Om nog een sna te denken over wat nu eigenlijk de bedoeling is.. De schrijver is (was?) Directeur van Haki Elimu, een NGO die werkt rond onderwijs in Tanzania.

Rakesh Rajani, East Africa Citizen Agency & Public Accountability Initiative, 6 June 2008

The interest in aid effectiveness is timely. We know from our own personal experiences, from the facts of chronic impoverishment, millions still not reading, women still dying from childbirth, and increasing inequalities that the aid business is not working. Responsibility applies to all of us – governments, donors and civil society alike – and often I sense that we CSOs are the least effective of them all. So I celebrate attention to aid effectiveness, because implicit in it is recognition that things are not well, and that we must get them right.  

But with all the attention the Paris Declaration has received, it is easy to lose sight of a simple point – that the purpose of aid effectiveness is not aid effectiveness, but households escaping impoverishment, and people realizing concrete changes in their lives. Paris is only the plumbing; the purpose is water and to have thirsts quenched. The problem with donors and governments is that they seem to have lost sight of the purpose of aid – so that countless months are spent drawing up assistance strategies and performance matrices which measure the extent to which aid is harmonized or the percentage which is provided in budget support, as if these in themselves were the goals of development.

A useful way to approach the Paris Declaration may be to put it aside for a moment, start with the core purposes of development, and then work backwards to what kind of plumbing we need. For many of us this would be ordinary people having the ways and means, the options, to live a good life, to get the basic services they need, to secure livelihoods, to have voice and to have their rights respected. To make things happen, rather than just have things happen to them. In short, ‘citizen agency’.

Citizen agency is not only the purpose – or the ends – of development and democracy, it is also its most effective means. People who are in good health and well educated, confident and secure, able to access opportunities within a level playing field, enjoy access information and express themselves – are the people who can makes things happen, fight injustice and unfairness, thrive. Historically we find that all the important changes – women’s equality, stopping slavery, ending apartheid, respect for gays and lesbians, concern for the environment – have been driven not by declarations in Paris or New York or Accra, or government schemes or NGO projects, but by socio-political movements of capable, committed and courageous people. The focus of our efforts, and for the Paris review for that matter, should be how do we enable capable, committed and courageous people to do their thing, to unleash their potential.

When I think in these terms an immediate observation is how the business of development is so out-of-touch from the reality of people’s lives – it is as if there are two separate worlds – lived reality on this side, and the aid industry on that side. The connection between the two is hardly organic. In Tanzania, when I have asked ordinary people to define development, often I am told that ‘it is to be sensitized and get an allowance’. I cannot imagine a more effective way to erase citizen agency. Demands for an allowance makes sense where people see no intrinsic value in development – you see it is a game that brings money, and you see that people running the game are making money from it, so you try to get your piece of it too. We offer sitting allowances as a bribe for people to show-up to our events, because otherwise they wouldn’t, and we wouldn’t be able to fill our boxes to show success. I am increasingly convinced that development, whether done by governments, donors or NGOs, however well-meaning, is too often all too corrupting.

My pessimism about the aid industry is surpassed by my enthusiasm for what happens on the ‘lived realities’ side of the column. When people are not ‘doing development’ sitting in workshops being sensitized and drawing up recommendations that go nowhere, there is suffering but there is also wonderful stuff happening. Recently in Uganda I learned of powerful debates on FM radio stations – where people discuss what matters to them, use meager resources to send in an SMS, rally against the corrupt politicians and say what should be done. This has enabled people’s voice to be heard and fostered public debate in a manner that is historically unprecedented. Or in Tanzania we see an equally unprecedented public stir about the use of natural resources, that is driven by and that drives the media and Parliament to uncover more of the truth. The events have led to the Governor of Central Bank being fired, the Prime Minister resigning, the cabinet dissolved and in the reshuffle seven big ministers losing their posts. Mining contracts with most powerful companies are being reviewed. Stolen billions from the Central Bank are being recovered. A powerful ex-minister is under investigation for corruption. Donors have been forced to amend how they play their game. And most importantly, among the people, there is a clamoring for transparency and accountability, and an understanding that government must work for them, which can no longer be suppressed. These powerful currents have little to do with the aid business; they have been driven by other forces. We need to connect with those forces.

So what does all this mean for the Paris Declaration? First, we need to recognize the high level of our irrelevance, of development as we know it and do it. Second, we need to understand that the aid architecture and our work will become relevant to the extent to which it can enable citizens to connect with the public domain, to find ways to make government and public sphere their own, to have aspirations and pursue their dreams, practically.

How? Here are three suggestions:

• Practical information for everyone: Information is indeed power – not the abstract supply-driven kind, but information that is concrete, practical, user-friendly. By definition this has to be demand driven and responsive. This is not national enrolment rates, but about who is going to my school and who isn’t, and how that compares with the neighboring schools and schools in the capital city. It is not pre-packaged notes on local government policy, but practical stuff on how my council can be a vehicle to improve my community and how I can get rid of a corrupt leader. It is about ordinary people having the ability to search whatever they want and getting the information in a quick, reliable and affordable manner. Imagine Googling using SMS from your cell phone.
• Quality and independent media: Mass media done well – newspapers, TV and in particular radio – can get information to people, create space for citizen views to be heard and debated, and hold governments publicly to account. Despites many constraints, media is doing an amazing job in many countries. Amartya Sen has famously declared that no country with a free press has had a famine. So what’s really important is to keep media free and independent (from undue state or commercial interests), to help it have real quality and reach, and to have it reflect diverse voices. Investing in a pluriform and free media is probably the single most important thing one can do to facilitate change.
• Citizens monitoring government: Governments are meant to do things for and on behalf of the people, but most people have little means to know or track what the government is actually doing. Access to information and independent media will help; but in addition we need to develop a fabric and tools for citizen monitoring of public bodies and public resources. In recent years, through the International Budget Project (IBP) and others, we have seen some terrific work on analyzing budgets and tracking revenues and expenditures – so that people know how public monies are allocated, distributed in practice, and used. This work needs to be expanded and extended to see whether people get services, who benefits and who is excluded, and how it changes lives. This is not a technocratic exercise, but one where people really can know what they are interested in, discuss among themselves, and find practical recourse to addressing concerns. A basic indicator of human progress has to be the extent to which people can monitor what their governments are doing, follow-up, and have the power to do something about it.

This conception defines development in the contestation and cooperation between citizens and public institutions. Information is the lubricant that helps fuel and massage this political dynamic, and one that, because it puts matters in the public domain, exposes matters and allows citizens to exercise influence over the state. When private, individuals are only as powerful as their wealth or personal connection, but when public the equation can dramatically change. The true work of civil society is not technical or capacity building (that awful phrase) or handouts or lobbying or advocacy, but to lubricate the ways and means in which citizens can exercise power.

The problem with the Paris Declaration offers a managerial set of technocratic solutions when the core reason development isn’t effective is not poor management or lack of harmonization or high transaction costs or lack of mutual accountability, but because the political dynamic between states and the citizenry is warped, and public institutions are either captured or dysfunctional or too weak to be a corrective. As a set of management tools, I have little problem with Paris. But what it seeks to take on and solve has its roots in something far more fundamental and ambitious.

For CSOs it would be a mistake to just complain about the Paris Declaration as ignoring civil society or taking away money from it or giving too much or too little control to donors, or worse moan that we were not involved in the process. These constraints aside, several aspects of Paris make sense to me in the plumbing of supporting governments. Moreover, it has been argued (and the donors in Tanzania have agreed) to apply the Paris principles for support to strategic CSOs – it certainly makes the job of an NGO head easier to have only one proposal, one budget, one set of reports and one set of processes, all designed by itself, to use with its donors. But the core point is that all this getting the plumbing right does not solve the challenge of whether any of us are doing the right thing.

The Paris review offers us at least two opportunities: One of them is to situate the Paris plumbing in terms of its larger context of accountability to citizens. The other is to take a hard look in the mirror. Many of us would be far more relevant and effective if we got our houses in order than rally against the powers that be that can brush us aside anyway. If we had the ability to inform and be informed by citizens, at scale, and transform ourselves into resources for individual and collective citizen action, those capable, committed and courageous people – the organic stuff not more workshops and allowances – then the powers would have to pay attention to citizens. This is the stuff of enabling citizens to claim and reclaim their democratic mandate and constitute the powers that be in themselves. In the elegant slogan of the Kenyan-American US Democratic Party presidential candidate, we will know we have arrived when the citizens know and feel that “we are the ones we have been waiting for”.