Aid and NGOs in a globalised world

Let me start with a couple of givens:

1. Official development assistance is at an all time low globally; private sector investment is now at least six times the level of aid, but is concentrated mostly in about 14 countries, including China and other SE Asian and Latin American countries. It cannot compensate for the very low level of aid to many countries.

2. One of the consequences of the pressures of globalisation and the widening inequalities is that there are more complex humanitarian emergencies. They may appear related to religion or ethnicity, but there are strong economic pressures behind most of the major conflict zones. Secondly, natural emergencies are having more devastating impacts as more people are trying to eke out livings in environmentally fragile or vulnerable environments. So one obvious role for aid is simply to deal with the growing number of disaster responses required. A growing proportion of aid budgets is going on these crises responses, rather than long-term development.

The main point I want to make about aid, NGOs, and long-term development is that to regulate globalisation, and transform it to a globalisation which fosters human development, we need to have a countervailing force. That force is the UN human rights system and the development agreements made in the UN system through the series of UN Summits and Conferences in the 1990s. These present an alternative framework for globalisation which NGOs and aid should be supporting and promoting. I will suggest that not all aid currently contributes to these goals, and NGOs must support those elements of aid which do, but critique those which contribute to the neo-liberal economic approach.

Let me start with the Human Rights System, which has been under criticism in Australia in the last week, but which many NGOs see as the key countervailing force in relation to orthodox economic globalisation. If economic institutions are pursuing policies which are leading to the undermining of human rights, what can we do?

The UN system is increasingly placing greater emphasis on economic, social and cultural rights, but the difficulty is that there is no effective mechanism for enforcement of these rights. The Special Rapporteur on Education, speaking in Geneva in June, discussed what could be done in relation to the requirement to pay user fees in primary schools in Mozambique, which is depriving some children of their right to education. She said that if she raised this with the Mozambican Government, they would tell her that this was a requirement of their Structural Adjustment Loan from the World Bank and IMF. So we need to go to the decision-makers in those institutions - the Executive Directors of the Bank and IMF - to ask them why they are supporting policies which contradict the upholding of human rights standards their countries accept.

So the role of aid, where it is used for loans in support of structural adjustment programs, should be to support, not reduce, peoples’ ability to enjoy their human rights.

The second area to focus on is how aid and NGOs can support the implementation of the set of UN goals agreed through the whole series of UN Conferences held in the 1990s, where widespread government agreements were made. We do not have to reinvent these - they are there, and agreed by governments already. I am thinking of the Earth Summit (Rio de Janiero), The World Conference on Women (Beijing), The Social Development Summit (Copenhagen), Children’s Summit (New York), Population and Development Conference (Cairo), Education for All Conference (Jomtien, Thailand), and of course the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna).

Many of the key goals from these conferences have also been encapsulated in the summary goals of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (the aid donor countries club). These are to achieve:

1. The proportion of people living in poverty in developing countries reduced by at least one-half by 2015.
2. Universal primary education in all countries by 2015.
3. Elimination of gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005.
4. The death rate for infants and children under the age of five years reduced in each developing country by two-thirds the 1990 level by 2015.
5. The rate of maternal mortality reduced by three-fourths the 1990 level by 2015.
6. Access to reproductive health services for all individuals of appropriate ages including safe and reliable family planning methods, as soon as possible and no later than the year 2015.
7. A national strategy for sustainable development, in the process of implementation in every country by 2005 to ensure that current trends in the loss of environmental resources are reversed at both global and national levels by 2015.

Development assistance can play a very positive role to help countries develop policies and implement programs to achieve these goals. But the emphasis must be on how aid dollars are used.

Aid programs and projects should themselves enhance peoples’ human rights, especially the rights of women and children.

We hear a lot about a human rights approach to development, but achieving it is quite a challenge. One area in which a rights-based approach is being developed is through the SPHERE Charter of Humanitarian Standards in Disaster Response. This sets out standards for aid delivery in emergency settings, based on a human rights framework. It is based on the view that even in disaster settings, when people are at their most vulnerable, they still have rights and entitlements.

These ideas about human rights approaches to aid need further enhancement in the area of long-term development. There has been some pioneering work by UNICEF and some other child-focussed agencies which have developed program responses based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Similarly, women’s NGOs have taken a strong rights-based approach to women’s development, using CEDAW as a basic tool.

So there are models, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Another area for aid to contribute is the strengthening of human rights institutions and human rights education. One major positive role for aid is to follow up the outcomes of the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights. One example currently being supported by Australian aid is the formation and development of the Asia-Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions. AusAID’s assistance to this important regional structure for National Human Rights Commissions has been extremely useful.

Other work may involve training of human rights professionals such as lawyers, judges, police and others about human rights conventions and the like. We still need to get more countries ratifying, but there is plenty to do where those ratifications have already been made. Another area for support is strengthening human rights NGOs. This is a most important factor in strengthening respect for human rights. NGOs are key human rights watchdogs and human rights educators. Support would also be valuable to assist countries to develop and implement National Plans of Action for Human Rights Education.

A further role for aid would be to assist in the development of codes for corporate behaviour in developing countries, and for NGOs or independent watchdogs to monitor compliance with them.

So there are roles for NGOs

• in advocacy
• in programming (modelling approaches and using these to leverage wider action and support) and
• in research on what aid is actually doing in relation to human rights.

Not all aid is assisting this alternative approach to globalisation. Some aid is supporting existing approaches to globalisation. Some funding goes to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, bodies involved in promoting the neo-liberal agenda. Of course, it appears that the World Bank is currently split over the kind of development it is supporting. Bilateral aid is also somewhat schizophrenic, as James Cornford’s study of Australian assistance to Laos illustrates.

In a recent study of Australian development assistance to Laos, Jonathon Cornford, of James Cook University, concludes that there have been two major areas in which Australian development organisations, supported by AusAID, have played an advocacy role in Laos:

(1) to engage in the processes of modernisation and integration into the global economy; and

(2) the advancement of rural livelihoods and well being.

Cornford argues that "ultimately these two areas of development advocacy lie on conflicting paths." The projects that reinforce the first trend are "governance" sector projects, which, he says, enhance the capacity of the Lao central government to implement programs to the detriment of rural localities.

Among the projects which he categorises as contributing to the first path - global integration- he nominates:

• the Friendship bridge, which is seen as a catalyst for sub-regional economic integration in line with ADB regional development directions
• assistance to Laos to enter ASEAN and AFTA in 1996/7
• assistance in the education sector, which is strongly biased to tertiary sector, English language training to key government Ministries, such as the ASEAN Department in the Dept of Foreign Affairs
• the Land Titling Project designed to develop land markets in a nation where usufructuary rights dominate.

Australia’s considerable contribution to the rural sector in Laos in the nineties included:

• the Lao Uplands Agricultural Development project
• two SCFA Projects in Xiagnabouli Province, in primary health care and integrated village development and
• Community Aid Abroad’s rural development and institutional strengthening project

The latter projects, he argues, have been particularly successful at improving rural lives.

Cornford concludes that development assistance should strengthen sectors of the state and/or civil society organisations that have the greatest potential to advance rural livelihoods. This, he says, includes local government strengthening and strengthening those central departments which themselves may promote a critique of current economic orthodoxy.

So it is not just the level of aid that we need to look at, but what part the aid is playing in supporting either the neo-liberal agenda or the one I outlined earlier in relation to human rights and human development.

If we really want to respond to the problems facing the poor, and genuinely listen to them, we might consider the four systemic and pervasive problems which the World Bank’s study of 60,000 poor people has identified. People living in poverty told the World Bank that

• corruption, "connections" and violation of human rights with impunity had to be tackled;
• in many countries they reported increasing levels of violence, crime, lawlessness, including violence inside as well as outside the home;
• they want a say - they want a chance to participate in decisions which affect their lives, not always to be on the receiving end of the latest edicts; and
• their livelihoods are precarious, even in some cases where poverty had actually decreased, they said their livelihoods were less secure.

Poor people want a focus on human rights and accountability. In particular they want a right to live free of violence. They want the right to participate and to more secure livelihoods.

Corruption must be tackled. Mahbub ul Haq estimated that five times as much capital flows out of South Asia because of corruption, as flows in as aid. The NGO Transparency International has been set up explicitly to address this issue of corruption.

NGOs focus on human rights and conflict resolution, but there is a need to strengthen the capacity of NGOs in this region in relation to these areas.

Peoples’ participation in projects is essential, but as decisions affecting people move further away from them, it is important that people participate in these international bodies which affect their lives.

Security of livelihood involves people having secure access to land and natural resources as well as access to jobs.

To conclude, to regulate globalisation and transform it to a globalisation for human development and human rights, we can use various elements of the UN system which are already there. We do not have to invent something new. And I have considered how aid can be schizophrenic, supporting both this more "human" globalisation and the neo-liberal globalisation. NGOs must advocate for those elements of aid which contribute to the transformation of globalisation, and which emphasise eradicating poverty and promotion of human rights, especially for the rural poor.