Doha summit aims to adapt tools of global cooperation

DOHA // The World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative could hardly be more ambitious. Its main objective is to adapt the tools of international co-operation – the G20, UN bodies, the World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the like – to the complex challenges of the 21st century to ensure the long-term security of humanity.

It also aims to create a more inclusive global system.

“Legitimacy comes from people,” Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a former Singapore ambassador to the UN, said during the opening session of this week’s Global Redesign Summit in Doha. The report the WEF prepared for the event is titled Everybody’s Business.

“We have to learn to listen to the voices of 6.8 billion people,” he added. “The real purpose of this meeting is: let’s figure out how we can get the whole world involved in this, and not just some parts of it.”

Backed by the governments of Qatar, Tanzania, Singapore and Switzerland, the WEF launched the redesign initiative more than a year ago, in the depths of the financial crisis. A key aim was to move away from the so-called Washington Consensus and Bretton Woods-style institutions, created and led by industrialised countries, in the hopes of avoiding future catastrophes.

“The world has gone through a heart attack,” Arif Naqvi, founder of the Dubai-based Abraaj Capital, the region’s largest private equity firm, said during the opening plenary. “We have to work very carefully through this moment to make sure everyone acts in concert to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

The GRI tasked more than 1,000 analysts, officials and policymakers to re-envision international institutions to better address global health, security, sustainability, development and the financial system. At a series of meetings over the past year, their ideas matured into proposals, which Doha participants sought to put into action.

“We have lots of ideas that now need spouses,” the WEF vice chairman, Mark Malloch-Brown said, advising government officials to choose a proposal and work to implement it.

Inclusion may be easier said than done. Despite the call for innovation and bold rethinking, many speakers at the event held fast to traditional institutions of co-operation.

Richard Samans, the WEF’s managing director, explained that the redesign initiative did not intend to replace the existing system for international co-operation, but rather augment it.

“We are not here to overthrow the system,” agreed He Yafei, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. “Global redesign of the system is not a revolution; it’s more an evolution.”

Few of the 58 proposals, which are to be finalised at Davos, Switzerland, in January, are revolutionary. They include strengthening the financial safety net, the creation of an international financial risk monitor, expanding the capacity of the International Labor Organisation and improving a UN-supported programme called Education for All.

“A lot of the proposals are what you might call ‘punting’,” passing the problem on, said Parag Khanna, the director of global governance at the New America Foundation, who previously worked for the WEF. He sat in on several meetings over the past year and attended several sessions during the Doha summit. “It’s not quite redesign yet.”

In addition, one sizeable demographic was mostly absent.

“For everything, whether it’s financial or climate change, we should look at the poor as part of the process, rather than beneficiaries,” said Harish Hande, the founder and managing director of Selco, a provider of sustainable energy solutions to rural India.

He was speaking on Davos Debates in Doha, a YouTube channel set up for the event. “Redesign needs to happen where the poor become part of the implementers, designers and thought processes,” Mr Hande said.

In the end, the GRI may be less redesign than makeover. In calling for change, one prominent observer complained of a hidebound system dominated by inertia.

“International deadlock is the norm; cynicism and mistrust are common currency,” said Queen Rania of Jordan, who is on the redesign council for education. “If just enough people are happy, there’s no need to change it.”

Mr Khanna acknowledged that the GRI is in part a branding exercise. But it could still effect change. “I think we might see in a couple years’ time that international organisations move towards sharing resources and collaborating more with NGOs and corporations,” he said. “And it will partially be attributable to WEF.”



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originally ran in 1 June 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae

Qatar school reforms pass test

By David Lepeska

Doha // Qatari first lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned launched this week’s inaugural WISE Summit with clear objectives. “Innovation in education should become an achievable and executable process,” she told hundreds of educators, academics and experts gathered here to discuss the future of education. “Innovation stems from the society and is not imposed on it – it should therefore be a part of the identity of educational institutions."

Innovation may soon be part of the scholastic identity in Qatar, where an ambitious, six-year-old reform programme has begun bearing fruit. In several dozen new government-run schools teachers have shown greater engagement and students tested higher than peers at standard public schools.

“The reform has achieved important successes in its early years,” said a study released this month by the Rand Corporation. “Independent schools have been showing clear progress in applying new student-centred curriculum and teaching methods.”

In a region with few high-achieving school systems, and millions of knowledge-hungry youths, this tiny nation’s new schools offer hope.

The seeds of Qatar’s billion-dollar reform programme, “Education for a New Era”, were planted in 2001. At that time, some 70,000 K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) students attended government financed and operated public schools that could impart the basics but little more.

Seeking to better prepare Qataris for post-secondary education and careers in a globalised economy, the government tasked the Rand Corporation, a US think tank, to analyse its schools and make recommendations.

Rand found a woeful public school system and laid out three options for reform. Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani chose the most ambitious – a comprehensive structural reform that would encourage innovation, accountability and variety within independently managed, publicly funded independent schools – and asked Rand to help implement the programme.

Advisers from the Centre for British Teachers and the US-based Charter Schools Development Center helped new school managers design learning programmes and developed an advanced curriculum centred on Arabic, English, science and mathematics. In 2004, the first dozen schools opened their doors. Increased demand led to the opening of a few dozen more schools by 2006.

Progress followed. “This is just a much better learning environment,” said Jan Wilson, director of professional development at Qatar’s new Supreme Education Council (SEC), which runs the independent schools. After 15 years helping the United Nations rebuild school systems in war-torn countries, she joined the SEC in 2003 and helped replace the traditional school system.

A two-year study by the Rand-Qatar Policy Institute, a joint partnership between Rand and the Qatar Foundation, was released last month and describes more demanding yet more supportive classrooms.

“The leadership teams are well-trained and have a good understanding of what they have to do and the teachers are much more secure and knowledgeable,” added Ms Wilson, pointing out the value of the annual assessment tests given to all students at the new schools. “The tests show a year-on-year improvement across the schools.”

At the Abu Baker Asdeeq Independent School, a boys’ middle school in Doha, the conference room shelves are lined with row upon row of binders – comprehensive profiles of all 650 students. Some 70 per cent are Qatari, according to the vice principal, Fareed Yaghi, and the rest from neighbouring countries.

“Everything is different from the other school,” said Abdullah Yousef Deyab, 14, an Abu Baker 9th-grader who attended a ministry-run school until a few years ago. “The students, the teachers, the whole way of learning – this school is much better.” The teenager is not sure what profession he would like to pursue, but he wants to study at a US university.

That’s a possibility. The number of Qatari students in the US increased by 35 per cent in 2008 – the fastest growth rate in the Gulf, according to the latest Open Doors Report from the New York-based International Institute for Education. About 1,000 Qataris are now studying at US institutions within the US and at Education City in Doha. Some of these students graduated from Qatar’s new independent schools.

Yet Qatar’s success remains a regional exception. “The divide between education and employment has not been bridged and the quality of education continues to be disappointing,” said a 2008 World Bank report on education reform in the Middle East and North Africa. “Despite considerable growth in the level of educational attainment, there continues to be an ‘education gap’ with other regions.”

Qatar’s 106 independent schools have begun narrowing that gap. The government eliminated the ministry of education and by September next year, will have also eliminated all its traditional public schools. By that time, the SEC will be operating 180 independent schools, with the possibility of more to come.

Yet the initiative has not been perfect. School leaders have had difficulty explaining to parents how their schools differ from traditional public schools.

Too many policy changes have slowed administrative progress, and classes in English have lagged because of little proficiency among teachers and students.

Most troublesome has been a shortage of Qatari teachers. “Local capacity is limited by numbers,” said Ms Wilson. “There are just not enough Qatari teachers in the country.” She has partnered with Qatar University to attract more, but that’s not the only hurdle.

Female Qataris are willing to teach in part because it provides a secure, gender-segregated workplace. Qatari males take a different view. “Qatari men just don’t want to teach,” said Fareed Yaghi, vice principal of Abu Baker, where six of the 50 teachers are Qatari.

That may change as the independent schools take root. For now, Qatari educators must content themselves with small, daily revelations. “Today the student parliament requested more time for exams, they told me one hour is too short,” Mr Yaghi said. “I’ll have to talk to the teachers – they may be right.”



-- originally appeared 20 Nov 2009, in The National (www.thenational.ae)

A Man of the Soil

By David Lepeska

Agronomist Stephen Carr gauges the degree of hunger stalking the Malawian countryside by opening his front door. “In a bad year I have 12 starving people on my doorstep every morning begging for food,” said Carr, who has lived in a cabin on Zomba mountain in southern Malawi since 1989. “This last year I had two old ladies in a month.”

As Carr’s stoop can attest, two bountiful maize harvests have filled stomachs and cupboards across this devastatingly poor sliver of southern Africa. Malawi exported a record 280,000 tons of maize last fall and felt generally flush for the first time in recent memory – a direct result of a bold new government-run fertilizer subsidies program.

Although loathe to take any credit, this humble octogenarian used his intimate knowledge of Malawian smallholder farming, his familiarity with the donor community and his aggressive charm to reduce donor opposition to the subsidies that helped the farmers buy the fertilizer that enriched the soil that grew the maize that overturned received wisdom in Washington.

Stumbling toward success

After graduating from London University in 1952, Carr moved to Sudan and began working with small-scale farmers. Years later Carr moved with his wife to Uganda, where they worked as agricultural missionaries and had two children. “We were extremely happily settled,” said Carr.

So much so that in 1971 he was considering an application for Ugandan citizenship when the Obote government was overthrown. The underlings of new strong-armed dictator Idi Amin Dada learned of Carr’s efforts to relocate locals to more fertile lands. “Without asking anybody they assumed that I was organizing a guerrilla camp to overthrow the government,” he said. “We grabbed our family and we escaped.”

Thus began the institutional mid-section of his career, from agricultural adviser posts with the governments of Sudan and Tanzania to a position with the world’s foremost development institution. “I joined the World Bank almost by accident,” Carr said of his hiring.

In mid-1978 the bank needed someone familiar with southern Sudan, its languages, farming and traditions, and it settled on Carr, who had spent two dozen years living in huts in African villages. “The bank found me moderately useful and so eventually I finished up as principal agriculturalist for all of sub-Saharan Africa,” Carr remembered. He also won the Royal African Society’s medal for “dedicated services to Africa” and became an Officer of the British Empire along the way.

In 1989 Carr approached retirement age in the World Bank and was anxious to get back to village-level work. He had planned to return to Uganda but had second thoughts. “I was sent to Malawi by the bank half a dozen times and encountered the worst poverty, and the most intransigent agricultural problems that I’d seen anywhere on the continent,” he recalled. “I decided I’d be of more use here than Uganda.”

A second career

In Malawi, Carr had a mountain to conquer. “When I came here the opposition to a subsidy by WB and USAID was so strong that it was absolutely like a brick wall,” he said. Although small fertilizer subsidies were offered through the 1980s and into the ‘90s, donors refused to extend the policy and it soon ended.

After attempting several organic soil improvement techniques, Carr started a fertilizer-for-work program. Locals built access roads and implemented irrigation and reforestation projects in return for inputs – mostly fertilizer and seed. Even with support from USAID and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, “it just became apparent at the end of ten years that we were not getting anywhere near the number of people on board, that this was never going to feed the country,” Carr recalled. “So I just switched my efforts.”

That switch occurred just before a devastating harvest in 2005, which prompted newly elected President Bingu wa Mutharika to reinstate and increase fertilizer subsidies despite staunch skepticism from the United States, Britain, and the World Bank. “As long as I’m president,” Mutharika famously declared, “I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food.”

The Malawi government turned to Carr to soften the international community’s opposition to Malawi’s fertilizer subsidies. Carr explained to major donors that at current prices the great majority of Malawians had no hope of buying fertilizer and thus little chance of feeding themselves without help.

Constant rejection spurred him on. At one event an American aid official told him the U.S. did not tolerate subsidies. Carr pounced. ”’Would you like to clarify,’” he asked her, ”’that while it’s perfectly alright for yellow, brown, or white people to be subsidized, you will not tolerate subsidies for black people?’” Carr recalled with a laugh. After another speech, a friend approached and told him he liked the subsidies idea but it wasn’t sustainable. “But 800,000 tons of famine relief every year is?” Carr responded.

“What one has to ram home to people is that there is not a third way,” he explained. “You either make inputs available to farmers so that they can grow their own food or you deny them the opportunity of growing enough food for themselves and you have hungry people and you stop them from actually starving by bringing in relief.”

The end of the rainbow

Over time Carr wore the opposition down, and President Mutharika’s subsidy plan went into effect in early 2006 with $8 million from the U.K.’s Department for International Development. The results have been staggering, with corn harvests nearly tripling from 1.2 million metric tons in 2005 to 3.4 million metric tons in 2007. Some, like U.S. ambassador Alan Eastham, believe the bountiful harvests are merely the result of good rains. But eight of the past 20 years witnessed as much precipitation as 2006 and 2007.

According to Carr the reason for success was simple: fertilizer became affordable for a larger portion of the population. The World Bank’s subsidy program of the 1980s and early ‘90s subsidized 35 percent of the fertilizer cost, enabling only the wealthiest quarter of the population to buy fertilizer. The new government-run plan, which subsidizes 70 percent of the cost, is affordable for two-thirds of the populace.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, now uses Malawi as Exhibit A in his “aid is good” argument. The country’s success has sparked a reappraisal of the value of farm basics — fertilizer, improved seed, and farmer education — and could ultimately become a tipping point for public support of fertilizer subsidies. Carr believes a few more good years would change donor minds.

Yet hurdles remain. The government has taken a staunch lead role, giving Malawi’s relatively mature private sector minimal involvement. This has meant slower distribution, according to Carr, but could become more problematic in the near future. USAID has demanded a greater role for the private sector as a condition of its acceptance of the subsidy program, which means continued governmental control could jeopardize the program.

Still, Malawi has undergone an economic sea change, as Carr’s empty front stoop can attest. Even more encouraging, a Malawian doctor recently reported an 80 percent drop in seriously malnourished children at his hospital.

Carr is happy to have played a part. “What I have done is act as a midwife,” he said. “It was Malawians did the hard labor.”

-- posted on devex.com on 18 May 2008

The Future of Farm Output in Africa and the Promising Case of Malawi

By David Lepeska

A food crisis grips the planet. Prices of rice, wheat and other essentials skyrocket, leading to food shortage riots in a dozen countries and jolting governments and policymakers to rethink their ideas about commodities markets, biofuels and agricultural production in the developing world. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said the losses could drop 100 million people back into extreme poverty, wiping out a decade of development gains. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran has called the crisis “the silent tsunami.”

Within this haystack of gloom shines the needle of Malawi, where a government-led fertilizer subsidies program has produced two bountiful maize harvests, filling stomachs and cupboards across this formerly destitute sliver of southern Africa. Last year Malawi exported 280,000 tons of maize as child malnutrition dropped an impressive 80 percent. And the good times are set to continue. Despite the global economic downturn the International Monetary Fund is forecasting nearly 8 percent growth for Malawi in 2008, as compared to 3.7 percent globally.

The success of Malawi’s subsidy program has overturned conventional donor wisdom and may have set an example for other African nations to follow. As we enter an era of high food prices, increasing Africa’s agricultural production is of greater urgency than ever before.

Few are more familiar with these issues than Uma Lele and Stephen Carr. In separate interviews and an e-mail discussion the duo discussed why the Malawi program worked, what it might mean for the policies of the World Bank and other major donors, and whether Malawi offers a replicable model.

Malawi and the problem of soil infertility

“The world is fed by inorganic fertilizer and good seed, and the only continent where that’s not being used is Africa,” said Carr, the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist for sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 1980s. He has lived in Africa for more than 50 years and was instrumental in getting the Malawi subsidy program off the ground.

Low soil fertility contributes greatly to low agricultural productivity in Africa. China’s farmland boasts 279 kilograms of fertilizer nutrients per hectare. South Asia’s receives 113. Africa, on the other hand, makes due with 6 kilograms, a paltry sum considering only 6 percent of this vast continent's land has high agricultural potential.

“We’ve got to find ways of giving farmers access to fertilizer,” says Carr.

Malawi found a way, with Carr wearing down donor opposition and the government managing a comprehensive plan that covered 70 percent of the price of fertilizer. The impact was immediate and revelatory.

“This program succeeded because it made fertilizer affordable to the majority of the population,” Carr said. Because of import, distribution and marketing costs, Malawi’s pre-subsidy fertilizer is about 40 percent more expensive than that of the United States, and representative of sub-Saharan Africa. “What the 70 percent subsidy has done is bring the Malawian farmer to the same level playing field as the American farmer," he noted.

American farm subsidies have long been a target for critics of Western aid policies. If the United States, European Union and other Western nations removed all domestic subsidies and tariffs on imported cotton, soybeans and other oilseeds, the developing world’s share in these products would jump from its current 50 percent to more than 80 percent, according to some experts. And it’s not only wealthy Western nations that provide farmer hand-outs; India and China spend lavishly to boost production.

African nations are not so flush.

“What are these countries supposed to do when [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries are not reducing their subsidies?” wondered Lele. An agricultural economist, she worked at the World Bank for 35 years and has written extensively about funding of farm basics. The United States doles out $5.2 billion every year in direct subsidies to farmers, while fertilizer prices have doubled, even tripled, across much of sub-Saharan Africa in the past six months. “They’re facing a ridiculous world market situation; there isn’t a willingness to recognize the reality," Lele added.

Some experts recommend a policy shift akin to India's Green Revolution in the 1960s. As new high-yield varieties of rice and wheat were introduced, major donors encouraged the Indian government to provide their farmers with essential inputs – seed, fertilizer and credit. The government also set floor prices to ensure farmers a return on investment. The result was a decade of vigorous productivity growth in India, and robust public spending on agriculture across the developing world.

But in the 1980s huge farm surpluses from developed countries depressed prices and slashed farmer's profits. As a result, developing nations cut farm budgets in half between 1980 and 2004. Donor agricultural aid also dropped by half over the same period as production growth dropped two- to three-fold across the developing world.

As donors and governments begin to increase investment in developing world agriculture – part of a post-millennial push to reduce global poverty – the Malawian success story has become Exhibit A for the backers of farm funding.

The World Bank mulls its options

In recent years the World Bank has undergone a transformation far beyond the arrival of Zoellick as a replacement for the disgraced Paul Wolfowitz. As the single largest donor to African agriculture since 1990, the bank remaims integral to the future of farming in Africa. But on fertilizers and farm inputs it’s still dragging its feet.

The most recent edition of the World Bank's annual global review, the World Development Report (WDR), focuses on agriculture and argues that “subsidies must be used with caution,… [and] need to be part of a comprehensive strategy to improve productivity and must have credible exit options.”

However subsides are implemented, Lele believes donors hold far too much sway. “The reality is that donors have much more power in Africa than they did even in the heyday," when policies were much more holistic, she said.

In a December interview with National Public Radio, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the World Bank’s new managing director, acknowledged the bank had pushed political reforms abroad in the past. “The bank has changed dramatically from that period,” she said. Nowadays, “each country should take the lead.”

Carr agrees, in part. “The nature of the bank has changed a great deal,” he said. “With interest rates at up to 75 percent, little government oversight and no smallholder credit, the bank has been driven to get more involved in macro policies.”

These broader policies have led to diminishing returns, according to the latest report from World Bank watchdog the Internal Evaluation Group. It found that the donor community has neglected the agriculture sector and that the World Bank’s strategy for agriculture has increasingly been subsumed within a broader rural focus, limiting its success.

During the 1980s Carr used his technical knowledge on straightforward projects such as smallholder irrigation. “At that time the projects department had virtually nothing to do with policy,” he recalled. “I didn’t have to deal with the organization of whole governments.”

The IEG report found the importance of agriculture had declined, with a subsequent loss of technical skills. The bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department in sub-Saharan Africa had 17 technical workers in 2006, compared with 40 in 1997.

That loss of technical skill can be seen in bank policies that pay little heed to ground realities like widespread hunger. For example, according to the report the bank “appears to have addressed soil fertility more as an environmental than as an agricultural productivity issue.” As food shortages lead to starving and riotous populations across the developing world, that error looms ever larger.

Spending the right way

To feed those masses production must be increased, most likely via aggressive governmental involvement. But public spending on farm inputs such as fertilizer must be done with deliberation and foresight. The WDR warns of the dangers of politicians claiming ownership of the beneficial subsidy program as well as the dependence such programs can create.

Yet Malawi's current administration has taken the lion’s share of the credit for the good harvests resulting from its “boma,” or government, fertilizer – and watched its popularity soar.

What will President Mutharika do now that fertilizer prices have increased by 120 percent across southern Africa? Will he turn to donors he so recently spurned? And what if the price hike forces the discontinuation of the program – will Malawians again go hungry? If they do they will know where to point the finger.

Carr says greater private-sector involvement would have improved procurement and distribution in Malawi. Yet he believes African governments must fund farm basics to “maintain food production aligned with growth.” Risks – such as inadequate oversight, price fluctuation and corruption – will remain, and policies will vary from country to country. Regardless, implementation is paramount. “It depends how effectively the plans are carried out,” he said.

System design will be key, too.

“Developing national systems is very complex,” said Lele, adding that many developing countries require policy advice and help in building reliable institutions. Dedicated people who understand local traditions and farming techniques have to be part of any successful program. "Money is necessary but not sufficient to do those things," she noted.

Furthermore, funding for farm inputs link fertilizer and seed often have less impact today because the structure of international farm markets has fundamentally changed since the Green Revolution. Not only are prices of seed and fertilizer much higher, but credit is less readily available to farmers, particularly during the ongoing global credit crunch. Also, supermarkets account for half of food sales even in developing countries, further reducing farmer control over pricing. India will disburse $37 billion to farmers in fiscal 2008 - $15 billion to cover debt and $22 billion for fertilizer subsidies - an increase of 50 percent and not a scheme to be emulated in sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa’s lack of funding, poor infrastructure and weak public sector and civil society hamper productivity growth. “African countries don’t have the benefit of indigenous volunteer organizations, like India and some other developing nations,” said Lele. “Malawi occurred under very unique circumstances.”

Malawi, floodlit

The IEG report recommended the World Bank and other donors help governments design efficient mechanisms to provide farmers with critical inputs such as fertilizer. Now, into donor laps falls the case of Malawi. In a May op-ed in Time, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute and author of “The End of Poverty,” urged policymakers "to scale up the dramatic success of Malawi" and create an "international fund based on the Malawi model." He suggested $10 per developed world citizen, or $10 billion total, and argued the fund could fight hunger as the Global Fund battles AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. But could Malawi serve as a model, a tipping point in ending the donor fad against fertilizer subsidies?

Lele is skeptical. “We think it’s a simple idea – fertilizer subsidies – but transportability of the particular design elements of that intervention are so intricate and complex," she said. "This is what often people don’t appreciate and they try to multiply things when it becomes a fad – and then they fail.”

Carr cites Rwanda and Burundi as possible imitators, as well as Tanzania, which recently sent consultants to review Malawi’s program. But he's more concerned about Malawi’s continued success.

“If Malawi’s subsidies become too politicized, or there’s too much corruption, or too inefficient, the international community’s going to say, ‘There you are, this shows that this kind of program cannot be run in Africa,’” he cautioned.

Lele sees no quick fix. "Short-term solutions are necessary in times like today," she acknowledged. "But not sufficient – holistic and long-term approaches with consistent, predictable policies are needed to develop food and agricultural sectors."

Malawi is headed in the right direction. “If we had another two or three really successful years,” said Carr, “it would be very hard for the donor community to go back to famine relief rather than helping people grow their own food.”

-- posted on devex.com on 15 May 2008

It Takes (A Little More Than) A Village

In a cramped shop in Orangi, a sprawling squatter settlement in Karachi, a weaver adds sequin designs to a shawl. Photo: David Lepeska

By David Lepeska

KARACHI, Pakistan – Akhtar Hameed Khan arrived in Orangi, Karachi's sprawling squatter settlement, with no expectations. The year was 1980 and, after working with farmers in Bangladesh, he had come at the request of his friend, a bank president, who wanted Khan to build a charitable school or hospital. Unconvinced that was the best way to improve lives, Khan asked for more time.

He strolled the lanes of Asia's largest slum for six months, observing the lives of its one million residents up close.

"The crucial problem was sewage disposal," recounted Perween Rahman, who worked with Khan for 16 years until his death in 1999. "The entire place was full of filth and excreta, people's houses were being damaged, the children's health affected, property values going down."

Khan suggested the residents do something about the sewage problem but many refused, claiming it was the government's responsibility.

Then Khan had an epiphany.

"He noticed that in some lanes people were doing the sewage disposal for themselves," said Rahman. "He saw that a house owner, if given proper guidance - his house and his neighborhood will improve."

Thus was born the Orangi Pilot Project, which started with sewage and sanitation and nearly three decades later oversees a miniature empire of empowerment and urban planning. First OPP helped over half a million Orangi residents clean up their lives. In the years since the organization has loaned tens of thousands of dollars, helped institute low-cost housing and assisted with the maintenance of 650 schools and the creation of hundreds of small businesses and dozens of clinics.

OPP's ascendance is timely. Pakistan's population recently became more urban than rural, and about a third of those city dwellers live in katchi abadis, or squatter housing, and lack basic infrastructure such as drinking water and sewage disposal.

Despite the urgent need, it took Khan six months to motivate 20 families to connect their homes to his new sewage system.

"Within that same week five more lanes got mobilized," recalled Rahman, Khan's successor as director of OPP. "That's the power of demonstration."

The organization began working outside Karachi in 1990, and now disburses microloans across the country and designs sewage systems, nurtures sanitation and drinking water initiatives and provides city planning in 15 Pakistani metros.

A model approach

Self-help is a term heard often in the halls of the OPP's small warren of offices, and it's not an empty catch phrase. An afternoon stroll through Orangi in mid-April found a man digging sewage trenches with his sons - he was connecting his home to the township drainage system. A couple dozen youths gathered in a sweltering living room to learn math. Up and down the lanes were small businesses and residents working on new home construction.

Many of these projects were initially funded or have been supported by OPP. Yet nowhere could a visitor find a logo or stamp, or any sign of the group's helping hand.

"OPP is only a facilitator of the people's agenda," said Rahman, explaining that the initiative should come from the people and OPP's work should remain invisible.

"It's the people's work," he explained. "We are only a little actor in between who provides a little social and technical guidance."

OPP aims to support community initiatives with social and technical guidance and encourage partnerships between people and governments. To be sustainable, projects must involve local resources and funds.

"We say the government, instead of partnering with the World Bank and ADB [the Asian Development Bank], should partner with the people because that is where it's sustainable," said Rahman. "The people's work provides a model of decentralized privation."

Development theorists and practitioners from across the world come to Orangi to study that model. A recent glance at the visitor's book found the signatures of representatives from the ADB and doctoral candidates in development from the Frankfurt School of Economics.

"The OPP is seen widely to be a success," said development analyst Syed Mohammed Ali, a former fellow at the Open Society Institute, a think tank based in New York City. "The component sharing approach of the OPP has been supported by the World Bank and the Lodhran Pilot Project, also funded by the World Bank, has subsequently adapted the OPP model of providing sewage in dense urban settings to the rural areas of southern Punjab."


The fruits of their labor

Education has been one of the Orangi residents' more impressive initiatives. Fed up with Karachi's useless public schools and too poor to pay for private schools or tutors, hundreds of Orangi youths set up small schools in their cramped living rooms throughout the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Without funding from the government, or even from their parents, most barely stayed afloat.

Starting in 1996 OPP distributed Rs 3,000 (US$45) grants to extend verandas, purchase books or provide a cooler and fan. OPP initially supported 350 schools. Some 50 failed, but the rest survive to this day, with many more coming on board. In early 2008, OPP helped several schools create joint savings accounts. After only a few months one of the accounts had a balance of Rs 180,000 (US$2,800).

"Now many of the schools are self-sustaining or dig into their savings whenever they need funds," said Rahman.

Those savings accounts will soon be linked to OPP's microfinance program, which is run by the Orangi Charitable Trust. Begun in 1986, the program has handed out 21,000 loans to some 68,000 clients. Loans support ongoing businesses and average around Rs 12,000 (US$190).

"We work not just in Orangi, but across Pakistan," said Nylah Ghias, the program's co-director. "We've supported a wide variety of businesses and created hundreds of jobs."

Nearly every other Orangi home hosts a small business: A mother of eight may string together fake flowers into garlands to sell in the market. Boys as young as 10 embroider silk shawls with sequins and intricate designs. Young men pound and stitch faux leather into wallets.

As it grew and succeeded - with a 97.5 percent recovery rate - the microlending program attracted considerable attention. The Sindh Microfinance Bank and the Pakistan Poverty Elevation Fund have become contributors.

Still, OPP manages a slim budget of PRs 6 million (about US$92,000). Initially funded wholly by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International - the very bank run by the friend who brought Khan to Orangi - OPP's financial backing now comes mainly from two European charity organizations.

The government lends an ear

From the beginning, OPP's relations with Islamabad were hardly cozy.

"At first they thought we were real fools, working here," Rahman recalled. "We'd come and visit and they'd offer respect to Dr. Khan and give us tea and feed us but they would never listen to us; they thought this was the work of great consultants."

The World Bank and the ADB designed and managed the majority of major development projects across Pakistan throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. Then, the Islamabad government appeared to believe developers and planners had to be born and educated abroad. Times have changed.

"Now it's a case that they need us," Rahman said.

The Pakistan government recently adopted OPP's S3 sewage plan for all of Karachi, a bustling Arabian Sea port of some 15 million. In a first, the entire project cost of $1.2 million will be provided by the government - no donor funds will be needed.

Further, the government is implementing OPP sewage and urban planning ideas in cities across the country, and regularly turns to OPP engineers for advice and input.

Pushing the people's agenda further

Rahman is already looking ahead to a new challenge.

"We are seeking expansion, but our strategy is different," she said. Rahman wants to strengthen non-governmental organizations and build stronger relationships between the people, NGOs and government. "In the future we'd like to be less us-oriented, more partner-oriented," she said.

The director was asked if OPP represented a replicable model.

"Our work in itself is based on what people are doing," Rahman said. "You have to respect it, learn from it; the work tells us where to go, and we're always talking and listening."

She recently visited Namibia to observe a project modelled on OPP. The major difference was that the Namibian government controlled the design and the cost estimates.

"Who funds and who designs the work is the make or break factor," Rahman explained, shaking her head. "People do it better, all the time."

-- posted on devex.com on 18 July 2008

World Bank Water Project Imperils Pakistan Fisherfolk

Mallah fisherman desperate for a good catch at Zero Point, a popular Badin district fishing spot. Photo: David Lepeska

By David Lepeska

HAJI HAJAM, Pakistan: John Wall has warned about poverty in Pakistan for years. "Poverty is an ethical concept, not a statistical one," the World Bank country director for Pakistan wrote in a 2006 editorial. "This clustering of Pakistan's population just above and just below the poverty line implies that families are quite vulnerable to falling into poverty with the slightest run of bad luck."

Wall cited drought and illness as examples of that luck, but the fisherfolk of southern Pakistan's Badin district ran into a more destructive and unnatural type of misfortune: a faulty World Bank project.

A vast alluvial plain unmarked by hills or rivers, Badin is one of Sindh province's poorer districts by most socio-economic measures - health care, education, infant mortality, income. Within Badin, no area is worse off than the coastal dhands, or shallow estuary lakes. The average family size is six, and many of them live on less than 200 rupees (about US$3) per day. Electricity coverage is minimal. Unemployment is rampant, eight out of 10 locals are illiterate and the nearest clinic is 40 kilometers away. Yet for centuries thousands of Mallah, or fisherman, families have called this soggy, desolate land home.

Those days may be numbered.

In 1984 the World Bank initiated the Left Bank Outfall Drain (LBOD) program to "reverse the deterioration of the land resource base caused by waterlogging and salinity." The key component was the construction of a 300 km outfall drain, or tidal link, from eastern Sindh into the Arabian Sea. Seen as the first stage of major regional drainage overhaul, the project received more than $1 billion from the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Saudi Fund for Development and others.

By 1997, when the World Bank closed the project and replaced it with the National Drainage Program (NDP), agricultural production had perked up along the north end of the drain. Some farmers had returned after seeking work in urban areas because of waterlogged, saline farmland.

But in the summer of 1999, heavy rains burst through the drain and destroyed thousands of acres of farmland. In 2003, widespread flooding wrought even more havoc, killing at least 50 villagers, inundating 75 villages and displacing about 50,000 locals. Damage to 1.5 million acres of farmland in Thatta and Badin districts - near the southern end of the drain - resulted in dislocation and extensive economic losses. Because of high salinity in the ground water, drinking water became scarce across the region.

In 2005, the World Bank began to investigate the program failures at the request of local leaders. Its inspection panel concluded in a July 2006 report that the bank violated six safeguard policies and in the process caused heavy damage in the coastal areas.

"Throughout design, construction and operation of LBOD and NDP," the investigators wrote, "social and environmental aspects were largely overlooked or downplayed. In particular, the Panel found that the Project paid inadequate attention to the people and environment downstream of the irrigation and drainage system in southern Sindh."

Perhaps most damning was the finding that "significant technical mistakes were made during the design of the Tidal Link." To avoid crossing into Indian territory, the designers routed the tidal link in a southwesterly direction, towards the Indus Delta and the Arabian Sea. In doing so they went against the natural slope of the land - south-southeast to the Rann of Kutch - and routed the drain across the dhands and into the powerful monsoon winds. Devised by Mott MacDonald, a British engineering consultancy contracted by the World Bank, and implemented by the government of Pakistan, this directional shift is at the root of the trouble caused by the LBOD.

The dhands have lost some 40 percent of their water in the past decade, according to Action Aid Pakistan. Salinity has increased because of the constant sea linkage. And with 54 breaches in the tidal link, floods are a constant worry.

"If you spend $1 billion it should result in a substantive change in people's lives for the better," said Badin native Mustafa Talpur of Water Aid Pakistan. "It's not just the people, the whole environment and ecology is worse."

World Bank management responded to the panel's findings with a three-pronged action plan: a livelihoods component called the Sindh Coastal Areas Development Program; an ecological component to improve and maintain the integrity and bio-diversity of the dhands; and an irrigation component, the Sindh Water Sector Improvement Project.

"At the time the project was designed, the emphasis was on getting the biggest benefit for farmers by reducing salinity and water logging to expand irrigated areas," Wall said at the 2006 release of the action plan. "The very poorest people outside the irrigation and drainage system were neglected."

Nearly two years later, locals said they were still being neglected.

"We asked them to address the root cause of the disaster and change the direction of the drain - they refused," said Talpur. "We asked them to consult with locals - they did not. We asked that the livelihoods program target all the affected villages - it does not."

Talpur spoke about the district's troubles at last year's World Bank meetings in Washington, D.C., but said he came away with little more than empty promises.

On an April afternoon at Zero Point, a popular dhands fishing spot, dozens of haggard and rail-thin Mallah complained about a steady decline of fish. In the nearby village of Haji Hajam, one fisherman cited a 60 percent drop in his catch.

"My family fishing here for five generations," said Moula Bux Mallah, 46, speaking in Sindhi.

He was sitting on a charpoy, or raised cot, surrounded by a couple dozen village children - eight of whom were his own.

"Now it is hard to catch enough to feed my family, and I have thought about leaving," he said.

Nurri Lagoon, which used to be 20,000 acres of shallow water, full of fish and home to a bird sanctuary, has shrunk to a quarter of its former size. Fishing has dropped between 70 percent and 80 percent. In Ahmed Rajo, a village along the northern edge of the dhands, a farmer named Assim said with output for rice down 40 percent, he switched some of his fields to sunflowers.

Badin native Abdul Salam Memon, secretary of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, said farmers have shifted thousands of acres of rice and sugarcane fields to sunflowers because they require less water.

"It makes about the same profit," Memon said. "But the problem is that there is less food to eat."

The World Bank's latest progress report reveals high salinity, increasingly irrevocable ecological damage, and dhands threatened by storm surges and high tides.

"The drainage system is grossly inadequate and poorly maintained," said the report, released in early 2008. "The system does not have the capacity to carry even a nominal increase in precipitation."

This in a land where rainfall is highly unpredictable and monsoon rains dominate from July to September.

The plight of coastal area villagers has worsened.

"The abject and pervasive poverty and limited livelihood opportunities of the people living and depending on the Badin dhands needs to be addressed," the researchers wrote.

Thus far, the bank's action plan has focused on building community action groups, helping develop local livelihoods and extending credit to poor villagers. According to the World Bank report, "The problem is that the dhand area communities are too weak to benefit from such a program; the program strategy needs to be re-thought to reach these poorest of the poor."

As the World Bank prepares to spend an additional $9 billion on new water projects in Pakistan, perhaps it should first repair the damage done in Badin. Talpur called it a "moral disaster." John Wall might call it an ethical one.

For the fisherfolk of the dhands it's just reality.

-- posted on devex.com on 01 July 2008

As Decision Makers Dither, Pakistan Water Crisis Deepens

A woman with her children in Badin district, an area of Sindh province facing acute water troubles. Photo: David Lepeska



By David Lepeska

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Water taps choke and spit. Irrigation canals dry up, shrinking farm output and making food scarce. Suddenly fallow regions are depopulated as villagers migrate to urban areas. Blackouts and drinking water shortages hit Karachi and Lahore. Hungry, thirsty, desperate peoples jostle - violence surges, the country falls apart.

As water becomes increasingly scarce across Pakistan, this apocalyptic scenario is not far from what experts envision.

"The very sustainability of Pakistan as an independent nation may be at stake, as shortages could lead to increased social discontent and disharmony amongst the federation and the provinces," a May 2008 World Bank report on Pakistani infrastructure warned.

With a population expected to shoot from today's 170 million to 220 million by 2015, the country's already weak water storage capacity will become woefully inadequate in the very near future. The problem is particularly acute in a developing nation that relies on water not only for drinking and agricultural production, but also for energy. Pakistan is already facing a 4,000 MW power shortage and will likely require several hydro-electric plants to satisfy demand.

Speaking in late April at a conference on the water crisis in Lahore, Sindh Water Council Chairman Hafiz Zahoor ul Hassan Dahir said a lack of water could devastate the country.

"Pakistan could become Somalia or Ethiopia," he said.

In 2007, the World Bank listed Pakistan among 17 nations facing acute water shortages and noted that the country had used up nearly all of its surface and groundwater. Indeed, nearly half the population has no local access to safe drinking water. One quarter of irrigated farmland suffers from acute salinity.

"Unless plans are put in place urgently," the World Bank report concluded, "these critical shortages will continue to undermine the efforts to improve socio-economic indicators and to reduce poverty."

But which plans, or more accurately, whose? The bank has put forth several ideas and the government is discussing at least two mega dams. Various independent experts and non-governmental organizations have countered with smaller, community-based water storage and usage schemes. But as Pakistan works to achieve a bright, democratic future, none has received widespread approval. The hesitation may be warranted.

If At First You Don't Succeed…

Pakistan's recent history of World Bank water projects is less than stellar. After $1 billion and 13 years of construction between 1984 and 1997, the Left Bank Outfall Drain collapsed under storm surges in 1999 and again in 2003. The LBOD project was financed by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Saudi Fund and U.K.'s Department for International Development, among others, and implemented by the Pakistani government. It preceded the World Bank's National Drainage Program, which mostly failed to undo the damage. Progress reports and a bank-led investigation found that the poorly designed canal had irrevocably damaged the fragile ecosystem of the coastal estuaries, failed to benefit most local groups, and made life more difficult for the poorest of the poor.

More recently, a $130 million emergency rehabilitation project for an aging reservoir called the Taunsa Barrage, also backed by the World Bank and executed by Islamabad, led to forced displacements without adequate compensation, severe river erosion, and a wall breach that killed several villagers. Locals are pushing for an independent commission to examine the failures and provide reparations.

Even the Tarbela dam, widely touted as a success, has its faults. Completed in 1976 some 50 kilometers up the Indus River from Islamabad, the dam has effectively stored water for agricultural use for some 30 years.

It has reduced seasonal flooding, but also severely curtailed downstream water supply: The flow of the mighty Indus River, which supplies 90 percent of Pakistan's water, fell to one-fifteenth of what it was in 1947, according to the Water and Power Development Authority of Pakistan (WAPDA). Further, the waters of the Indus carry a great deal of silt. Bank and government experts agree that within three years, the Tarbela dam will become useless because its reservoir will have filled completely with sediment.

Other water projects have faced problems from the start, including the plan, approved in 1953, to create a new dam in northwest Punjab's Kalabagh District. Design and paperwork were completed in 1984 and construction was set to begin with U.N. Development Program assistance, World Bank supervision, and WAPDA execution.

Then the real trouble began. Sindh legislators worried that construction of the dam, occurring far upstream in Punjab Province - which contains more than half of Pakistan's population and is considered its bread basket - would curtail their water supply. Two other provinces, Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier Province, soon joined the chorus with the former alleging rule by Punjab fiat and the latter downplaying the project's anticipated benefit. In 2005, President Pervez Musharraf overruled the objections and declared the government would go ahead with the project. But construction had not begun when a new government was voted into office this February. Some 55 years after it was conceived the Kalabagh dam exists only on paper as Pakistan's water crisis deepens.

Despite these hiccups, in late April the World Bank announced it would spend $8 billion on the construction of the Daimer-Bhasha dam, as well as two related Indus River projects at $500 million each. The offering represents one of the bank's largest single country loans - to a nation with a poor track record for mega-development projects.

Bigger May Not Be Better

Why have these large projects repeatedly disappointed? There's enough blame to go around.

"The state is culpable, the multilaterals are culpable of reproducing the failure time and again," said Assim Sajjad Akhtar, history professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and a leader of the People's Rights Movement, a left-wing political group. "You have a very deeply entrenched bureaucracy, and their planning conception is very colonial, paternalistic, top-down; if you try to give advice, you're not helping, you're committing sedition."

Projects are designed in a very short-sighted manner, as illustrated by the impending Tarbela dam failure, Akhtar said. The government rarely makes design plans public or explains how funds are being spent, he added, and the resulting constructions are often faulty and spur discontent among locals.

"The World Bank, Asian Development Bank, all the donors refuse to accept that they are somewhat responsible for what happens," Akhtar said. "They are the ones who describe this whole development and liberalization paradigm as interconnected, but whenever they fail they say it's not their responsibility."

Development analyst Syed Mohammad Ali, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, put it this way: "When you go for mega-projects you have mega-squandering."

The World Bank offered a laundry list of Pakistani shortcomings in a May 2008 report: a lack of adequate education and skills training; a lack of government commitment, vision, planning, and budgeting ability; corrupt contracting procedures; no protection against adverse physical conditions or external processes; delays in payment and absence of credit; and unfair competition from government-linked contractors and consultants.

Ayesha Siddiqa, visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that the real machinations occur behind the scenes and that Pakistani farmers have been completely removed from shaping policy. According to Siddiqa, politicians and bureaucrats do not much care whether projects succeed.

"The whole thing is political," Siddiqa said, citing the example of Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister and a former Farmer's Association of Pakistan leader.

"Instead of putting him in charge of agriculture, they put him in charge of foreign policy," she noted. "There's a great gap between growers and policy, between rural and urban populations, and those gaps will only be narrowed once the government realizes there is a problem."

Stemming the Crisis

To Akhtar, the solution is obvious.

"Don't do big projects, do small projects," he said.

Small, community-led projects are more cost-effective, he argued, as well as more ecologically sustainable and less divisive.

The water minister of neighboring India has expressed similar views.

"The era of big dams is over," Saifuddin Soz told the Indian Express in late May. "We should have small dams and try and do something on rainwater harvesting and recharging ground water."

Pakistan faces a more severe water crisis than India, but the minister's views are relevant.

If the mega-projects were to continue, program managers should take into greater consideration the needs of affected residents, Akhtar suggested.

"Large projects can only work if the state actually does it [sic] in a manner where people are not looked at simply as objects to be transformed," he said. "They have to be the end, not the means."

Siddiqa takes more of a macro approach to improving water management.

"The problem with this government: It doesn't have a clear-cut agenda," she said. "To begin with, they have to define their plan to develop the rural areas, one that appreciates the gaps in the Pakistan economy and seeks to bridge them."

Projects should include lining all canals to prevent water seepage and switching from flood irrigation to the drip-sprinkle approach Israel uses, Siddiqa said. To break the industrialists' monopoly, farmers should shift away from cash crops. Siddiqa acknowledged such efforts would be costly, but said that returns would validate the expense.

Ali, the development researcher, recommended a more holistic approach that takes into account local needs and seasonal river flows, government capabilities, and donors efforts.

The panel that investigated the failure of the World Bank's LBOD and National Drainage Program seems to agree.

Its report "highlights the need to take a holistic view of water and drainage systems to ensure risks are identified and assessed and harm to people and the natural environment minimized," panel chair Edith Brown Weiss said upon the report's release in 2006. "We trust that the Bank's Action Plan will be implemented in close consultation with affected people."

But the bank appears to have other ideas. Despite identifying a long list of inadequacies with Pakistan's capacity to build and sustain its infrastructure, the bank suggested in a recent report that Pakistan "needs to establish frameworks under which it will deliver say Bhasha, Kalabagh, Karachi Mass Transit, or other large infrastructure projects and procure teams based on ‘framework' agreements."

Thus, the World Bank, which employs some of the most well-educated and skilled development experts, is counting on a series of working agreements between designers, builders, and suppliers to curb the failures that have destroyed thousands of livelihoods and bedeviled $1 billion in projects, including the LBOD.

Whether it's small, community-led projects, integrated, holistic approaches or mega-project partnerships, Pakistan needs to act soon.

"The ethnic divide is huge in Pakistan to begin with, and water is increasingly a source of that conflict," Akhtar said.

In newly settled regions and along provincial borders and shared irrigation canals, the tensions are particularly high.

"These areas are waiting to explode," he explained. "It's a time bomb."

--- posted on devex.com on 01 July 2008