Sub-Committee on the Work of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact

Oral evidence, 9 April 2014.

Witnesses

Joy Hutcheon, Director General, Country Programmes, and Pauline Hayes, Acting Director, Western Asia Division, Department for International Development, gave evidence.

Chair

We have quite a few questions on the agenda, but first, may I ask you to introduce yourselves and make any opening remarks you wish to make? Thank you for getting here nice and promptly. We want to be finished before International Development questions in the House.

Joy Hutcheon

Understood. Good morning, I am Joy Hutcheon. I am the Director General for Country Programmes at DFID. I have appeared before you and before the full Committee a number of times before, although not previously on Afghanistan, which I became responsible for in February. I am extremely pleased to have with me Pauline Hayes, who is the Acting Director of Western Asia Division, who has now worked on Afghanistan for three and a half years and I know has had many conversations with members of the Committee during that time.

Chair

Pauline, anything else you want to say at all?

Pauline Hayes

No, that is fine.

Chair

Thank you very much. As you know, this is the sub-committee of the International Development Select Committee. Development progress in Afghanistan has been minimal over the past decade. The country’s position near the bottom of the UN development index remains almost unchanged over the last few years. We have seen that your staff work very hard in very challenging conditions, but are you confident that UK aid is achieving any impact at all in Afghanistan?

Joy Hutcheon

We are as frustrated as I know the Committee and others are about the slow pace of change in Afghanistan, but things are moving in a positive direction. As the Committee noted on the visit in 2012, things are improving from a very low base. We now have 6.3 million children in school; it was fewer than 1 million in 2001. It was 5.8 million when the Committee visited. We now have over half of pregnant women receiving some antenatal care. It was 16% in 2003 and it was 36% when the Committee visited in 2012. So there is progress; it is slower than we would like and it is also very difficult to measure accurately. The Human Development Index is a composite of health, education and income data. Some of it is simply very out of date. The data on life expectancy, for example, is still from 2007-08. That will tend to show stagnation. I am not saying that it is actually all lovely and it is really moving rapidly, but we cannot be absolutely sure how fast the progress is. However we are confident that it is positive.

Chair

Pauline, would you like to add anything to that?

Pauline Hayes

Just to stress the problems of data reliability and gathering data; there has not been a census in Afghanistan since 1979. Trying to get that reliable data is inevitably very challenging.

Chair

One of ICAI’s major concerns is the sustainability of DFID’s interventions. While there is some evidence, as you say, of positive changes in people’s livelihoods, job creation and education improvements are easily reversible gains, I think you will agree. Can you point to any systemic improvements in Afghanistan’s economy and society? I appreciate the data are quite old.

Pauline Hayes

In the economy, I think the biggest success story is tax and the tax take. We have been very heavily involved in that from the start. The tax take has grown phenomenally over the last 10 years from a very small level to over $2 billion. That, as a systemic change of laying the foundations for a functioning state, is a fantastic achievement. There is obviously a long way to go, but we are on the right track.

Joy Hutcheon

The education gains are potentially reversible in the period of uncertainty that we are going into, but in the end education can create its own momentum. The other thing that we are seeing in Afghanistan is a very high level of urbanisation. It is one of the fastest urbanising countries in the world.

Chair

From a very low base though, I think.

Joy Hutcheon

Yes, from a very low base but we are starting to see the expectations of girls and women in cities changing. It can be reversed, but it becomes more difficult.

Chair

What steps are you taking to improve the sustainability of your efforts, specifically in places like Helmand, given the strength of the Taliban in that region? Do you think you need to focus on some of the poor areas such as Bamiyan?

Pauline Hayes

We do work in Bamiyan in a number of ways. It is important to recognise that we have a national programme in Afghanistan that operates across all provinces. Inevitably the UK is very focused on Helmand, and rightly so, but it is important to recognise that we have always operated a nationwide programme.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

We recognise that fact and I agree with you; it needs to be stressed all the time, because everything goes to Helmand. Indeed, Jeremy and I went to Bamiyan but unfortunately we did not get very far out, which was a bit annoying given that nothing has happened in terms of violence or security in Bamiyan for 10 years. We were told that we could walk cheerfully around the place, but the Foreign Office would not allow us to.

Pauline Hayes

It is the route between Kabul and Bamiyan that was the problem, rather than Bamiyan itself.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

I know, but when we were there it was fine. That was frustrating. That was part of the point; the frustration is how do you ever follow things up? You have amber-red ratings. ICAI have said they fully appreciate that it is a very difficult environment and there are security situations, and you have to work through intermediaries sometimes, but the question is: do you then simply say, “It is a very difficult environment; you should not expect better than amber red,” or are there specific things you can and will do that will reverse that or turn it into at least amber, if not amber-green?

Joy Hutcheon

First of all, we do appreciate your frustrations about Bamiyan, and I am sorry about that. We are certainly not in a position of saying, “This is a very difficult environment; we should not aim for more than amber-red.” One of the things that, having taken over this programme, I was very pleased to see in the report is that the team is learning well and learning from the different things they are trying to operate effectively in this difficult environment and as it changes. That, for me, was a positive from the report. There is clear evidence that we have learnt on our programme assurance and controls, where the report told us we were responding positively to that and that fiduciary controls were good. That is something we have managed to develop during a difficult period. We are choosing effective delivery partners and managing them well. However, there are things we need to get better at. There is a clear story in the report that we have progress to make on how we identify our indicators and how we monitor them. There is helpful material in the report to enable us to take that forward. The team has been doing a lot of thinking about how we are going to manage monitoring in the range of scenarios that might face us, including the most difficult ones, and are putting in place an arrangement to monitor robustly through independent third parties where we are not able to travel ourselves. We absolutely aspire to come back before you and discuss a report that is at least amber, if not with some green in it.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

As you know, we said we were not convinced about the objective of creating a viable state, not that we do not want to see a viable state, but we were not sure DFID could shoulder that ambition in ever-changing circumstances. I know it was set by the National Security Council, so it may be above your pay grade to say you can change it, but has there been any discussion about that? In the post-2014 scenario, what we felt was—and you have touched on it—that you needed to find local partners, both in terms of monitoring and delivery, who could probably have better contact communication and less security problems, provided you were able to monitor and control them effectively. Is that the way forward?

Joy Hutcheon

I know that the Committee has been concerned about the viable state objective. We do see building a viable state as an absolute pre-requisite for poverty reduction in Afghanistan, in the same way as we would in Somalia or DRC, where the state is really not functioning. Our Secretary of State is also very comfortable with that analysis. We know that addressing conflict and fragility are fundamental to reducing poverty, but building a viable state does not all have to be at the central level. We see building a viable state very much as something we do at the centre and locally because, in the end, the capacity of local government to deliver locally to citizens is a building block of a state that functions. You are absolutely right, Sir Malcolm, and the fact that we have moved back to national programmes does not mean that we will be focusing all our efforts in Kabul. We are going to be thinking very carefully about how to support local and provincial governments to build the legitimacy of a functioning state.

Pauline Hayes

Around 50% of our programme funds are channelled through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, the multi-donor trust fund funded by the World Bank, and that very much operates nationwide, filtering right down to local levels. For example, it funds the National Solidarity Programme, which is working right down at community levels, so our money is reaching out and down.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

I just want to repeat that it is not that we do not think building a viable state is a desirable outcome and a necessary one. However, you have to deliver poverty reduction whether or not that viability is achieved. That seems, to me, the prime purpose of DFID. The worry is that the grand central schemes can be at the expense of other areas—and you are saying to me that they will not be. For example, you would certainly be able to achieve poverty reduction in Bamiyan more easily than you would around Kabul, for example. That is what I am asking: are you prepared to focus where you can get results?

Joy Hutcheon

I very much take that point. For me, having taken this programme on in February, alongside the other programmes I mentioned—Somalia and DRC—I am not seeing, in the Afghanistan programme, programmes that I would not expect to see in other programmes in other countries or a different mix between trying to build state capacity, which is essential for sustainability in the end, and trying to do the really grassroots, on-the-ground work. We are doing a significant amount of humanitarian work, and we are ramping up that humanitarian work and the development on the ground—trying to deliver concrete results.

Jeremy Lefroy

During our visit in 2012, one of the great concerns expressed was that the military drawdown itself would have a very substantial impact on the economy because so much of the economy depends on spending by the partner countries that are assisting Afghanistan at the moment. Obviously, the UK Government is committed to a long-term engagement with Afghanistan through the DFID programme, but are you already seeing an impact such as was forecast on the Afghan economy and therefore with the consequences for a viable state because of the military drawdown, or has that been mitigated since we were there in 2012?

Pauline Hayes

It is a combination of things. The economy has slowed down over the last two years but the economic growth spiked upwards last year because there was a bumper harvest. It has always been a very volatile economy, as you probably know, so it has come down. There is no doubt that the shift of transition has affected that. We always knew that was going to happen. In addition, I think the uncertainty over the future affects investor confidence, etc. Until we get through the current elections process, it is hard to say where the economy is going to go. However, the growth rate is still 3.1% or around about that at the moment, so we are still in positive figures. Inflation is still under 10%. The Government still has very strong foreign reserves, so it is not all doom and gloom; it is holding up. However, it is really important that they get through the elections process as quickly as possible, and if they come out in a good place after that elections process, I think we could see a little spike, because that confidence in the future of Afghanistan’s economy will grow.

Joy Hutcheon

There is still significant progress to make on tax, which will improve the Government’s fiscal position.

Fiona O’Donnell

Pauline, you were mentioning what a significant year this is in terms of the drawdown of troops and also picking up on what Jeremy was asking. ICAI have said they found it quite difficult to find evidence about how your forward planning is resilient to the changes that may be ahead, both in terms of the withdrawal of troops and also the results of the elections; we are still waiting to hear how that all settles down. What reassurances can you give us that that planning and that flexibility within the planning is taking place?

Pauline Hayes

First of all, I can assure you that there is constant planning going on, none more so than over the last 12 months, for a number of reasons. We have always done scenario planning with our programme, right from when I was there. Over the last 12 months, the team in Kabul in particular have been doing a range of scenario work, in part because of 2014 and needing to be ready to respond to whatever happens in 2014 and to do contingency planning as necessary and so on. Also, in DFID globally, because we are in the new resource allocation round, all country offices are going through a poverty reduction analysis phase and looking at what the future direction of their programmes should be over the next two to three years. DFID Afghanistan has been doing exactly the same. In a way, they are a bit ahead of the game because they have been doing some of this scenario planning anyway. Now it is being done in a much more structured way as part of our resource allocation round. We have actually had discussions internally with our Secretary of State. That is obviously internal at the moment but I can assure you that the programme is getting constant forward looks and, subject to certain scenarios coming out, they have a very clear sense of direction as to where they would go with those scenarios.

Fiona O’Donnell

You state that in Afghanistan you are ahead of the game, but in the findings section of the ICAI report in 2.66 they share your refreshed strategic aims for your work in Afghanistan. They go in 2.67 to say, “The set of aims does not yet appear to derive from a top-down, clearly defined goal.” It talks about the evidence base being very weak and, where there is evidence, it is usually low quality, and the design is not based on the experiences of the intended beneficiaries. How would you respond to that?

Pauline Hayes

As I say, the team has been doing their homework on a lot of this. In addition to general scenario planning, they have been doing what they call deep dives on certain thematic topics that could affect the development of the country in certain scenarios and to help us judge the future direction of the programme. Probably the timing of when the ICAI team were there meant that they maybe they did not see some of the work that has been done particularly over the last six months. I think they were there in about September. It has been an intensive period, not just for DFID Afghanistan but for all country offices.

Joy Hutcheon

We feel that set of aims does flow from a top-down goal of reducing poverty. That is what we are setting out to do and that is what those aims flow from on our analysis.

Fiona O’Donnell

How might UK aid be impacted in Afghanistan depending on the electoral results? Also, if we find out that fraud is as widespread as it was in 2009, are there any thoughts being given to reducing aid?

Pauline Hayes

First and foremost, we have to recognise that what we, the UK Government, are looking for are credible elections and transparent and inclusive elections. What we saw on Saturday was a very good start. There was some fraud. It is early days in terms of what we are getting back in information, but the levels of fraud are significantly lower than back in 2009. That is a very good sign, but we are probably going to go to a second round so we will have to see how the next stage goes. If we were in a situation where the election results were seriously defrauded, then we would have to look again at the whole situation, but as part of the UK’s overall policy towards Afghanistan.

Fiona O’Donnell

What will change in DFID’s approach in Afghanistan following the creation of the UK Conflict, Stability and Security Fund in 2015-16?

Pauline Hayes

The UK has already made commitments under the current Conflict Pool, which will continue into the CSSF, for the funding of the military officer training academy, and also for security costs for the salaries of policemen, essentially. That is part of international commitments made at the Chicago Security Summit in 2012. In terms of where DFID is going to go with CSSF, we are still looking at options. One area we are interested in thinking about is how we take a more coherent response to some of the policing issues in Afghanistan. At the moment we and other Government Departments do some work in that vein. Perhaps the CSSF provides an opportunity to pull all of that work together and deal with it in a more coherent way.

Fiona O’Donnell

Could I be a little bit cheeky and ask one final question? In terms of the refreshed strategic plan, the final one was around tackling violence against women. I just wondered, given that the quote I read earlier spoke about not focusing and engaging with the beneficiaries, are women’s rights organisations within Afghanistan being involved in the shaping of the strategic plan?

Pauline Hayes

We are very engaged with women’s rights organisations in all of our work in this area through a number of routes, having general dialogue with them, whether it be here, in London, or in Kabul. We also provide direct support to women’s rights organisations, which enable us to engage with them on policy issues as well. We have a major civil society programme called Tawanmandi, which has a particular focus on women’s right issues. The decision last year to make women and girls a strategic priority has enabled us to have a much wider dialogue at official level; when our Secretary of State has visited Afghanistan, each time she has met women’s rights organisations. I could provide lots of names, but we are very heavily engaged with them. The elections work that we provided has also enabled further dialogue, and the political participation fund we have set up, which includes support for women political participants, strengthens our engagement.

Jeremy Lefroy

In our 2012 report, we commented on the turnover of DFID’s staff in Afghanistan and the risks to institutional memory. In your one-year-on update, you say you are continuing to build capacity in DFID’s office. Could you perhaps explain how you are doing that?

Joy Hutcheon

This continues to be a difficult issue. It is something that is going to preoccupy me—keeping the right skills in the office and the continuity. We work hard to keep some continuity through staff who have been posted in Afghanistan. We have eight on the team at the moment. A year ago it was 14. Those levels will fluctuate a bit. We are also slightly increasing our local staff. About half our team in Afghanistan are local staff, who provide a good measure of continuity, and we have been increasing and strengthening that team as we approach this period.

Jeremy Lefroy

DFID, quite rightly, is spending an increasing amount in fragile states. You say in the report that “given the high-risk and high-pressure environment in Afghanistan, in our view it is still not feasible to create a formal cadre of experts to work routinely in Afghanistan”. There seems to me to be a potential conflict in the long term between DFID’s, we believe, admirable aim to work in fragile states, because it is one of the few organisations that makes that a priority, and the inability to create the kind of cadre of experts in those fragile states—Afghanistan being the case in point here—to do that, to retain the institutional memory and to ensure that we have a long-term approach. How would you respond to that, because it seems to me that we are in danger of setting a goal of working in fragile states, which we all support, and then not really being able to deliver on that to the best of our ability?

Joy Hutcheon

We do keep this under constant review and it is helpful that you challenge us on it. In fact most of our bilateral programmes now are fragile states. Most of our staff posted overseas are developing experience in being in fragile states, although some are more fragile than others. We do see, in practice, staff developing expertise and circulating between some of the most fragile. It is very common to go to Afghanistan and find staff who have been in Nigeria or South Sudan, or who have worked on Somalia. The difficulty with gathering those up into a cadre is that sometimes they need a break. Sometimes it is important for other people in the organisation to see that, if you go and work in a really difficult, hard posting, you can go and do a less difficult posting, and the ability to go and work in fragile states often depends on where people are in their own life stage.

Jeremy Lefroy

I fully understand that, but can I challenge you? We are talking here about British Government policy. However much we may respect individual circumstances, British government policy cannot be determined by individuals’ life circumstances. Therefore, should we not be giving more consideration to really develop this expertise—this cadre—however difficult it may be, given that it is such a fundamental part of implementing what is a very large ongoing programme of £190 million a year? That is a challenge—a personal one. I do not know whether my colleagues share it.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

No, I agree with it.

Joy Hutcheon

We are giving a lot of thought and we think we are making progress on developing a cadre of expertise in working in fragile states. We do not think, at this point, that UK policy is put at risk by not being in a position where we are basically directing people to be mobile and to particular countries.

Jeremy Lefroy

The follow-up is that, if we are not able to do that—whereas we probably are in most other countries—there is a question mark over our entire programme in Afghanistan, saying, “We would like to do this programme but we simply do not have the people to do it,” or, “We have people who can come intermittently but are not able to devote reasonably substantial parts of their careers to it,” which would be the way, I believe, to have a really sustainable programme. I understand what you are saying and I do not want to explore that any further, but I would just challenge DFID to go back and think about this, because that coming out in your report seems to me a bit of an admission of weakness and does not give us the confidence that the long-term engagement of DFID in Afghanistan is necessarily sustainable.

Joy Hutcheon

I accept the challenge. It is a risk that we track. At the moment we feel able to staff our team effectively. There are not programmes that we are not able to pursue because we do not have the right people. There are a number of donors in Afghanistan who, particularly with the current security events, are finding it difficult to work out how to keep their presence there. We are not one of those at the moment, but we absolutely accept that challenge and we will keep that under review.

Jeremy Lefroy

On the measurement of results, the ICAI report expresses serious concerns about DFID’s measurement of results, as we did in our 2012 report. Could you just explain to us what you are doing to make the measurement of results more robust in the future?

Joy Hutcheon

One thing that we should say is that all of the programmes that ICAI looked at were designed pre-2010, when we changed our processes and our business case process. We have put a lot of effort, since then, into being clearer about our theory of change—why it is we are expecting something to happen and what we are going to monitor, and therefore how we will know whether we are delivering results. I expect to see progress on that. We are doing some specific training in Afghanistan on how to set indicators and monitor in that very difficult, particular environment. Some of the things we are trying to monitor are very difficult. When we are trying to monitor the changes in the perception of women in politics, that is very difficult to do during the course of the programme. Even if you do see a change at the national level, it is very difficult to attribute that to the specific things that you have done. We will continue to be in the territory of monitoring proxy indicators. In that case, for example, we are looking at the number of religious leaders who are giving messages about women’s participation, women’s rights and women in politics. We want to get away from the high-level perception surveys and the high-level outcome change, which is hard to attribute, and be really clear that we are monitoring things we can count and that relate to a really robust theory of change. If they are happening, we can be reasonably clear that the theory of change is working.

Jeremy Lefroy

One of the things put to us was that some of the aims of DFID’s programmes were just unrealistic; there was no way you could have monitored them even if you wanted to. ICAI particularly referred to the Rural Development Programme’s impact on poverty indicators. Is this the consequence of a former method of drawing up business cases that has now been remedied, or is this still a problem with current businesses cases that are being produced—that they are too ambitious and the goals could not be achieved or at least could not be monitored?

Joy Hutcheon

It is a combination of things, Mr Lefroy. We do still tend to be a bit ambitious and we are trying to be very clear with teams right across the business that we are not looking for people to oversell what they can achieve, but to be very realistic about it. It also goes back to this point about understanding what the right indicator is to set. Trying to monitor something by looking at the national poverty data is not going to tell you clearly what you are achieving. It goes back to my previous example of picking something that your theory of change tells you is a good thing to monitor; so you have to be clear that the thing you are monitoring will tell you if you are making progress towards the bigger objective. It is therefore just getting smarter at picking things that indicate the right direction but can also be counted.

Jeremy Lefroy

Are you making changes already in terms of your monitoring as a result of the ICAI report and some of their suggestions?

Joy Hutcheon

Yes. The team identified monitoring in this next period as one of their big challenges back in 2013. They initiated a study on beneficiary monitoring that talked to beneficiaries of the local-government-strengthening programme, both to monitor that programme but also to learn lessons about beneficiary monitoring. They are putting that together into a programme-wide monitoring strategy, which they are working their way through at the moment, which will address both the internal monitoring across the programme and look at how we can use third-party independent monitors and, preferably, if we can manage it, in collaboration with other donors. If a team is going off to Helmand or Bamiyan to look at a DFID programme, they may be able to look at a number of donor programmes in that area, and that will be more efficient.

Chair

Let me come back to the theme of the place of women in Afghan society. In March 2013, the Secretary of State announced that the next DFID operational plan on Afghanistan would include an explicit priority goal on tackling violence against women and girls. As you know, the International Development Committee has produced a very comprehensive report on that particular subject. How are you translating that commitment into programme and funding priorities, and what are you doing, for example, to support women’s shelters or legal services, as we recommended in our 2012 report on Afghanistan?

Joy Hutcheon

We have entered into a partnership with the Australians to support a programme on eliminating violence against women. The first phase of that is looking particularly at strengthening referral and justice systems, but there is potential to expand into both shelters and medical care and other issues, which we are exploring in the context of our future plans. Our civil society programme, Tawanmandi, as Pauline mentioned, is engaging with 35 women’s groups. We had an extensive programme in the run-up to these elections to support women’s political participation for women local provincial councillors. That will continue through to the parliamentary elections next year to support women MPs. Then through the ARTF, we are strongly supporting girls’ education, which is a fundamental platform for addressing violence against girls, as you know, and also through the Girls’ Education Challenge Fund, which is a significant investment in girls’ education.

Chair

We have discussed education and literacy rates. I wonder what further steps you are taking to ensure that women and girls are a major focus for your education and wealth creation programmes?

Pauline Hayes

It is about consolidating what we have been doing, so continuing to channel funding through the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund, which has a major education project called EQUIP. Since the Committee visited Afghanistan in 2012, we launched the Girls’ Education Challenge Fund, which will run for three to four years initially, and that is part of a global fund we operate. That is around £47 million in total and is trying to help girls get to school in some of the most remote areas of Afghanistan. There is a particular focus on that. It is about consolidation. We have put major funding into the UN elections programme to do outreach work for women and encourage women’s participation in the elections and so on. It is keeping going with all that we are doing.

Joy Hutcheon

I just to add to that, consolidation may sound unambitious, but the Girls’ Education Challenge will support the education of 250,000 girls in some of the most difficult areas. The other thing I would say is that the discussions we have with the next Government about the TMAF and the commitments that they have made—or Afghanistan has made—to the reform of women’s rights under the TMAF will be fundamental to underpinning all of this. We have to make sure we give due attention to that.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

A question occurred when we were talking to ICAI. We have achieved a lot in getting girls into school, and some of those girls presumably have had enough schooling to be leaving school after having several years of education. Do you have, or should you have, a programme to try to transition those girls into useful, economic activity if there is pressure on them, having got an education, to then get married, have children and disappear into the background. What is the scope for doing that? Is it something you have considered?

Pauline Hayes

Some of the technical and vocational training we have been providing has helped and will help some of those women. They get the basic education and then they get the skills training. It is an interesting time for Afghanistan because there has been the huge focus on the basic school education. The international community as a whole needs to start to think beyond that to higher education, to more vocational training and so on. That time is coming, yes, and we need to think about that as well.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

We met the chancellor of the university, and I know I am repeating it, but he said that the enrolment of women in his university had gone up sharply—about a third of all students. He also said that the men—the fathers, husbands, brothers and what have you—were really very supportive of it, because they could see the economic and social value of having educated women. They could see the economic value; that is the interesting point. So it has a little twist to a highly conservative society, which says, “There are benefits for everybody here.”

Pauline Hayes

One of the reasons why we cannot get more girls into school is a lack of teachers; we need female teachers. It is very interesting; if you talk to a lot of the girls who are being educated—I have been to several schools—and ask, “What do you want to do?” they reply, “I want to be a teacher.” This could start to have a knock-on effect and then there is a point of no turning back.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

Are you thinking about a specific DFID programme that could do that?

Pauline Hayes

Not a specific DFID programme, but our education focus has been primarily through the ARTF—through the education development programmes that go on through that. That would be the way to go, because a multi-donor approach to all of this is the right approach out there, in a fragile state especially.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

Has that particular idea happened?

Pauline Hayes

There is work going on to improve teacher training, yes. I can find out some more details for you if that would be helpful.

Chair

Can I come back to something that you mentioned earlier, which was the Tokyo Mutual Accountability Framework, or TMAF? In your response to our 2012 report, you rejected our recommendation that a joint donor government plan for women and girls during transition should be created, saying that TMAF should provide sufficient international focus. Do you stand by this position and do you think the framework is providing a sufficient safeguard for women’s rights during the transition?

Joy Hutcheon

To be fair to Pauline, who was there at the time, I would observe that we often angst about whether to try to pursue women’s rights through mainstream government processes or to pull them out into a separate strategy. Sometimes that has the unintended effect of side-lining them off into a women’s Ministry or a separate document.

Pauline Hayes

TMAF has, over the last 18 months, had its ups and downs. I do not deny that the Government has not delivered on some of its commitments. However, it has enabled a high level of regular, sustained, policy dialogue between the international community, the donors and the Government on women’s rights issues, and particularly on the elimination of violence against women. It has proved a very good advocacy method, and that has proved more helpful than coming up with some plan. It is still on the table and will continue to be on the table, because the international committee is not going to let this issue go away; it is too important. That message has to be got through to the new government. In January, there was a stock-take meeting of TMAF in Kabul and, at the time, all the presidential candidates were invited to attend. At the time there were 11, and 10 of them stayed throughout the whole proceedings. They were able to hear for themselves the key messages from the international community, including on this agenda, and take that away with them, as well as make statements themselves. They should be in no doubt that this is a critical issue, and that is part of the step along the way to having that dialogue with the new Government and making sure this agenda stays on the table.

Fiona O’Donnell

Another section of society that is often left behind in development is people with disabilities. Indeed, the Committee’s most recent report looked at development and people with disabilities. We are hoping to see, all of us I am sure, something in the post-2015 framework that refers to people with disabilities. I wondered what work DFID is doing in Afghanistan to make sure that either our aid is inclusive or to look specifically at funding to ensure people with disabilities are included in growth and development in Afghanistan, in education and all services.

Joy Hutcheon

It is a very good question. Specifically, through the Girls’ Education Challenge Fund, we have an innovation window that is looking at new ways of addressing girls’ education. We have a number of those programmes looking very specifically at education for disabled girls and in very remote and difficult environments. I am afraid I cannot remember, at this moment, whether there were any in Afghanistan but I can check that, or Pauline may know.

Pauline Hayes

We can check on that.

Chair

So you will write to us on that?

Pauline Hayes

Yes.

Jeremy Lefroy

The UK support for the Bost Business Park in Helmand was scrapped in 2013. What lessons have we learnt from that?

Joy Hutcheon

Again, as Pauline was instrumental in recommending that, I will hand over to her. However, I would say that one of the things I very much encourage my teams to do is to monitor the value for money of programmes on an annual basis, through the annual review, and not to be frightened to say if they need to be stopped if value for money is no longer viable. In principle, we should expect that to happen from time to time and we should be worried if it does not.

Pauline Hayes

We had to stop the Bost project, or recommend that it should be stopped, because we had reached the stage where we were waiting for our Afghan partners to fulfil various commitments that would enable the construction of the Bost Agri-Business Park. There were delays in reaching those commitments. We set them deadlines, because beyond those deadlines it would become very difficult to develop this. Unfortunately, they did not meet those deadlines and that is why we had to reappraise the situation and decide it would not be good value for money to carry on. It was a very difficult decision to make, quite honestly, but we felt it was the right decision and we still feel it was the right decision. What lessons have I learnt? We have to check into something—can our partners deliver on commitments? Are we being realistic in asking them to deliver on those commitments? These particular commitments related to power and water connections to the agri-business park. There were landowning issues as well and stuff like that. Perhaps we should have looked into that in more detail at the appraisal stage, which was way back in 2009/2010. However, the decision to stop the project was the right decision, and I would hope that the teams have learnt, as Joy has said, that these are not easy decisions but they have to be made sometimes. Maybe we need to do more of that rather than less of it.

Jeremy Lefroy

Given that one of the areas we identified as being very important for the economic development of Afghanistan was agro-processing, where currently most of Afghanistan’s agricultural production seems to go outside to Pakistan for processing and then come back in the form of finished goods, clearly the idea behind the park was an extremely good one and conformed with our long-term policy. I would be worried that the process we have had to go through with Bost might put us off doing such things in the future when, in fact, they could be part of the long-term economic development of Afghanistan. How do you ensure that, when it comes to projects like this, which all of us would probably agree in general are positive, we do not end up once bitten, twice shy and very risk averse. How can we ensure that the reasons, which we understand and are justifiable for pulling this particular project, do not result in generally being adverse to this type of project?

Joy Hutcheon

It is partly about the messages we sound when we have to take this kind of decision. We do not want staff to feel that it is a personal failure and that it should be avoided at all costs, because that will lead to risk-averse behaviour. I am often asked if, in DFID, we are willing to celebrate failure. Personally, I do not like celebrating failure, but if we are doing high-risk things, some of them will fail and people need to feel all right about that, provided we have done everything we can and have managed them well. Then we need to draw the learning from them and move on. We are clear that agriculture will continue to be a focus of the programme as we look forward, and we will look to continue programming in this space, having learnt lessons from the Bost experience.

Pauline Hayes

We have another agricultural programme called CARD-F, Comprehensive Agricultural Rural Development Facility, which works with four Ministries but works out in about four or five provinces at the moment. It is a multi-stranded programme designed to improve agricultural productivity, encourage small business development and so on. It took a long time to get going but it is starting to show very interesting results at the moment, and the team is designing a second phase of that programme. There could be real opportunities within the second phase to do some initiatives like agro-processing, which are crucially needed.

Jeremy Lefroy

The other aspect of this decision is: what was the local reaction to it? Did people understand DFID’s reasons or was it taken in a fairly negative spirit—that DFID is not fulfilling its commitments to us?

Pauline Hayes

Inevitably our partners were disappointed but we took very great care to communicate our decision with both our local partners and centrally in Kabul with the relevant Ministry. They accepted our decision and, frankly, there has been very little fallout between us since.

Sir Malcolm Bruce

You have just reminded me that a recurring theme in Afghanistan is improving agricultural productivity and local processing, which Jeremy’s question was about. It is all being shipped in and out of Pakistan, which is not without its own issues. Do you still see that as something that DFID and the international community can support? The problem we discovered when we asked people about why it was not happening was basically corruption. The money did not get to where it needed to go. The clear recognition was that, if you could produce more and process it locally for the local markets, it would add value and be a basic thing to do. It may be a basic thing to do and it may be self-evident and obvious, but in the context of Afghanistan it is darn difficult to achieve.

Pauline Hayes

No, it is an area we want to continue to pursue. Afghanistan is going to continue to be a heavily agricultural based economy for some years to come, and if we are to help bolster that economy over the coming years, these are precisely the issues that we and other donors need to help address.

Joy Hutcheon

The Bost business park was one way of approaching that, but there is a range of other approaches to try to make local markets work, which includes rehabilitating local roads and markets. There are other ways of addressing this.

Chair

Before we conclude—and I want to thank you very much for the evidence session you have given us today; it has been extremely enlightening—can I just ask you about this: you responded to ICAI’s three recommendations in the report, and I note that you, on all three of them, have partially accepted their recommendations, yet it seems from the description you have accepted almost everything. Could you clarify why it is a partially accepted recommendation and, yet, you seem to be wanting to implement all of the recommendation.

Joy Hutcheon

I suppose, Mr Chairman, it was to reflect the fact that, on each of these, we were already doing a number of things. ICAI has, therefore, underlined the importance of some of the things we are already doing and identified some new things that we need to pay more attention to.

Jeremy Lefroy

Whenever we see “partially accepted”, this Committee—or at least I—understand that as being you do not accept some things and you do accept others, rather than saying, “We are already doing some of it.” Therefore, I wondered whether there could be a different terminology used for where you say, “We are doing some of this already and we accept the rest,” rather than, “We are rejecting some and accepting others.”

Chair

That is a good point.

Joy Hutcheon

Let me take receipt of that.

Chair

I must say, I thought it meant you had rejected some of it, but thank you for clarifying that. Pauline and Joy, thank you very much for your evidence this morning. That concludes the business of this meeting of the ICAI Sub-Committee. Thank you. Oral evidence: The UK Development’s Work in the Middle East, HC 948 21