sides found comfortable and useful as platforms for mobilization.

In the run-up to the G8 Kananaskis summit, the Forum arranged meetings between several of its African members and Canadian officials leading the planning process, including people from the Prime Minister’s Office who were involved in the G8, Foreign Affairs and CIDA.

“The Forum afforded the opportunity not simply to discuss policies but also to take a common advocacy position. Coming from an African NGO, I found that very useful,” said Mr. Hormeku, a


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This followed naturally from its successful efforts to engage civil servants in policy discussions at the Forums themselves. ACF co-chair Serge Blais also made a presentation to the Minister of International Cooperation as part of CIDA’s consultations on strengthening aid effectiveness. At the same time, he accompanied his colleague and ACF co-chair Molly Kane to the Africa Social Forum in Mali, where NEPAD was a principal focus. Several months before the Kananaskis G8 summit, many African colleagues came to a meeting in Montreal, at the invitation of the Minister of International Cooperation, to discuss NEPAD and the G8 meeting. There, they took up the Forum’s NEPAD commentary in sometimes heated discussions with representatives of the Canadian government.

in an era when something vital to human survival is increasingly regarded as a market commodity, subject to trade rules so often adjudicated by the world’s most powerful private interests and governments. In 2003, the Forum began exploring with its members a “rights-based approach”, discussing how such an approach might be usefully applied to both programming and advocacy work. Instead of being carried away by the novelty of the approach, the Forum pointed out that claiming and enforcing social rights takes money, something poor countries and poor people lack, particularly in the context of structural adjustment programs and a lopsided international trading system.

As it evolved, the ACF did not shy away from self-criticism. It recognized differing agendas, North and South: Canadian NGOs were wondering how to get access to state funding now that Africa was back on the map, while African organizations were often buffeted by daily concerns like survival and peace. The Forum acknowledged the oftunspoken fact that NGOs are only part of civil society, not civil society itself. What’s more, it pointed out that NGOs involved in the development enterprise are often “fragmented” and “not very independent from (Northern) donor interests.” Is it ethical, the Forum asked “to respond to requests from northern donors ‘to be realistic’ in our promotion of issues of interest to African popular movements, in the name of those who will never be at the table?”

A Diverse Forum

d A dictionary definition of “forum” hinges on open discussion and debate on matters of public interest. The Africa-Canada Forum has attempted to be true to the image of a place for freewheeling conversation. As such, it became a remarkable spot for give-and-take across three divides. One was inter-continental, between Canadian and African groups and colleagues. One was between Canadian programming and advocacy initiatives. Finally, there was a third, rather familiar, Canadian divide. “The ACF’s bilingualism was not just lip-service bilingualism,” said Claudie Gosselin. “Not what we hear too much in Ottawa: ‘Bonjour tout le monde. Merci d’être venus and now let’s talk about the important things’. There was a commitment to crossing this divide – both a Canadian and an African reality – to start with. It happened because the chair and the staff and the majority of the people in the co-ordinating committee are truly bilingual.”

Even if the (perhaps inadvertent) use of the word “never” has a tinge of Afro-pessimism, it was balanced by a recognition of the importance of what the political theorists call “rights talk.” Putting the rights of poor people at the forefront offers the possibility of placing the often muddy notion of “development” on firmer and more familiar terrain. Social, economic and cultural rights (such as the right to clean water) loom large

For World Vision’s Kathy Vandergrift, the Forum has been different. “They have worked harder at that than most coalitions I’ve been part of.”


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Tetteh Hormeku summed up the dynamic when he observed that he had attended educational seminars too numerous to mention. “But I’ve always found the experience of having different types of organizations debating particular policy questions, bringing their variety of experiences to bear on that discussion to be much more effective. In the NEPAD discussions, I remember one of the key things was whether or not Canadian organizations were looking at what could be done because there was going to be more funding available for a NEPAD priority. It became clear that, even though we all welcomed more funding, the context was ‘Would there be additional funding for the vulnerable?’ because so much in NEPAD was oriented to the market. That was a very interesting discussion. Everybody came at the issue from a different perspective. Those of us who are experienced as policy advocacy organizations learned a lot from grounding our analysis in the direct experience of organizations that were delivering concrete projects to the vulnerable. So it was a dual learning process.”

She added that the ACF’s bilingual character makes it easier to deal with Ottawa’s bilingual public service. Danielle Gobeil is a veteran of Development and Peace, an organization whose bilingualism reflects the bi-national character of the Catholic Church, one of the few institutions in Canada that bridges the bi-national divide. “One indicator of the Forum’s success is that people keep coming – French people and people from Toronto,” she said. “It brings people together. Québec used to be very close to itself. But being from D&P I’ve learned to have more of a Canadian perspective.” The Forum’s meetings offer simultaneous interpretation. This is not only helpful for Canadian participants. It also works for people who arrive from Ghana and Senegal not being able to communicate easily with their NGO colleagues from West Africa (one of the legacies of colonial rule). Finally, the ACF has attempted with some success to do another form of bridging – opening better lines of communication among a diversity of NGOs, many of whom have been programmers and service providers, while others have leaned more towards policy advocacy. It has, as the social workers say, been a “challenge” for service NGOs to deal with the policy framework within which they provide services. So an NGO may be supporting counterparts in Africa involved in the delivery of water in a remote corner of Senegal, where both partners need to better understand macro-level policy measures around water privatization.

ACF was attempting to show that Afro-optimism was something to strive for. “When people take three days to gather in the woods in the fall where your room is not heated,” concluded Danielle Gobeil, “it’s because they’re really serious about discussing issues. One indicator of the Forum’s success is that people just keep coming.”

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Poverty Reduction Strategies and Donor Country Plans: Do they add up to aid effectiveness? World Vision Canada1

“Armed with poverty reduction strategies, countries become masters of their own development, with a clearly articulated vision for their future and a systematic plan for achieving their goals.” “A New Approach to Country-Owned Poverty Reduction Strategies” World Bank/International Monetary Fund, 2000 pressure, the World Bank announced a change of course in the fall of 1999. Instead of imposing the much-criticized market-based structural adjustment programs on developing countries, it would facilitate the development of countryowned PRSPs. These would then be used as the basis for debt reduction and concessional lending. In theory, the PRSPs would ensure that money saved through lower debt payments would be used for effective poverty reduction. While their basic economic assumptions did not change, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) finally recognized the need to replace a onesize-fits-all approach with plans tailored to each country.

Aid effectiveness has become an issue for both governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Since 2002, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has made aid effectiveness its major goal and tied its search for success to the implementation of Poverty Reduction Strategies in recipient countries. CIDA has been working with the assumption that aid will be more effective by allocating more money to fewer countries in fewer sectors, using country development plans based on Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Strategies to implement the Millennium Development Goals are now tied to PRSPs. A lot depends on the quality of these PRSPs, including the hopes and dreams of millions of people living in poverty. Are PRSPs worthy of this confidence? If not, what can be done to improve them? That is the question World Vision Canada set out to explore with its partners in four of CIDA’s core countries in Africa.

Central to the logic of the PRSP approach is a recognition that national efforts at reducing poverty have to be just that – national, developed in the countries themselves. In order to qualify for renewed financial support and debt reduction, countries like Senegal and Tanzania were required to produce comprehensive strategies based on more careful analysis of poverty in their country, and active participation of civil society and the private sector. Accountability mechanisms were proposed to ensure that the poor would benefit from debt reduction and new loans. The hope was that local ownership would mean a greater chance of success.

Why are PRSPs and Country Development Plans Contentious? In the 1990s, millions of people around the world joined the Jubilee 2000 campaign to demand debt cancellation and reform of the development paradigm used by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Responding to public 1

This story reflects the views and experience of World Vision Canada and partners who were involved in developing it. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation as a whole. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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Evaluations by the World Bank itself are surprisingly critical, but often recommend minor changes that fail to address fundamental issues such as sustainable economic development. Many critics are more harsh in their assessment. Four years after the new approach was first promulgated, the UK-based Bretton Woods Project, established by NGOs to advocate for change in the IFIs, noted: “The government is responsible for writing the PRSP and for commissioning and organizing technical and donor input into it. In practice it often means building “ownership” around pre-existing, IFI-preferred standard economic policies.... Many NGOs are concerned that this contradiction means that governments opt for programs that they know will be accepted even if this conflicts with priorities identified through consultative processes.”

At the same time, however, the IFIs retained final approval of draft PRSPs and control of the purse strings, without changing their own basic economic policy framework. This made the new PRSP approach controversial from the beginning. Some development actors wanted to give local ownership a chance; after all, this was the first time in many countries that people might have a chance to participate in any way in decisions that affect their lives. Others were harshly critical, accusing PRSPs of being a fig leaf, veiling powerful interests, or a Trojan Horse to impose the same discredited structural adjustment policies indirectly. Many were simply sceptical and feared that PRSPs were just the latest development fad, unlikely to last long enough to be worthy of attention. Staying outside the debate became more problematic when donor agencies jumped on the PRSP bandwagon. The money freed up by debt relief alone could not finance any of the plans. So donor agencies, like CIDA, were enlisted to align their bilateral development programs with PRSPs, in the name of local ownership, donor co-ordination and aid effectiveness. In many cases this was done without questioning the basic economic assumptions that continued to drive IFI decisions and shape PRSPs.

When CIDA moved to align its strategy for aid effectiveness with PRSPs, World Vision Canada drew on research reports developed with its partners in the South, voiced concerns about the lack of critical analysis, and decided to do its own analysis. To test the effectiveness of CIDA country strategies and their basis in PRSPs, World Vision Canada decided to undertake a participatory research project with partners in four CIDA core countries in Africa. Tanzania, Ethiopia, Senegal and Mozambique were chosen because they offer a range of experience and different contexts, from which lessons might be drawn for wider application.

From the beginning World Vision adopted a stance of critical engagement, publishing a series of research reports that raise serious questions about the PRSP approach. Based on evidence from developing countries, the reports recommend substantial changes in the process and content of PRSPs, and in the IFI macro-economic policy frameworks that put unreasonable constraints on local options. Without changes, PRSPs are unlikely to lead to sustainable poverty reduction, and will be judged as yet another failure in the search for aid effectiveness.

Pooled Experience Provides Evidence World Vision brings on-the-ground experience to the discussion of aid effectiveness through donor country plans and PRSPs. In all four countries, development partners were active in the PRSP process from the beginning, and remain engaged in various forms of program implementation and direct work with poor communities. Interviews with partners and community leaders identified three areas that could illustrate the impact of PRSPs: governance, education, and economic well-being of the

As implementation of PRSPs continues, other reviews are mixed. Some civil society voices emphasize their potential and argue for improvements, but few show wholehearted enthusiasm.


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in debates with the government over priorities and strategic directions in the PRSP. Although this engagement is valuable, it is not a substitute for direct consultation with the poor people who are directly affected. There is a need to link the knowledge and analytical capacity of nationallevel civil society organizations with the field experience of community-based organizations and development NGOs working in poor communities. This is essential to spread awareness of the PRSP and foster participation in monitoring and evaluation of its specific elements.

poor. In each of these areas, special concerns about impacts for women were repeated from country to country. In addition to interviews, two in-depth case studies were done at a local level, both in education, one in Tanzania and the other in Mozambique. These case studies illustrated both common factors and significant differences. (Evidence from the Tanzania case study can be found on page 24.) The first important finding is that significant improvement is needed if PRSPs and donor country strategies are going to add up to effective aid. “CIDA should not base its success on assumptions about PRSPs,” said Kathy Vandergrift, Research Project Director. “A more responsible approach would include critical analysis and specific strategies to improve the country plans that now form the basis for its claims of more effective aid.”

In Mozambique and Tanzania, civil society groups reported a lack of accountability and responsiveness in PRSP programs at the community level. PRSP initiatives are top-down and often do not respond to the conditions of local situations. When NGOs and community groups turn to local governments to monitor progress on PRSP programming in their communities, they find that local officials are often unaware and uninformed. Local governments in both countries remain largely outside the PRSP process. In Mozambique, the PRSP is officially linked to the state government rather than local governments. In Tanzania, a plan for decentralization exists, but there is little political interest in its implementation, so involvement at the local level is highly uneven.

Focusing on health and education in fewer countries may sound smart, but sectoral programs cannot be effective if the national strategy is badly flawed. Common themes in the four countries suggest at least four areas that need improvement in order to achieve aid effectiveness.

Stronger linkages between national policies and local programs

While Ethiopia’s PRSP process is officially being decentralized through district-level governments, NGOs raise concerns about the capacity to carry out the PRSP. One NGO dealing particularly with health issues, for example, stated that it supported the idea of decentralizing expenditures to the Woreda (district) level, but noted that there were risks:

“When I go to the government and ask how much money they have spent on health, they can tell me,” said one local person in Tanzania. “But when I ask how much has been spent and on what in my community, they won’t tell me. When the government is secretive, doubts emerge about the impact of the PRSP.”

“The technical capacity at the Woreda level is still very limited,” said the group. “Many people in the health sector fear that health may not receive due attention from Woreda leaders if they set their priorities differently…”

A critical challenge for PRSPs is more effective implementation and accountability at the local level. In Senegal, for example, there is a lack of community awareness and popular involvement in the PRSP process. At the national level, some civil society groups are actively involved


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Decentralization is a double-edged sword, as anyone familiar with downloading in Canada knows well. While small is beautiful, it is not necessarily powerful. First, decentralization policies can shift responsibility downward, permitting national governments to abdicate responsibility for key sectors in poverty reduction. Secondly, standards and services may become uneven across the country. In Ethiopia, for example, the particular interests of regional governing authorities may determine program design, quality and outcomes. There is no automatic guarantee that these authorities will be more responsive to community needs. Finally, the capacity of local and regional government needs significant strengthening in the areas of administration and programming knowledge.

Economic development strategies must address inequity as well as national growth PRSPs were launched with the promise of something the IFIs called “pro-poor growth”. But partners in all four countries identified serious shortcomings in the economic strategies. A closer look at them reveals that they generally resemble the now-discredited structural adjustment programs, precisely what the PRSPs were supposed to correct. Senegal is like most developing countries in that agriculture is an obvious choice if economic development is to affect the lives of poor people. Unfortunately, details of an agriculture strategy were omitted when Senegal drafted its PRSP. At the same time, other decisions were made that negatively affected agriculture. In an earlier study of PRSPs, entitled Masters of Their Own Development, World Vision documented how the IMF attached conditions to a major loan to the Senegal government right in the middle of PRSP discussions, without consultation. Conditions included privatization of two key state-supported enterprises: peanut production and electricity supply. But there was no analysis of the impact this could have for the poor.

Whatever level of government is responsible for PRSP implementation, there is a clear need for more participation and accountability at the local level. Communities cannot be used as vehicles to make sure the PRSP money is being spent in the way that someone, somewhere else, decided it should be. Strict conditionalities imposed from abroad did not work when it cameto the “Washington Consensus” version of structural adjustment. There is little reason to believe that a “Maputo Consensus” or a “Dakar Consensus” will prove any more effective in a local community.

“There seems to have been no attempt to harmonize the new conditions for the loan with the forthcoming directions of the PRSP,” concluded the study.

The people most affected must have a role in deciding what best suits their communities. They also need a real voice in determining how new programs will be administered. This is not simply a basic democratic principle. It also encourages efficiency, because local people can report ineffective programs and develop innovative alternatives.

Peanuts are the primary crop in Senegal. Now, two years later, another look at the peanut industry in Senegal shows how forced privatization, without considering the impact on producers, actually pushed people further into poverty instead of improving their lot. While the PRSP proposed diversification from peanuts to yucca and maize, which take longer to become profitable, there were no transitional strategies. In addition, the lack of infrastructure, which is essential for agricultural development, was not addressed. Meanwhile, the government convinced farmers to sell their peanuts to official buyers, who paid them in bonds. When the

As one respondent expressed it: “Poor people should not be seen as beneficiaries of government programs or consumers but active citizens, collaborators and joint actors. People should be empowered through enhancement of capabilities in order to influence, engage and hold accountable the institutions with which they interact.”


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In general, research partners suggested that forced privatizations and trade liberalization often have counter-productive impacts for poverty reduction. Social impact assessments and transition strategies are essential. PRSPs need to stop making assumptions and to include poor producers more effectively in the development of realistic economic development strategies. For CIDA, economic development strategies that provide livelihoods for poor people are essential to ensure that its investments in health and education will be effective and sustainable.

buyers subsequently defaulted, small producers were hit with massive losses. The cash-strapped government had to provide subsidies. Mistrust between the government and farmers has grown, with many farmers preferring to avoid formal buyers and sell directly into informal markets. One irony in this case is that the tools for marketdriven growth actually pushed people out of markets back into informal survival modes, setting back community development plans. A further irony is that a poverty impact assessment simulation, subsequently undertaken by Canada’s International Development Research Centre with the Center for Applied Economic Research in Dakar, showed a likely decrease in profits for peanut farmers and an increase in poverty for households indirectly dependent on farming. The damage could have been avoided.

In all four countries, employment strategies for poor people, including youth, need much greater attention. United Nations Development Programme studies of successful development in eight Asian countries highlight the importance of this for breaking the cycle of poverty. World Vision partners in the four African countries flag their concerns for a large youth population that received too little attention in the formation of their PRSPs.

In Ethiopia, where food security is broadly recognized as a chronic problem, local groups report that little attention is being paid to the Agricultural Led Development Plan, which was part of the PRSP. Some farmers who participated in a resettlement program, for example, were sent to land that is not suitable for irrigation. This is a serious problem in Ethiopia and it deserves more consideration, if the PRSP is going to lead to sustainable development.

Accountability to the poor, access to information, and citizen participation Monitoring and evaluation of PRSPs is something that all participants – IFIs, donors, NGOs and community groups – believe will increase accountability and ensure that funds are effectively spent. Community report cards and other methodologies were initially envisaged as means for communities to hold governments accountable for program implementation. The reality suggests that much remains to be done to improve the accountability and transparency of PRSP implementation in all four countries. As a first step, there is a critical need for wide distribution of easily understandable information.

In Tanzania, borders were forced open for investment, resulting in uncontrolled logging in some parts of the country and a decrease in local water tables. Women, who are responsible for getting water, will be adversely affected by the decrease in water supply. Women were not included in the PRSP consultations, even though many are among the poor. If women’s concerns had been considered, the full impacts of economic choices might have been considered. While logging may contribute to national growth, the impacts will make life more difficult for some poor women.

In Senegal, for example, the PRSP is supposed to be implemented through the work of a crosssector committee. It is commonly perceived, however, that the ministries represented are only


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World Vision’s research project provided an opportunity to ask partners about the role of donors. Partners consistently suggested that donors need to use their influence with national governments to push for greater transparency with the citizenry, for more willingness to listen to local people, and for mechanisms to make PRSPs more responsive to local needs. Although there may be a place for donors to encourage governments, what is striking about these responses is that donors are still perceived by civil society as being the ones with influence over development decisions. It is also clear that civil society groups want to have ownership in development initiatives.

concerned with the interests of their particular sector, rather than forging a unified, coherent strategy for reducing poverty. More importantly, there are no tools for monitoring and evaluation at the community level. Taken together, these two factors work against effective monitoring and evaluation of the PRSP by civil society. In Tanzania, civil society has had little involvement in the development of guidelines and tracking of public expenditures. Although general expenditure figures are available, specific information on particular communities is withheld. Similar problems were evident in Ethiopia. When asked about the impact of the PRSP, people reported that it was difficult to assess impact in various areas because of a lack of openness on the part of the government. Neither communities nor groups working with the poor were consulted in the latest Annual Progress Report (APR). When NGOs reviewed the APR, they found numerous inconsistencies and significant omissions in what was reported. Furthermore, progress data that were made available were aggregated in some sectors. As the NGOs reviewing the document pointed out, aggregation obscures important variations and differences between populations, including gender impact. Finally, because the people affected were not consulted in determining the impacts of the PRSP, it is difficult to say whether the PRSP is improving the well-being of the poor in their own eyes.

Ownership remains an elusive goal. If donor agencies are truly committed to local ownership, they need to examine ways that they can reinforce the capacity of citizens to hold their own governments accountable.

Greater flexibility in macro-economic policies by the World Bank and the IMF The many critics of PRSPs have used their troubled beginnings in countries like Senegal to argue that relations between IFIs and governments have not changed because of PRSPs – that they are the same old medicine in a different bottle. Part of the problem, documented in the trail of research reports done by World Vision, is that major decisions about macro-economic policy continue to be made outside the PRSP process. This contradicts the primary objective of local ownership. World Vision and others have pointed out, for example, that even parliaments in developing countries frequently remain uninformed about conditions being negotiated with the IFIs for major loans. These conditions have a major impact for poverty reduction, but the people who are supposed to own the plans to reduce poverty know nothing about them.

PRSPs were supposed to increase local ownership of development. In the past, critics of both the IFIs and donor country development agencies correctly pointed out that the interests of donors were driving the development agenda. They also took international NGOs to task when their projects were dictated by faraway head offices rather than by the stated needs of the affected people.


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What surprised World Vision this year is that the World Bank’s own evaluation of PRSPs recognizes the need to shift from consultation to genuine participation. Yet the evaluation does not include a critique of the Bank’s own process for making major macro-economic decisions that will determine the space for poverty reduction in developing countries. It recommends, for example, greater dialogue between parliaments and civil society groups on poverty reduction. But it does not call for greater transparency, let alone dialogue, in the area that is most directly under the Bank’s own control: the macro-economic policies built into its loan agreements.

Strategic Alliances in Policy Analysis and Advocacy This research project has moved World Vision more firmly in the direction of an approach based on strategic alliances for its policy and advocacy work. In the NGO world, there is a lot of discussion about the relationship between Southern and Northern partners in program decisions and in determining what policies NGOs will advocate. Some argue that Northern NGOs should convey messages from their Southern partners to be effective advocates on development issues. Others argue that Northern partners should merely open doors for Southern partners to speak for themselves in dialogues with donor agencies, etc.

The Bank and the Fund need to be more flexible in their macro-economic policies. Canada could use its good offices and its membership on IFI boards to press for substantive changes. Supporting independent research into the effects of macro-economic policy on poverty at the household level would also be useful, as would research and analysis of alternative models. If development is not a one-size-fits-all enterprise, then practical alternative policies to enhance pro-poor growth are absolutely fundamental.

In addition to working together as partners in the research, World Vision has attempted to build strategic alliances that would take advantage of each partner’s opportunity to advocate in its own country for common goals. In Tanzania and Mozambique, for example, partners who did case studies on the impact of PRSPs in the education sector use that information in their own advocacy work to improve implementation and revision of their own country development plans.

“Canadians,” said Kathy Vandergrift, “can look back on our own experience with fighting the deficit to recognize the importance of public discussion of the fiscal situation in order to build public support for difficult choices that impact the lives of the people. We should not allow our donor agency, CIDA, to be complicit in development plans that exclude citizens in developing countries from a similar level of participation in the affairs of their countries.” So, as one outcome of this research project, World Vision Canada has asked the Canadian Minister of Finance to use Canada’s position on the board of the World Bank to work for substantive changes in the World Bank’s approach to PRSPs.

At the same time, in Canada, World Vision Canada engages in discussions with CIDA, as a Canadian organization, to improve the way CIDA develops its country strategies. “Canadian citizens,” said Kathy Vandergrift, “need to take ownership of the policies being implemented by our government that have implications in other countries. This research helps us understand the impacts of the fine-sounding principles in our international aid policy and recommend changes in Canadian development policy.”

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The second mechanism available to donors is a greater emphasis on human rights in the PRSP process. Existing international human rights conventions put people at the centre, which is essential for poverty reduction. They also recognize the right of poor and vulnerable people to have a voice in decisions that affect their lives. Existing conventions on economic and social rights address many of the factors covered in a typical PRSP. They also provide a basis for dialogue between donor and recipient countries because both have signed on to the same international agreements. If PRSPs took into account human rights commitments and helped developing countries to fulfill those commitments, the result would be a stronger role for affected people, without the fear of undue political interference by the donor government.

What Can a Donor Country like Canada Do Differently? The new aid modalities, adopted by CIDA without sufficient critical analysis, are now enshrined internationally in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, adopted in March 2005. Country development plans and PRSPs are basic building blocks in these new directions. This is all the more reason for Canada to invest in improving the foundations on which it bases its claims for aid effectiveness. World Vision Canada identified two main directions for change through this research project. The first lies in the area of good governance, which is now the top priority in Canadian foreign policy. Right now, most of the focus is on building the technical capacity of government departments to deliver services and manage finances. CIDA needs to provide more support for citizen accountability mechanisms in its country development plans. Accountability should mean accountability to a country’s citizens, more than to donor agencies. One option is support for initiatives that enhance democratic processes, such as mechanisms for citizens to engage with their parliamentarians on PRSP priorities. This can be done without interfering in the substance of the dialogue. Evidence from the four countries examined by World Vision Canada indicates that strengthening democratic processes would be less politically intrusive than the current practice of influencing the decisions of department officials without public accountability.

in each of these four countries, over half the people are under the age of 18. In keeping with Canada’s leadership on the rights of children, it is worth considering the role that the Convention on the Rights of the Child might play. In each of these four countries, over half the people are under the age of 18. The Convention provides a particularly holistic framework for development. It includes provisions for progressive realization, which encourages continuous progress without creating unrealistic expectations.

Citizen-based initiatives could include support for developing practical employment strategies aimed at people living in poverty, or for independent analysis of the links between macroeconomic decisions and household poverty, with a view to identifying alternative economic policies that reflect local realities. Along the same lines, CIDA could work with national and international networks of development NGOs who promote active citizen participation in monitoring and revising PRSP policies and programming.

In 2002 Canada, along with all other members of the United Nations, adopted an international Plan of Action to realize the rights of children, entitled A World Fit for Children. It calls for national plans of action with more specific targets and goals. It also makes specific reference to including the goals of the Plan of Action in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, and to a commitment to “build community capacity for


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If Canada wants to lead in promoting child rights, it could work with other countries to develop impact assessment tools and monitoring mechanisms to ensure that the rights of children receive adequate attention in Poverty Reduction Strategies of countries where children are a large part of the population. It could also take a leadership role in a campaign to ensure that the IFIs help instead of hinder developing countries in fulfilling human rights commitments they have made.

monitoring, assessment, and planning.” Canada’s National Action Plan, approved by Cabinet in April 2004, includes international commitments under each of its major themes – strengthening communities, promoting healthy lives, protecting from harm, and promoting education and learning – and it commits Canada to a rights-based approach in working with children. Canada needs to promote consistency between PRSPs and its stated commitments to the world’s children in documents like A World Fit for Children and A Canada Fit for Children. Recent research by German NGO Kindernothilfe, entitled Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers – blind to the rights of the (working) child?, documents that very few PRSPs take into account the rights of children, including working children. The relationship between education and livelihoods for young people is central for effective poverty reduction. CIDA could start with a focus on those countries where young people comprise over half of the population.

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In summary, if PRSPs are to be a tool for aid effectiveness, they need to link national policies and local programs. Economic development strategies must address inequity as well as overall national growth. Accountability to the poor, access to information, and citizen participation need to be improved. Donor nations like Canada need to use their influence to push for greater flexibility in macro-economic policies at the IFIs. It’s a tall order. But by listening to those living in poverty, and supporting mechanisms for citizen accountability and the realization of human rights in PRSPs, Canada can make a significant contribution.

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Education and Poverty Reduction in Tanzania “I need skills for agricultural production and entrepreneurship in these harsh conditions. If they are lucky, our children will do better than us. Until then, they need to master these surroundings.” Ramadhani, interviewee in Tanzania Tanga region, in Tanzania. He stayed at his studies for seven years, hoping to gain the privilege and opportunity that education offers.

With all the focus on education as the key to poverty reduction, it is important to hear from people like Ramadhani, who talk from experience about the need to link education with other factors in order to be effective.

When asked how primary education has helped him, however, he replied with alarming frankness. “It has not helped me at all.”

Like many of his peers, Ramadhani attended Gendagenda primary school in Handeni district,


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This admission piqued the curiosity of those sitting in the makeshift house that Gendagenda villagers call a dispensary. They were talking to a well-built man in tattered clothing. He had no shoes on, but his eyes shone with hope for the future. This is part of his testimony:

secondary school. In Mumbwi, five of the nine who passed their exams were selected for secondary education. While local residents appreciate the improvements, they realize that more will be needed if the goal of poverty reduction through education is to be achieved.

“The school had three classrooms and only one teacher. We would go to school around ten o’clock, which is after we had been to the family farm for at least four hours. The teacher usually came in at the same time because he had to attend to his own shamba too… Two classes shared the same classroom at the same time. For example, when I was in grade six, I remember, there were second graders in our class. When the teacher was teaching them (2nd graders), we stayed inside…mostly because even we did not feel any more knowledgeable than them... I don’t remember how many people in my class knew how to write. I definitely learned to write after I finished school…out of my own initiatives… because I wanted to do business…Only the teacher had books…There were about 20 students in each class…sometimes only five pupils came to class…”

The Chairperson of the local school committee described the situation:

Since Ramadhani graduated in 1984, there have been tangible improvements in his former school. Through the Primary Education Development Plan (PEDP), five classrooms have been built in the last two years, with the number of teachers increasing from one to four. Enrolments for Standard One have increased from 30 to 90 within a single year. Efforts are underway to make textbooks and reference books available to all the students.

A look around the village explains this sobering fact. Gendagenda is located 27 kilometres from the main road. The train is the only formal means of getting to the village, but the railway yard is now closed for lack of income generation and the 21 railway workers, who happen to be the only salary-earning individuals in the village (apart from the four teachers) are in the process of moving to other stations. The only road near the village ends at Mgambo army camp and one has to get through thick grasses, on foot or by bicycle, to reach the village. This predicament partly explains the lack of income-generating activities in the village. To villagers in Gendagenda, therefore, the value of education is as high as the extent to which it has the potential to change the reality of their livelihoods.

“It is unfortunate that all these changes have limited impact on the questions of school attendance and the poverty lived and experienced on a daily basis by the local people. Although more villagers participate in enhancing school attendance, they are challenged with difficult food production conditions and a lack of income-generating activities, such that every chance they get they would let their kids participate in these activities rather than school. Both male and female students are disadvantaged in this respect. In fact, this is why provision of lunch meals has so far failed. Six- and sevenyear-olds from two neighbouring villages stay hungry for long hours …in satellite schools? Where are the teachers?”

One student of the 17 who sat for the Standard VII school leaving certificate examination passed, but he was not selected for secondary education. These are meagre changes when compared with two other schools in the same district, located in more “urban” areas. In Mzundu school, for example, 12 students were selected to join the nearby


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public education system, and increased private-sector participation in education. While controversy surrounds the success and/or failure of these policies, after two decades of embracing the neo-liberal economic policy, approximately one-third of Tanzanians still live in absolute poverty. Twenty-nine percent cannot read or write in any language. More people are suffering from preventable diseases.

Community leaders identified several possible changes in the education sector, including curriculum that addresses life skills and social status, improved training and living conditions for teachers, and more secondary schools. They saw community involvement in the education program as essential to change social attitudes that prevent girls from completing their education. They also named the need for improvements in education to be linked to local economic opportunities to improve livelihoods.

At the turn of the century, Tanzania embarked on a number of complementary policy initiatives aimed at tackling poverty and other development issues, especially education. These included a PRSP whose overall goals included promoting economic growth, attaining social justice by satisfying basic needs, and promoting good governance and democracy. Since the introduction of the PRSP, the education sector has undergone numerous changes. The main goal is to improve equality of access to education, regardless of geographic location, income, age, gender and physical ability.

Communities like Gendagenda need a more holistic approach to poverty reduction to ensure that the children attending school today have a better sense of the critical role of education in poverty reduction than does Ramadhani, when they become community decision-makers.

d How has this situation evolved? And how has it been affected by Tanzania’s PRSP?

In 2002, the government began to implement the Primary Education Development Plan (PEDP) within the Education Sector Development Program process. The goals of the four-year PEDP program focussed on expanding enrolments, improving the quality of education through improvements in the school environment and available resources, enhancing local people’s participation in education, and strengthening financial availability and management for schools. The plan aimed to abolish all school fees, introduce compulsory primary education, add new teachers and more classrooms, and democratize school committees. In three years of implementing the PEDP, total enrolments have soared, gender parity in enrolment has improved, transition from primary to secondary schools has increased, and more local people participate in education.

Over the years, Tanzania had invested heavily in welfare-oriented strategies to improve the quality of life of its people. This included universal primary education and community-based primary health care. While the 1970s witnessed improvements in education, health and provision of other social services, success was shortlived. Caught in the international economic depression of the early 1980s, the country experienced severe macro-economic difficulties that, in turn, led to an overall deterioration in public services. IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies were then adopted with the aim of phasing out welfare-oriented policies so as to enable a market-oriented economy that was perceived to be the answer to the economic crisis. In education, structural adjustment policies called for cost sharing, withdrawal of government support for the


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access to secondary school. People raised two issues – the fact that the number of secondary schools placed in a region determines enrolment, and the fact that the government had decided to reduce boarding facilities at secondary schools in order to reduce costs. With only three secondary schools, people were concerned about capacity. The issue was of particular concern in Gendagenda, where the only student to pass his Standard VII exam in 2003 failed to secure a place in secondary school. Lack of boarding facilities makes placements even harder for pupils from remote villages.

World Vision Canada, in collaboration with World Vision Tanzania, designed a study to see what impact these changes are having at the local level, particularly to get a sense of whether increases in student enrolment had been accompanied by an improvement in the quality of education. Data were collected from the Vice President’s Office, Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA), Economic and Social Research Foundation, United Nations Development Programme and the Ministry of Education. The researcher spent a week in Handeni district, in Tanga region, visiting three villages, Mzundu, Gendagenda and Mumbwi.

since the introduction of the prsp, the education sector has undergone numerous changes.

Since the introduction of the PRSP and the PEDP, Handeni district has witnessed tremendous improvements in the provision of basic education. In Mzundu, enrolments for Standard I more than doubled from 70 to 160 in 2003, rising to 190 in 2004. They were expected to increase to 210 pupils in 2005. Part of the reason lies in the abolition of school fees and other forced contributions. More parents are now able to bring their children to school because they do not have to pay school fees. Books are available at their schools. As far as law enforcement is concerned, teachers are reportedly more willing to keep records of the pupils’ attendance and absences. More parents are monitoring the progress of their children, with legal action taken against parents who neglect warnings of absenteeism.

There is no reason to believe that the increased enrolments discriminated against gender. There were no major gender differences in enrolment into Standard I in Gendagenda, where records for all 7- and 8-year-olds indicated that all eligible girls and boys were enrolled for entry in 2005. This is not to say that the number of boys does not exceed that of girls, and there were concerns over retention of schoolgirls, especially related to early pregnancies. The class in which most girls were dismissed for pregnancy was Standard IV, where the average age is 10 years. This was more prevalent in Mumbwi, where there is extensive adult illiteracy and parents give priority to other aspects of life for girls, such as employment, marriage and having children. Unless parents are helped to understand the need to prioritize education, they will continue to emphasize other milestones for their children. A government directive lowering the age at which girl-children start school may help to address this issue. However education needs to become more relevant to local needs, a goal that can be achieved

Access to primary education has also been improved through increases in the number of schools and in the number of classrooms in existing schools. In Handeni, 72 classes were built in 22 schools over a period of one year (since 2003). Although there is still insufficient classroom space for the increasing number of enrolled students, the main concern that emerged from community discussions is


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with a teacher shortage, the changes in studentteacher ratios in the three villages in this study were not substantial. In Gendagenda, where the need is acute, only three more teachers have been added over three years of the PEDP. Though the government has tried to transfer teachers there, poor living and working conditions mean that teachers request transfers as soon as they get to the village. In Mumbwi, the number of teachers has increased to eight, while in Mzundu the number stands at 12. Increased enrolment, which ranged from 90 to 210 in Standard I alone, outstripped the impact of adding more teachers, so the teacher/pupil ratio has not improved. Teacher/pupil ratios are recognized as a key component for retaining students and for successful completion of their studies. It is not a surprise to find that, under these conditions, there is only a meagre increase in the number of students passing their Standard VII exams.

through increased community involvement in education. Another factor that helps keep children in school is the availability of lunchtime meals. If a noon meal is available, children who have to walk over two kilometres are more likely to stay in school. The challenge facing Gendagenda primary school was more instructive. How to equitably serve children from the three villages surrounding it? The children from the two villages a little further from Gendagenda have to walk further to school and tend to drop out. With the help of the school committee, a program is underway to provide lunch meals at the school. However, most parents did not participate in the program in 2004 due to food insecurity.

citizen participation in education is central to the poverty reduction strategy. Improvements in education infrastructure have not necessarily translated into improvements in quality, measured in terms of teacher qualification, primary school pass rates, and the number of pupils per teacher and classroom. Most villagers recognize the importance of regular school attendance, but parents find it difficult to reinforce school activities with their children because of extensive adult illiteracy. In one incident, several parents whose children were continuously recorded as absent were taken to a local civil court. As part of his innocent plea, one parent revealed that he could not even recognize the dates on his children’s exercise books.

Another factor affecting educational quality, particularly in Mzundu, has been lack of coordination between central government decisions that are often duplicated by NGOs working in communities. For example, in several schools, NGOs had already built classrooms to meet local needs. However, at the onset of the PEDP, more classrooms were built without considering local conditions. As a result, some schools have more classrooms than they need while others have too few. The lack of government flexibility and co-ordination with local communities is also reflected in teacher availability. Teacher absenteeism has apparently worsened since the government’s call to teachers to improve their training. The Grade B teachers spend most of their time studying for exams that will promote them to Grade A and diploma qualification.

Although there has been a major expansion in the number of new teachers trained and recruited, along with transfers of many teachers to schools

Citizen participation in education is central to the Poverty Reduction Strategy, with leadership an important aspect of this. However, there is a ten-


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son was also the village chairperson. This raises several issues. First, the school committee is supposed to be accountable to the public, first and foremost via the village council. With one person chairing both groups, a conflict of interest is likely to arise. There is a need for checks and balances between the different levels of governance. This has implications for the democratization of school governance, and it may be important to revise the guidelines for school committees.

dency among local leaders to see their role as being one of simply carrying out government instructions, instead of listening to and serving people. In Mumbwi there were two Grade B teachers willing to teach at the school, but the local government prevented them, citing lack of money to pay their salaries. Asked about the PEDP money, the teacher replied that most of the money comes with special instructions regarding how it should be used. The school failed to find a way to transfer use of the funds to take advantage of local resources. This contradicts the envisioned role of the school committee, which is supposed to “prepare whole school development… that are intended to enable schools to make their own decisions about the development of their school. This enables each school to make use of local expertise from amongst their communities, pupils, and teachers about what is best for them.”

A recent report on perceptions of the PEDP, based on 1,260 respondents in six councils, revealed that 70 percent were satisfied with primary education. However, the satisfaction was based on improvements in infrastructure and abolition of school fees, rather than quality of education. There was no question that people are more concerned with poverty eradication than anything else.

Adult illiteracy was again identified, this time as a barrier for local participation. Concerns over a parent’s ability to make informed decisions were invariably voiced in interviews in the three villages. Even though parents are called to attend meetings concerning their schools, very few attend. Since it is likely that literate parents would invest more in educating their children while taking an active part in improving the school quality, the emphasis on primary education must go hand in hand with adult literacy. Other reasons for limited parental participation included farm work, lack of understanding of the need to get involved and previous experiences of getting involved but being ignored.

Respondents felt that poverty reduction in rural areas requires concerted efforts that go beyond the education sector. Economic opportunities, access to credit, and knowledge and skills appropriate for agricultural enterprises are some of the needs voiced. Until their children can have these opportunities, it is hard for people to perceive that they are getting good-quality education. “It should be able to open up such opportunities, otherwise what is the difference between being educated and not being educated,” said one student respondent. What seems to be accepted by many is that this is an opportune time to send your child to school, because future prospects look promising.

The issue of accountability was observed, rather than raised, during the study. In Gendagenda, the school committee chairper-

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Another major challenge is to modify the gendered division of labour and perceptions associated with what roles girls and boys can play in society. It was suggested that part of the formal PRSP education programs – the provision of text and reference books as well as non-formal education – be dedicated to working with the people to transform perceptions about gender equity. The curriculum should eliminate activities that identify specific gender roles.

Challenges and Conclusions The village of Gendegenda reflects the wideranging nature of the issues pertinent to the impact of education in poverty reduction. The cycle of poverty in this remote spot was striking. Due to a lack of reliable transportation, the village has been unable to engage in any concrete income-generating activities. A few young people venture into the vast Saadani game reserve to catch game or cross the reserve into Pangani for sea products. Several attempts to collect the abundant mangoes in and around the village for sale in Tanga have also failed due to unreliability of the train. The circulation of money is very limited, being dependent on 25 adults with reliable salaried income. In 2004, the village committee failed to raise TZS 600,000 to start a village bank account. This is a main requirement for the government to disburse development funds.

While at this stage it is important to improve the well-being of a girl-child whose opportunities for employment and other income-generating activities have lagged behind, it is as important to make sure such opportunities still exist for the boy-child. It is suggested that education needs to empower all children to confidently take their place in society, regardless of gender. An important step that needs to be taken in this regard is to include more life skills in the curriculum.

A lack of social services also plagues this remote village, established in 1977. Since that time, it has had no health services and no reliable water source. Currently, the village has about 360 households, with 880 adults. According to health aides, the village has 300 children under five years old. Until three years ago, the school consisted of three ramshackle rooms with no sanitation facilities. Teachers have been known to arrive and then leave on the first available train. People are proud of the fact that they now have four teachers, new classrooms and toilets. They see hope for their children, but many challenges remain.

Children learn by example. Without satisfied teachers, there is little hope of improving educational quality. Efforts to revamp the quality of primary and secondary education need to go hand in hand with the improvement in teaching and living conditions of teachers. A positive step towards this might be to set aside an endowment fund for support of teachers. One option for increasing the number of teachers might be initiatives to encourage unemployed graduates to become teachers. Such a move would not only close the gap between the number of teachers and available students but would also decrease unemployment among youths. With a grant as an incentive, more graduates might be convinced to take up teaching careers, with on-the-job training to improve their teaching skills.

The government needs to reach out more to remote schools – decreasing distances that children have to walk to school, increasing the number of teachers and improving living conditions. Income-generating activities must be developed in conjunction with the schools to encourage both stronger links between community and school and greater community ownership of the welfare of the school.

Although the whole community has a stake in education, it is still not clear how each stakeholder can relate to the task of improving edu-


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cation. More specific definitions of the roles of each stakeholder need to be discussed within communities to ensure productive governance of education and ownership among villagers.

place, it is riddled with inequalities among regions. Poverty reduction initiatives need to be flexible enough to take into consideration geographic factors, and to allow for a variety of strategies that address local circumstances. There is a need for change, as Ramadhani so eloquently noted. His children should not have to rely on being “lucky” to have a better life.

The PRSP paints a laudable picture of the ways to improve education quality and reduce poverty in Tanzania. However, it is a picture clouded by inequities, difficulties in addressing the problems of local people, and an inability to change people’s perceptions of education. If improvement in education quality and gender parity has taken

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Speaking Truth to Power: Serving people while advocating for change in Ethiopia Canadian Foodgrains Bank Canadian Nurses Association Canadian Council for International Co-operation1

“Ethiopia (has) a long tradition of government from the top, which has scarcely been affected by a revolution whose function has been to transform the conditions of social and economic existence, rather than to replace a hierarchical form of government with one more participatory. Government in Ethiopia is a matter for experts who know what to do; the ignorant peasant, by contrast, is there to be organized, villagized, cooperativized, resettled, conscripted, taxed, or, in a word, governed.” Land rents and the remnants of feudalism were abolished. However, in the same way that the Bolsheviks transformed Russia, the men who took over Ethiopia’s government initiated a revolution-from-above. The Derg held on to power for 16 years that were marked by famine (half a million died in 1984-5), civil war and bloody internal purges. By 1990 and the end of the Cold War, Mengistu, the head of the Derg, had removed a Soviet-supplied statue of Lenin and proclaimed himself a supporter of freemarket forces. But it was too late. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was marching on the capital, and Mengistu fled in 1991.

The British academic Christopher Clapham was referring to a regime headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam – a man who was simultaneously President, Chief Executive, Commander-in-Chief and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People’s Republic of Ethiopia. Mengistu had helped topple the semi-feudal regime of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Haile Selassie, the King of Kings, had ruled the country since his coronation in 1930, save for a six-year interregnum when Italian fascists took over after invading in 1936. He entered into a close relationship with the United States in the post-war period. By the time of his downfall, Ethiopia was receiving some 60 percent of all US military aid to Africa. Throughout much of the Cold War, his despotic regime had been the largest recipient of American aid to Africa.

Meles Zenawi, the EPRDF leader who was to become Ethiopia’s president, had once said that he was a committed socialist. However, the collapse ofthe Soviet bloc and pressures from International Financial Institutions (IFIs) for market-oriented reforms heralded a new era. Yet Ethiopia’s problems would not be solved by the magic of the market, any more than they had been by

When the military men who became known as the Derg, or Provisional Military Administrative Council, took over in 1974 in the aftermath of a famine in which 200,000 perished, there were those who thought that a new era had arrived. 1

The introduction to these stories from Ethiopia was written by Jamie Swift under contract to the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC). The introduction has been reviewed by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank and the Canadian Nurses Association, but CCIC takes responsibility for any remaining errors or omissions. The stories reflect the views and experiences of the organizations and partners who were involved in developing them. Views expressed in these stories are not necessarily shared by the membership of CCIC as a whole. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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– and to the world at large – the problem was always drought, to the point that parched plains and hungry people have become synonymous with Ethiopia. NGOs have tried to move from relief to development work, “to enhance sustainable agriculture and continue towards achieving food self-sufficiency”, as expressed at the conclusion of the conference.

the stringent dictates of state socialism. To the challenges of environmental degradation, lack of food and land, and political fragmentation were added HIV/AIDS. Still, for the first time in memory, a measure of political openness began to prevail. The years after 1991 were marked by another bloody war with neighbouring Eritrea. The conflict killed 75,000 and made two of the world’s poorest countries even poorer. The 1990s also saw Ethiopia enter the familiar dance with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Loans began flowing on the basis of conditions that included deregulation of fertilizer prices, privatization of government enterprises, and higher charges for water and electricity. Ethiopia emerged from this “aid” as one of Africa’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, with the government facing the unpayable debts of previous regimes.

agriculture continues to underpin the ethiopian economy, with 85 percent of the people dependent on subsistence farming. These are laudable goals. And Ethiopia is by no means the only place in Africa and the world where they have been identified. But if we step back from familiar nostrums to consider the realities of power, a key point emerges. The majority of people who suffer hunger in a country with long traditions of top-down governance have historically been treated as passive recipients of policies, rather than as active citizens with rights and entitlements. Ethiopia confirms the observation of the eminent development economist Amartya Sen in his classic study Development as Freedom: “The causal connection between democracy and the non-occurrence of famines is not hard to seek. Famines kill millions of people in different countries of the world, but they don’t kill the rulers. The kings and the presidents, the bureaucrats and the bosses, the military leaders and the commanders never are famine victims.”

Agriculture continues to underpin the Ethiopian economy, with 85 percent of the people dependent on subsistence farming. Agricultural production supports half the country’s Gross Domestic Product and 85 percent of its export earnings. Coffee, like the human race itself, has its genetic origins here. Between 1980 and 2000, the price ofcoffee received by developing country producers like Ethiopia fell by 64 percent – just as the IMF and the World Bank were urging producers to export more and more. By 2003, a conference in Addis Ababa called Breaking the Cycle of Recurrent Famine in Ethiopia, which was sponsored by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), underlined the frustrations of a situation it termed “disastrous”. Ethiopia is potentially a rich agricultural producer that could feed its people and still export. Indeed, until 1947 it was a major supplier of grain to the Middle East. However, the country has experienced a downward cycle of food insecurity over several decades, with five major humanitarian crises since 1974, each more apparently acute than the last. Officially

This blunt observation sounds so obvious as to border on the mundane. Its author, however, is no mere polemicist. Amartya Sen is a long-time analyst of famines, their causes and remedies. When analyzing hunger, the focus should not be restricted to the amount of food available in a particular country or region. The economic power and freedom of individual citizens to


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Routinely absent from most Northern reports of hunger in developing countries – and indeed from food bank appeals closer to home – is a list of the kind of people suffering. Pastoralists. Evicted farm servants and rural labourers. Tenant cultivators. Small land-owning cultivators. Men working as daily labourers in towns. Women in service occupations. Weavers and other craft workers. Occupational beggars. Note the singular lack of kings, presidents, bureaucrats, bosses, military leaders and commanders, who suffer from neither hunger nor entitlement constraint.

establish ownership over adequate food, either by growing it or buying it, must also be considered. As anyone who has watched the explosion of food bank use in North America over the past 25 years can testify, people often go hungry (or at least suffer from food insecurity) when there is ample food available. Even when food production declines and people starve, as they did in Ireland in the 1840s or China in 1960, many people have ample food.

people go hungry when they are unable to gain entitlement to sufficient food.

This raises the connection between hunger and a notion that has been pervasive in development policy circles since the late 1980s, informing both the programming and policy work of development NGOs: Governance.

“Famines,” explains Sen, “survive by divideand-rule.” The famine period of 1972-74 in Ethiopia, when 200,000 people died (out of a population of some 27 million), was a case in point. It was concentrated in the northern Wollo region, where some people were unable to buy food – even though, in spite of drought conditions, food prices in the main grain market town of Dessie were no higher than they were in Addis Ababa or Asmara. In fact, food was moving out of Wollo to areas where people had the money to buy it.

“The issue of good governance,” stressed the 2005 report of the Commission for Africa on the eve of the G8 meeting in Scotland, “is what we believe lies at the core of all of Africa’s problems.” Such a clear and forthright assertion calls out for a clarification of the meaning of “governance”. Like the idea of development itself, it is one of those plastic words that can mean many things to many different people. The Commission referred to the lack of an effective state and the inability of governments to create the economic, social and legal structures to foster economic growth and “allow poor people to participate in it”.

Though local food production declined, people died of starvation even though the cost of food was the same as it had been before the drought. For Sen, this amounted to a classic case of what he has described as “entitlement failure”. Food insecurity is influenced by social and economic relations – not just by food production and agricultural arrangements. People go hungry when they are unable to gain entitlement to sufficient food. So the famine that led to the end of Haile Selassie’s ancient monarchy and the rise of the Derg was the result of “extensive entitlement failures” for the millions who were living on the margins of a formal market economy.

Talk of governance became amplified in the wake of the failure of so-called “Washington Consensus” policy prescriptions promoted by IFIs throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. These involved opening the economies of countries like Ethiopia to imports from the North, privatizing services and pushing countries to trade their way out of poverty. The idea was that free-market policies would let poor countries grow their way out of poverty by “getting prices right”. The recipe failed, and left the most vulnerable


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It is against this background that two Canadian civil society organizations with programs and partners in Ethiopia undertook to describe their efforts to combine advocacy with programming and to work with their partners in a mutual strengthening of capacity.

people in poor countries much worse off. IFIs took no responsibility for these “failures”, but rather decided that poor countries had to “get politics right” by reforming institutions. “Good” governance came to mean everything from reform of the judiciary, to legislation protecting private property and guaranteeing contracts, to citizen participation and the “accountability” of governors to citizens. It is apparently either very technical or highly political, depending on one’s perspective. According to the IFIs, a second wave of reform would succeed if countries instituted pro-market political reforms, with more efficient, corruption-free bureaucracies, administering laws to protect private property. Such measures would, in turn, encourage foreign investment, the sine qua non of the neo-liberal development agenda.

d The Canadian Foodgrains Bank The Canadian Foodgrains Bank integrated public policy research and advocacy into its overall hunger response in 2000 under the name “Food Justice”. Initially, the work concentrated on Canadian foreign aid policy, World Trade Organization (WTO) agricultural trade rules and the implementation of the Right to Food. These hunger-related issues had emerged from Foodgrains Bank networks and field contacts. Advocacy efforts have subsequently focussed on research, preparation of briefs and lobbying of government representatives. More recently, this work has reached out to the Canadian constituency of the Foodgrains Bank.

An opposing set of ideas about what constitutes “good governance” emerged from civil society organizations and some United Nations agencies. According to this perspective, poor people and those who have traditionally been excluded should have the right to a say in the decisions that affect their lives. The keywords are voice, accountability (of state and private institutions to citizens) and, above all, participation.

This approach, while enjoying some success, gave rise to important questions of legitimacy and accountability. Is the Canadian Foodgrains Bank speaking on behalf of some “voiceless” group? If not, is the organization clear about the origins of its policy recommendations? To whom is it accountable for the information it uses and the results obtained? The Foodgrains Bank believes that the engagement of Canadians in public policy advocacy will be enhanced if such advocacy is grounded in consultation with people in the South.

The key to understanding the tension between these diverging sets of ideas on “good governance” is the difference between ends and means – what “freedom” means. Is it freedom to invest, engage in voluntary exchange and hold property so that economic growth can occur? Or is freedom an end in itself? From this latter perspective, enunciated at length by Sen, freely functioning markets are necessary, but far from sufficient – for citizens are not free if they are hungry, ill, homeless or illiterate. The political freedom inherent in the second conception of governance points towards substantial public investment in education, particularly with respect to female literacy.

To this end, Foodgrains Bank staff, working together with partner organizations in Ethiopia, engaged in a two-week process in Ethiopia in October 2004, exploring ways of responding to these issues. Seven partner organizations discussed food justice and public policy advocacy during an intensive workshop in Addis Ababa.


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These comments raise the often tricky issue of the relationship between NGOs and the governments of countries in which they are based or where they support projects. Providing adequate food – not to mention land, population and environmental challenges – is a public policy issue. Governments can be ineffective or authoritarian – or both. NGOs concerned with long-term development needs – not to mention the empowerment of people who have traditionally been excluded – invariably face questions of how to relate to governments that are impeding these goals.

On the first day, Stu Clark of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank described changes in export markets that had forced Canadian farmers to store more grain on their farms. This presented ethical problems for Christians whose value system tells them, “Don’t store up grain in silos when people are hungry”. He went on to describe the evolution of the Foodgrains Bank, an organization that built on its experience in food relief to develop programs emphasizing food security, and now food justice. Each partner organization shared some historical background, as well as the hopes and visions that have shaped their work. The group discussed the root causes of hunger and food insecurity, and activities they have undertaken to address them.

All those at the Addis Ababa workshop were firm in their desire to assist Ethiopians to become food-secure while addressing the root causes of hunger in order to break the cycle of famine. But there was also a sense of discomfort. Some of the answers were clearly beyond the scope of program activities. They involved dealing with powerful people and organizations. This raised the famous imperative, sometimes attributed to American Quakers, of “speaking truth to power”. NGOs and faith-based organizations with grassroots ties know the terrible truths about famine and hunger. These truths have faces attached to them, people on the ground who suffer the effects of famine.

the workshop participants acknowledged that there are risks in speaking truth to power. “Our story is wrapped up in the national story,” explained one participant, who then proceeded to list possible causes for Ethiopia’s food insecurity. The temptation is to single out the failure of rains or failure of crops and to respond simply by trying to provide food for the hungry. This limited analysis and response only contributes to the cycle of famine. It neglects wider landrelated problems, population pressure, environmental degradation, war and conflict – historically the underlying causes of food insecurity.

The workshop participants acknowledged that there are risks in speaking truth to power. As one said, “Remembering the previous government, we think about the risk of speaking truth. In Canada, if you speak truth, you may lose friends. Here if you speak truth, it could be worse.”2

“Suppose I am a starving person, and you provide me with food for 30 days, and after that I am starving again. Suppose you want to feed me for 10 years. It’s impractical. Nor is it loving. Love is when you help me to feed myself and feed my neighbours during a bad time. So how long do we provide this food aid?”

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He added an observation that reflected the meeting’s openness of spirit as well as the group’s ambivalence about formal advocacy work: “I think we are lacking in courage. It is also good to support the government and help them do the right thing.”

This was a prescient observation. Towards the end of 2005, following peaceful demonstrations that were challenging election results believed by many to be suspect, the Ethiopian government arrested hundreds of organizers, including several from domestic and international NGOs. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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Sam Vander End, the regional representative of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, had emphasized at the outset that the Foodgrains Bank wanted very much to be “part of the solution”. By holding the Food Justice workshop, it was seeking to create more opportunities for its partners to join with other NGOs in advocacy with the Canadian government or the WTO on important issues such as aid to Ethiopia and trade rules affecting agriculture.

Wzo Engudai of Partnership Africa Canada summed up the dilemma: “How are we going to collaborate with government in tackling these fundamental issues for Ethiopia?” As discussions unfolded, it became apparent from further stories that the groups in attendance were sometimes tackling fundamental problems in collaboration with different levels of government and through common initiatives such as the Civil Society Coalition Against Famine in Ethiopia (CS CAFÉ). But they also acknowledged that they feel tension in dealing with government. For Wzo Engudai, policy advocacy requires a strong foundation. Advocates need to have enough research and information to back up their position. They must conduct dialogue with people affected by policy before getting into policy advocacy. Stu Clark pointed out that stories, like those being shared around the table, are a form of action research.

The Foodgrains Bank’s Ethiopian partners at the workshop responded positively when Sam asked about follow-up and what he called “actionable ideas”. A flurry of interest emerged – in advocacy training, in the need for networking among organizations working in the field, in the work of CS CAFÉ and the Christian Relief and Development Association working with its 250 organizational members. The discussion reflected a sense of self-confidence with respect to local challenges and a thirst for more information about the global context.

There was general support for the work of CS CAFÉ. One participant said that, after listening to Ato Abiy (Director of Christian Aid in Ethiopia), he had realized how important it was to lay the organizational groundwork necessary to influence donors and government.

“I feel we have the grassroots knowledge,” said one participant. “The parts that I don’t know are the ‘big picture’ issues. That is the hole that this workshop has uncovered for me.” Another participant, responding to the request for actionable ideas, remarked: “You have given us a huge assignment.” He added that confronting the need for food justice involves networking and identifying allies: “The root problems of our communities will not be addressed only by service delivery. The Foodgrains Bank may not only be a source of grain, but also a source for communication to powers beyond Ethiopia. We implementing agencies have not had close ties to advocacy organizations. That has to be changed so that we will address food justice appropriately. We see our work, but we also have to address root causes. One of the points raised is that an NGO can only work in a limited area, but that area may have problems in common with other areas.”

“We all have experience,” agreed another participant. “We have to address untouched issues, identifying the ones that inhibit our ability to go to what we expect.” She gave an example that she had heard from a colleague working in the Afar region. An NGO had worked with the regional government as policy was being formed so that the needs of the community were addressed from the beginning. “We know the problems at the grassroots level,” she added. “There is nothing wrong with researching, asking questions, checking every step of the way. We need to intervene at the design stage.” In the end, Stu Clark emphasized that the meeting was about two things that are inextricably linked – policy advocacy and accountability.


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One option is resettlement. There are still parts of Ethiopia where productive land is available. However, such areas are often populated by other ethnic groups, a particular problem in a country with a long history of internal conflict. Tensions arise when “outsiders” move in. Furthermore, this land is usually at lower altitudes, where malaria is more common. Such problems can be overcome, but not if farmers are forced to relocate as they were under the Derg’s tragic resettlement program in the 1980s, in which thousands perished. The current Ethiopian government has a policy to ensure voluntary resettlement and to provide adequate transitional supports, but those needing to move are very cautious.

As the meeting wound down, Ato Abiy remarked that the traditional top-down approach needed to be replaced by something rather different. “What happens at the grassroots level is what we need to put forward to influence policy,” he said, urging participants to use their stories and knowledge to speak truth to power. “You have experience-based practice that would be worth bringing to the attention of policy-makers.”

d Immediately after the meeting Stu Clark, along with Christine Harmston of CCIC, travelled to two locations in rural Ethiopia where partner organizations have been distributing food from the Foodgrains Bank. The people they met in Boricha in Southern Nation State, and in Nefas Mewcha in eastern Gondar, provided anecdotes and insights that highlighted critical policy issues – trade protection in the face of volatile commodity markets, land ownership and distribution in the face of environmental pressures, food safety nets and food-for work-programs, and education for women.

Off-farm employment is also an option as people diversify through small-scale manufacture of agricultural equipment and food processing. This can offer a way of reducing pressure on the land without actually moving people. Education is critical to this process. The current government has constructed new high schools and colleges and is encouraging the education of young women as well as young men.

Land, land tenure and land reform are crucial issues throughout the developing world. Ethiopia has a diverse landscape with verdant plains in the southwest, steep mountainsides in the north and deserts in the east. Traditionally the highlands have been a preferred place to live, as the cooler climate and absence of malaria makes them healthier. However, in the past 50 years the population of the highlands has skyrocketed, in part as a result of improving health standards and a drop in child mortality. The results are clear in several of the stories that follow. Farmers are trying to make their livelihood on smaller and smaller plots of land. While small farmers can be very productive on even two to five acres, one acre is too small, particularly if the land has become degraded by desperate attempts to wring the last bit of production out of it. What can be done about this situation?

The land itself can support more people if it is healthy and if farming techniques are improved. Land restoration, combined with improvements in productivity, can involve terracing of steep slopes, reforesting areas too steep to farm and the introduction of new techniques. These measures can help the land to support more people, in a sustainable manner, than it has in the past. Canada has made agricultural development assistance a high priority for its aid to Ethiopia. This is a good decision and should be backed with consistent funding commitments.

Dawit Elias: Coffee production Coffee remains the chief foreign exchange earner for Ethiopia, and the country counts on growers like Dawit Elias. Like many Ethiopians,


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the result of Ethiopian government action to raise domestic prices, he is retaining his remaining coffee trees. He hopes that the government will be successful in assuring long-term stability at these higher prices. If this happens, he says he will replant more coffee trees.

his family has been directly affected by war. At 30, he is the second-youngest of four brothers. One of his older brothers was killed in 2001 while fighting the Eritreans. Like many of his compatriots, Dawit must attempt to get by on a small parcel of land, part of which is devoted to coffee production.

coffee is the most widely traded agricultural product in the world.

Before the global collapse of coffee prices, his land was largely devoted to cultivating coffee. But the price plunge forced him to destroy many of his coffee trees to make room for plantings of qat bushes (catha edulis). More profitable than coffee, the tender leaves of the qat bush produce an effect similar to a mild amphetamine. While qat production is not illegal, there are growing concerns in Ethiopia over the diversion of agricultural resources to a non-food product that suppresses the appetite. Its increasing use by the young has been linked to increased HIV/AIDS transmission.

There are several causes for the disastrous drop in prices for a commodity so crucial to many vulnerable Southern producers. But foremost is the lack of a system for bringing the supply of coffee into balance with the demand of the market. In theory, price should do this, but the high costs of moving into and out of coffee production make farmers like Dawit reluctant to get out of production, even when the price falls. Thus surpluses are produced.

Coffee is the most widely traded agricultural product in the world. Almost all of the world’s coffee farmers depend on the international market, either directly because they export or indirectly because their local prices are determined by the export price. Starting in 1997, international coffee prices went into free fall, tumbling from US$3/kg to less than US$0.50 five years later. (Needless to say, retail prices in the North did not decline in tandem with producer prices in the South.) At any price below about US$1.30/kg, the Ethiopian farmer is subsidizing his own production. After 2002, coffee prices recovered slightly, but they remained far too low to make production profitable. Many farmers would stop producing coffee, were it not for the fact that coffee trees take five years to grow.

What can be done to improve the price that Ethiopian coffee farmers obtain? In the early 1970s, oil-producing countries got together to regulate the production of oil, ensuring better prices. While a similar organization for coffee was attempted at the time, it collapsed in the late 1980s. A comprehensive “coffee-pec” would have to bring together all the major exporters to agree on a division of the world demand for coffee, and then ensure that production met demand at a price that was fair for the farmers. This would offer relief to all coffee farmers. But as the earlier failure demonstrated, it is notoriously difficult to manage supply for a commodity whose world supply fluctuates dramatically on an annual (and even seasonal) basis. This volatility is compounded by speculation and by the inability of producers to agree on production limits, particularly when they are constantly being urged by powerful donor countries to export their way out of poverty.

Due to the global glut of coffee, the price of Dawit’s coffee had fallen as low as Birr 3-4/kg (or about US$0.40 to $0.50 per kg), at which price he must pay to keep his coffee trees healthy. With a price rise to Birr 12/kg (US$1.50 per kg),


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Entitlements are especially fragile under authoritarian regimes, with the poor particularly vulnerable to acute hunger. Lack of democracy and entitlements were factors in the famines that hit Ethiopia in the 1970s under the monarchy and in the 1980s under the Derg. The government subsequently formed by the EPRDF, though hardly devoid of authoritarian politics, was more responsive to popular needs than its predecessors. Among its initiatives have been food-for-work programs that have helped to keep people fed while starting to address the causes of environmental destruction.

Moreover, three transnational firms control three-quarters of the world coffee trade. Is it any wonder that the last attempt at supply management – which goes against the economic orthodoxy of free trade – collapsed in failure? On the other hand, “fair trade coffee” has mushroomed since the 1980s. It is purchased from Southern farmers by specialized marketing organizations established to ensure that producers receive a price that covers their production costs. These organizations roast, package and market this coffee – mostly in Northern countries, at prices that are usually, but not always, somewhat higher than the price of supermarket coffee. Although fair trade coffee makes up a very small part of a total market dominated by major producers, it is expanding rapidly, particularly in Europe. It could make a real difference for those Ethiopian farmers who become part of this system. Currently, fair trade coffee comprises only a small fraction of the Canadian market. But it could be a powerful and practical way to link the needs of farmers like Dawit for a secure livelihood with more knowledgeable Northern consumers, who increasingly understand that they bear responsibility for the consequences of what they buy.

Yet food for work can only ever be a stopgap measure – and it can have drawbacks. Ethiopia has been receiving international food aid for several decades now, in spite of the fact that most people see food aid as an emergency response. There have been frequent criticisms of Ethiopia’s dependence on international food aid. The Ethiopian government has decided that ongoing and increasing food aid dependence is unacceptable and has made it public policy to reduce and, if possible, eliminate the country’s food aid dependence. The government has decided to integrate food aid into a larger framework of “national food security”. In theory, this means that food aid will be used primarily for food-for-work activities, with a strong preference that food is procured in the country and that cash for work is used wherever possible.

Misgan Tadessa and Bishaw Nagash: Social safety nets Amartya Sen underscored the importance of democracy and entitlements in the face of hunger, by comparing the Chinese food crises in the late 1950s with an emergency in India in the early 1970s. In Maharashtra in 1973, a massive famine was prevented with the creation of five million temporary jobs, part of the political response by government authorities wary of inaction. In China, with little connection between political rights and economic needs, the government faced no pressure from political opponents, and local officials glossed over horrific realities as they competed for favour in the capital. Some 30 million people starved between 1958 and 1961.

However, at the local level there are concerns about these new policies. There are threats that food aid will only be provided to those who agree to leave overpopulated areas. For the elderly and for the growing number of HIV/AIDS-affected households (often made up of the very young being looked after by very old people), food for work may be impractical. For these and other people, some sort of “safety net” is the only realistic solution. Although in the long run, such


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bution scheme in the 1990s, although Bishaw lost much of his land through the same process and now farms only four acres. He has noticed that the land produces less and less food, most recently because of cutworm infestation. His family has enough food to last from the November harvest until June. During the remainder of the year, they must find the resources to purchase food from the market. The gradual impoverishment of the area is particularly noticeable in the decline of meat in the diet.

safety nets should be provided by the government, for the foreseeable future international food aid will be necessary. For such safety nets to be reliable, long-term commitments to provide food aid – purchased locally or, if that is not possible, imported from outside the country – are essential. The Foodgrains Bank and other donors will be supporting local partners involved in such programming. Misgan Tadessa lives in the Abyssinian Highlands of Southern Gondar near Nefas Mewcha, a place whose name means “Where the winds meet”. At 7,500 feet, it is an area where deep valleys cut 3,000-foot trenches in the landscape. Misgan came to the area from Wollo, having moved to Gondar to get married. She noted that when she moved, the situation in her part of Wollo, which is flat, was better than in this part of Gondar, where erosion is a constant problem. Misgan likes the current hungry season “safety net” of food-for-work projects where both the husband and wife can work, and particularly likes the fact that men and women work together on the same tasks. She sells some of the grain that she is paid to buy salt, vegetables and clothing.

Bishaw noted that the lack of employment for young people is a particular problem, and he hopes that factories will be built in the area to provide off-farm employment. His own sons have become traders and he is hopeful that they will support him when he “becomes tired”. He has heard rumours that the government is going to cut off food aid programs in the area, and predicts that many will die if this happens. The government wants those who can’t manage, to migrate to the lowland areas of Gondar. But fear of malaria and inadequate preparation of their settlement have impeded earlier resettlement efforts. Bishaw also expressed concern over a local controversy that has caused much talk around Nefas Mewcha. Schoolgirls have protested to the government over their parents’ plans to marry them off before the age of 15. Bishaw recalled that girls used to marry as early as age eight, and that this ensured that they had economic security when they had children. He feared that the new law that prohibits early marriage of girls may mean more unwed mothers who are shunned by the local society.

A spry 76 years old, Bishaw Nagash is Misgan Tadessa’s older brother. He also came to the area from Wollo when his mother divorced her husband and returned to her parents. He recalls that during his childhood years, the family had ample food and buried seasonal surpluses in underground caches. Those who lacked food at any time borrowed from neighbours who had a surplus, repaying them at harvest time. As a young man, he farmed 13 acres of land. During his early adulthood, much of the forest was still intact and wild animals such as foxes, leopards and hyenas were common.

Worke Abetenow: New opportunities for young women Worke is a young woman of 17 who does not share Bishaw’s perspective on early marriage. She is one of two daughters and three sons of a farming family that lives outside Are Gabeya, a village about 15 miles from Nefas Mewcha. Her family

Bishaw has three sons and two daughters, all of whom are married. The sons have their own land obtained through a government land redistri-


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capital, where Grades 11 and 12 are available. While tuition is free, the students must find the money for room and board and school supplies. College and university entrance depend upon passing Grade 12. Providing financial and emotional support for young women who want to study to Grade 12 is an important key to improving the lives of women in Ethiopia. These young women face newfound freedoms and risks when no longer under the protective eye of their local communities. Clearly, more emphasis should be directed to supporting them.

works 1.5 acres, growing chickpeas, beans and teff (a local grain). They sell a portion of their crops to purchase salt, spices and school supplies. Worke’s elder sister is married and had no schooling. Worke tends the farm but is enthusiastic about the local school, which she attends half days. She is in Grade 7. She is determined to complete Grade 10 and has no intention of getting married or having children. Her ambition is to study sciences and possibly become a doctor. Her parents support the new law on early marriage of girls, and Worke dreams of being able to find a job so she can send money home. When her teachers ask her about her plans for further study, she says that she does not dare to be too hopeful because of a lack of money.

Babu Ashegre: Small-scale local marketing Babu, 34, farms a single acre about 12 miles from Nefas Mewcha. He owns a bullock for ploughing and a cow. He received his small parcel of land when it was redistributed in 1991 and, like other farmers, he has the use of the land but does not own it. He cannot sell or give it to someone else. His land is also part of a land restoration project being assisted by Family Health International/Ethiopia. The terracing and water harvesting effort has greatly increased the productivity of his land.

Ethiopia, like other countries in the region, is home to cultures that have traditionally placed significant restrictions on the lives of women. Often motivated at least in part by a desire to protect women and their procreative abilities, cultural practices such a female genital mutilation, early marriage (often as early as 12 years of age) and restricted access to schooling have meant that women have few options.

His land normally provides food for his family until the end of June. However, in 2004 an infestation of grasshoppers gave rise to fears that his harvest would last no longer than February. Babu has noticed that grasshoppers seem to come with low rainfall, an increasing problem in recent years. If his fears are realized and casual labour is unavailable, he will have to rely on the foodfor-work program. Without that, he would be forced to sell the family cow to feed his family.

Ethiopia’s current government has initiated policies to change some of this, especially in the area of schooling. In many ways, improving the educational opportunities for young women is a good entry point to solving many of the other problems that women face. The government has made it illegal for a girl to marry before the age of 15. As a result, school attendance by girlchildren has skyrocketed, to the point that the casual observer cannot help but be impressed by the number of girls heading off to school each morning. Around the world, education of young women has been shown to be one of the most developmentally positive single changes in a society.

Yet he remains optimistic. He has been improving the soil by adding compost and hopes he can soon start to cultivate vegetables as a cash crop. He plans to grow lettuce, cabbages, Swiss chard and beetroot to sell in Nefas Mewcha. But he is concerned about finding a way to market his produce there.

Schooling at the village level is, however, limited to a nominal Grade 10. Students who want to go beyond this point must travel to the district

As Ethiopian farmers work to improve their productivity through terracing and water harvest-


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ing, they often look to higher-value crops like fruits and vegetables. This can be an important way to strengthen their livelihoods. But learning how to produce high-quality fruits and vegetables efficiently is only part of the equation. Developing reliable transportation and marketing for such perishable produce often poses a great challenge to single farmers. While middlemen and traders can provide such services, experience elsewhere in Africa has shown that it is often farmer cooperatives that offer the best possibility for ensuring that farmers obtain a fair price for their production. Organizing cooperatives with the administrative skills and capacities to effectively manage such efforts is key to helping small farmers make progress. This should be an important part of Canada’s focus on Ethiopia’s agriculture and food security.

The Canadian Nurses Association Ethiopian Nurses Association: Improving nurses’ working conditions and health for Ethiopians The Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) is a federation of 11 provincial and territorial nursing associations representing more than 123,000 registered nurses. Its vision is “Registered Nurses: leaders and partners working to advance health for all”. In pursuit of this vision, CNA has established six goals, one of which is: CNA advances international health policy and development in Canada and abroad to support global health and equity. CNA has been actively supporting national nursing associations (NNAs) from resource-poor settings for 30 years. In doing so, CNA works with NNAs to identify policy and capacity priorities best suited for the international health partnership. The following story tells of some of the issues that have emerged in CNA’s partnership with the Ethiopian Nurses Association.

Other challenges await in the near future. Ethiopia is in the process of pursuing membership in the WTO. One of the key requirements to join the WTO is to “open your markets”. This usually means a commitment to keep import tariffs very low so that exporters can sell into your markets. This can pose a huge threat to the development of local, high-value agriculture. In neighbouring Kenya, farmers in cooler areas planted orchards, in order to sell apples in the local market. However, as a result of both IMF and WTO rules, Kenya had to keep its import duties low. When New Zealand fruit flooded into Kenya’s urban markets, that country’s fruit farmers lost their market. The same results from WTO membership may happen in Ethiopia. It is imperative that civil society organizations in Ethiopia be able to monitor and influence the WTO accession process, to ensure that Ethiopia retains the ability to protect its small farmers until they are ready to compete in an international market.

Rahel was just 20 years old when she started work as a nurse at the Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city. Just like the more senior nurses, she worked without latex gloves, even though she was frequently exposed to blood and body fluids. Rahel and her colleagues at the hospital were well aware of the risks, but continued, committed to their work. After all, they had worked so hard to get their training, in a country where education for nurses is as scarce as medical supplies. Rahel knew that the senior nurses complained to hospital administrators about the serious risk of contracting HIV. Resources were scarce, so nothing was done. Two years after starting work, Rahel received the test result. She was HIV positive. Rahel had become infected at work.

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Nurses are the backbone of Ethiopia’s fragile health care system. As in many countries, nurses comprise the majority of Ethiopia’s health care workforce. Still, there is only one nurse for every 2,000 people. Meanwhile, seven million Ethiopians depend on food assistance to survive, and nutrition-related and communicable diseases are common. As one of the world’s poorest nations, Ethiopia faces tremendous challenges in providing health services of quality to its people. Its health system can provide services for only half of the population. Much of its rural population has no access to modern institutional health care.

As a girl, Yegomawork Gossaye’s role model was her uncle, a handsome man who was always neatly turned out in a crisp white lab coat. Her uncle would tend the family’s wounds and administer inoculations. His ability to care for others convinced Yegamawork that she too should become a doctor. It was only just before he died that her uncle told Yegomawork that he was actually a nurse. Yegomawork decided to go to nursing school in Addis Ababa. After several years working at a hospital, Yegomawork began to study nursing and health policy. It occurred to her that front-line nurses had much to offer when it came to helping their country face up to its daunting health care challenges. Although this went against the topdown tendencies ingrained in Ethiopian culture, Yegomawork and a handful of fellow nurses got together to revive ENA.

Escalating rates of AIDS in Ethiopia – from two reported cases in 1986 to approximately 1.5 million now – are exacerbating these health challenges. Of those living with HIV and AIDS, almost 100,000 are children under 15 years old. The country is working hard to increase antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS. However, a major stumbling-block is the lack of health care professionals to administer and monitor the effects of the AIDS medications.

d “We are strong. Our profession has led many important advances in health care,” Yegomawork explains to the 700 nurses. “By coming together we can honour Rahel’s memory and instigate change that will make a difference for future generations of nurses – and for the people of Ethiopia.”

d A few months after Rahel’s death from AIDS, 700 nurses pack a conference hall in the Ethiopian capital for the 2004 general assembly of the Ethiopian Nurses Association (ENA). Just six years earlier, ENA had only four members and no political influence. Now, through hard work and with the support of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), the Association boasts 1,000 members.

In 2004 ENA, in collaboration with CNA, organized a series of discussions with 80 Ethiopian nurses. A recurring message from these nurses was that a lack of resources, such as latex gloves, was putting them and their patients at risk for AIDS. To make matters worse, nurses who ended up with a needle stick injury, for example, did not have access to confidential and affordable care.

ENA President Yegomawork Gossaye recounts the story of the young nurse named Rahel to her large, motivated audience. Many nod in recognition. It sounds all too familiar. Yegomawork urges them to act.

ENA also heard that, due to the serious shortage of registered nurses, existing staff is called upon to work double and triple shifts. Salaries are low, so nurses often need to take on second jobs to provide for their families. As nurses are not

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capacity and support to enable them to change the day-to-day realities within which they worked. Building nurses’ organized capacity to participate in policy development dramatically increases the potential for positive, democratic impact. By working together and strengthening networks, nurses now have an influence on health policy.

unionized, they lack job security or a system of support to address grievances. ENA members also insisted they needed better professional development. Continuing education and upgrading is virtually non-existent, with the exception of training by organizations such as UNICEF and the recent, limited upgrading on HIV/AIDS. On top of that, the increasing number of privately run, unregulated training institutions is threatening to result in inconsistent skill sets for nurses.

ENA has also reached an important milestone by developing a Nursing Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice. Developed with assistance from CNA and its member associations, the Code has been endorsed by the Ethiopian government and integrated into the basic education for nurses in that country, confronting possible declining standards that result from unregulated private nursing schools.

d CNA began working with ENA in 1998. The initial partnership focussed on improving outreach and increasing membership. Within three years, ENA had organized elections for both national and branch executives. Membership had grown to 800.

ENA is now represented on the government’s evaluation committee for Schools of Nursing, representing four universities that have established baccalaureate degrees. ENA has also taken its place internationally, presenting a paper at World Health Organization meetings and briefing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on the issues facing Ethiopian nurses.

ENA then joined CNA in a partnership entitled “Strengthening Nursing Associations and Nurses for the Advancement of Global Health and Equity”, focusing on primary health care and HIV/AIDS. The program encourages nurses to advocate for increased equity in health services, especially for the poor. It also aims to improve the skills of nurses, standardize nursing education, and reinforce the leadership position of women, especially nurses.

d “What will we do for one another?” Yegomawork asks the assembly of nurses. “Will nurses stand together and support one another? Will we bring our united voices to government policymakers to influence change?”

To date, over 500 nurses have received training and materials that help them with AIDS treatment and support. With support through CIDA Ethiopia, ENA has also provided training sessions for nurses on AIDS stigma and discrimination.

If the last few years are any indication, the answer is a resounding “Yes”. And if ENA continues to grow in strength, continues to influence health policy, continues to support nurses in their work, Rahel’s tragic story will some day be recounted to show just how much things have changed for Ethiopia and its nurses.

Nurses bring skills, knowledge and a day-to-day knowledge of the population’s reality to the policy table. On their own, most nurses lacked the


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From the Sideline to the Front Lines: The campaign to change Canada’s policy on tying food aid Canadian Council for International Co-operation1

“There come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land ... And there shall arise after them seven years of famine ... and the famine shall consume the land ... let them gather all the food of those good years that come ... and that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, that the land perish not through the famine.” Genesis

two decades of on-the-ground experience. He also knew Canadian farmers and individuals would be as generous as ever in gifts of grains and cash, and that the Canadian government would match most donations four-to-one.

James Alty was on his 80-acre farm south of Winnipeg on December 26, 2004. It was the day after Christmas and, along with most Canadians, Alty was enjoying a day of rest. Then the news reports starting coming in – reports of an earthquake in South Asia and of massive waves hitting the shores first of Indonesia and Thailand and soon Sri Lanka and India. The home-made videos came next – tourists turning their cameras in fascination at the flood of water – then the shaky images as the same tourists fled for their lives.

But Alty also knew his agency couldn’t be a significant part of the solution. “As a logistics person I thought, ‘how could we respond in timely way?’ I knew we couldn’t,” Alty laments. The reason: government policy said that only 10 percent of official Canadian food aid could be provided by buying food near the disaster area. The Foodgrains Bank had quickly used up its share of that 10 percent. It couldn’t use its share of the other 90 percent because that had to be provided from Canadian supplies – it was tied to Canadian procurement.

“It was horrific,” Alty says, recalling the deadly tides sweeping through tourist towns and poor cities. Then the images of floating bodies being sucked back out to sea. The death toll mounted by the hour – by thousands at first, then by tens of thousands.

“And that takes time,” Alty explains. “You have to buy the commodities, which involves the tendering. Then there’s the packaging – bagging peas and beans for example – and then the commodities have to be moved to the container yard, stowed and then shipped. It takes at least three months, optimistically, from start to delivery.”

And James Alty felt totally frustrated. As the logistics coordinator for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB), he knew that thousands would need emergency food aid. And his agency knew how to deliver it. The CFGB was the largest private food aid provider in Canada with more than

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This story was written by Bob Carty under contract to the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC). CCIC has edited the story and is responsible for any errors or omissions. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of CCIC as a whole. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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policy,” explained Secretary of State George Marshall as he sent massive food consignments to Europe as part of the Marshall Plan of post-war reconstruction.

And so while Canadian individuals would respond with massive donations to charities for emergency relief, government and nongovernmental agencies with experience in feeding the victims of catastrophe were out of the picture. “We were sidelined,” Alty concedes.

Washington, ever the largest food donor, soon discovered the leverage effect of food aid. In 1951, India requested US grain to stave off famine. The US agreed, on the condition that India relax its embargo on the export of thorium, an element essential to American nuclear energy production. Shortly afterwards, the US Congress passed a food aid act (PL 480) that barely mentioned development motives and instead described multiple objectives: serving “national security” objectives, disposing of American food surpluses, supporting farm and agribusiness incomes, and creating new markets.

That may have cost lives. A program designed to feed people in emergency situations was unable to respond. The one consolation for aid workers like James Alty was that maybe the next disaster would be different. Canadian Foodgrains Bank and a network of NGOs had been working for years to change policies that put Canadian food aid on the sidelines. They were close to changing decades-old policies that put self-interest ahead of help.

History: Food as Weapon The politics were bold and blatant. Bangladesh, suffering a famine in 1974, only became eligible for American food aid when it stopped exporting gunny sacks to Cuba. When Chile elected a socialist government in 1970, its traditional food aid was cut – only to be revived when General Pinochet seized power in a bloody coup d’état in 1973. In the last stages of the Vietnam War, South Vietnam received 20 times more food than five African countries most seriously affected by drought.

“If you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.” Senator Hubert Humphrey, 1957 On the face of it, food aid seems to make perfect sense – a moral and right thing to do. Canadian farms can produce far more than can be consumed domestically or commercially sold abroad. So why wouldn’t voters and politicians support a program that gives away leftovers instead of burying them in a landfill: “save the starving in India” – as mothers were wont to scold their children at the dinner table – if not by cleaning up your supper plate, at least by shipping them what we can’t sell.

Canadian food aid has never been so integrally part of foreign policy ambitions. But when Ottawa first ventured into the aid business in 1951, with a $10 million shipment of wheat to India under the Colombo Plan, a clear underlying hope was that hungry people would listen to those with food instead of to revolutionaries.

In fact, the history of food aid has a much less altruistic and a much more political legacy. After World War I, soon-to-be-president Herbert Hoover directed a food relief program to combat the spread of communism in eastern Europe. A quarter of a century later, in the aftermath of WWII, Washington shipped large quantities of food to Greece, pre-Maoist China, Italy and France to woo voters away from leftist parties. “Food is a vital factor in our foreign

Later, the “surplus disposal” goal of the Canadian food aid program was conceded by John Diefenbaker. Touring the Asian Commonwealth in 1958, the Prime Minister, ever mindful of the interests of western farmers, noted that “we would naturally hope, if not expect, these countries would take a large share of wheat and flour under the Colombo Plan”.


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programs could serve a donor’s political or strategic goals but would not address the root causes of hunger. They could also undermine attempts to build sustainable agricultural economies, supplying a meal for a day while the policies needed for food self-sufficiency, including land reform, were overlooked.

Bureaucrats in the Canadian aid program favoured food aid because of its “disbursement ease” – large amounts could be disbursed with minimal administrative costs. Throughout the 1960s, both US and Canadian food aid programs unloaded large quantities of wheat in the “Third World”, with PL 480 regularly absorbing 25 to 30 percent of total US agricultural exports. Food aid shipments of Canadian wheat made up 10 percent of all wheat exports by the end of the decade. For all donor countries, food aid represented a hefty 20 percent of all aid dollars.

There were still other problems. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) conceded as early as the late 1970s that there were often “leakages” – when food aid does not reach the targeted population but is diverted by local smugglers and profiteers.

the sudden arrival of food aid was often found to undercut the demand for local crops and put small farmers out of business.

In addition, the sudden arrival of food aid was often found to undercut the demand for local crops and put small farmers out of business. In 2000, for example, donors belatedly responded to a famine in eastern Ethiopia by sending in massive amounts of food aid (mainly sorghum). Since Ethiopian communities had critical needs in addition to food (such as health care to deal with a measles epidemic), quantities of the food aid were cashed in by recipients. The sorghum flowed to the main available outlet, across the border in Somalia. Prices there collapsed, and the negative consequences are still being felt by farmers in southern Somalia, itself a desperately poor region.

Despite the political and commercial motivations, there was no doubt that in some emergency situations, Northern food aid shipments did save lives – and in the aftermath of disasters could contribute to reconstruction. But it was also apparent that sometimes even emergency food aid had negative impacts. A classic case was the shipment of Canadian surplus milk powder to Guatemala in the wake of the 1975 earthquake. Large sectors of the indigenous population found the powder indigestible, and many suffered diarrhoea and serious illness, either because they lacked the enzymes to digest the lactose in cow’s milk, or because milk powder requires clean drinking water that is so often lacking in disaster situations.

The evidence of food aid’s effectiveness as a general development tool is mixed, and it is a poor substitute for cash in many situations. As a result, over the past 40 years the absolute value and the relative importance of food aid have declined dramatically, from more than 20 percent to less than 5 percent of the official development assistance. Still, it was recognized that food aid had an important role in disaster and emergency situations and, under very defined conditions, some use as a development tool. But its value was severely restrained by tying.

Food aid provided in non-emergency situations was even more problematic. Sometimes, it was provided not to feed needy people, but to be sold on local markets, generating cash for the recipient government or for NGO non-food aid development programs. Some of these


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way, food aid dollars, if spent locally instead of in Canada, could have bought 70 percent more food – could have fed more hungry people.

The Ties that Bind For its first four decades, Canada’s food aid was totally tied to Canadian products. That changed in 1990, when CIDA was authorized “to purchase foodstuffs and other nutrients from other countries, provided that the total of such procurement does not exceed 10 percent of the food aid budget in any one year.”

The Campaign In the late 1990s, Canadian NGOs set out to change the tying rules. Leadership came from the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a coalition of 13 church development and relief programs. Founded in 1983 with food and cash donations largely from Canadian farmers and a 3:1 match from CIDA, the CFGB now supplies more than $20 million dollars of food aid a year.

The change made Canada the second most restrictive donor – only the US had more severe tying of food aid. However, a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveals that Ottawa does not fully utilize even the small amount of untying allowed. For 2000-2003 Canada used only half, 5 percent, of its food aid budget for local purchasing.2

In 1999, the CFGB was the catalyst for the creation of the Canadian Food Security Policy Group, an informal working group of NGOs dedicated to a broad range of food issues. Joining the group was the Canadian Council for International Cooperation and a number of CCIC members including Oxfam Canada and World Vision Canada.

There are two major problems with such tying. First, it means that Ottawa cannot respond in a timely fashion to disasters, due to the time it can take to organize and ship food from Canada. Ironically, at the time of the South Asia tsunami there was a bumper crop of rice and other foodstuffs available for local purchase – but Canada lacked the flexibility to make significant local procurements.

“The first thing we had to do was work out a sound argument,” says Stuart Clark, the senior policy adviser for Canadian Foodgrains Bank. His argument was simple: the Canadian government should allow the local purchase of food in developing countries. This is a limited form of untying since it does not allow recipients to spend Canadian aid funds on subsidized US or EU commodities, just on developing country products. That is exactly what the EU had already established as its policy in the mid-1990s; as a result, the EU had untied more than a quarter of its food aid to be procured locally or regionally, giving its programs greater flexibility to quickly feed people in urgent need.

The second drawback is the cost of shipping food aid from Canada. The OECD study found that food aid often arrives late, that it disrupts local markets, and that “the actual cost of tied direct food aid transfers was, on average, approximately 50% more than local food purchases.” An example: in 2004, the price of local wheat in Nazaret, Ethiopia, was $248 per tonne. The price in Montreal was virtually the same: $253 per tonne. The cost to ship each tonne of Canadian wheat to Nazaret was an additional $172. In this case, the cost of Canadian food was 70 percent higher than local supplies. Or, to put it another

2

The proposal also recognized that in some situations, where there is limited food supply, local purchasing can cause prices to rise and thus hurt the food-buying power of the poor. In these cases, regional or Canadian purchasing might be more appropriate.

The Development Effectiveness of Food Aid: Does tying matter?, OECD, September 2005. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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So, the Canadian NGOs were proposing that local or regional purchasing be permitted if:

CFGB supporters. They had to get the nod from groups like the Canadian Wheat Board, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the National Farmers Union. In addition, government politicians had to be convinced that they wouldn’t be shot down by the opposition parties.

1. The needed commodity was not produced in Canada; or 2. The purchase would be more cost-effective than shipping from Canada; or

The campaign began in the trenches of NGO organizations – in church basements and living rooms where people discussed the issues and often followed up with letter-writing to politicians in Ottawa.

3. In cases of urgent need, delivery could be made more quickly. “We had a sound argument,” Stuart Clark asserts. “But that was not sufficient. Without political support it wasn’t going anywhere.”

For the CFGB, it also meant talking with farmers. “I talked with a lot of them,” says CFGB director Jim Cornelius, who often pointed out that food aid makes up less than one percent of the country’s production of any major commodity. So untying would have little, if any, economic impact.

Mark Fried of Oxfam Canada concurs: “People were easily convinced by the logic of the arguments – the challenge was motivating politicians and farm organizations to take the risk of alienating some of their constituents.”

“Farmers are sharp business operators,” Cornelius contends. “They donate to our organization in order to make a difference in the world, not to gain a benefit for themselves. And they always ask about our efficiencies – they want us to maximize the benefits of their donation for poor people. So they say if you can feed more people with untied aid, why wouldn’t you?”

Resistance to untying food aid was due to the perception that Canadian farmers would be on the losing end of the stick. They would forfeit an important economic prop. And farmers need every bit of help they can get. It would eventually become apparent, however, that farmers, more than most Canadians, understand the potential negative effect of tied food aid on developing countries, especially in terms of depressing prices and demand for local products.

Then the campaign had to reach out to commodity and farming organizations. Contacts were made with the Canadian Wheat Board in 2002. The initial reaction was that it did not object to untying but wanted to be assured that untying would really benefit developing country farmers.

CIDA was not listening directly to farmers but instead to organizations that claimed to speak for farmers – including marketing boards, corporations involved in food processing, and provincial and federal departments of agriculture. They have long lobbied hard for a continuance of food aid tying.3

The National Farmers Union (NFU) was initially cool to the idea, according to Stuart Clark. “They were concerned that Canada would be buying subsidized US and European food and large multinational corporations would be the beneficiaries.” The campaign had to convince the NFU that that wouldn’t be the case.

“We had to show that farmers and other Canadians were on our side,” Stuart Clark concedes. And that meant more than just

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In testimony to Parliament in 1980, former Trudeau adviser Ivan Head revealed that some members of Cabinet had actually argued that it was in Canada’s best interest that poor countries continue to rely on Canadian wheat – and “it was not in our interest, therefore, to help them to grow their own food.” Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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“This is a cause for celebration,” said Oxfam Canada’s Mark Fried. He attributes the victory to having a simple strategy: “We picked a very specific policy for change – we weren’t questioning the whole approach and we weren’t asking for a change to a lot of different, complex rules.”

Meanwhile, there was positive support at the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association and the Western Canadian Barley Growers Association. By the spring of 2005, those organizations had approved the untying of 50 percent of Canadian food aid for local or regional purchasing – not as much as the campaign was seeking, but more than the EU practices. “We said we could live with that,” Stuart Clark recalls.

“Persistence,” was the key according to Kathy Vandergrift, the director of policy for World Vision Canada. “People like Stuart Clark kept plugging away at it.”

At the same time, approaches were made at a political level. In Ottawa, the campaign already had support within CIDA; development experts knew that tying meant that aid dollars were not being used efficiently. This, in turn, was a powerful message the NGOs brought to meetings with Ministers responsible for trade and agriculture. Mostly the Ministers wanted assurances that farmers wouldn’t object and that the opposition would not be down their throats.

Vandergrift also admits that the change in government policy came at a time when it was a bit easier to make. Food aid transfers are but a fifth of what they were several decades ago. “The reduction of surplus volume in Canada is a factor here,” she concedes. Nonetheless, untying Canadian food aid may actually gain it a more secure place in Canada’s development assistance tool kit. “Canada’s food aid budget would get smaller if there was no change in tying. It’s just too inefficient,” notes CFGB’s Cornelius. “So the change is vital to sustaining a food aid budget which otherwise would decline in my view.”

In Parliament, the NDP was solidly in support of food aid untying. So was the then international cooperation critic for the Conservative Party, Ted Menzies. He recalls meeting subsistence farmers in Africa who couldn’t sell their meagre crops because the warehouses were full of US “good will” food aid. For him, untying food aid was a no-brainer: “It is the right thing to do to help those less fortunate, but let’s make that dollar go as far as it can.” In fact, Menzies would have supported untying food aid even more than 50 percent.

The Next Challenge … End the dumping “It’s time to end the five-decade policy of U.S. food aid that has aimed to boost the profits of large agro-exporters and flood the world market with U.S. agricultural surpluses. The European Union, and now Canada, have already adopted policies to provide cash to buy regionally produced food for hunger-stricken populations. The U.S. government could start shedding its bad neighbor image by following suit.”

And then the tsunami disaster came along. It tipped the balance in the debate, illustrating in dramatic form how an old policy was failing the good will and aspirations of Canadians.

Tom Barry, International Relations Center On September 22, 2005, Canadian Ministers of aid, trade and agriculture jointly announced that in order to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of assistance to the hungry, up to 50 percent of Canada’s food aid could be purchased in developing countries.

There is a huge problem that remains in reforming food aid: the policies of the United States government.


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This is an ongoing struggle in the United States. Tom Barry sees the Canadian move to untie food aid as a welcome tool in his debating kit, another point of moral leverage: “American advocates (of untying) are citing Canada and the EU for untying their food aid. It is very helpful in our efforts to make a change happen in the US.”

The US provides more than half of all food aid donated each year. And unfortunately, it is delivered under regressive, self-interested policies. American food aid is a blatant exercise in surplus disposal and foreign policy manipulation. “Ours is a ‘bad neighbour’ policy,” says Tom Barry, the policy director of the International Relations Center in New Mexico and the author of a book on food aid in Central America.

d Conclusion: What a difference a policy change makes

The stated purpose of American food aid, Barry explains, “was to build a market for USA products abroad – get them used to eating American yellow corn or wheat – or the Cold War idea of winning over their ‘hearts and minds’. It never had anything to do with development.”

In the fall of 2005, several nations in southern Africa were in the midst of a continuing drought. Poor people in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique were facing starvation. Again, the international community was challenged to respond – and respond quickly.

There have been recent attempts – even supported by the Bush White House – to reduce tying of the largest American food aid program, PL 480, by 25 percent; the White House supported a proposal to let $300 million out of the annual $1.2 billion PL 480 food aid budget be untied. But Barry says that proposal was vehemently opposed by strong farm lobby groups – and even by US charities that deliver the food aid.

This time, with changed Canadian tying conditions in place, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank was able to move rapidly. There was a bumper crop in South Africa (the largest export harvest ever) and also some surpluses in Tanzania. The CFGB purchased local white, non-GMO maize within the region. Buying locally meant spending about $300 a tonne for the maize. If it had to be shipped from Canada – with at least a three-month time lag – it would have cost $500 a tonne.

America’s intransigence is not just simply a matter of a refusal to improve the quality of its aid – it is an issue that hits at the heart of global trade disputes. At the World Trade Organization (WTO), US food aid has been identified as nothing less than a hidden farm subsidy – the dumping of surplus commodities to help American agricultural producers. Many WTO members want Washington, at a minimum, to acknowledge these subsidies and move to reduce the subsidies. In turn, that would encourage EU countries to reduce their own agricultural subsides. Both actions could be positive developments for farmers in developing countries.

“That means local producers are getting their stocks used – and that keeps farmers in business in southern Africa,” says the CFGB’s Cornelius. At the same time, Canada’s food aid dollars go further. “It means we can deliver 70 to 80 percent more food than before. It means we are more timely. It means we save more lives.” This is what Canadian NGOs are seeing on the ground: that the change in Canada’s tying policies on food aid makes an important difference.


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Coalitions for Women’s Rights and Citizenship: A collective force for action and influence Canadian Centre for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI)1

Through the Women’s Rights and Citizenship project, CECI created a networking dynamic that has developed into a collective force for action and influence – coalitions – in Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea. Today, there are three formally structured coalitions that include a total of 31 civil society organizations (women’s and mixed) with complementary expertise, gathered around a common interest. n

The coalitions have focused on three strategic issues: n

equality within the family,

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elimination of violence, and

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citizenship and participation in power.

The three coalitions have gained considerable credibility among populations, local authorities and governments. They have created formal structures and developed strategic plans, and are seeking funding to strengthen their organizations and pursue collaborative action.

CECI adopted a multi-faceted and integrated capacity-building approach: training, exchange of experiences, experiments in elaboration and management of action plans and projects, and support. This contributed to building capacities for analysis, intervention and management and to solidifying the relationships among organizations.

d A North-South Partnership Based on Responsibility-Sharing and Participation, with a View to Local Capacity-Building

CECI’s provision of support for reflection and action was a key factor in the success of coalitionbuilding by the West African organizations. It allowed for special training based on the needs of the moment. It encouraged creativity, enhanced strategies and encouraged questions. The CECI team accompanying the partners was made up of both West African and Canadian resource people, including volunteers from the Canadian women’s movement.

The success of the project was due in part to a clear understanding of shared responsibilities between CECI and the African coalitions. n

1

The role of CECI was to provide methodological support for analysis, planning, organization and monitoring; to lead and support processes, reflection and action among the coalitions and each NGO (non-governmental organization) member; and to carry out the capacitybuilding program.

The role of the coalitions was to define and carry out actions to promote women’s citizenship rights; to be actively involved in collaboration; and to commit to participate in, and attain, capacity-building results.

CECI originally presented this case study as a contribution to a CCIC/CIDA dialogue on ownership and aid effectiveness in March 2003. CECI acknowledges the financial support of CIDA for this project. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation as a whole. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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process, identified possible results, encouraged debate, fuelled analysis of context and reflection on strategies, and assisted in establishing a budget. Over the years, the coalitions assumed an increasing role in the process, which, at the beginning, was very demanding and a source of tension.

A Program for Capacity-Building Identified by the Coalitions A participatory diagnosis allowed the NGOs to identify their own strengths and weaknesses. A summary was shared and discussed within each coalition and served as the basis for developing a four-year capacity-building program. Each year, the coalitions updated the program.

The accountability of the coalitions for defining action plans, given the challenges of collaboration, was a source of learning and self-sufficiency. For real ownership of issues and actions, it is essential to respect partners’ paces (faced with donors’ schedules and payments) and to learn to draw lessons from problems and mistakes. Such an approach allows local organizations to be actors, not operators or providers of services.

Flexibility in carrying out the program promoted empowerment, allowing the project to meet the needs of the organizations, rather than vice versa. The coalitions were actors, not instruments, in the project.

Collaborative Action Plans Developed and Implemented by the Coalitions Rather than adopt a project-based funding approach, CECI promoted a collaborative approach within the coalitions to develop action plans.

d A Civil Society with Increased Capacities, Actively Committed to Women’s Rights

The coalitions first analyzed and evaluated the problems related to each of the three issues (equality within the family, elimination of violence, and citizenship and participation in power), in order to identify priority actions for each country. On this basis, updated yearly, they defined the directions, strategies and budgets for their action plans.

Capacities for Collaboration and Cooperation Capacity for cooperation developed through the analysis of issues and socio-political context, and the development of action plans, and benefited from semi-annual evaluations. Cooperation gradually evolved into collaboration on collective projects, and even led to the sharing of tools and methodologies. The coalitions succeeded in rising above political, ethnic and religious affiliations. Collaboration and cooperation increased daily, despite conflicts between NGOs and tensions between NGOs and government agencies.

The action plans were implemented through projects defined and carried out by the NGOs that are members of the coalitions. Some projects were collective, conceived by several NGOs, which together developed the awareness-raising messages and tools. Each NGO then carried out the same types of actions in its own area.

Cooperation provided opportunities for learning the exercise of democracy, and allowed the acquisition of skills for negotiation, dialogue, acceptance of differing points of view, etc.

CECI’s role was to propose a methodological framework for assessing issues and developing the annual action plan. CECI also led the


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parents about violence toward girls. Girls began to testify about rapes, sexual harassment, etc.

Carrying Out Diversified, Innovative and Increasingly Strategic Initiatives Apart from information, awareness-raising and training, strategies have included cooperation, inquiry, advocacy and lobbying. Use of cultural tools – such as theatre, songs and local radio – has been widespread. Target groups have varied: adults and youth of both sexes, law professionals, the education sector, the political sector, media and religious groups. The exchange of experiences among the three coalitions has permitted successful strategies to be reproduced.

In Mali, an NGO has broken new ground with awareness-raising tools. Audiocassettes and video clips of popular stars singing about the hazards of female circumcision play regularly on radio and television. Citizenship and Participation in Power In all three countries, diverse actions led to marked improvement in women’s participation in commune management and elections.

In Burkina, advocacy among political parties contributed to 13.25 percent of first- and secondplace candidates on the 2002 electoral lists being women, compared with 9.5 percent and 4.13 percent in 1997 and 1992.

… That Prompt Change Equality Within the Family

In Guinea, 19,968 people, including 17,058 women, were educated by 154 paralegals in rural and urban areas. Among the paralegals were rural radio journalists and paralegals from the Ministère de l’Action sociale, de la Promotion féminine et de l’Enfance (department of social action and the promotion of women and children). Based on a pilot project developed by a member of the coalition, with the technical support of a departmental legal officer, the project was renewed by three members of the coalition. Since that time, 700 cases of women’s rights violations have been reported to the department.

In Mali, close to 1,800 women leaders, trained in women’s rights and commune affairs management, became actively involved in commune management. Of these women, 114 were candidates in legislative elections in 2002, and 100 were chosen by the Commission Électorale Nationale Indépendante (independent national electoral commission) as observers during elections. Furthermore, women have become more aware of their rights, claiming them and denouncing violations. In Mali, women took action against a credit officer who abused his authority; they won their case, which gained them respect in the community and from authorities. In Burkina, a civic education campaign reached more than 15,000 people, including 10,900 women and 370 leaders in 270 Citizenship Information-EducationCommunication clubs. Seventy-four cases of women’s rights violations were reported to them and were resolved. Several women from the

In Mali, women reported that information regarding civil marriage and succession have changed their lives. They receive more respect from their husbands and the community and have felt more at ease expressing themselves. In three villages in the Koulikouro region, civil marriages increased following awareness-raising. Combating Violence

In Guinea, “observatories on violence” were created in rural and urban schools following awareness-raising among students, teachers and


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clubs were named as members to departmental commissions during legislative deliberations in 2002. In Guinea, an awareness-raising project regarding women’s rights reached 13,000 people, including 8,000 women. Synergy with a literacy program and local radio contributed to improving respect for women’s rights and encouraging women to express their opinions more often during village assemblies.

… That Becomes a “Joint Effort” for Increased Results for Women and Better Governance n

A Civil Society That Dares To Go Further Capacity for Political Dialogue The three coalitions include representatives of government departments as “advisory members”. Co-existence, although difficult at the beginning, opened the way to dialogue and allowed the departments to participate in directing the plans of action and to be informed of the actions taken.

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In all three countries, the departments in charge of promoting women’s rights and justice recognized that the coalitions were contributing to the attainment of their goals. Governments have responsibilities in terms of women’s rights, but for those responsibilities to be appropriately assumed, women’s rights must be known, there must be recourse, and legal decisions must be understood. But government cannot do everything. The contribution of civil society is essential. The experience of the coalitions shows that, if this contribution is achieved through dialogue and cooperation, based on common interests and concrete proposals, it can be very effective.

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… And For Advocacy Encouraged by the success of their dialogue with the departments, and by the concrete and recognized results of their actions, the coalitions gained assurance and legitimacy in creating alliances with other players and in advocacy. Practical training gave them the technical tools.

Revision of sections of the Guinean Civil Code that discriminate against women – part of a coalition initiative with the participation of the Ministère de l’Action sociale, de la Promotion féminine et de l’Enfance and the Department of Justice – led to an overhaul of the Civil Code. Legal texts from the subregion were used as examples. Civil society and administrative, political and religious authorities validated the proposal, which was then endorsed by the Justice Minister and filed with the government’s general secretariat. In the three countries, 50,345 civil status documents (identity cards, birth certificates, etc.) were acquired, including 28,380 for women. Women who have civil status documents can exercise various rights, such as voting on their own, and have easier access to credit and to market spaces. In each country, the government agreed to relax conditions for obtaining documents. The operation netted $26,000 for communities in Burkina and $8,000 in Mali. Civil registers were harmonized throughout Burkina. The new training manual for Department of Justice courts incorporates a gender and development framework, based on coalition training pilots. An agreement between the Department of Communication and the Mali coalition allowed 24 hosts from private and public radio and television, who were trained by the coalition, to contribute to a broad awarenessraising effort about participation of women at the legislative level. These people make up a network of communicators on women’s rights for the department, and field contributors for the coalition.


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Conclusion The experience of CECI and its partners has demonstrated that the ownership of issues and actions by local organizations, and the sustainability of cooperation and actions, are increased by the following factors: n

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A North-South partnership in which local organizations are at the heart of program orientations and have a wide scope for analysis, proposals and actions, enabling them to assume the role of actor, rather than operator, from the outset.

A structured approach, in which the Northern NGO encourages and supports cooperation (proposed by Southern NGOs), encourages and fuels innovation, proposes methodological support, provides support for action, encourages questions and meets needs in a practical and specific manner. Respect for the pace of local organizations and the flexibility to adapt to changing needs and lessons learned.

An assessment report for CECI and CIDA noted that “the coalition approach was highly innovative … This new mechanism for civil society in the three countries … will play an increasingly important role in the future.”

Capacity-building of local organizations, based on self-diagnosis and adjusted in response to needs that arise from actions and lessons learned.


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Women Arise: A dialogue on gender implementation Gail Hochachka and Sandra Thomson One Sky – Canadian Institute for Sustainable Living Cross River State, Nigeria1

Patricia Eyamba stands tall, holding her newborn baby, as her mother’s coffin is unloaded from the Last Call Ambulance; soon she and her sisters are crying hysterically. The harmitan dust from the Saharan Desert softens the scene, tingeing the moment with a hue of calm. Several groups of grievers, many women, have waited for several hours in the hot sun. As the shiny blue and white coffin is placed outside her old house, the family swarms around it, followed by hundreds of villagers. The moment is overwhelming – it feels like the entire village has come out to honour Patricia’s mother, the Chief Mrs. Elsie Ukpoka Umera Bassey (née Princess Ada Ijim). This is the village of Ikun in Cross River State, Nigeria, one of thousands of small villages that scatter the southeast corner of this country. mother founded Women Arise seven years ago when she began to recognize that the suffering etched onto the women’s faces was due to unjust and unfair treatment.

The crowd of grievers is diverse. The male chiefs wearing their regal crocheted ivory hats, the elders walking with canes that look auspicious in their simplicity, and the older women sitting in their wisdom sharing few words. The children gaze wide-eyed. Patricia says a prayer, her voice calling out across the throng of people, and cutting through the humid afternoon heat. Patricia and other family members – her sisters Myrtle and Virtue and brother Eugene – sing songs over the coffin. The church preacher and the traditional chiefs make emotional speeches in Efik, the local dialect, which cause others to burst into tears, unabashed in their grief.

Patricia reminisces about conversations she had with her Mother about women’s empowerment, and the visions she had for her community: “I remember my mum saying to me, ‘Papat, the women in the village are suffering, they have very low self-esteem, powerless, they are sex objects for men, and the men are not taking responsibility. They want to form a group. I will pass on all the knowledge I have acquired in [the city] to them through our meetings.’”

The most noticeable among the crowd are several women in outfits made from the same bright yellow-green cloth elaborately patterned with green hearts. They are members of a local women’s empowerment group, Anabena Gibera, or Women Arise, and today they are here to honour their leader and mentor. Patricia’s

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Mrs. Bassey’s vision was profound, born from her own life experiences as an African woman and infused with her own passions for justice. Gazing around today and seeing the bright eyes of this women’s empowerment group, it is clear that her vision is becoming real.

This story reflects the views and experience of One Sky and partners who were involved in developing it. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation as a whole. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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How has Patricia’s mother had such an impact? Considering the level of need for gender equality throughout the country of Nigeria, and Sub-Saharan Africa more generally, questions on effective implementation are simply wise ones to ask.

Mrs. Bassey’s life reads like a novel. Born a princess and the first daughter of a village chief in the hierarchical tribal system, she was expected to marry someone with status. “My mother was cherished, guided, and protected, because my maternal grandfather didn’t have children for a long time. So when it was time for my mother to be married, nobody was fit, nobody was good enough for my mother. My father was 60 years old and my mother was 16. That’s because he had exposure, traveling all over the world, he was well educated, well informed, but after the death of his first wife, he came down to marry my mom and brought her to Calabar, to the city.”

Policy Focus: Balancing Implementation with Donor Requirements This story revolves around Ikun village in Cross River State, Nigeria. It tracks initiatives to promote gender equality by a grassroots organization, Women Arise, as well as One Sky’s work with the Nigeria-Canada Coalition. One Sky is a Canadian environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Smithers, BC, whose aim is to promote sustainable living globally. One Sky is working in environmentally and socially challenging areas in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and in Canada. In Nigeria, One Sky is working to build the capacity of four Nigerian environmental organizations and a regional network. An important dimension of One Sky’s work is improving policy dialogue and sharing lessons of development experience between donors, governments and practitioners North and South.

Her husband died when all four children were very young. Yet, Mrs. Bassey herself was a very young mother, with no education. When her husband died she literally had nothing. According to tradition, women are not entitled to their husband’s assets, and so when the sons from his previous marriage took the land and property, she found herself with the responsibility of taking care of all four children on her own. Patricia explains how her mother sold her own homemade clothing to raise money to send her children to school. And through this dedication, eventually all four children went to university.

Despite a commitment to local ownership and recipient-led programming, the expectations of the donor community in other areas of policy, such as gender equality, often take precedence. For development practitioners at One Sky (from both Canadian and Nigerian civil society organizations), the task of translating gender equality policy into practice is made all the more challenging by sometimes unrealistic restrictions and expectations of partners.

“It is because of my mother that I have gone to school, that I have a degree. She inspires me. I call her my mentor. She stood on her own, she had [nothing] and today she is an object of envy in our community.” The funeral attendees mill around the coffin as another set of prayers and speeches are made. A woman leader stands tall, her hand on the coffin, and speaks gently but emphatically in Efik. Her words elicit a ripple of response through the crowd; many of the women in greenhearted dresses crumble into tears. The speech honoured Mrs. Bassey and her contributions to women in the village.

1. Policy influences and informs actions, but will not necessarily change values. Creating and upholding gender policy is only one of several ways to affect gender equality. In general, policy can be used to influence actions,


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behaviours and decisions, but it is important to recognize its limitations. Long-term sustainable social change requires a deeper shift in peoples’ values and policy, in and of itself, cannot achieve this.

2. Donor agencies must recognize that changing values takes a long time, and requires creating emergent conditions within existing cultural contexts. It cannot be forgotten that, in promoting gender equality, we are promoting shifts in traditional institutions, cultures and mindsets, which will take considerable time. While short-term projects that implement gender policies can influence some behaviour related to gender, this does not indicate a change in societal and individual values. It also does not necessarily create the conditions for deeper, long-lasting change.

Simply instituting gender policy does not necessarily produce desired outcomes. To actually foster shifts in values is a more complex, multifaceted and qualitative affair, one in which people’s sense of self, and sense of self-incommunity, change profoundly. Often such qualitative (subjective and inter-subjective) shifts are difficult to achieve and measure. There is seldom a direct causal relationship between outputs and results, particularly when the development result, or long-term impact, we are seeking is an internal attitude or value. Can such values and attitudes, which are internal and qualitative, be measured using quantitative, external indicators? Outcomes are difficult to describe in the more quantitative frameworks often required by donors.

Seeking approaches that create enabling environments is key to fostering long-term changes in behaviour and attitude regarding gender. In Nigeria, for example, members of One Sky and the Nigeria-Canada Coalition explore approaches to gender equality that are multifaceted – working in, but going far beyond, policy. These create enabling environments, or emergent conditions, in which gender equality can be fostered. Approaches include:

For example, successful results toward gender equality are often measured solely by sexaggregated data that report x number of women present for a meeting or an activity. But a more important result is the degree to which those women participated meaningfully, or the process by which men honoured and validated women’s input. These are far more accurate measurements of gender equality. When donors ask only to see numbers of women participating in development activities, the qualitative dimensions of this work may be disregarded, and it is not acknowledged that practitioners may have to actually work with the men in power to raise awareness about gender and development objectives.

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As practitioners, the challenge is to continue to dance between meeting the expectations of donors and identifying approaches to achieve effective implementation.

Empowering existing and/or local change agents (organizations and individuals) and providing resources to support them. This reinforces locally-initiated positive shifts toward the desired development outcome. Emulating and providing opportunities for people to open up to new perspectives and to new modes of being, via workshops, community-led empirical studies on gender, education about gender, co-developing gender policies, and raising awareness through more qualitative means. Creating and supporting role models by hiring women in positions of power and participation who then interact with men and women, in urban and rural areas.


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recipient-led and/or community-directed work, knowing that lasting effects tend to come through the empowerment and actions taken by local people, for local people. Yet, on the other hand, practitioners are also setting a bar in terms of what is morally acceptable in a globalizing world – standing up for abused women, opening up spaces for new modes of being, and recognizing that such issues are shared issues in today’s world. This balance is tenuous, but if it is done well, practitioners can accommodate both objectives simultaneously.

Modelling gender equality within their organization and with partners by establishing and implementing comprehensive gender policies, as well as valuing gender equality at a deeper level (e.g., a man cooking and washing dishes; women designing and delivering a workshop; high-level decision-making processes by men and women working together).

3. Implementation of gender equality policy must be balanced with current development paradigms such as local ownership and recipient-led programming. One factor that particularly complicates this work to promote gender equality is the inherent contradiction of local ownership. On the one hand, the current development paradigm is moving toward local ownership and recipient-led programming. Yet, some policies (i.e., gender equality) are underpinned by cultural values that then are assumed to be universal principles. Gender equality as a value does not necessarily arise from beneficiaries and recipients, nor does gender equality necessarily drive their activities for implementing change.

To be successful, these challenges need to be more clearly shared between civil society organizations active on the ground and donors, so that program and project expectations can reflect the complexities of affecting gender equality, as well as other value-based policies and requirements.

4. Donor agencies must establish countryspecific strategies for achieving gender equality that reflect the range of cultural values within one country. In order to affect change in gender equality, strategies to implement gender policies must be developed that are suitable for the particular cultural and political contexts of different geographical regions worldwide. This vast diversity requires the strategic development of relevant approaches that will create the environment for change to emerge. Numerous development practitioners from diverse parts of the world stress that there is no single approach to mainstreaming gender. Successful results have only been achieved when programs are innovative, creative and speak specifically to the traditions, customs, religions and beliefs of the constituents.

Brian Tomlinson, in his article in The Reality of Aid 2002 on “Promoting ownership and gender equality”, explains: “Differing perspectives on aid no doubt reflect more profound debates about the place of values – [such as,] international justice, equality and solidarity – rather than national interests. Many donor policies, including CIDA’s, are increasingly influenced… by these values.” In terms of what this means for practitioners tasked with implementation, it again brings up the issue of balancing donor expectations with realistic outcomes. Practitioners tend to span this vast divide between different value systems, seeking to be effective in reaching development objectives on both accounts. On the one hand, practitioners seek to respect a process of

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adopting a new constitution in 1999. From the country profile on CIDA’s website:

Gender Mainstreaming Gender mainstreaming is relatively new for donor agencies, including Canada. Although Canada has been a leader on gender policy for more than two decades, CIDA’s policy was only revised and strengthened in 1995. Canada now recognizes that sustainable development and poverty reduction will not be attained unless the inequalities between men and women are addressed. Canada continues to play a leadership role internationally in pursuing gender equality, by emphasizing the importance of gender equity and women’s empowerment. Gender equality is an essential cross-cutting theme throughout all of CIDA’s policies, programs and projects. CIDA emphasizes the need for gender analyses to better understand the relationships between men and women, as well as the connections between gender, ethnicity, culture, and class. Gender analyses also help to decipher the potential effects that development policies and programs may have as a result. But there remain large gaps in knowledge about how to implement gender equality.

“The new president faces the daunting task of rebuilding a petroleum-based economy, whose revenues have been squandered through corruption and mismanagement, and institutionalizing democracy. In addition, the present administration must defuse longstanding ethnic and religious tensions, if it is to build a sound foundation for economic growth and political stability.” Nigeria ranks 151st out of 171 countries worldwide on the Human Development Index, and 122nd for the more specific Gender Development Index. The northern part of the country is Muslim, while Christianity and traditional beliefs predominate in the south. With high cultural diversity (over 350 ethnic groups with distinct languages, and a judicial system based on English common law, statutory law, Islamic law and tribal customary law), it is challenging and complex to implement social change in Nigeria. Although Nigeria ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1985, clearly Nigerian males still have significantly more important status than women, and male children are still regarded more favourably. A government plan was presented to implement the Platform for Action following the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, but as in many African countries, there is still a long way to go in terms of developing appropriate institutional mechanisms and adequate capacity for implementation of such policies.

When pursuing the goal of affecting changes in gender equality, Canadians need to explicitly recognize our own history of addressing gender issues in Canadian society. For example, it took Canada several decades, and a concerted effort by a strong, empowered civil society, to achieve the outcomes that we have today. At the same time, in comparison with Nigeria, the socio-economic and cultural starting points and settings were vastly different. In working with gender as a crosscutting theme worldwide, donor agencies need to recognize the complexity of world views and social norms with which development practitioners are working.

The women at the funeral in Ikun village in Cross River State today are poised between two worlds – living in a society in which Hollywood film productions and DVD players are juxtaposed with traditional marriage rites and laws that

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, with a population estimated at more than 130 million people. It has relatively recently established a peaceful transition to a civilian government,


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Clearly, working to improve gender equality is complicated. Implementing gender programming effectively requires sensitivity, contextual understanding and thoroughness. Michael Simpson, Executive Director of One Sky, explains how he has witnessed practitioners treating gender equality superficially, rather than analyzing the more systemic nature of the issue.

forbid women to own land. The women seem to move seamlessly between pounding yam in large wooden bowls by hand, and posing for digital photographs. How can we as practitioners move as seamlessly between such different realities, bridging these diverse world views, as we work in gender equality?

The Challenges of Community-Level Development Practitioners

“It is not just how many women come to a meeting, but how many of them make meaningful interventions at that meeting. It is a question of empowerment and of choice, not just numbers.”

CIDA’s policy provides many examples of “results that contribute to achieving gender equality”, but little guidance exists for how to get there. As development practitioners working with several community-based NGO partners in Nigeria, One Sky has experienced the gap between donor development policies on gender, and the effective implementation of these policies in development projects. At the heart of these challenges is a lack of contextual understanding of how to implement gender policies, while also honouring and respecting cultural diversity, traditions, value systems and world views.

He explains that when donors insist on a gender component, with insufficient expertise about gender work on the part of the agency or actors on the ground, the process can be set back. Some practitioners are often unsure about implementation, and therefore they avoid the deeper roots of the issue. “If gender work is done at a token level, then doing it is a disservice to the society,” he explains. Some effective ways in which One Sky works in the area of gender include providing role models to community women and getting gender policies into projects at the outset, so that it becomes common ground for working together. The majority of One Sky employees are women, including the most senior position in the Nigeria program, which again offers a modelling opportunity. There have been South-South exchanges between gender programs in Sierra Leone and gender programs in Nigeria in the hope of providing cultural context. Most importantly, One Sky has resourced and supported existing local effective change agents like Patricia Eyamba.

Other challenges faced by practitioners are: goals, indicators and strategies that are not adequately articulated or fine-tuned to the individual country circumstances and the diversity of cultural contexts within which we are working; inadequate identification of priorities, challenges and most appropriate responses; and inadequate capacity, expertise and resources to implement gender equality well. The risks of not addressing these challenges are significant: potential allies will block further dialogue and discussion, others may impede the process altogether, women may be harassed, pressured or even threatened if they participate, and the process for introducing gender equality will regress. Another risk is that we create a climate of tokenism, where the issues are addressed at a superficial level and not truly considered or taken seriously. These risks have been manifest numerous times.

These challenges and risks point to the need for further inquiry and dialogue. Particularly, how can practitioners remain sensitive and respectful of cultural realities of recipient communities, and also promote gender equality in these regions? How can policies on gender equality reflect the complexities of implementation?


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“gender equality” to enter mainstream dialogue, under specific historical influences and experiences, and it is still not completely stabilized as a social norm. This emergent concept of gender equality points to new epistemologies and world views, at particular levels of cognitive and moral development, which correspond to changed life conditions.

Cultural Sensitivity and Values Development donors and practitioners hold their own sets of values and perspectives about development, such as pacifism, egalitarianism, communalism, secularism and rationalism. The question is not whether to work to promote such values, but rather how to do so in ways that honour local world views. Civil society organizations are effective when they recognize the evolutionary context of local values, respect cultural diversity and engage with development processes in ways that are appropriate for the local customs.

Inappropriate externally-driven implementation of gender equality programming runs the risk of creating more strife and social dysfunction. Buckles explains: “Take the two most important… factors that CBNRM [community-based natural resource management] researchers and practitioners are constantly faced with: age and gender…. Most studies also show a concern for the widespread imbalances that exist between men and women, or between the old and the young. The implicit assumption is that wisdom of the elders is tainted with elements of patriarchy or gerontocracy, to be reduced or attenuated through proper participatory methods…. Defining the stakeholders in a dispute is considered all the more problematic, as some parties – women, youth, the poor – may not be viewed locally as interest groups entitled to be heard in the negotiation process. CBNRM may wish to empower these voices with greater equality in view, yet this may generate new conflicts…. ”3

Daniel Buckles, Senior Program Officer at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), explains in Cultivating Peace: Conflict and Collaboration in Natural Resource Management that many donor agencies and practitioners tend to assume their principles to be universal, and then work to promote these principles in other countries with often very different cultural realities.2 He notes that these principles are actually culturally based values, and questions the ethics of assuming that they should be taken up by other countries. This brings up questions of how to promote these principles in culturally ethical ways that acknowledge local customs and context, while also respecting and fostering local ownership of the development process.

Clearly, the values and world views of local beneficiaries and development practitioners weave together in a complex tapestry. Seeking to be ethical and effective in promoting gender equality puts forth several requirements for implementation. Implementation often requires longer time lines and may necessitate work in other thematic areas first, to slowly build awareness, trust and capacity for gender issues to be addressed later. If practitioners do not take the time and engage appropriately in this process,

Many donor agencies consider gender mainstreaming to be important for their missions to end poverty and achieve greater equality. But to assume that a country like Nigeria will take on the values of gender equality easily, immediately and in the forms in which Northern societies did so, does not take into account the evolution of these values through history. For example, it took close to a century in North America for the concept of 2

Buckles, D. (ed.) (1999) Cultivating Peace: Conflict and Collaboration in Natural Resource Management. IDRC/World Bank. Available on-line at http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-9398-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html.

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Buckles, D. (ed.) (1999) Cultivating Peace: Conflict and Collaboration in Natural Resource Management. Chapter 1: Conflict Management: A heterocultural perspective. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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traditional village structures may react to, rather than accept, initiatives for gender equality.

decision-making. The concept and movement for women’s rights simply has not yet become widespread in this region of Nigeria as it has in other countries.

Members of Women Arise stand proud at the funeral of their founder. Mrs. Bassey’s leadership connected with traditional village institutions in a non-threatening manner, such that the entire village exalts her today. How did she do this? Mrs. Bassey’s magic touch in gender equality lies silent at her side.

When gender issues are overlaid with environmental concerns, things become even more complicated. Men and women have different knowledge of, and ways of relating to, the surrounding environment, and yet women are rarely included in community-level decisionmaking about natural resources. Ironically, however, while men may make decisions about natural resources, often it is the women who have the responsibility for carrying out the work – and so, in their own ways, they strongly influence environmental management. The take-away point, here, is that it is complicated. To work for gender equality is similar to working to alleviate poverty – no one-step solutions exist.

The inquiry into balancing gender policy with implementation as a cross-cutting theme is pertinent and present for many others, and probably also for the members of Women Arise as they continue their path without Mrs. Bassey to lead them.

“Small Small” – Mainstreaming Gender and the Environment In December 2004, One Sky hosted a workshop on Gender and the Environment as part of an ongoing policy dialogue on gender issues with all its Nigerian partners. The participants were all part of One Sky’s Nigeria-Canada Coalition (NCC) and involved in the CIDA-funded “Cross River Environmental Capacity Development (CRE)” project. The goal of the project is to strengthen the management and policy-dialogue capacity of environmental NGOs, which in turn are instruments to support the communities surrounding two key protected areas in the Cross River bioregion of Nigeria. Project participants and government representatives came together to discuss current issues linking gender and the environment and to brainstorm a future vision of how to influence policy in this area. The hope was that what participants learned together at the workshop could also be directly of use to Women Arise and other grassroots women’s empowerment groups.

The gap between CIDA’s high-level policy descriptions and actual capacity to implement in the field is particularly apparent in our discussions. A minimal level of capacity is witnessed at all levels – within communities, NGOs, and the state government. Currently, Cross River State government is developing its gender policy, and the Ministry is seeking assistance, from, and in collaboration with, One Sky and its Nigerian partner NGOs. The workshop brought together these members of the NCC, as well as a representative from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development, to make policy suggestions for working in gender and the environment. These participants were some of the most central players in fostering sustainability in Cross River State, and this workshop became a venue for them to discuss and creatively inspire each other, to build capacity and recommendations for gender and the environment, and to untangle the complex questions around implementation.

Gender and the Environment is a theme of particular complexity in a country like Nigeria, with traditional structures that are largely genderinsensitive and with few women included in

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This is the reality of implementing gender equality. Although these participants are well informed, educated, and working for development organizations, they are also living in a complex milieu of values and perspectives about men’s and women’s roles. Gender issues are so close to one’s sense of self that the issue is naturally a challenging one.

Patricia starts off the workshop with a song and a prayer, asking God to guide us successfully through our two-day workshop. Although the day is hot and the room is humid, the electric enthusiasm cuts through the sticky heat. The group is made up largely of women; approximately one quarter of the participants are men. Two participants, Lilian Ekenem and her husband Ubong, founded Women, Youth and Children Action Team (WYCAT), a grassroots organization that uses interactive theatre performances to help empower and motivate women on current topics such as HIV/AIDS. Other participants include: Odigha Odigha, the Executive Director of the NGO Coalition for the Environment (NGOCE) and recent award-winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize; Mrs. Mary Omaji, from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Development; and other members of environmental NGOs and community-based organizations. The group is steeped in experience working with local communities, and yet the level of understanding and capacity for the specific issue of gender equality is varied.

For Patricia, who has been working for social change for most of her life, these strong opinions are nothing new. Inspired by her mother, she completed a Master’s degree in Business Management and has worked on a variety of social issues, from HIV/AIDS and commercial sex trade workers to community development. The gender theme was always an important one to her in this work. When she began her career, gender was not a word that people used, although Patricia was always asked for advice on issues related to women. “I was attracted to help the woman not the man, because of what I saw as a child and because of what I experienced. When I see that a particular woman is affected because she is a woman, not because she [does not have the capacity], I will make sure that the woman is favoured.”

We begin with an animated discussion on the differences between gender and sex, and gender equity and equality. It is immediately apparent that discussing gender issues is challenging for everyone; some are honestly puzzled by the topic, others speak angrily, others say very little. One man insists that we clarify the difference between gender and feminism, concerned that we might give credence to “extreme” or “radical” ideas, such as the idea that women be given preference for employment opportunities. This provokes another heated discussion about whether women actually have fewer employment opportunities than men. Someone points out that “any woman can get any job, they are the ones that limit themselves!” and, in response, another points out that “there are social, cultural and psychological barriers that are more prominent than physical ones.” Another person mentions the similarity between feminism and terrorism.

Having experienced sexual harassment and discrimination first-hand throughout her career, Patricia recognizes that we must work as much with men as with women. “It is not easy, this work. Talking about safer sex, for example. It is impossible for women to negotiate safer sex if the man does not change. I have seen cases where a husband will end the marriage if he sees the woman with condoms. ‘Condoms are for prostitutes’, they say. That is why we have to work with the man as well as the woman.” Patricia’s words must ring true for the members of Women Arise. To come together as a group and to stand up for gender equality is to challenge the traditional world view. How does this group of women communicate their mission to


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We offer some suggestions and share some messages as part of a North-South, practitionerdonor dialogue.

the traditional chiefs, to their husbands and sons? How have they managed to balance this challenge with respect for the existing traditions and customs?

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Seeing the chiefs and men honouring Mrs. Bassey at the funeral, it is obvious that she hasn’t burned bridges but rather built bridges between traditional and modern approaches to gender. This is reinforced as a young man bursts into tears over her coffin, defying the “tough guy” image and instead letting tears run down his cheeks.

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d For a two-day workshop, the group did not get far into the topic, yet it enabled participants to initiate a dialogue on gender equality, outline which next steps are needed and identify where the lack of capacity resides. It also gave the Ministry of Women’s Affairs enough content to further discuss gender policy at a state level. Outcomes of the workshop are being profiled in a policy paper to be presented to the Cross River State government. The real success of the workshop was in the sharing of ideas and initiating a dialogue – “small small”, as locals would say.

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Recommendations and Policy Messages It is risky to institute gender equality immediately and across the board without a keen eye paid not only to cultural sensitivity but also to the rich variety of value systems throughout a nation like Nigeria. The fact that there are so many different legal systems in the country illustrates the breadth of beliefs, morals, social norms and world views. Moreover, it is challenging to balance the objective of local ownership with often externallyand culturally-informed policies related to gender equality.

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What did Mrs. Bassey do in the Ikun village that worked not only to organize and empower the women, but also fostered acceptance from traditional clan heads, in a locally-grown gender equality project? How can donors, such as CIDA, assist this fine balance of meeting both objectives?

Donors need to acknowledge that gender mainstreaming and local ownership can be contradictory, and thus need to adjust the frameworks for proposals, reports and budgets to reflect the complexity of this work. In particular, along with existing tools, more appropriate (qualitative, subjective) measurement tools for evaluation are needed – tools which balance principles of local ownership with value-based policy approaches to gender equality. An appropriate time frame and strategy need to be set for gender equality program activities. While small steps can be made through the four-to-five-year project modality, 40-50 year time lines may be required to achieve shifts in values and world views related to gender equality in some current contexts. Supporting local grassroots activities does achieve results, no matter how small; an example of this is Women Arise, which was funded through NGOCE’s small grants program, part of One Sky’s CRE Project. Profile successes about gender equality in non-threatening ways, so as to foster inspiration, awareness and empowerment on the issue. In doing gender analysis, ask the right questions – questions that get at the root of the issue, that address the values that underpin gender-inequitable practices, customs and institutions. Work towards country-specific strategies for gender equality, developed with respect for the range of values within one country, is necessary for effective policies and implementation.


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CIDA should take a lead in implementing gender equality, bringing together ways that this policy can augment, not contradict, local ownership. One approach would be to profile Canadian case studies in which these two (seemingly opposing) objectives are held simultaneously.

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Recognize the need for healthy traditional structures through which gender awareness and policy can emerge. n

Begin small, begin slowly. During education and training, draw upon statistics (evidence-based policy analysis) to back up statements so they cannot be dismissed as assumptions.

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Engage Southern partners or community people to carry out gender analyses. Find other techniques where local people can “take on” other perspectives, and thus learn in an experiential manner what gender equality means.

Gender equality involves men and women; working with chiefs helps to meet gender equality goals. Create emergent conditions and healthy structures through which gender awareness can emerge, keeping in mind that gender equality is an immense shift in ways of thinking and existing values. Policies help to regulate actions; other more qualitative work is needed to raise awareness and foster changes in values. One Sky offers some suggestions for creating such conditions (listed above). Priority should be on raising awareness, building capacity and collecting evidence via locally-conducted gender analyses. What is missing from gender analysis is often an understanding of how culture influences attitudes about women, and how this understanding is crucial to designing specific activities within programs and projects that support gender equality.

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Study cases that have worked, looking at their salient and replicable features. Encourage locally-designed ways to implement gender programming that links to the traditional cultural and social systems, rather than threatening them. Mrs. Bassey is an example of someone who was elected within the system, which then led to attracting more women to become involved.

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Grassroots organizing, with small “bite-size” projects, works. Women understand it as their own, and this helps to bring together local ownership with high-level gender mainstreaming. Identify women leaders with an embodied understanding of the community reality/needs. Mrs. Bassey had a foot in both the rural context and urban/globalizing culture; her vision was thus broad enough to bridge various value systems.

Where does local ownership (communityinformed) meet gender equality (when it is donor-prescribed)? In other words, rather than imposing gender equality programming on local communities and organizations, how can we create emergent conditions for gender equality to arise through the local structures that are currently not gendersensitive? While the principles that stem from our world view and value system (such as promoting sustainability, fostering gender equality and alleviating poverty) are rooted in international law and United Nations agreements, donors and practitioners must not assume that all other societies will realize these rights and values in a manner similar to our own.


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carrying a framed photograph of her grandmother as a young woman. At each stop, hymns were sung by one of the church choirs, and the chiefs and the priests made impassioned speeches about this woman’s life. We visited the house where she was born and raised, passed by the Town Hall that Mrs. Bassey was undertaking to rebuild after it was destroyed in a strong rainstorm a couple of years before, and eventually arrived at the Presbyterian church. There was standing room only at the two-hour-long service.

Embedded within our world view and cultural value system are the metaphors and forms of how we communicate and interrelate. A truly culturally sensitive approach works with methodologies and communication strategies that are appropriate for reaching out to different world views. How does gender mainstreaming at a national policy level relate to the grassroots community level? What is cultural sensitivity to local people? How do we understand gender equality and gender policy in the context of cultural evolution? In other words, how do we recognize it took Canada close to 100 years to stabilize gender equality as a mainstream value, and then address the question of gender equality in Africa?

This woman was a leader and role model for fostering gender equality in Nigeria. Although she herself has passed on, her ideas and life work continue; and her legacy is seen in the changed values and social norms in her village of Ikun. As the mourners filed out with the coffin, again, the pathway was lined with women dressed in bright cloth patterned with green hearts, with broad smiles on their faces.

Conclusion The vigil lasted well through the night. The next morning, weary friends and loved ones accompanied Mrs. Bassey’s coffin on a solemn funeral procession to all the significant places in her life. Her six year-old granddaughter, Miss Ibededem Ibokette, led the procession,

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You Can Fight City Hall: Together we will realize our rights! CUSO Bolivia Program1

“Since the Popular Participation Act was passed – in 1994 I think – we’ve only had two small projects. We haven’t had any for the past three years. We’ve always been turned down. My people think that I’m not managing properly and that I’m not a good leader because I could not bring projects to our area. But now it’s possible. I am personally very happy and so will be the people in my neighbourhood, because we’ll have the social centre we’ve been asking for, for so long. Thank you everyone for supporting us!” By 2001, El Alto had become the third-largest city in Bolivia – home to 650,000 people, mostly of heterogeneous indigenous descent. Most of the people in El Alto – Alteños – have migrated from the countryside, and about two-thirds of them know or speak Aymara.

Loud and sustained applause greeted the emotional speech by Señor Miguel Morales, President of the Wara Zone in District 2 of El Alto, Bolivia. The eight years since March 1994, when Bolivia’s government passed its Popular Participation Act, had proven to be eight years of often painfully slow progress in community mobilization in El Alto...

El Alto is divided into nine districts, eight of which are urban. It is not uncommon to see pigs and semi-wild dogs foraging for food in the garbage, where people also search for anything of value to exchange for their daily bread. At the time of this story, District 2 had the highest population of the nine districts, with 80,000 people living in 55 different zones. The centre of action in District 2 is Cupilupaca Central Zone, which has about 850 resident families (about 4,600 people).

d El Alto (“The Highland”) is in Murillo Province of La Paz Department in northern Bolivia. At an altitude of 4,035 metres above sea level, this fast-growing satellite city of La Paz is well named. It is 1,000 metres higher than the city of La Paz, which itself is the highest capital city in the world. La Paz nestles into a great glacial bowl carved out of the Bolivian Altiplano. El Alto has sprung up on the edge of these high plains, where they come to an abrupt halt overlooking the older city below. The only way to leave La Paz is by taking one of two roads that first lead up through El Alto before connecting to the rest of Bolivia (and the world). This means that El Alto has a very strategic placement.

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Under the terms of the Popular Participation Act, 314 new municipalities in La Paz Department were to receive funds, according to population size and the total taxes collected by the government. These new resources were to be distributed equitably throughout each municipality. Budget allocations were to be determined through community consultations.

This story reflects the views and experience of CUSO Bolivia and partners who were involved in developing it. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation as a whole.


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The best-laid plans ran up against traditional patronage politics and official intransigence. The efforts of local people to ensure equal distribution of public funds also underlined the challenges of community organizing – lack of volunteer time, lack of trust, lack of familiarity with official channels, lack of political will by the authorities. Many local residents came to realize that if they wanted to put the Popular Participation Act into effective use, it would be up to them...

CUSO and the Centro de Investigación Social y Trabajo en Equipos Multidisciplinarios (CISTEM), the civil society organization working with the community associations described in this story, have a close working relationship that started in 2002. At that time, CISTEM, with the support of CUSO, applied for funding for a project which aimed to improve the health and nutrition of the Cupilupaca community in El Alto. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) supported this project through its “Basic Human Needs” fund, and the project was successfully completed in March 2004.

d It was cold in Cupilupaca that March morning in 1994. With temperatures dipping to six below zero and a light mist in the thin mountain air, the majestic Illimani volcano could just be made out in the distance. Children and teenagers were heading for school as the area’s handful of businesses were opening.

Since 2002, CISTEM has played an active role within the CUSO Bolivia program. In view of the important work that CISTEM is doing in different districts of El Alto, CUSO has collaborated with its programs through the support of Canadian cooperants. CISTEM has been offering curative and preventive programs, and has helped citizens take an active role in improving the quality of their lives.

At a newspaper stand, groups of people were reading the news. Among them was Ricardo Almaraz, a man of about 53, father of two sons and two daughters. While his wife, Severina Callisaya, waited for her husband to finish reading the news, she chatted with her friend Rosita about her family and the economic difficulties they faced.

houses. Sewers under, not in, the streets. Street lighting, paved streets, sidewalks. Parks for children and young people.

The news that people were talking about was that the Bolivian Government had approved the Popular Participation Act. The stated objective of this Act was to promote and consolidate the popular participation process, by linking indigenous communities, indigenous peoples, peasant communities and juntas vecinales (neighbourhood committees) to the country’s legal, political and economic life.

It was obvious that many public works were needed in Cupilupaca. It was a world away from the well-serviced streets in the affluent enclave of Aranjuez, where the houses had armed guards and boasted as many bathrooms as bedrooms. The real estate agents called that gated community in nearby La Paz “exclusive,” and the impoverished Alteños were indeed excluded – except for those who travelled for hours to clean and cook and tend the children of the affluent.

Don Ricardo, the President of the Central Cupilupaca Junta Vecinal, was excited and hopeful about the Act. He saw it as a great opportunity to improve the woeful public services in his area. To have drinking water in the


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that started in 1985. Moreover, inadequate formal instruction in Spanish often posed problems for impoverished children whose first language was Aymara or Quechua.

Filled with hope and following local customs, Don Ricardo called a Junta Vecinal or Neighbourhood Committee2 meeting for the following Sunday to inform people that there was a good possibility for new public works projects in the zone. The local residents were enthusiastic, offering Don Ricardo their support and authorizing him to take all the steps necessaryto get on with the work. Since he worked independently as a master bricklayer, Don Ricardo was free to dedicate some of his time to moving long-overdue projects forward. After reviewing and putting together documents, he went to the municipal government’s legal office to submit his application and inform them about the neighbourhood’s needs.

Still, Don Ricardo was not deterred. His wife Severina had heard of a new organization that had recently arrived in El Alto. The Centro de Investigación Social y Trabajo en Equipos Multidisciplinarios (CISTEM) was a new nongovernmental organization (NGO) that hoped to help people and organizations in El Alto increase their capacity for dialogue, negotiation and participation. Don Ricardo approached CISTEM and the group gladly opened its doors to him. Following several meetings and workshops involving all the members of the Neighbourhood Committee and CISTEM technicians, the Cupilupaca group successfully completed the paperwork needed to obtain legal status.

The Popular Participation Act, it seemed, was more complex than its promoters in the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, elected the previous year, had claimed. The new President was the architect of neo-liberal policies that had eliminated much public employment, frozen wages, closed the tin mines, and slashed health and education.

This is no easy feat. There are hundreds of these Committees in the city, each striving to secure water, sewers, electricity, better streets and other services for its area. Before legal status is granted, the government has to approve an urban settlement plan for communities that are home to many newcomers who lack land titles.

Don Ricardo came away disappointed from his initial encounter with City Hall. Apparently the Neighbourhood Committee did not have legal status necessary to qualify for assistance. He was confused and bewildered, and did not quite understand what was meant by “legal status”. Don Ricardo had little experience with forms and formal requirements. Added to this concern was his low level of schooling. According to the 1990 census, some 35 percent of Bolivians were functionally illiterate. In El Alto, 77 percent of the women and 71 percent of the men had not completed elementary school, and Don Ricardo was one of them. He had hardly completed fifth grade. Public education, always under-funded, had been further eroded by neo-liberal reforms 2

The Cupilupaca Neighbourhood Committee also asked CISTEM for technical support to develop internal regulations to define responsibilities, rights and obligations and improve the group’s administration and management. This would, Don Ricardo and his colleagues hoped, keep the leadership accountable to the community. The process of working out organizational details sparked a lot of popular interest. For three months, evening and weekend meetings were well attended, as people informed themselves of their

The term Junta Vecinal can be translated as “Together as neighbours”. Each Junta is organized from the ground up, with people choosing a directorio or leadership group of between 3 and 15 representatives from the community. The mandate of this social collective is to mobilize for improvements to the community, to be brought about by local government structures – in this case, the El Alto Municipality. There are also Comités de Vigilancia (Vigilance Committees) made up of other community members whose job it is to keep both the Junta and the government bodies responsible to the community. All of these positions are voluntary and unpaid. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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In the end, Don Ricardo and other members of the Committee went to the planning department of El Alto municipal government to enquire about the status of their request. They were told that their file had been lost. Their request had not been processed. Despite their frustration and feelings of helplessness, they returned to “square one”, starting the application process once more and asking CISTEM for technical assistance in developing their work plan. They hoped this application would be better than the one that had disappeared at City Hall.

rights and responsibilities. Finally, a general neighbourhood meeting at the end of June 1994 approved both the organizational by-laws and the documents that City Hall had said were necessary for legal status. The correct papers were in order. Or so it seemed. The Committee began the formalities at the El Alto Prefectural office, seeking legal recognition as a “Territorial Based Grassroots Organization” (Organización Territorial de Base or OTB). After three months of paperwork, the Central Cupilupaca Junta Vecinal was recognized as an OTB. With the documents in hand, a hopeful Don Ricardo went to the municipality’s planning department to submit his application to gain access to funds under the Popular Participation Act. He then resumed his work as a bricklayer, as the time he had invested in the organizing efforts had taken away from his job, and he was falling behind in meeting deadlines. He already had a considerable backlog.

all this volunteer activity took away from their ability to earn a living. All this volunteer activity took away from their ability to earn a living. They often could not afford the bus fare to get to the municipal offices and were forced to walk there (two hours each way). Don Ricardo neglected his work and his family responsibilities. His wife Severina was asking for food, clothing and school supplies for their children. Sobbing, she begged Ricardo to quit as President of the Junta Vecinal because it was undermining his family. She argued that in return for his efforts he was becoming grist for the local rumour mill. People were speaking ill of him, accusing him of corruption. The critical comments obviously affected his wife’s and children’s social relationships in the neighbourhood. Doña Severina had started to lose friendships with other women when she defended her husband.

Six months later, in December 1994, Don Ricardo was surprised to find a group of angry people at his front door accusing him of failing to fulfill his duties as a neighbourhood leader. They were upset because there were still many thefts and assaults in the area due to the lack of street lighting. Women continued to worry about being raped in the dark streets. In the absence of parks or recreational areas, local young people were spending their time in other ways, forming street gangs and drinking. The Cupilupaca area still required substantial support from the municipal government. Don Ricardo was put on the spot, faced with the choice of putting his work aside to once again push for improvement, or supporting his family by staying on the job. It was no small dilemma for someone in a city of poor newcomers who are forced to scratch and scramble for any job at all – selling handicrafts, commuting to La Paz to work as domestic servants or security guards, doing small construction jobs, angling for work at the international airport.

Another six months went by with their request still unanswered. The Junta Vecinal committee went to the Sub-Municipality office in District 2, to which their file had been transferred. Don Ricardo once more made the trip to the Planning Department, and this time received the happy news that his request for public works had been accepted.


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Cupilupaca obtained its personeria juridical, its legal status under the Popular Participation Act, and was in a position to carry out small-scale works that had been on hold for years: construction of sidewalks, some street lamps, refurbishment of the Neighbourhood Committee premises. Despite the municipal government’s inaction and paper-shuffling, the Neighbourhood Committee and the community had managed to collect enough bottle tops to win a Coca-Cola contest, and the prize money had allowed them to build a children’s playground and a basketball court. The laughter of children playing echoed in the park, and on the basketball court two women’s teams played futsal, cheered on by their children and husbands. The atmosphere in the zone had started to change, and the news spread to neighbourhoods near Cupilupaca. Seeing that things were happening in the area, they in turn asked CISTEM for technical assistance in developing their by-laws to obtain legal status as OTBs.

from the countryside in the hopes of a better life. Many relied on the crafts that they had been making in the countryside – handmade clothing, textiles, alpaca and vicuna capes which they wove on rustic looms. Don Pedro Arpaza and his wife Luzmilla, for example, began making alpaca capes and opened a stand in the largest street market in El Alto. At seeding and harvest time, they returned to their rural community, Achiri in the province of Pacajes, to bring back Andean products like potatoes, chuños (dried potatoes), wheat, and fava beans to help them feed their four growing boys. The family was typical of the Cupilupaca community, where people living in conditions of poverty and exclusion migrate from rural areas and struggle to find ways to get by. The “City of the Future” – as the tattered billboard on the road to the airport called it – was expanding at the spectacular rate of nine percent annually in the early 1990s. El Alto was suddenly the country’s fourth largest city, attracting attention from Evangelicals and NGOs alike. Evangelical churches competed with the Catholic faith, with Pentecostal cultos offering individual self-sacrifice instead of the emphasis on social inequality that had been a staple of Catholic teaching since the 1960s. Another new arrival in the burgeoning city was the NGO phenomenon. Funded by Northern state and private donors, this “NGO boom” coincided with the retreat of neo-liberal governments from direct social service provision to poor people.

Looking back, Don Ricardo had three observations about the whole Public Participation Act process. He had succeeded in establishing some smallscale public works in Cupilupaca, but it came at a high personal and community cost. Due to the Neighbourhood Committee’s lack of funds, Don Ricardo had been forced to pay for bus fares, stationery, photocopies and other small expenses out of his own pocket, and this had a significant impact on his family’s well-being. Finally, his responsibility as the Neighbourhood Committee’s President had brought him more conflict and social pressure than satisfaction, as well as generating domestic problems with Severina.

Some NGOs accepted neo-liberalism and were stepping in to try to fill the void left by the state. Others engaged more critically, helping people organize themselves to agitate for better services and to mobilize politically against governments and policies that embrace what has been called the “Washington Consensus”, which favours the rich and powerful and reduces the role and capacity of government. Such policies not only gave rise to the NGO boom, but they also fuelled the growth of slums like El

d Three years later… El Alto had been growing like Topsy since neoliberalism hit Bolivia in the mid-1980s. Unemployed Quechua-speaking miners were joining Aymara people who were migrating


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control. During the rainy season, floods threatened people living in raw earth buildings made from unbaked adobe bricks that were susceptible to erosion. Lack of efficient sewers meant that streets were contaminated by wastewaters from houses and also from people relieving themselves on the street. Garbage accumulated on vacant lots and was blown all over the area by the nearly constant Altiplano winds.

Alto right across the global South, from the umjondolos of Durban and the iskwaters of Manila to the conventillos of Quito. Another ingredient of the neo-liberal recipe was decentralization, the idea being that local governments are best equipped to deal with local problems. This was the logic behind Bolivia’s Public Participation Act. “Downloading” seems like a sensible notion, provided that local authorities have both the capacity to deliver services to the poor and a willingness to move beyond the politics of patronage and clientism that so often characterize local politics in many parts of the world.

days and weeks turned into months and the dream seemed ever further from becoming a reality.

On a scorching day in July 1998, Cupilupaca’s dusty streets were filled with people eagerly walking to the Junta Vecinal’s headquarters. According to the committee’s by-laws, a new group of residents was to be elected to serve as its new directorio or Board. The group that won the vote was called Vecinos Organizados (Organized Neighbours), and was made up of 14 people headed by Mario Flores. Don Mario was a teacher with several years of experience in community work. His wife Carmen was from Cochabamba. They had two daughters and two sons who studied at the Colegio Humanístico República de Francia in the Cupilupaca area. The family had moved to Cupilupaca because they wanted to have a house of their own. Carmen, an understanding woman, did not mind that it was a marginal area without basic utilities. The new board, which also counted on CISTEM’s support, seemed to be better prepared than the first group and the community was optimistic about improvements.

The Board of the Cupilupaca Junta Vecinal developed an Annual Operational Plan that gave priority to sewer installations, and shared this plan with the community. During a neighbourhood meeting, Don Mario argued that because of the large number of needs, each resident would have to contribute some money to cover small expenses like bus fares and photocopies. The plan was then presented to the municipal government. Two small areas near Cupilupaca joined this initiative in order to meet the population size requirement set by the private sewer construction company. Negotiations for joint community work began, and the authorization was given to collect people’s contributions immediately. Days and weeks turned into months and the dream seemed ever further from becoming a reality. Facing rigid bureaucracy in the municipal government, Don Mario did not press the area’s case. He had been appointed director of a small school and had little time left for the neighbourhood’s concerns. After a year had passed, people became alarmed and began to mobilize themselves to exert social pressure on the Board, demanding a progress report. They received no reply from Don Mario or the other Board members.

Don Mario applied again to the municipal government and soon obtained installation of about 100 street lamps, construction of more sidewalks and other small-scale works. All this led to increased trust from the neighbourhood, but the community was not satisfied with modest improvements. People felt it was time to tackle large-scale works, particularly sewage and flood


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bution of US$45 into the company’s bank account. However, he forgot completely about the contributions that various families in the community had made directly to him.

More time passed, and meanwhile the Cupilupaca neighbourhood went on with its daily activities. People kept on organizing new projects, renovating houses and building new ones. New mini bus lines appeared. The School Committee of the Colegio Humanístico República de Francia began work to improve the school infrastructure. The San Francisco de Asis Community Assistance Centre, managed by Sisters Catalina and Emilia from Spain, expanded its community services by creating a day-care centre for children and a community kitchen for those living in extreme poverty. Stores, butcher shops, tire shops and boarding houses opened up. The Bartolina Sisa Market offered basic goods at low prices and also allowed families to save on bus fares. This market was initiated and organized by local residents with CISTEM’s technical support, and was managed by the Junta Vecinal.

Surprised, the whole community demanded that their money be refunded and that Don Mario resign. Like Doña Aurora, several explained tearfully that the money they gave had involved huge sacrifices. They had deprived their children of basic needs in order to get access to a sewer system, but their community was still being ignored by the municipality. The whole affair generated a lot of bitterness, with Doña Flores having to deal with widespread recriminations against her family. Don Mario himself had distanced himself both from his community obligations and from the coordinating role which, until then, had been maintained between the Junta leaders and CISTEM. He left office in a climate of condemnation and distrust.

their community was still being ignored by the municipality.

Cupilupaca’s Electoral Committee called for elections in July of 2000. The Frente Renovación Nacional (The National Renovation Front), headed by Felipe Carrillo, was elected as the new Board. Don Felipe was a former miner of about 50 who had migrated from Oruro with his dressmaker wife and five children. Because of his age, he could not find work. The family invested their modest savings in a small dressmaking workshop. Don Felipe had served as a neighbourhood leader in Cupilupaca in the early 1990s, and had a good reputation. Along with colleague Doña Roxana Barrionuevo, he began by requesting CISTEM’s assistance to continue and develop new works in the area. He also tried to clear up the problem of accountability inherited from the previous Board. He and Doña Roxana began to review the finances. They concluded that the previous Board had collected a substantial amount of money but that the process lacked transparency. They felt compelled to take legal action to recover the money given by the residents.

Eighteen months after the Board had taken office, no progress had been made in the development of neighbourhood works. There was a feeling of discontent in the air, and residents started to press their leaders. They wanted their cash contributions back. Doña Aurora Huanca, a single mother of five whose husband had deserted the family, was supporting herself and her children by knitting sweaters and washing clothes. She cried inconsolably, begging for the return of the US$30 that she had given Mario Flores. Though it was a small fortune for her, she had not asked for a receipt because she trusted the leader. Don Mario denied having received the money. He promised that, before the end of his term, he would deliver plans approved by the municipality as well as the contracts signed with the Cono Sur company for the sewer installation. It was for this that he had asked each family to deposit a contri-


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Two years later, after much worry and confrontation, Don Felipe managed to win the case and recover part of the community’s money. This gained him recognition by the community, but the whole legal process ended up exhausting the Board.

to the El Alto municipal government. Although Cupilupaca was becoming better organized, the citizens were still frustrated by the municipal government, which remained a persistent obstacle to obtaining improvements. The Alteños realized that the municipal system was inefficient, bureaucratic and inequitable. The municipal authorities had ignored the principles and duties established by the Popular Participation Act. The citizens watched as their demands, despite being valid and urgent, were never incorporated into the municipal Annual Operational Plan (AOP). Discontent mounted as residents of the poorest neighbourhoods, who had already been ignored for many years, continued to be denied municipal resources that had been specifically earmarked for communities such as theirs.

Doña Roxana, a former factory worker with four small children, came from eastern Bolivia. She and her husband had moved to Cupilupaca so they could have a house of their own. She enjoyed supporting neighbourhood development but noted that her husband was very possessive and did not want her to develop as a person. Although she had lived a very secluded life for years, her work as Finance Secretary with the Neighbourhood Committee made her feel useful, and she contributed a great deal throughout her term. The newly empowered Doña Roxana became an effective advocate for the rights of local residents, especially women.

Several busy months in 2002-2003 would mark the beginning of a new chapter in community and organizational life.

d

Don Felipe concluded his final report and returned to the family dressmaking workshop to help his wife. The work of a neighbourhood leader is often thankless, because people frequently fail to recognize the amount of voluntary time required, preferring to criticize. Still, he was happy with the progress his Committee made, as well as with the technical assistance provided by CISTEM. Several neighbourhood development projects went forward and people regained confidence in their representatives. A Haemodialysis Centre, the only one in El Alto, was built with the support of the Order of Malta, Spain. The French government assisted with construction at the Colegio República de Francia. The funds for these initiatives came from exterior agencies, and were facilitated by the Juntas Escolares or School Committees. Local municipal government responsibility and support for basic infrastructure, like sewers and electricity, was still notably missing from the picture.

Alteños may be poor, and many local people lack formal education. They may not trust authorities who can provide water to almost everyone, but a sewer system that serves only half of them. By now, Alteños were highly organized into associations capable of exerting pressure on public authorities. Still, the process of trying to influence municipal policies was not easy. Mayor José Luis Paredes initially displayed a very negative attitude by refusing to meet with the Neighbourhood Committee presidents. Instead, he delegated this responsibility to the head of the planning department. The issue, however, was not planning but budgeting. Neighbourhoods like Wara and Santa Isabel had not benefited from any improvement projects in years. National laws about public participation were one thing, using them to get real services quite another. Local community representatives continued to take seriously the spirit of the Public Participation Act, and organized a series of public meetings with the authorities. Some 80 to 100 leaders,

Local residents again began to participate, putting forward renewed demands for neighbourhood development and presenting them


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representing nearly 100 zones, attended. The most frequent complaint was that some areas were consistently favoured while others were left behind. This led to conflict not just with public officials but between local leaders.

without consulting the participants, who immediately began shouting: “We don’t accept! The mayor has to face the consequences.” They then demanded that the officials immediately leave the room.

The first meeting in January 2003 heard from municipal officials that the budget for 2003 would be 20 percent lower than the previous year. If accepted, the budget would mean that even more communities would be excluded. The presidents of the Juntas unanimously rejected the scheme and agreed to fight to increase the budget and not be deceived again by the mayor.

Feeling their backs to the wall, the officials asked to stay. The people demanded that Señor Valdivieso explain clearly how resources should be distributed and whether that was in fact being done. They added that they would hold the officials hostage until the mayor arrived. It was against this background that the fearful officials revealed that the mayor had been allocating half of the resources to area-based projects and had kept the remaining money to distribute exclusively as he deemed appropriate. This was contrary to the 80 percent/20 percent proportion established by the Popular Participation Act. The local leaders also learned that Paredes had instituted this arbitrary policy in 1999, three years before, and had been applying it ever since.

At the next meeting a week later, CISTEM included a breakdown of the municipality’s operating expenses. The NGO’s analysis revealed the way the funds should be distributed among neighbourhood projects, according to the regulations of the Ministry of Finance and the Deputy Ministry of Popular Participation. Complaints intensified against the mayor and his technical team, who had arbitrarily allocated the budget, particularly the Popular Participation funds.

This made the leaders even more furious. They immediately decided to organize a popular demonstration march through their neighbourhoods to the municipal offices, to protest the abuse of power and demand a 100 percent budget increase. If their request were denied, they would demand the mayor’s resignation.

The neighbourhood presidents agreed to hold their third meeting in the presence of the mayor. They authorized Oswaldo Ibañez and two Neighbourhood Committee presidents to invite the mayor to the next meeting to explain how resources were being divided. But when some 90 presidents, a fifth of whom were women, arrived at the offices of the submunicipality, they encountered a handful of planning officials. There was no sign of Mayor José Luis Paredes.

“No wonder there are more projects in District 1,” said one leader, echoing the prevailing sentiment. “It’s probably his favorite district since they supported his election. And now he’ll call us condepistas, and say it is us who are trying to ruin his municipality!” (The Condepa party was the previous ruling party that held the Mayor’s office for three terms and is still held accountable for mismanagement.)

Señor Luis Valdivieso, head of the planning department, apologized briefly on behalf of the mayor, indicating that he was busy elsewhere. He added that the mayor had left instructions to authorize a 20 percent increase – not a penny more – in the assigned budget. Oswaldo Ibañez turned down the offer at once,

The group agreed to organize the demonstration for the following Monday. The leaders of areas like Cupilupaca, las Delicias and Santa Isabel


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added that they would not move until he talked to the people.

distributed leaflets to their communities. They sought to convince people that it was everyone’s duty to support their leaders in agitating for better services, because the area was the future home of their children. Many residents volunteered to make placards with slogans that included: n

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Faced with this threat, the mayor agreed to address the residents. As soon as they saw him, the crowd greeted him with a chorus of hissing. Oswaldo Ibañez reminded the mayor that the budget allocated for 2003 was too small, lower than the previous year’s budget and insufficient to meet all the needs of District 2, one of El Alto’s largest districts. An increase of at least 100 percent was required. The people responded with shouts of “100 percent”.

District II demands a budget increase in the 2003 AOP! Mayor Paredes, stop deceiving your people, work transparently! What do we want? More works, more budget, no more deception!

Next to speak was Señor José Montesinos, president of the Santiago II area. He reminded Mayor Paredes that everyone was well aware that he routinely gave himself exclusive authority to use 50 percent of the budget as he deemed appropriate. Señor Montesinos added that district budgeting should be undertaken in consultation with the residents themselves. Upon hearing this, some residents started shouting that the mayor was corrupt and that he was fomenting conflict in the city by playing districts off against each other.

Cupilupaca is here! We don’t want charity, we demand our right to more budget! El Alto stands up and never kneels! United we will win!

On Monday morning, protest parades began to wend their way through the streets, with people chanting slogans against the mayor and demanding better public services. Amidst cheers and occasional firecrackers, other areas joined in on the way, increasing the number of marchers, placards and banners. The head of the march reached the municipal offices at 11 a.m. and found the doors locked and heavily guarded. By noon, the crowd had swollen to 1,800 people. Speakers urged people not to throw things and to let the appointed committee present the demands.

After 20 minutes, the mayor spoke. He said that he could not meet the request because it affected the other districts and that it was a lie to say that he had exclusive use of half of the resources. Señor Montesinos immediately replied that the mayor was lying, pointing out that some districts had received project funds that they had never even requested. Mayor Paredes argued that the projects that had been carried out were for the benefit of the city of El Alto. The crowd reacted by hissing and shouting “Increase! Increase! Increase!”. The mayor then consulted hurriedly with Señor Valdivieso, the head of planning, and, turning back to the crowd, repeated that 30 percent was it. The crowd shouted “100 percent, 100 percent or nothing!” Señor Ibañez told the mayor that the people

Just before noon, a delegation entered the building and obtained an offer of a 30 percent increase from the mayor, who argued that anything more would affect the budgets of other districts. The delegation refused to consider this, reiterating the demand for a 100 percent boost. When Mayor Paredes shrugged, claiming this was impossible, the representatives asked him to go out and present his proposal to the local residents who were waiting outside. They


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for a new committee, the District Works Committee to monitor compliance, was unanimously approved.

would immediately declare a hunger strike. After another flurry of consultation, the mayor proposed 50 percent. Señor Montesinos replied that this might be acceptable if district projects were determined through community consensus and not by his sole authority. After giving it some thought, Mayor Paredes accepted.

d These events seem minor, almost mundane in the great global scheme of things. The citizens of one small neighbourhood, in one rapidly expanding but still medium-sized city, trying to get their fair share from City Hall. Anyone who has ever attended a city council meeting, tried to get their sidewalk fixed or sought funding for some new playground equipment will recognize it as the day-to-day stuff of city politics. And there is truth to the claim that local government, being closest to the citizenry, is often the best-placed to deal with the nittygritty of service delivery.

The mayor then announced to the crowd that he had reached an agreement with the delegation for a 50 percent increase for District 2. From then on, he added, it would be the people’s right to define and coordinate the development of district projects. Some applauded, others hissed. Señor Ibañez immediately insisted that the deal was a victory – that this had never been achieved before. He argued that the mayor was yielding to popular demands, giving people the right to determine which projects they wanted. Señor Zapata, President of the Kenko area, added that people should congratulate themselves for joining forces to obtain Bs.6,000,000 instead of Bs.4,000,000. More people nodded in agreement. As the crowd dispersed, people embraced and congratulated one another, but immediately started discussing ways of planning for new projects.

But the whole trend of devolution, downloading – call it what you will – takes place against a particular political background. It’s one into which Bolivia’s Popular Participation Act of 1994 fits quite nicely. Global forces, institutions and government have been pushing people from the countryside, shrinking the public sector, destroying formal sector jobs for men, and pressuring poor city women to be “flexible” by supporting families as traditional craft workers, maids, market vendors and prostitutes. Every high school student in the North learns of the Industrial Revolution which exiled Europeans from the countryside to work in mills that were truly dark and satanic, but which did provide jobs and the breeding ground for trade unions and political organizing. In many Southern cities, such formal employment opportunities do not exist. As a United Nations study predicted, “urban poverty in the world could reach 45 to 50 percent of the total population living in cities”. Southern cities like El Alto would seem to be the template for a foreboding future.

Three days later, a meeting of neighbourhood presidents settled on a new plan for areabased plans, adding new projects. Six work groups supported by CISTEM technicians began working on programming, using specific criteria. These included prioritizing areas that had not had any projects in two years, and ensuring widespread neighbourhood consultation before approving projects. (The idea was to avoid top-down decision-making.) No project could exceed Bs.80,000 in one year and all should contribute to a better quality of life in the area. Though there was still conflict between larger areas that demanded more resources because they paid more taxes, a sense of solidarity seemed to prevail. Most importantly, all areas of District 2 would be included when the district plan was prepared. A proposal from Señor Montesinos


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According to a UN-Habitat document, The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003: “Instead of becoming a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected, low-wage informal service industries and trade...a direct result of liberalization.”

Bolivian neo-liberalism, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, to flee both the presidency and the country in 2003. Then in 2005, El Alto was again a hotbed of the resistance movement that shook the country, with popular organizations pressing for the nationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas fields. The citizens of this particular “slum” have taken the rhetoric of popular participation at face value, and are seeking to translate it through ongoing daily, unified effort, into the concrete actions necessary to get their fair share from City Hall.

Rural exodus, political decentralization, growing urban poverty, the shrinking of government services…in Bolivia, and particularly in El Alto, these have not been met with passive acquiescence. A popular revolt, which enjoyed mass support in El Alto, forced the architect of

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From Popular Participation to Democracy: As the village goes, so the country will go Cardinal Léger et ses Oeuvres Yves Tremblay1

Cardinal Léger et ses Oeuvres (CLO) has over 50 years of experience in the field of international cooperation. In accordance with its mission, it is helping to restore human dignity to those who have been marginalized by society, in Canada and around the world. It supports activities that seek to reduce poverty by enabling target populations to fulfill their basic needs in a sustainable and equitable manner. With this objective in mind, CLO has contributed close to $200 million over the years, working with its partners in Africa, Latin America and Asia. consistent with the fundamental principles of sustainable development: popular participation, ownership and governance.

CLO is concerned about the direction that development policy is taking. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) appears to be increasingly orienting its activities toward a delivery approach that favours national programs and multilateral approaches. Over the past five years, CIDA’s contributions to civil society partnerships have decreased significantly, by approximately 18 percent overall. This is a trend that will have a major impact on international cooperation, if it continues.

d Let’s go to Africa, where more than half the countries are counted among the poorest in the world. In the sub-Saharan region alone, the number of individuals suffering from hunger increased from 166 million in 1992 to 199 million in 2001; this distress casts shame on all humanity.

We find this disengagement on CIDA’s part to be worrisome, because it would affect both Southern civil society and CIDA’s non-governmental organization (NGO) partners. We believe that our concerns are well-founded and warranted. To illustrate these concerns, CLO has chosen to tell the story of a program, supported jointly by CIDA and CLO, that takes an approach to socio-economic development that is local, based on solidarity, sustainable, equitable and focused on people. This program is very

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Let’s stop in Mali, a landlocked Sahelian nation, the fourth-poorest country in the world (ranked 174th out of 177 according to the United Nations Development Programme). Mali, with a population of 13 million, of whom nearly half are under 15 years of age, is 80 percent dependent on agriculture, in an area that is 65 percent desert or semidesert. Only 65 percent of the population has access to potable water, and environmental degradation is proceeding

This story reflects the views and experience of Cardinal Léger et ses Oeuvres and partners who were involved in developing it. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation as a whole. This text is a translation of the original French story. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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Since 1994, SUCO-Mali and CLO have joined forces to participate in the democratization movement. All programs begin with a memorandum of understanding between the village and SUCO-Mali/CLO, signed at a village general meeting, formalizing the establishment of a program of support for local development and ownership. With these agreements, sustainable endogenous development is now underway in the communes of Soye (26 villages) and Sansanding (15 villages). SUCO-Mali also works with CIDA support in the Sanankoroba area (three communes and 60 villages) and throughout the town of Gao (nine districts). So to date, over 100 villages and nine districts have participated in this bottom-up process of democratization and development.

at a rapid pace. As well, literacy levels are low, especially for women and girls (16 percent for women, 36 percent for men). Poverty and malnutrition are omnipresent. These concerns are compounded by the recent massive return of Malian immigrants from the Ivory Coast. Despair reigned in the villages. And this despair was deepened by the fact that Malians are dignified and proud, and aspire to independence. This story consists of testimony gathered from approximately 10 Malians from four villages in the Sansanding commune, in a sincere and open discussion.

National Independence, but a Breakdown in Popular Participation

From Gerontocracy to Popular Participation

Moussa Konaté, program director of SUCO-Mali, says, “Our people put a lot of effort into working with our leaders in the conquest, the struggle for independence. Once independence was acquired, on September 22, 1960, the people continued to believe. I was still a child in Bougouni, my hometown, when the entire population was mobilized, all classes together – but everyone was soon disappointed, very disappointed. There was a sudden divorce: the choice of French as a vehicle for communication at school and in business automatically excluded 80 percent of the population from public debate.”

Some people in Soungo and Gomakoro say, “Our villages are managed by a gerontocratic system. The elders are the ones who dominate and who make the decisions. Even the elders say that winning any war requires the right fighters and weapons. The war we are waging today is one for development and for improvement in our living conditions. In this war, the effective warriors are young people.” According to the elders, “Village administration was becoming difficult in the current context of decentralization and democracy, because there was no proper social organization. Elders alone made decisions, and meetings and assemblies mobilized very few people. In addition, the array of problems had us focusing more on looking for miracle solutions than on our values, skills and knowledge. Our problems included a low level of agricultural equipment, grain shortfalls that increased year after year, the erosion of our traditional values and broken homes and families.”

Those in power became increasingly dictatorial and no longer allowed any protests. In 1991, the government was overthrown by members of the military. According to Moussa Konaté, “It was not until 1992 that Mali launched itself on the road to democracy, and just recently, the government adopted a national strategy to fight poverty and implemented a national government decentralization project.” Today, Mali is undergoing a profound process of cultural, political, technological and economic change, and the experiment with democracy is proving to be positive.


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“Granting of funds for revenue-generating activities must be preceded by 30 training workshops which villagers undertake to attend over a year-long period, ensuring the participation of at least 25 percent of residents over 15 years of age (elders, adults, women, and youth). This training, as laid out in the agreement, enables all villagers to assume responsibility for their community environment, to encourage and strengthen their democratic structures and to acquire skills for managing economic activities that they identify and develop.”

Young people in these same villages speak: “All we were allowed to do was to carry out public works. Only the elders made decisions, and we were not entitled to say anything. When we attempted to express our opinions on a topic, the elders told us they had been there when we were born, and we had nothing to teach them. So we were not consulted about development or village or family problems. We drifted away and became disinterested in everything. Our villages were left to their fate. Many of us were illiterate and gave little thought to our future, focusing on day-to-day family life instead. The road out was the road to hope.”

According to Gomakoro village association secretary Abdoulaye Traoré, “The training we receive is even more important than the money, because the training lasts much longer.” Another participant adds, “A year is not too long, because coming with money without providing training would have led to conflicts in the village, and very quickly to the loss of the funds received.”

Bô Coulibaly of Gomakoro adds, “Previously, women were marginalized, not really involved in village business. They were outcasts in our villages. All they could do was submit.” In the words of the SUCO-Mali officer, “When the representatives of SUCO first come to a village, they ask to address the whole population. Public spaces become places for continuing education. We tell them that as much as we respect the elders, as much as we do not want to overshadow them, as much as we owe them considerable recognition for village management, we are also asking them to give a chance to young people, to those who are more aware of, and experiencing, current realities.”

Solidarity A village development association (ADV) is created by the villagers and becomes the fundamental channel for development activities in the village. Funding (ranging from 4 to 10 million CFA francs, or between Cdn$10,000 and Cdn$20,000) is intended to support the revenuegenerating activities selected beforehand by consensus; it is handed over to the ADV at an official meeting in the presence of the entire community.

“How do we open the debate? We ask their opinions, we give them the floor to express their concerns about their situation. We explain the SUCO-Mali/CLO approach, a process for local ownership of development based on the principle of training so that people assume responsibility for themselves, which requires prior development of an agreement and creation of a true climate of partnership. The agreement clearly stipulates the expectations and requirements of both parties; it is a contract based on the honour and dignity of those involved.”

Gomakoro ADV Chairperson Bandiougou Coulibaly says, “Since SUCO-Mali/CLO has come into the region, all the pre-existing traditional structures are represented in our development structure; they are in no way excluded. Nor have we abandoned our positive values; SUCO-Mali/CLO did not impose anything on the population; we ourselves freely expressed what we wanted to do.”


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In every village, the loan repayment rate is always over 90 percent. A villager says, “Repayment does not pose any problems, because the people understand that they alone are responsible for managing the funds given to them, that it all up to them; no one is coming to make decisions or repayments for them. And repayments are made to village funds. Moreover, tradition is so important – when the elders tax you and you refuse to pay, you run the risk of being expelled from the village – that there is no question that people are going to pay.”

The elders say that their motivation, and their membership in and support for the partnership, are mostly explained by their constant desire for a better future for their children and wives. They understand that this partnership enables them to solve their problems using a process that values them, respects them and makes them accountable for their future. As for the women and young people, they placed their trust in SUCO-Mali because it was the first time, they say, that they were publicly consulted about the village, which has been very validating for them.

As he says, “Thanks to the partnership, truly everyone has received the money; it has been equitable; there has been equality in the division of funds between men and women. As a result of this transparency, there has been no exclusion. The experience has enabled people to regain trust in their structures. It has been a great innovation to see women associating with men, in the same space, thanks to the accompaniment process of SUCO-Mali/CLO. One of the most crucial elements of respect for individual and collective freedoms is the right to expression, freedom of speech. In the public arena everyone, literate and illiterate, is together.”

An Imam addresses a village meeting: “Before, I had nothing. I looked for food to sustain me and waited for the harvest. Today, I have been allocated two oxen to work the land. I have paid everything back. I can feed myself all year round, and moreover, I can help my village. I have found my dignity again.” Many other villagers in the audience are in agreement, because they were in the same situation.

Equity When funds have been distributed, those most in need have been the first to benefit. All the traditional revenue-generating activities for men have been encouraged (such as fishing, and farming with draft animals) with a view to increasing income. Women in 15 villages in Sansanding have received close to 24.5 million CFA francs to create loan clubs. Today, these clubs have more than 2,000 beneficiaries, and since 2001, their assets have increased to over 30 million CFA francs. In Diado, the women called on the village development association to report on its management of village development funds. In so doing, they ensured the supremacy of one of their basic rights – equal access for all to information.

Power-Sharing The ADV speaks to all outside stakeholders and is responsible for implementing all village development activities (executive power). In a very democratic and representative way, a village monitoring mechanism is put in place; it becomes a vehicle for prevention and settling of conflicts, and for instituting a climate of trust and transparent management in public affairs. The result is a strengthening and clarification of the elders’ role in the village (legislative power), which fosters the replacement of gerontocracy by participative democracy.


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Young people continue: “We have no hesitation in saying that we have emerged from darkness into light, which is frightening at first, since change is not easy. Some of us were afraid of the elders’ reaction and of not being up to the task. But early in the process, we realized that we have an important place and a crucial role to play in the development of our village. Now more than ever, as a result of the quality of the information and training provided in workshops led by SUCO-Mali representatives, and their impact on our families and the village, we young people are motivated and committed to making every effort to ensure that development is everyone’s concern.”

The ADVs, each represented by a man and a woman, now participate in the development of the communes’ budgets. The mayor of the rural commune of Sansanding, Lassana Kouma, says he consulted ADVs in the selection of a location for a market gardening project. The coordinator of SUCO-Mali in Markala, Luc Camara, asks the mayor, “Are you not afraid that the populations of an entire commune of 15 or more villages will get together, talk to each other and call you to task? That doesn’t frighten you?” “No,” says the mayor. “Before, the previous administration consisted of appointed managers who listened more to those who had appointed them than to the people. Now we are elected, and I am anxious to see what this inter-village association will create, because we will be debating real problems with partners, and finding solutions together.”

Effective Partnership Men gain dignity and pride and young people return to their village because hope has returned. Women are freed from the fields and have more time to take care of their homes and children, and diets improve. The village is reborn in harmony, builds a community fund that is the pride of the mayor, and puts in place ways to work together. A reduction in illiteracy in participating villages is noted.

A participant adds, “Thanks to the training we received in decentralization and democracy, a lot of people came out to vote in the last municipal elections. Previously, we excluded ourselves, we did not participate, and frequently those in charge did not even take us into consideration, but that is no longer the case. Four people, ADV directors, are members of the commune council.”

The originality of the partnership is based on a vision of equitable and sustainable human development. The role of civil society is to accompany disadvantaged populations toward change that respects and values human beings, strengthens their dignity and takes into consideration their context. Gomakoro ADV Chairperson Coulibaly expresses it in this way: “SUCO-Mali/CLO speaks to us authentically. SUCO-Mali/CLO shows us the true road to development. They do not speak for us, they do not act for us, but they help us learn how to do these things.”

Hope Elders take the floor again: “The changes that have taken place in the villages have helped to bring harmony to social relations and to safeguard the homogeneity of the village. Far from there being a loss of power for us, the involvement of everyone in decision-making has strengthened our social position. Previously, we were mouthpieces for any outside stakeholder in the village, but now we have a true decision-making (legislative) role, which gives us the consideration and respect of the entire village. We are more convinced than ever that ‘We all need to work together’ and that young people are the future of our villages, because ‘old age has wisdom but youth has strength’.”

“In the traditional NGO approach, development meant activities such as building a well or a school. In this partnership process, we focus development primarily on human beings as a key resource in their own development. The Malian proverb


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says: ‘If you are supported by a wall, the wall may collapse, if you are supported by a tree, the tree may fall, but if you support yourself, you are sure to see a better future.’ It takes on its full meaning here.”

Canada is a model for social justice, with its Charter of Rights and Freedoms cited everywhere in the world. Canada’s values – social justice, equity, equality, democracy, freedom, peace, respect for the family, and respect for cultural and religious differences – are transported around the world in all our partnership programs with CIDA. It must be acknowledged that CIDA has built strategic alliances based on sharing Canadian values. CIDA has also recognized the skills and expertise of NGOs such as CLO in setting up effective sustainable development programs (77 percent of Canadians believe that financial support for civil society organizations is the most effective aid mechanism). CIDA has put its trust in us, and the results obtained have been impressive.

Promising Tomorrows As mentioned above, more than 100 villages have experienced this process of local development and ownership since 1994. For Sansanding, the next step is creation of an inter-village structure in which one woman and one man from each village will participate. This structure will become a preferred representative for local civil society and a partner of elected municipal officials. So, the more people take on self-reliant activity, the more involved they will feel in government. People will no longer be able to close their eyes or remain indifferent to corruption. They will be able to call the government to task, which will force the latter to manage public assets more wisely.

Canada has committed to the Millennium Development Goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, ensuring universal primary education and reducing child mortality. By pursuing its partnerships with NGOs, Canada will be in a position to reach its goals and fulfill its leadership role in the area of international cooperation. But better still, this will show that Canada is not an exploiter, but a builder of peace and social justice for a better world - as it has always had the wisdom to do, and as is already recognized throughout the world.

The Republic of Mali is a young democracy, and as Moussa Konaté says, “There is no model for democracy, we must innovate, we are learning. We are creating public forums; we wish to participate in public debate. What is encouraging is that the government wants the grassroots to let elected representatives know about their needs.”

In conclusion, we would like to make a recommendation: that CIDA’s partnership budget be reviewed in terms of its objectives, and that it take into consideration the joint collaboration of NGOs and CIDA – a partnership that has proved itself, and that is essential to balance in Canadian international development efforts.

I, in turn, will borrow the words of an elder as a reminder that “it is all the villages and people together that will build a state.” So, this partnership is contributing to the construction of a state in which people are truly full citizens!

Canada, a Model With the support of 35,000 donors, CIDA and others, Cardinal Léger et ses Oeuvres (CLO) has acquired undeniable expertise in strengthening local partnerships (currently, over 100 partners in 24 countries), great credibility and remarkable professionalism. We are concerned about the future of the partnership with CIDA.

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Project Ploughshares: Learning war no more Project Ploughshares1

“The only thing in abundance in Darfur is weapons. It is easier to get a Kalashnikov than a loaf of bread.” Jan Egeland, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, July 2004 weapons used in most armed conflicts characterized by mass human rights abuses by government and opposition forces.”

Small Arms and Light Weapons. They sound innocent enough, but terminology can be misleading. The former are handguns, rifles, assault rifles and machine guns. The latter include grenade launchers, small mortars and mobile rocket launchers.

Project Ploughshares, along with Amnesty International, the Small Arms Working Group (a coalition of American non-governmental organizations), and groups like the Kenyan Association of Physicians and Medical Workers for Social Responsibility have formed a global network called the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). The central clearing house for a growing international campaign against small arms and light weapons, IANSA now includes over 500 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. Founded in 1998 in Orillia Ontario, it comprises gun control lobbyists, research institutes, faith groups, human rights and aid agencies, victims’ and disability groups, and policy advocacy organizations.

The legal trade in these weapons is worth at least US$4 billion annually. Due to poor government reporting and lack of transparency, the exact figure is unknown: it could be even higher. No one knows the scale of the illicit trade. Small arms are cheap and long-lasting, easy to hide and easy to carry – a child of eight can tote them and use them. These characteristics make them ideal for an illegal trade in which guns get passed around in exchange for hard currency, drugs or diamonds. The images are familiar fare on television news broadcasts from the world’s “trouble spots” – the distinctively curved magazine of the AK-47, the bulbous rocket-propelled grenade. Less familiar to Northern viewers are the realities of the armed conflicts that grind on, often without much attention from Northern newscasts, in the South. Child soldiers in the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo, where war has led to four million deaths, have told Amnesty International that one way of earning promotion is to rape women. Systematic mass rape, often at gunpoint, has become a feature of that war. Amnesty International has pointed out that “small arms are now the principal 1

The effort to control the proliferation of the world’s 639 million small arms – one gun for every 10 people – sprang in part from the work of a handful of researchers, activists and organizations. In less than a decade, they have succeeded in putting the gun issue on the international agenda – drawing attention to the carnage and suffering wrought by the uncontrolled spread of these true “weapons of mass destruction”, and insisting it be stopped. A small band of Canadian activists and organizations has been central to these efforts. They continue to work nationally and regionally with partners in areas

This chapter was written by Jamie Swift under contract to the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC). The chapter has been reviewed by Project Ploughshares, but CCIC takes responsibility for any remaining errors or omissions. Views expressed in the story are not necessarily shared by the membership of CCIC as a whole. Te l l i n g O u r S t o r i e s : D r a w i n g p o l i c y l e s s o n s f r o m d e v e l o p m e n t e x p e r i e n c e

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greatly affected by these weapons, particularly the Horn and Great Lakes regions of Africa, where armed conflicts have devastated communities and indeed entire societies. At the same time, they also maintain an international focus through the United Nations process on small arms.

By the early 1990s, Ploughshares had recognized that changes in the global geopolitical architecture were affecting its work. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the Gulf War, there was a flurry of international concern with the arms trade. This sprung in part from recognition that the proxy wars of the post-colonial era had helped create a world awash with weaponry. Both sides in the Cold War had provided their client states, many of them in the South, with whatever weapons they needed…or wanted. From Chile to Ethiopia, both the Soviet bloc and the U.S. and its allies cultivated relationships with local (often military) elites by providing them with guns. Weaponry helped to cement the age-old imperative of the powerful, the “sphere of influence”.

d “... they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.” Isaiah 2:4 A research and advocacy organization located in Waterloo, Ontario, Project Ploughshares was founded in 1976 as a working group of the Canadian Council of Churches. Initially oriented to draw attention to the links between militarism and underdevelopment, Ploughshares soon developed considerable research capacity by documenting Canada’s role in the international arms trade. With the nuclear weapons build-up of the Reagan years and the controversy over cruise missile testing in Canada in the early 1980s, it found itself responding to requests for information from across the country, from groups that soon transformed themselves into local Ploughshares groups. Along the way, it evolved into a broadly based activist organization involved in a unique form of international citizen diplomacy.

One result of the Cold War spill-over was the growth of militarism in the South, where coups and counter-coups became regular features of the political landscape. Another was the diversion of scarce resources from health and education to arms. But when the Cold War went away, the weapons didn’t. The doctrine that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” had unintended consequences. Things really do bite back. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War prompted the U.S. and its allies to realize that they had a new enemy. Former friends, customers and clients were eminently capable of turning their weapons on former suppliers, a pattern that would repeat itself in the case of Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al’Qaeda. The international order threatened to become less, not more, stable after the end of the Soviet bloc.

Ploughshares gradually developed a network of global contacts and a unique database of Canadian companies involved in arms production. Connections to the University of Waterloo assisted with the latter, while links with the World Council of Churches and other civil society organizations concerned with peace, the arms trade and development helped in the evolution of the former. In 1987, Ploughshares also began to monitor the world’s frightening array of armed conflicts. Indeed, the group calls its quarterly publication The Ploughshares Monitor.

Recognition of this dynamic was one factor that prompted the Canadian government to create the Automatic Firearms Country Control List to provide stricter export regulation, and to establish its first (and only) official hearings on the arms trade. (Another factor was Ottawa’s desire to change the Criminal Code to allow


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General Motors and Diemaco to export machine guns.) When the Mulroney government convened a special subcommittee of the Standing Committee on External Affairs in 1992, Ploughshares provided important testimony about the scale and danger of the arms trade, pushing for more effective export controls and more transparency about Canada’s weapons production. Some of the subcommittee’s recommendations stemmed from Ploughshares’ research.

“It started in Canada, I think. Groups were working to start an international network which would monitor the activities of governments, who were also beginning to talk about small arms control.” Richard Mugisha, People With Disabilities Uganda, 2004 In the early 1990s, a remarkable international NGO coalition initiated a high-profile advocacy campaign that ultimately resulted in a breakthrough treaty banning land mines.

it’s the smaller weapons that have been doing the damage to civilians and infrastructure in so many wars.

Ploughshares was an important participant in the land mines campaign, and had already begun to make common cause with respected groups like the British American Security Information Council. Ploughshares founder and Executive Director Ernie Regehr had long been collaborating with American peace and disarmament specialist Michael Klare, one of the world’s leading analysts of the technologies of repression. Mr. Regehr, who had himself published eight books on the Canadian arms industry, disarmament and defence policy by this time, was a widely-respected peace and disarmament policy analyst with an extensive personal network of global contacts.

This activity reflected a new interest in the arms trade on the part of NGOs that were hoping to curtail the destruction caused by weapons, particularly in the South. The “big power” interest in arms control had generally focussed on nuclear weapons and the larger weapons systems – tanks, heavy artillery, ships, fighter aircraft and helicopters – that had the potential to affect regional or global power balances. Little attention was paid to the dangerous but profitable trade in smaller, but no less lethal, weapons. According to Ken Epps of Project Ploughshares: “Much of the destruction and death in the South was being created by weapons that were typically left out of arms trade monitoring because they were viewed as not that expensive and not that consequential from a global strategic standpoint. From that perspective, the smaller weapons are inconsequential. But of course it’s the smaller weapons that have been doing the damage to civilians and infrastructure in so many wars.”

The land mines campaign demonstrated that sufficient effort by civil society, when combined with political will on the part of government, could add up to real progress to curb the spread of weapons. At a 1997 meeting in Ottawa, most of the world’s nations (notably excluding the United States) signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction. The meeting also included sessions where peace activists underscored the threat posed by small arms.

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of Churches, introduced the Canadian peace activist to Bonaya Adhi Godana, Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Minister. Since the encounter coincided with the formation of IANSA, it seemed like a good time to broach one of Mr. Godana’s concerns, the escalation of gun violence in the border area between Ethiopia and Kenya from which he hailed.

The NGOs that attended the historic gathering did not all agree that small arms and light weapons would be next on the agenda. Some felt that momentum on the land mines issue needed to be sustained. Most agreed that small arms constituted a far more complex challenge than land mines, because guns were far more widespread and had many more uses, including legitimate ones. Still, there was a general feeling among weapons control advocates that the time was ripe for more attention to small arms. As 1,700 delegates looked on, Canada’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Hon. Lloyd Axworthy, signed the land mines treaty on behalf of the Canadian government. He also joined the head of the Red Cross in describing small arms as an urgent challenge.

The Horn of Africa and Great Lakes regions as a whole were inflamed with armed conflicts from Ethiopia/Eritrea and the Sudan to Rwanda and the Congo. A toxic combination of weapons and weak states had altered longstanding local rivalries. Among pastoralist peoples along Kenya’s northern borders, historical patterns of cattle raiding had escalated. “During the 1980s and 1990s, people went from using single shot rifles and Winchesters to using AK-47s, and the dynamics of such conflicts changed radically,” said Mr. Regehr. “So the whole issue of changing conflict was very real to Minister Godana.”

It was a challenge that Ploughshares took up. Within a year, it had convened an international gathering at Lake Couchiching, near Orillia, Ontario. Funded by the Canadian government and the Ford Foundation, the August 1998 meeting brought together 45 individuals representing 33 organizations from 18 countries (eight Northern and 10 Southern). The idea was to discuss ways that civil society groups and institutions could cooperate and advocate for policies and actions to control small arms. The conference led to the creation of IANSA. At the closing session, Lloyd Axworthy noted that “civil society activism is the major factor in ensuring that governments actually take up the responsibilities that they have now acknowledged are theirs.” An international steering committee that included Ernie Regehr subsequently oversaw the establishment of IANSA.

Mr. Regehr and Ambassador Kiplagat stressed the need for a regional approach to small arms control because conflicts – and weapons – were spilling across porous borders. The situation called out for a regional approach. The Minister, who had already been in touch with the Norwegian government about his concerns, suggested that Mr. Regehr contact the Canadian government to explore the possibility of support for a regional conference that would address the issue. At this time Canada and Norway were involved in joint diplomatic efforts on human security. The NGOs that were just then in the process of initiating IANSA were eager to get involved with any effort to curb small arms. Canadian NGOs and “official” Canada each played a pivotal role.

One of the participants at the Couchiching meeting was Bethuel Kiplagat, a founder of the Nairobi-based Africa Peace Forum, a peacebuilding NGO and Ploughshares’ main Southern partner in the small arms initiative. Ambassador Kiplagat, a former Kenyan High Commissioner to the United Kingdom whom Mr. Regehr had met some years earlier through the World Council

This coincidence of circumstance, personality and initiative gave rise to a regional conference that produced the Nairobi Declaration, a groundbreaking international arms control agreement for the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa regions. It was signed in 2000 by 10 countries that


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made a formal commitment to regulate and control the manufacture, import and export of small arms, light weapons and ammunition. They also agreed to boost the capacity of their police and military forces, as well as customs and border guards, to curb illicit trafficking in such weapons. The Nairobi Declaration’s list of signatories included countries whose peoples had been subjected to war and killings on a massive scale: Rwanda, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Djibouti.

The Nairobi Declaration supported previous United Nations and African Union resolutions on small arms, as the issue was gaining prominence in these fora. According to Mr. Regehr, the Declaration’s language was inserted in the pre-conference drafting process as a means of persuading the countries involved to agree to the document. After all, their diplomats had already voted in favour of controlling the weapons trade in larger fora. Mr. Regehr also took the opportunity to insert regular references to civil society into the text, thus ensuring that NGOs would have a legitimate role to play in the difficult process of trying to turn the Declaration’s good intentions into reality.

reaching a formal agreement on arms control was a significant diplomatic accomplishment involving both states and ngos.

As it turned out, this was a good thing, because those intentions did not translate into the capacity to take action on arms control. Traditional police and military mindsets do not usually include openness to participation by civilian groups in security planning. The Nairobi Declaration stipulated the creation of National Focal Points: new arms control offices where grassroots organizations could have a seat at the table along with military, police, immigration and customs officers as well as other civil servants. The idea was to provide a bureaucratic mechanism to coordinate gun control efforts. The aim was also to bring an advocacy perspective to bear, including voices that would urge the authorities to consider the causes of gun violence and the gun trade when they were planning their disarmament initiatives.

Reaching a formal agreement on arms control was a significant diplomatic accomplishment involving both states and NGOs. The Nairobi Declaration was all the more remarkable because it encompassed countries that had not only been riven by internal conflict but had, in some cases, been at war with one another. The Declaration, however, was just that – a document. It was not something that could automatically be enforced. There was much to be done before the formalities and good intentions were translated into real activity and progress where it really counted. That was the place so often invoked in the world of the NGO – “on the ground.”

Some NGOs that had become involved in peacemaking recognized the challenge they faced, particularly in shifting prevailing mindsets that wanted to fight fire with fire. “The government’s work was to maintain the situation by fighting,” observed Richard Mugisha of the group People With Disabilities Uganda (PWDU).

d “The [land mines] campaign raised a question of ethics. Eddy Jadot, a Belgian Jesuit, [asks] whether we, the global community, are ready to consider the consequences of our actions. Can we finally agree that this weapon should not be allowed, because its effects are too indiscriminate and the damage it causes is too excessive?” Celina Tuttle and Joanne Epp, “The Ploughshares Monitor”, 1995

PWDU had decided to go beyond its service role in the struggle for the rights of the disabled – to address the issue of why so many people in


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opportunity to meet each other for the first time, and to make contact with policy advocacy organizations like the Africa Peace Forum.

the country were being wounded and maimed. One big reason was gun violence, and PWDU did not see that the traditional approach was getting anyone anywhere. The security debate had to be democratized. Mr. Mugisha had been jailed as a suspected terrorist back when advocating gun control was still in bad odour politically. Before the Nairobi Declaration, the thought of creating a broader dialogue on gun control was not on the agenda. “Guns were considered something exclusively for the government to talk about and the government to handle,” said Mr. Mugisha.

Although she referred to the effort to bring security officers and popular organizations together as “small steps forward”, Lynne Griffiths-Fulton of Project Ploughshares did not underplay the importance of what was achieved: “A key result of the project was that a greater number of government officials and civil society groups became informed. National and regional networks were established as a result.”

As a result of pressure from PWDU and other members of the Uganda Action Network on Small Arms to implement the Nairobi Declaration, the Ugandan government moved to establish a National Focal Point, allocating an office within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. However, such success was the exception, not the rule, in the region. As months turned into years, the Nairobi Secretariat, a central body meant to co-ordinate action plans drawn up by various National Focal Points, was still not functioning properly. Focal Points did not even exist in most countries that had signed the Nairobi Declaration. While there was clearly an opening and a need for grassroots pressure for action, local NGOs, often fragile themselves, were not especially familiar with the issue.

ngos often have stronger links with citizens than do their governments. Richard Mugisha explained that while it is an uphill struggle to make governments understand and work harmoniously with civil society, it is also up to groups like his own to ensure that “we don’t leave government behind. Whenever we have a meeting we have to involve them.” The Ugandan administration’s recognition of the NGO efforts represents a step forward in getting the government to bring arms control into the mainstream of poverty reduction programming.

It was against this background that two of the founding members of IANSA, Project Ploughshares and the Africa Peace Forum, undertook a project to build civil society capacity to support the implementation of the Nairobi Declaration. Foreign Affairs Canada provided the funding for a series of workshops that brought together NGOs, faith groups, government officials (including the police and military), and Northern donors and diplomats. The sessions took place in Kenya, Burundi, Ethiopia and Uganda, involving a total of 143 participants and developing a base of networked support for efforts to control small arms in the region. NGO participants had the

For Ambassador Ochieng’ Adala of the Africa Peace Forum, it is important for civil society to keep emphasizing the links between arms control and development. Similarly, the retired Kenyan diplomat insists that groups seeking the implementation of the Nairobi Declaration must stress that the proliferation of guns does not occur in a political vacuum, and press home the fact that real solutions to armed conflict are political, not military: “We must constantly keep reminding our colleagues in other countries that they have a responsibility to keep reminding their governments that the Nairobi Declaration has all these provisions about peaceful resolution of conflict,


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often seems to provide a ready answer for problems. Mr. Regehr describes the efforts of his organization, the Africa Peace Forum and all their local partners to give life to the Nairobi Declaration’s fine intentions as “an extraordinarily slow process” in which the cheap and easy work of holding conferences has been done. “Now you actually have to start collecting the guns and have local development projects to reintegrate the decommissioned combatants once you’ve persuaded them to give up their guns. That’s expensive, but cheap compared to dealing with the consequences of these guns and armed conflict.”

entrenching a culture of peace and looking at economic development, good governance and human rights. This is the message that civil society has to keep carrying.” It is an important message when virtually none of the world’s recent wars have involved direct state-to-state confrontations. Many bloody confrontations (including those within the states that signed the Nairobi Declaration) have persisted in part because governments are incapable of brokering political solutions or providing basic human security such as protection of human rights and a minimum of social support. Armed conflicts – sometime ethnically or regionally based, sometimes over resources, often both – have flourished. In this context, NGOs can offer the hope of helping with peacemaking. They often have stronger links with citizens than do their governments.

Persuading Northern governments to back such long-haul initiatives will not be easy. Real progress means building trusting relationships. Such accomplishments are often intangible, hard to measure on a month-by-month or even a year-by-year basis. They do not lend themselves easily to management by results. They are also best brought about through working relationships between Southern and Northern organizations making common cause. According to Ernie Regehr, Ploughshares’ working partnership with the Africa Peace Forum provides the Canadian organization with political traction close to home: “For us to do effective advocacy work on small arms in Ottawa, we depend heavily on our relationship to that region. Our engagement there gives us whatever authenticity and legitimacy we have.”

All this speaks to the democratization of security, providing an important antidote to what has been described as the “securitization of aid.” To be successful, securitization depends on regular doses of demonization of someone else – some other, some enemy. It has little to do with democracy or real human security. By insisting that there can be no true security without disarmament, and linking disarmament to the imperatives of development through international networks like IANSA and regional initiatives in eastern and central Africa, NGOs are responding creatively to narrowly defined notions of security.

d

Ernie Regehr of Project Ploughshares has spent over 30 years working for disarmament, picking up the Order of Canada along the way. It is painstaking work. Patience is a prerequisite, particularly in a dangerous world where war too


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Drawing policy lessons from development experience

Drawing policy lessons from development experience

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