I wanted to share an incredible article I recently ran across, by Rosalind Eyben on Contestations: Dialogues on Women’s Empowerment:
“Recent years have seen a marked shift in official development discourse, with less emphasis on a rights-based approach and more on an efficiency approach to gender equality, a tone set by the World Bank’s 2006 action plan – ‘Gender equality is smart economics’ which a number of official development agencies committed funds to resourcing. Other equally disturbing trends are emerging, such as DFID’s adoption of the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ theme of ‘stopping poverty before it starts’ by ‘investing in girls’ – an approach that entirely ignores the historically derived structural inequities that are keeping many millions of girls [and boys!] in conditions of poverty.
Nike’s message is a simple one. It is communicated in a slick two-minute animation, on YouTube and at www.girleffect.org. Take a look. It paints a picture of ‘the other’, living in a situation of dirt, disease and despair. A girl surrounded by flies, taken out of the context of her family, community and country, objectified as the solution to the world being ‘in a mess’. It paints a totally unreal picture of linear cause-effect change. Based on the mantra ‘invest in a girl’ it tells us there is a single, simple solution and we can stop worrying about the historically derived patterns of injustice and inequity in the world. Nor do ‘we’ have to either bother with finding out more about what is happening in the lives of people in poorer parts of the world nor how they perceive their own lives and how they want to make their own futures.
It is a message that is profoundly anti-rights. And it is one that says nothing about where boys – and men – might come into the picture. It ignores notions of justice and equity in relations between people and countries that underpin a rights based approach. The seeming triumph of the 1990s had been that social justice was seen as a sufficient reason for efforts to be made to secure gender equality. Women’s and girls’ well-being was an end in itself. Today, it is all about calculating the rates of return from investing in a person as if she were a piece of machinery.
Removing the realisation of rights, including women’s rights, from the donor agenda is part of a wider tendency to define development in terms of instruments – immunisations, bednets, numbers of children going to school, quotas for women in parliament – rather than xxx [you choose a good word, I was going to put “the social changes needed to make a fairer world”]. So we see investment in immunisations and bed nets rather than in x and y. This reflects the growing influence of large corporate sector philanthropic organisations and of the big accountancy companies. Technical solutions are sought for what are perceived to be technical problems…”
This is a very important message and distinction, one that is being lost in the midst of ‘randomised trials’ and monitoring and evaluation to ensure that X girls obtain education or healthcare. Yes, tangible results are important, but are we forgetting the rights-based approach, that tries to address the underlying problems of structural inequalities?
.jpg "The Girl Effect: Well meaning but is it addressing underlying structural problems?")
The Girl Effect: Well meaning but is it addressing underlying structural problems?
This doesn’t just apply to women’s rights, but in non-profit efforts as a whole. An efficiency approach is more about quantity than quality. It’s about getting more bang for our buck. It’s about saying – “we helped 1000 women obtain health care/education!” Large numbers of beneficiaries sounds good to donors, but what about the quality of the services provided? And the quality of life as a whole for each woman, man, or child we have helped? The long-term impact?
Isn’t it better to invest deeply in one community and ensure they are truly empowered, lifted up, and have an improved quality of life as a whole, rather than to provide piecemeal services, without addressing any systemic challenges? The approach that donors like is more about scaling up, than depth of impact within one community.
Ultimately, devising programs on the basis of being more economically efficient is not a rights-based approach. Think about the death penalty: arguments that putting someone to death is far more expensive than imprisoning them for life do make sense, but what about the deeper moral argument? Saying that reducing prison sentences makes economic sense because prisons are expensive is one thing, but arguing for an improved criminal justice system and abolition of the death penalty on moral grounds is another thing altogether. The moral and rights-based argument, in my opinion, gets down to what makes us human — and is thus far more powerful. It hits at the core of human rights. It’s a rights-based approach.
Is our obsession with indicators, numbers and monitoring ignoring the rights based approach?
Indicators and numbers and monitoring are important, but so is asking people what they really need, and allowing them to have a hand in devising and running projects for their own communities. It’s important not to just focus on the numbers that sound most impressive, but also what is really demanded and needed. What upholds the human rights that each beneficiary has. Even if it costs more, or is less economically efficient, or doesn’t look as sexy to donors.
And so, I agree with Rosalind when she concludes:
“…today, many donors only want to fund projects for which the exact outcome of their support can be attributed to the donor and determined in advance. This ties the hands of aid recipient organisations. It takes away their ability to consult with their members in response to a local context always in flux. It stops that process of empowerment that happens when individuals and organised groups are able to imagine their world differently and to realise that vision by tackling the injustices in their society”.
About Akhila Kolisetty
Akhila Kolisetty serves as a Development Advisor of Justice for All Organization (JFAO), a non-profit that works to strengthen the rule of law and expand access to legal services for women and girls in Afghanistan. Akhila also works with a civil rights law firm in D.C. handling fair housing and police misconduct complaints. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2010 with a B.A. in Political Science and Economics, where she studied at the London School of Economics and wrote an honours thesis on transitional justice in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. This is a modified post which can be found on her blog.
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Thanks for your thoughtful post Akhila. There are a number of voices joining your own in critically thinking about a 'value for money', measurable approach to aid effectiveness. Australia appears to be following the UK's lead in this regard. The IRIN have good article (link below) following your line of thought, with some serious considerations to think about heading into the 4th high-level aid effectiveness meeting (http://www.aideffectiveness.org/busanhlf4/) in Sth Korea this year.
"Sue Unsworth, formerly with the UK Department for International Development, now a principal with advisory group The Policy Practice, talks of the fundamental dishonesty of presenting everything in terms of measurable results and the inherent assumption that development challenges are simply about lack of finance and skill and so something which external donors can deal with" (http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93402).
There also needs to be considerations of differing priorities of fragile states, tackling corruption over the long-time and how this fits in with the aid agenda, the role and agenda of non-traditional donors (China, India). It appears that a 'value for money' approach is, at least partially, motivated by a need to justify and reassure voters/taxpayers in the UK, Australia in a time of slow economic growth.
Where do you see the rights-based approach fitting into these considerations, particularly in fragile states?