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A recent report in the Canberra Times heavily criticised the Australian Government’s use of the Australian Development Scholarships Scheme. This isn’t surprising as the Australian Development Scholarship Scheme essentially enables the children of ruling elites in developing countries to access a university education in Australian Universities which is funded through the aid budget at an average cost of $105,000 for each scholarship. The reporter, Markus Mannheim, claims that the expenditure on the scholarship program accounts for an incredible $1 in every $9 spent by the Australian Aid Program.

These scholarships enable the children of powerful elites to gain a university education in Australia at the Australian taxpayers expense. This education is provided under the assumption that scholarship recipients will use their education to strengthen governance when they return to their own country.

Unfortunately there has never been an independent evaluation of the impact that this program has had on the lives of poor and excluded people and its contribution to lasting social change.

The result is that no one has any idea of whether this program actually impacts on the poor and excluded people of the world or whether it’s an expensive white elephant that makes Australia’s political leaders feel good.

Read the rest of this entry »

“L-N-G” are three letters that attract people’s attention here in Papua New Guinea. For most, LNG – which stands for Liquefied Natural Gas – resonates with forced land resumption, displacement, disharmony and greed – everything that is not in the interests of the local people.

“The guns are pointed at their [local people] heads!” exclaims a community development worker. I had asked her whether people in villages were able to refuse foreign companies from exploiting their land for LNG and other mining projects. “How can they [local people]? They have guns pointing at them.”

The sight of LNG workers is what I immediately noticed as I stepped off the Polynesian Blue flight from Brisbane to Port Moresby. In an aircraft carrying roughly 200 people, I count about ten women including myself. Most of the men – who are Caucasian – dressed in their neatly ironed short-sleeve business shirts – either chequered or stripes – long trousers and boots, carrying black laptop bags are employees or consultants brought over to PNG by the mining companies.

One LNG project in PNG is being led by ExxonMobil, who in 1989 spilled up to 750,000 barrels of oil off Prince William Sound, Alaska. It is deemed to be one of the major environmental disasters in global history.

The project, estimated to be US$15 billion, involves the construction of a gas pipeline starting from the Southern Highlands to a proposed LNG plant in Port Moresby with the first phase to be completed by 2014. The Consortium led by ExxonMobil includes Oil Search, The Abu Dhabi Government’s International Petroleum Investment Company and Santos (the latter recently received Queensland Government approval for its LNG project in the Surat Basin). The race to supply LNG to energy hungry Asian countries is on between PNG, Australia and Qatar.

The last article in the 2010 4th edition of the PNG Resources (a quarterly report on PNG’s petroleum and mineral industry) which happened to be amongst the collection of ‘Welcome to PNG’ glossy magazines in my hotel room, has a short interview with the ANZ’s Chief Pacific and Asia Economist, Paul Guenwald.

‘Mr Guenwald saw PNG over the next ten years performing well,’ it stated, followed by “The reason is the LNG project, which if it’s managed properly should be able to keep PNG’s [economic] growth rate relatively high” – an example of a response entrenched in the neoliberal model of development; the exact type of development that local groups have fought and continue to fight against.

There is no hiding that my research could inform ActionAids’s possible engagement in the Pacific region. Whilst it is easy to ‘conduct research’ with clear time, budgetary and organisational parameters, we have to also think how our potential research partners work, their model of engaging with the community and how they can benefit from the partnership. We also need to critically reflect on our role as outsiders, what beliefs and assumptions we bring, and our expectations. Will the relationship between ActionAid and the partner organisation be equal and fair? Will both parties be aware of their responsibilities and accountability to each other? Will the partnership be mutually beneficial?

All too often do researchers come into a community with their strict agendas, then leave a short time later, with the local people feeling as though they may never see or hear from the researchers again. That very research may be critical in informing government or organisational decisions (or its remnants may remain as dust-collecting reports in bookshelves) but the information never returns to the people in a way that can be used to help them move forward. Then another one year down the track, another researcher arrives to the community and then leaves again.

I don’t want to be that researcher. And I don’t want to be doing research that will not benefit the very people who share their knowledge and stories with me. I have so many more questions running through my head, which makes me think about how we do our research. I’m sure there will be even more questions tomorrow.

The Libyan crisis is prompting a broad debate on the need for international intervention in the country which includes the possible establishment of a no fly zone to stop Moammar Gadhafi killing his own people from the air.

The UN Security Council is still considering the international community’s response to the Libyan crisis and it is essential that the Council bases its response around the Responsibility to Protect or (R2P) doctrine. R2P originated from the work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). R2P was embraced at the United Nations World Summit in 2005 by a unanimous declaration of the UN General Assembly and was reaffirmed in April 2006 by UN Security Council Resolution 1674.

R2P establishes unprecedented international responsibilities to prevent and respond to situations where war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity are imminent or in progress.

R2P rests on two basic premises: first, that State sovereignty implies responsibility for the protection of its citizens; and second, that the international community has a responsibility to protect civilians when a State is unwilling or unable to prevent or stop abuses inflicted as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or State failure. R2P comprises a continuum of measures for the international community ranging from prevention to rebuilding.

The people of Libya are calling for the international community to protect them from a State that is inflicting human rights abuses on its own people. It is essential that the United Nations Security Council hears these calls, has the courage to endorse the application of R2P in Libya and delivers a mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to establish and enforce a no fly zone over Libya.

Tony Abbott’s suggestion of cutting aid to Indonesia to fund Queensland flood reconstruction was met with immediate fury from aid experts, who declared the decision morally bankrupt.

Yet Mr Abbott’s announcement has raised an important issue that should not simply be brushed under the carpet: the need for aid effectiveness.

When he announced the proposed cut, Mr Abbott said funding would be “deferred” subject to a full review of the effectiveness of the program.

The aid budget has been steadily increasing since the Howard Government committed Australia to achieving the Millennium Development Goals in 2000.

In short, the goals commit Australia to working with the international community to halve hunger, get kids into school and ensure families have access to basic health care.

Part of our commitment to reaching the goals is to increase our aid budget to 0.5 percent of gross national income by 2015. In real terms, that means doubling our aid program over the next five years.

That makes the need for ensuring the money is well spent all the more important. We shouldn’t just be spending more money, but be spending it more wisely.

Effective aid is a reward in itself, as it delivers justice to more of the poor more quickly. But ineffective aid not only slows the efforts to end poverty, leaving the entire aid program at the mercy of short sighted politicians.

Currently, our aid program is based on the belief that economic growth is a primary driver for eradicating extreme poverty. But as ActionAid’s experience in countries like India shows, economic growth alone is not sufficient for the eradication of poverty.

Often economic growth simply exacerbates inequalities between the rich and poor.

Over a billion people today live in absolute poverty, the majority of them in middle income countries, such as China and India, where the unjust distribution of resources is an acute violation of human rights and results in high levels of inequality and injustice.

To address this, we need to be less concerned with the wealth of nations and much more focused on the fundamental rights of human beings – in particular women, who universally bear the greatest burden of poverty.

Take the example of a forced marriage in a country like Afghanistan, in which AusAID has spent $106 million this year. The marriage of young girls is common practice to solve disputes or to ease financial pressures on families.

She won’t have further opportunities for education and will have children young, continuing the cycle of poverty. She will never have a say in her government, won’t own land and will probably never see a government service provided to her.

This cycle entrenches poverty and it can be broken. It is exactly the cycle that Australia’s aid program has the ability to confront.

Countless studies have shown that women are the key to ending poverty. They prioritise educating all their children, both boys and girls; when in leadership roles they reinvest in the community at higher rates than men and it has been proven that educated women’s children live longer.

That’s why non-government organisations such as ActionAid have increasingly put women at the heart of all of their work. With sustained, strategic support, women are the key to eradicating poverty.

The Australian aid program needs to have strategies to explicitly confront the oppression of women and put women at the centre of the program to maximise the effectiveness of our aid.

If we take this direction I’m confident the results will speak for themselves and Australians will be justifiably proud of their efforts to end extreme poverty.

“The world faces a crisis of civilisation, a systemic crisis, a complex and inter-connected crisis of the economy, of the local and global architecture of power, of values and of the environment” Candido Grzybowski (ActionAid International Board Member)

ActionAid has recently made a submission to the review of Australia’s Aid Program that has three main focus areas; 1. a focus on poor and excluded people rather than poor countries; 2.  the need for the Australian Aid Program to use a human rights based approach to poverty eradication and development and 3. centring the program on women’s rights. 

ActionAid believes that greater attention must be paid to the needs of poor and excluded people, regardless of their geographical location, when determining the Australian aid program’s priorities and focus. There is a need to shift the program’s focus from “poor countries” to “poor people” as identified in recent reports from the Institute of Development Studies in the UK. This would lead to an increased AusAID focus on countries with high proportions of poor and excluded people. Over a billion people today live in absolute poverty, the majority of them in middle income countries, for example China and India, where the unjust distribution of resources is an acute violation of human rights. For example if Australia focused on “poor countries” there would be a substantial increase to a country such as Zimbabwe that scores lowest in the human development index whereas by looking at “numbers of poor and excluded people” would see an enhanced focus on countries with the most poor and excluded people which could be a middle income country such as India that has hundreds of millions of poor and excluded people.  The point is not that the program needs to make choices between countries such as India and Zimbabwe but rather that there is a need to focus on working with greater numbers of poor and excluded people.

The underlying causes of poverty and injustice are gendered. The fact that women are living in poverty because of their socially ascribed roles means that they have less access to land, education, networks, technology, transport, cash, decision-making and control over their bodies and safety, which keep them poorer. Violations of women’s human rights are the most pervasive to the extent they are perceived as normal. ActionAid is demanding a specific focus on women’s economic and social empowerment and on promoting gender equality. Strategies to explicitly confront these different causes of poverty and injustice are therefore essential to enable the program to have a real impact on the lives of women, their communities and to maximise aid effectiveness. This is understood globally and in all major international agreements, but the rhetoric abounds. Australia should commit to “walking the talk” ensuring the program’s work in every area, on every issue and in every campaign prioritises women’s rights.

Within a few years, in many parts of Africa, half the population will be under 20 years old. This could be a catalyst for rapid economic take off, if investments are made now in education and job creation, but it could equally lead to millions of disaffected youth, contributing to instability and the potential failure of States. Increasingly those struggling with poverty and injustice are concentrated in urban areas, living in often unsafe illegalised slums without basic services, facing unemployment or under-employment and being confronted with the constant threat of forced eviction. In many countries, the aid business, working in the name of poverty, continues to be part of the problem, undermining democracy, fragmenting efforts and contributing to privatisation processes. The focus of the Australian aid program needs to shift from an economic growth paradigm to a paradigm that focuses on equity and justice, particularly between men and women, taking into account the vulnerabilities of people that have not benefited and/or have been further marginalised by existing aid and MDG efforts.

Supporting governance reform is imperative and vital to poverty eradication. In too many countries, there is an active shrinking of democratic space for effective citizen engagement, through terrorism laws, legislation against civil society, a backlash on women’s rights, constraints on access to information and the curtailing of the freedom of the press. AusAID should engage both institutions and civil society to expand democratic space and promote accountability from governments, and from Australian NGOs, to poor and excluded people. Governance reform efforts should not focus on states alone but rather on a variety of actors, including but not limited to, electoral commissions, the media, women’s groups, human rights groups, and civil society organisations.

ActionAid is arguing that humanitarian protection should be made a priority in both conflict and natural disaster situations. The establishment of a Humanitarian Protection Unit within AusAID would enable the development and implementation of a humanitarian protection policy and framework that reflects Australia’s international obligations to protection of civilians, as well as supporting the complementary work of mandated and non-mandated protection actors in humanitarian emergencies. Government response to humanitarian protection should ensure the integration of protection objectives into all humanitarian programming, as well include preventive and responsive programming for particular groups in line with relevant UN Security Council resolutions, for example SCRs 1325, 1889 and 1612.

I’ll be in a meeting with the Aid Effectiveness Review Team in Canberra on Thursday, along with most CEOs of Australian NGOs working on development issues, and this will be a great chance to press our views a bit more. More on this later!!!

I’ve been in Johannesburg this last week attending an inspiring conference that developed the foundations of ActionAid International’s new strategy to take us from 2012-2017. The conference was attended by 120 members of ActionAid’s senior leadership with every day seeing a different venue which ranged from the simultaneously shocking and inspiring Constitution Hill, to the Origin Centre at Wits University to the Apartheid Museum and ending up at Soccer City on the outskirts of Soweto.

So what was the outcome of all this thinking, talking and fun, well on Friday we reached a broad consensus on the future direction of ActionAid and I thought I should share this with you.

Four key focus areas of the future strategy emerged:

1. To empower women to claim and defend their human rights and control over their bodies, time, labour and environment.

2. Reasserting communal control over mother earth’s resources through international and national agreements.

3. Catalysing people’s movements to guarantee education, social protection for poor and excluded people

4. Strengthening the leadership of women vulnerable to disaster and conflict and working with governments to protect people’s rights during and after major disasters.

This was backed by a suggested definition of our theory of change which whilst it needs further work, already neatly nails what ActionAid does;

“when people struggling with poverty and injustice are empowered and they work collectively with organisations and movements, campaigning together for structural and behavioural change, they will be able to achieve and enjoy their rights and overcome injustice”.

This is a step forward and takes us to using a rights based approach to enable poor and excluded people to secure justice. ActionAid’s role in this should be to catalyse people’s movements to overcome extreme poverty and extreme injustice and suggests we should be transforming and connecting movements across the world to achieve change.

The consensus was that ActionAid needs to take a more robust role in challenging the aid and development sector to stop the rampant spread of the privatisation of poverty and to challenge governments, corporates and even other NGOs that have little or no accountability to poor and excluded people.

There is also an emerging consensus that we need to enable movements to take advantage of the increasingly frequent shocks to the globe, whether they be climate, financial, or food.

Our commitment to linking our programming and campaigning work at the local level was restated as the basis for our national engagement and upwards from there. This is the core of this organisation and it was exciting to see the enthusiasm to build on our great work to date with local communities in changing their lives through programming and political action.

Above all there is a genuine excitement to build on what makes ActionAid different to others which is our federal model of governance where our members whether they be Australia or Uganda have an equal voice in our Annual Assembly that guides the strategy and policy of ActionAid. I’m so proud to be a part of this organisation and also proud that Bill Armstrong from ActionAid Australia’s Board is the elected Convenor of the 2011 Assembly Meeting in Tanzania in July which will be responsible for the final review and approval of the new International Strategy.

I’ll be writing more as we go through this journey and more soon on what this means for the continuing evolution of ActionAid Australia.

I’ve been in Bangladesh this past week with three members of the ActionAid Australia Board, Kevin Bailey, Nichola Davies and Quang Luu, learning about the work of ActionAid Bangladesh and sharing our Board’s experience with the ActionAid Bangladesh Board as well as the Boards and Executive Committees of a number of our partner organisations in Bangladesh.

It has been an inspiring week that has focused on Women’s Rights and I’d like to thank Tracey Spicer for her guest post on women’s rights and follow this post up with a story from Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh most women are excluded from the lives of the community, excluded from all decision making in their community and systematically marginalised to the point where they have no human rights, such as the right to health and the right to education, and are therefore effectively less than human.

Against this backdrop we drove six hours from Dhaka to visit a number of communities in the Kushtia region. The highlight of the week was visiting a women’s reflect circle in a remote community 200 metres from the border with India. Reflect is a process developed by ActionAid that enables excluded and marginalised people to have a facilitated conversation that enables them to analyse the social, political and economic reasons that have led to their exclusion from society. The reflect circle we visited had 24 members (who were all women) and over a two year period the women in the circle have made the most amazing journey. Read the rest of this entry »

On International Human Rights Day, it’s appropriate for us to focus on perhaps the most marginalised people in the world: the women of Afghanistan.

What I’d like to talk about is two-fold: The degree to which the slumberous and short-sighted international media contributes to the ongoing infantalisation and disempowerment of these women; and, conversely, how these women are using the tools of technology to fight back.

Before I explore the international perspective, please indulge me  to publicly lament the deliberate ignorance in the Australian media about Muslim women.

(I guess it’s a bit chicken-and-egg. Who started it? The audience or the talkback radio hosts? The readers or the editors of the tabloid newspapers? I fear it’s symbiotic)

But the puerile, racist and sexist comments about women who wear the burqa – well, frankly, if that’s what passes for informed public debate in this country, it’s a sad indictment indeed.

About 13 years ago, I had the great privilege of producing and presenting three documentaries on the work of NGOs in Kenya, Papua New Guinea and Bangladesh.

What struck me about the latter experience was the nine-hour drive from the capital Dhaka to a remote village. I didn’t see one single, solitary woman by the side of the road. It was as if an entire gender was invisible. Read the rest of this entry »

Giant multinational brewer SABMiller – the company that brews Peroni and Grolsch and who owns 50 percent of Australia based Pacific Beverages – are avoiding an estimated A$30 million of taxes in Africa and India every year, enough money to educate a quarter-of-a-million African children, according to a new report  that we released in Austalia today.

The report, “Calling Time: Why SABMiller should stop dodging taxes in Africa” reveals how the company, which is the world’s second biggest brewer, uses a complex system of tax havens to siphon profits out of subsidiaries in developing countries, which, although not unlawful, deprives those governments of significant amounts of tax.

In Ghana, ActionAid found that SABMiller’s brewery has paid no income tax at all for the last two years. The most shocking part of this story is not the huge amounts of tax avoided, but the fact that one woman selling beer outside SABMiller’s brewery in Ghana paid more income tax last year than the multi-million dollar brewery.

SABMiller should stop using tax havens to drain money out of Africa. Instead it should aim to become a market leader for tax justice. Ghana, along with other developing countries, is trying to develop its tax system to fund essential services including schools and hospitals. The more money it can raise in tax, the less it needs to do to rely on aid to pay for public services. But while small businesses and traders are being brought into the tax system, big companies like SABMiller use their superior resources and multinational structures to find ways of avoiding tax.

One way in which SABMiller avoids tax is by holding valuable trademarks for African beers in Europe rather than in their country of origin. The cost of using the trademarks helps eat into the profits in the African subsidiary, so less tax is paid there.
Other ways of avoiding tax include paying “management fees”, mostly to Switzerland, and routing its procurement services via a subsidiary based in Mauritius.

ActionAid has launched a campaign in Australia demanding that SABMiller stop using tax havens. It says tackling tax avoidance should be a top priority for the company’s corporate responsibility programme and that it should come out publicly against the use of tax havens. ActionAid also wants SABMiller to make its tax affairs more transparent by publishing a basic set of accounts in every country in which it operates. This would act as a deterrent to tax dodging as companies currently use tax havens in secrecy and with impunity.

The truth is that SABMiller has avoided paying millions of dollars in tax to some of the poorest countries in the world. This has to change in order to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. Peroni and Grolsch drinkers are entitled to expect better from a company that claims to be committed to sustainable development.  So please help the people of Ghana and check out the email on our website that you can send to the CEO of Pacific Beverages demanding his support  in our campaign to stop SAB Miller dodging tax.

Help us make your beer taste better this festive season!!

The Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, has launched a comprehensive review of the Australian Aid Program to ensure that the program learns from its experience and becomes as effective and efficient as possible. The team here at ActionAid welcome the announcement as the international development assistance budget is expected to double between now and 2015 and there hasn’t been an independent review of the aid program since 1996.

ActionAid received some terrific media coverage yesterday and thanks to all media outlets for covering our impressions of this review. One area that received considerable attention was a recent post on this blog which questioned the concept of the aid program providing “value for money”. I completely stand by my original comment but probably should explain it a little more. I wholeheartedly support the view that the aid program should provide value for money on every Australian taxpayer dollar that is allocated to the aid budget. My question is who determines what value for money is?   The voices of people living in extreme poverty need to be the loudest voices when the government is determining how effectively Australian aid money is being used and each and every aid dollar should maximise the development outcomes for people living in extreme poverty. Given that we are working in complex political and social environments this is always going to be difficult to explain to the Australian taxpayer and we all need to get much better at doing this. For example the real drivers of social change in developing countries tend to be social movements who function in their own unique way and such movements rarely, if ever, comply with the traditional modus operandi of the aid community which is “provide resources, implement activity, monitor output and evaluate outcome.” This review would be doing international development a huge service if it were able to unpack these issues and suggest new approaches of enabling people living in poverty to have a loud voice in determining what they want from the aid program.

There are further concerns as the review seems to be based on the flawed notion that economic growth is the main driver of poverty alleviation. Whilst economic growth has been one of the main drivers for millions of people in China and India lifting themselves out of poverty, it has recently been noted that the high levels of economic growth haven’t done much for the bottom 20% in both countries who still live in humiliating poverty. The evidence from countries such as Nepal and Sri Lanka is that relatively low levels of economic growth have not constrained large increases in the numbers of people living in extreme poverty being able to access essential services such as health and education as a result of governments getting serious about providing services for the poorest. So maybe we shouldn’t gamble too much on economic growth as the main driver of poverty alleviation and instead focus on other issues that seem to be neglected such as human rights.

The words human rights are missing from the government announcements that I’m reading yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and accompanying covenants provide a clear framework to guide the aid program into the future. Other progressive donors such as DfID use a human rights based approach to poverty alleviation as a key driver of their programming work so maybe this review should have a good look at this as well as getting stuck into the issue of economic growth.

However my single biggest fear is that this team is not going to hear the voices of people living in poverty.  Sure I expect that the review team will be talking to all sorts of wise heads from the World Bank, the UN, NGOs and they might even come to talk to us at ActionAid. However I don’t expect that the review team will widely seek the views of the very people that the aid dollars are provided to help. Recently the Prime Minister announced that Australia would contribute some $500 million to education in Indonesia which would finance the reconstruction and building of thousands of schools. Australia has poured money into school rehabilitation and reconstruction over the last decade. Just maybe someone might go and ask the very poorest people in a country such as Indonesia whether the construction of these schools has helped their kids, particularly their girls, access education and enabled them to claim their basic human rights.

Now that would help demonstrate value for money!!