Author: DFID

Mahabat is a natural teacher. Her warm character is balanced by a gentle authority that ensures her young pupils are quick to follow her direction in class. I met her last week in Dostuk, Kyrgyzstan, while visiting the kindergarten where she works and which DFID helps to fund through the Equity project. The dilapidated building had been closed for twenty years but effective collaboration between villagers, the authorities, local organisations and DFID has now transformed the school into a vibrant community hub. Approximately a hundred infants attend the kindergarten daily where they learn and play, an opportunity previously denied to them. DFID, in partnership with UNICEF, supported the renovation, trained teachers and donated educational materials.

Prior to becoming a teacher, Mahabat – like increasing numbers of women in Central Asia – was a labour migrant in Russia where she had a tough life as a domestic worker. She is now a passionate, capable kindergarten teacher who benefits from the training made available to her from this project. Mahabat told me that “participating in a critical thinking course and also learning how to best use the new teaching resources I now have access to have helped me to become a better teacher…I have learnt new skills that help me to identify and address the problems of my pupils, especially the kids who find it difficult to focus in class.”

Mahabat with her kindergarten class. Photo: Will Schomburg/DFID.

Equity is our biggest project in the Kyrgyz Republic where we work with UNICEF to promote interethnic harmony in the south of the country. During our visit to monitor the progress of the project, my colleagues and I were impressed with the results. Osh, the provincial capital in the south and several of its surrounding towns, have occasionally witnessed bloody clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities, most recently during the 2010 ‘June Events’. Through a variety of different activities, Equity provides young people with the opportunity to reach their full potential and interact with one other regardless of ethnic background or economic situation. This is achieved through the development of youth centres, hospitals and schools, and support to the institutions of local government.

For example, in the Tash Bulak municipality, DFID supports a day-care centre in Ariet for disabled children. A large number of children and young people visit this centre daily where they benefit from remedial services such as vital physiotherapy and psychological care. Crucially, centres like the one in Ariet bring together these young people and their families, helping to prevent social isolation in a region where disability remains taboo.

Kindergartens and day care centres like the ones the Equity project funds help to combat social exclusion. Photo: Will Schomburg/DFID.

We firmly believe that sustainable development can only be achieved through a country-led approach and we’re confident the financial support for these centres from the municipality will help ensure their continued success. While the funding Britain provides is by no means the only solution to Kyrgyzstan’s development challenges, the dynamic communities of Dostuk and Ariet have now been empowered with the tools needed to drive forward the education and health outcomes of countless children for generations to come.

DFID has implemented a programme in the Kyrgyz Republic since 1998, in partnership with the Kyrgyz government and people. We support political reform, better access to services and increased equality. This year DFID will spend over £5 million on these projects as part of a long-term commitment to the sustainable reduction of poverty in Central Asia.

Through projects like Equity and our wider portfolio of interventions, DFID and the British Embassy ­– through UK aid – is deepening our growing relationship with the Kyrgyz government and citizens.

In the UK, Pakistan is regularly in the news, and most of it is bad. So you may find it hard to believe that anyone would work here by choice. But I do – and I really enjoy it! Pakistan is a fascinating country with great people, stunning landscapes, and real potential for a brighter future. It’s a complex environment with many deep rooted challenges, but if you think that Pakistan is all about bad news, you’d be surprised by some of what’s going on here.

Let’s start with the big picture – which is certainly daunting. More than 60 million people in Pakistan live on around 30p a day; nearly one in ten of the world’s out-of-school children live in Pakistan; and one in eleven children dies before their fifth birthday. The population is growing by 3 million every year and is set to rise by 50% in less than 40 years. Decades of conflict, instability, weak governance and corruption have left the state unable to deliver the services that people need.

Set against this, some things are changing – and fast. After 60 years of democratic instability, national elections this weekend will mark the first ever democratic transition from one civilian government to another. Women are gaining a voice and rights. Landmark legislation passed last year finally provides legal protection against violence, and more women will vote in this weekend’s elections than ever before – one million of them thanks to support from the UK. The media – liberalised in the mid-2000s – is flourishing, and new media and new technologies are propelling changes to banking, industry, communications, and politics which have been visible even in the two short years that I’ve been working here. A full 50% of Pakistanis now have access to a mobile phone. And get this – Pakistan has produced two of the world’s top five most popular blackberry apps.

So the challenges are enormous, but I think there are important reasons for hope, and our support is helping to make a difference. I manage DFID’s health and education work here and over the coming years we’re aiming to transform education and deliver real improvements in health for poor people, especially women and girls. I’m mostly office based in Islamabad, but the best part of my job is getting out to see what’s happening on the ground, where we’re making progress and what still needs to be done.

A lady health worker in Pakistan, with a patient and her 14 day old baby. Picture: DFID Pakistan

For example, last Friday I went to visit some schools in central Punjab. The second one was most interesting. I walked into the headmistress’ office to find her talking sixteen to the dozen to my colleague Taimoor. Without pausing for breath she recounted how hard it was trying to get her teachers to turn up every day. She would phone, cajole, scold them. She was turning down their requests for days off. But (and here she mellowed) it was working. The teachers were turning up and as a result things had improved at the school.

This was the Government Girls’ Higher Secondary School in warm and dusty Jhelum. Built in 1880, it was an impressive red brick building. On the wall beside me a big banner announced the importance of the ‘Punjab Schools Reform Roadmap’. This is what I went to explore – I wanted to know whether the UK’s support for the Roadmap was really helping to improve things in schools.

Two years ago, Mrs Cheema’s school, like most in Punjab saw around 25% of teachers fail to turn up to work on any given day. Without teachers to teach them, many of the 1700 female students would stop turning up too. Now, she told us, things were changing.

Debbie with headmistress Mrs Cheema. Picture. DFID Pakistan

Mrs Cheema’s school is part of the turn-around happening in 60,000 schools across Punjab. Since the UK started work with the Punjab Government on the Roadmap in 2011, 81,000 more teachers have been employed in state schools. By tackling absenteeism, around 20,000 more teachers are in classrooms teaching kids each day. We’re helping to improve the quality of teaching by giving teachers lesson plans which guide them through what they need to teach, lesson by lesson. And this year, for the first time, every child in Punjab is being given a textbook for English, Maths and Urdu – a big step forward. The statistics speak for themselves, but I wanted to cross-check them against what was happening at local level.

As we walked around the school, Mrs Cheema complained that she got little recognition for all her work ensuring her teachers were in school. She, and thousands of other head-teachers across Punjab are the key to making things better. I thought she had a really good point, and vowed to raise this with the Secretary in charge of Punjab’s schools when I next met him.

Girls getting an education – pupils at the Government Girls’ Higher Secondary School. Picture: DFID Pakistan

So some things are changing – and fast. But it’s only the start. There are around 20 million kids in school in Punjab, but over 3 million don’t yet go to school at primary level alone. Transforming education is the focus of my work here. DFID invests in a range of education programmes across Pakistan. As a result some 4 million children in primary school will benefit from UK aid by 2015. We are helping them learn better and for longer. There are signs that all the hard work is beginning to pay off. It’s early days – to transform a system of 60,000 schools will take time – but it’s starting to happen. That’s why I’m here. And that’s why, despite all the challenges, and despite all the bad news, I’m hopeful.

I’ll put up another blog soon to keep you posted on progress, including what happens this weekend, when I’ll be out and about monitoring Pakistan’s historic elections.

I recently travelled to Herat, a beautiful city in the west of the country, with my economist colleague Kevin. Kevin has kindly agreed to write a guest blog about our trip:

Kevin, Economist in DFID Afghanistan. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

As someone returning to Afghanistan, I have found progress in the space of three years – the last time I worked here – extremely encouraging if signs are anything to go by. Literally. Outside our Embassy in Kabul, a giant TV screen advertising 3G mobile phone services acts as a makeshift street light. Other parts of the city too are bustling with growing Afghan consumerism – neighbourhoods specialising in the selling of toy cars, fast food and phone credit. All of this would not look too out of place in Piccadilly Circus!

My day job can be best summarised as helping the Afghan government improve the nitty-gritty aspects of public finances. This includes raising more taxes and spending public money according to need. Or, as a colleague puts it, ensuring that the financial pipes work. Better services provided by government are expected to follow, such as in education, health, roads and access to water. Whilst it is fascinating to have a national perspective from Kabul, I occasionally yearn to see what is happening out in the rest of the country, just as I did when I was in Helmand back in 2009.

You can imagine that I jumped at the chance to join Christa to discover ground truths in Herat. Together we flew on a freezing Saturday morning due west of Kabul. My first impression when we landed was how steeped in history the city is, like many other parts of Afghanistan. Some things have not changed – the remnants of a giant city wall, said to have been constructed by Alexander the Great, can still be seen. Interestingly, for me as an economist, Herat still is the trade route to Iran. Sadly, Herat still suffers from a significant number of landmines from a previous conflict though DFID is financing a project which will eventually make Herat mine-free.

We packed in a lot during the visit. We built on lessons learned from Helmand, on issues that still persist in getting public money into the provinces. I recall a great discussion with provincial directorate officials on where they believe the blockages in the national budget lie. The health sector director eloquently and diplomatically likened this to a tailor having your measurements but giving you a random suit – budgets are not always based on local needs. On a more positive note, we also saw examples of local government and politics working very well, when locally-elected representatives outside the city showed us a school built and maintained by them. This is the water pump that serves the school and houses around it.

Local representatives prioritised the building of a water pump, paid for by the UK via the World Bank’s National Solidarity Programme. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

When visiting the provincial tax office we also stumbled on a poster informing officials of an upcoming training event provided by DFID. This was a pleasant surprise and perhaps the most joy I have felt looking at essentially an official mandate. You can find out more about how tax collection is helping the country here.

Village representatives of Baland shahi. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

One highlight I did not expect was culinary – we had lunch with Afghan counterparts in a restaurant overlooking the town, with delicious local food.

We also met with the provincial governor during our visit, to talk about an existing DFID support to his office. The conversation was in English (Christa an Austrian, he an Afghan and me originally coming from Hong Kong) as he sat in front of a wall filled with pictures of the last two centuries of Herat’s governors. He wheeled out his economic strategy; music to an economist’s ears. We were even luckier to be invited by him to see the old citadel, used by previous emperors of the city before it was even part of Afghanistan. The panoramic views of the city on offer inside the fort are a sight to behold. This reminded me of something a colleague recently mentioned, having seen it inscribed on a stone outside the Kabul museum: a nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.

The impressive Qala Iktyaruddin citadel. Picture: Christa Rottensteiner/DFID

I went to the launch of a new website, Turning the World Upside Down last week, and spent a fascinating 2 hours hearing about innovative ideas and approaches from poor and middle income countries that might help inform or shape health in the richer world.

Paul Farmer, Maureen Bisognano, Fiona Godlee, Charles Alessi – the Panel at Turning World Upside Down

The beauty of the Turning the World Upside Down idea (the brain-child of Lord Nigel Crisp – here and here), is that it challenges our perceptions of development as something provided by ‘developed’ to ‘less developed’ countries. The website launches a movement whose intent is to promote a model of co-development, in which we recognise the mutual nature of development, promoting the idea that we can and should be learning from one another. An example of the ideas presented at the meeting included work with Community Health Workers in Brazil, which is now being used as part of a research project on health service delivery in Wales. Prof Andy Haines, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, talks about Brazil’s experience here.

Necessity is one of the greatest drivers of creativity, and innovative ideas being developed to overcome or cope with sheer lack of resources in developing countries may provide helpful insights to different ways of working that can have benefits in rich and poor countries alike. The site is seeking to gather ideas and examples of innovation, and hopefully will lead to some robust evaluation of these approaches, helping build an evidence base for new, effective ways of working.

I was prompted to blog on this idea as I have been reading a set of country case studies on Universal Health Care, commissioned by the World Bank (here), which contain a number of important lessons, including from Brazil, which could be of value to other countries.

Taking the Brazil thread of this post a step further, Brazil’s experience, as the host of the 3^rd Global Forum of the Global Health Workforce Alliance, to be in Recife in November this year, will be one of the key inputs to what is shaping up to be an important meeting. Given the importance of building a strong and capable health workforce in support of Universal Health Coverage, the research and evidence feeding into this meeting is likely to be central to the on-going consultation on what will shape priorities after 2015, in the so called ‘post MDG’ period (and here).

An article by Professor Mala Rao in the British Medical Journal also highlights how DFID’s work in India and an innovative technical partnership established with China is already fostering a process of mutual learning. The nature of UK aid is transforming rapidly to reflect the changing nature of our country partnerships.

With a day job dedicated to preaching the virtues of education – and how it should improve, I recently felt obliged to get my hands ‘dirty’ once more and enrolled on a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to see what all the fuss was about. If Khadijaah Niazi, an 11 year old girl from Lahore could enroll and pass a Udacity Physics course (a Stanford University spin-off), what was I afraid of?

Random control trials and the behaviour of the poor sounded interesting, so without cost or hassle I quickly enrolled on the MOOC: The Challenges of Global Poverty run by the edX consortium of MOOC’s, with ‘celebrity’ professors Duflo and Banerjee (authors of Poor Economics) from the Jameel Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) leading the course.

Poor Economics by Banerjee and Duflo

With a fairly slow broadband connection at home, I found myself staying up late 1 or 2 evenings a week to read the fascinating online material (e.g. Why do some people starve themselves to buy TVs or not bother to get kids vaccinated?), watch YouTube videos (complete with script) and attempt quizzes that pass for homework in collaboration with 35,000 other students around the globe. Not having to write essays was a big plus, but the multiple choice questions set were searching and the bulletin boards posted showed fellow student’s desperate pleas for help and occasional hints. I presume the moderators stop obvious cheating – I haven’t encountered any answer sharing online!

edX MOOC course: Challenges of Global Poverty

Despite conflicting international travel and some tired early mornings I’m over the hump and should finish in a few weeks. In theory I will have 12 credits to a degree, although this is where the business model will kick-in as the MOOC organizers try to convert mass online activity into profit, for example by charging for accreditation and certificates that accumulate to recognized qualifications.

Will MOOCs revolutionise the delivery of tertiary education in developing countries like Tanzania? This is a question of great interest, can they bypass the financial and bureaucratic challenges faced by poor but capable, intelligent students? I hope so! This is the sort of initiative that DFID may support in the future, internally we’re crystal ball gazing to understand the trends across the whole spectrum of development and ensure we have the necessary ideas, tools and skills to respond to such challenges in the future.

In Tanzania COSTECH the government technology and innovation agency is partnering with the World Bank to launch a MOOC using content from 1 of the major new providers Coursera. It will focus on IT skills and knowledge, seeking to support college students to become employable – a common complaint is that current Tanzanian school and college graduates lack the rounded skill-set that employers seek.

I feel it is likely that there will need to be a lot more adaption of content, delivery models and support mechanism to realize these benefits. Internet access is erratic and expensive, but perhaps more of a barrier will be language and cultural issues for students who may be unaccustomed to student centred, but independent and at the same time collaborative, learning.

When I started at DFID in October 2010, I didn’t expect to be getting on a plane a year later to move to Sudan. My first year at DFID was spent working in our Internal Audit Department, ensuring that the money DFID spends is well managed and delivering the best results. This role required visits to DFID country offices in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda as well as regularly visiting DFID’s office in East Kilbride. I had expected to stay in London for a few years before moving on to a country office post but when the chance to work in Sudan came up, it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

My friends and family had lots of questions and preconceptions about Sudan and what I would be doing. Some of these I could answer before I left, some of which I can now answer having been here 18 months and some of which I’m still learning about. I thought it might be helpful for my first blog to answer some of these questions.

Are you going to the North or the South?

This I could answer before I left, having applied for a job in Khartoum, Sudan and not South Sudan (capital Juba). In a referendum in January 2011 the South Sudanese voted for secession and South Sudan became the world’s newest country on 9 July 2011, transforming Sudan from the largest country in Africa to the third largest. Sudan is almost all desert, irrigated by the White and Blue Niles which meet in Khartoum and move north to Egypt. South Sudan by comparison is greener with the world’s largest swamp, the Sudd. Most of Sudan’s people are Muslims, while in South Sudan, there are Christians, Muslims and adherents of traditional beliefs.

What is life in Khartoum like?

Pyramids at Meroe, Sudan. Picture: Emily Beardsmore/DFID

Sudanese people are famously friendly. Khartoum’s low crime rates make it one of the safest cities in Africa. My parents and siblings visited me for Christmas and we visited Sudan’s pyramids, some of which are older than those in Egypt. Khartoum is one of the world’s hottest cities – in December the temperature is a pleasant 30 degrees celcius most days. Now it is over 40 degrees most days, and soon it will be summer when it will be even hotter.

What does a ‘policy and aid effectiveness officer’ do?

Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lynne Featherstone visits a WFP programme in Tawilia Darfur. January 2013. Picture: Sophie Wood/FCO

Before I arrived I had an idea of what my job might involve – like most job titles it’s full of buzz words and it wasn’t clear what interesting things I would get to do. My job is about making sure that the work DFID is doing in Sudan is accountable to the British taxpayer and that they know what we are delivering in Sudan. It’s involved organising two ministerial visits for the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for International Development, most recently in January 2013 for Lynne Featherstone and her predecessor Stephen O’Brien in November 2011. These visits are a great opportunity to show ministers the impact British aid is having on the ground.On the most recent visit, I accompanied the minister to visit DFID programmes in Darfur which included meeting women who were supported by the World Food Programme to make and sell fuel efficient stoves and bricks. Darfur is the size of France and so we had to use a helicopter to visit some of the field sights.

I have also led on DFID Sudan’s response to a yellow fever outbreak in Darfur. This was the worst outbreak globally for 20 years. DFID Sudan funded 2 million vaccines to help stop the outbreak in Darfur.The policy part of my role involves leading on the Multilateral Aid Review, which in 2010 looked at the performance of multilateral organisations that DFID funds. In Sudan we have been giving our thoughts on the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration’s (IOM) performance in country back to the DFID head office on a 6 monthly basis. This helps DFID to make decisions about where it can achieve the best value for money in funding multilateral organisations.Accountability also drives my work on communications, part of which is this blog. It also involves working with press office in London to explain to the UK public what we are doing in Sudan.

What does DFID do in Sudan?

DFID is the second largest bilateral donor to Sudan and we have some ambitious results that we want to deliver by 2015 including supporting 800,000 people to get access to water and 250,000 women with access to security and justice services. In future blogs I will look at our results in more detail. For more information our Operational Plan is a great place to start. On the diplomacy and defence sides, the UK has been supporting talks between Sudan and South Sudan, financially and technically.

Women in Tawila, Darfur. Picture: Sophie Wood/FCO

What about Darfur? Is there on-going conflict? 

When most people think about Sudan they will think about Darfur or conflict. Darfur makes up about 50% of DFID’s spend in Sudan and so is central to our work here. Sudan has only had 11 years of total peace since independence in 1956 -therefore DFID’s work in Sudan focuses on responding to the immediate effects of conflict and the underlying drivers. However there is no short answer to either of these questions and they will need a full blog in future to answer fully. If you’re interested, the British Ambassador to Khartoum has blogged this week on Darfur following a donor conference in Doha.

In future blogs I hope to talk about DFID’s priorities in Sudan, the 10 year anniversary of the Darfur Conflict, how the UK responded to the yellow fever outbreak in Darfur, our new programme on Female Genital Cutting, how we measure and record what we are delivering in Sudan, amongst other things. Please let me know if there is anything you’d particularly like to hear about.

Mitch and Vendell representing the Caribbean Union of Fisherfolk Associations. Picture: Anne Philpott/DFID

Mitch Addison Lay has come all the way across the ocean to Dublin to tell us about the Caribbean Union of Fisherfolk Associations and their worries about diminishing fish stocks close to the shores of many of their islands. He was first and foremost a red snapper line fisherman but had worked hard to bring unity across his fellow Caribbean fisherfolk. The experience had taught him that, “It’s easier to get politicians to listen than to get fisherfolk together”. He told us that fishing for him and his fellow fisherfolk is “a way of life, which is not economic, but an entire life for us, socially and culturally”.The Dublin Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Climate Change has been different in its determination to bring people who are immediately affected by these issues to ensure they meet policy makers. The messages generated will then feed into the post Millennium Development Goals (MDG) framework discussions. The conference is made up of ‘grassroots’ participants, many of whom are leaving their home country for the first time. These include pastoralists from Ethiopia, Malawian farmers, Arctic peoples and a group of Mongolian cattle herders. The other half of policy makers come from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), governments and UN agencies.

The opening ceremony urged us all to “listen up” and started with Eamon Gilmore, the Irish Foreign Affairs Minister telling us how he felt a deep empathy for women headed small holders as he grew up on a small farm, run by his mother where weather was the determining force in their livelihoods – if it rained and a crop spoiled they would go hungry. The President of Ireland, Michael Higgens spoke of Ireland’s “deep compassion for others experience of hunger” due to their own history of famine.

Runa Khatun from Shushilan NGO in Bangladesh with colleagues. Picture: Anne Philpott/DFID

The day was spent listening to people telling their own stories of the impact of climate change, hunger and nutrition – and the relationship between them all. We also heard from World Vision youth ambassadors who spoke about hopes for their adult lives – Alex Nallo came from Palestine to urge action in tackling these issues which would have an impact on him in his 40’s. He said there will be “limits to their inventiveness” to deal with the combined stress of all three. Runa Khatun, representing Shushilan NGO in Bangladesh, said that they were women who classified themselves as extremely poor and vulnerable to floods who wanted to increase their resilience to disasters by organising together, and a combination of cash and food helped to improve their collective quality of life.

I was nominated as a policy champion for one of these learning circles and needed to define, determine and articulate the lessons of empowerment we gained. Although empowerment was hard to define, key themes were emerging such as dignity, participation and knowledge, as well as discussion of what outcomes were empowering. We also tackled how to get there in terms of a collective process to a receptive environment and we were tasked to deliver a one minute video address – a real challenge when tackling a subject as complex as empowerment.

Nick Dyer, Policy Director at DFID with Mary Robinson. Picture: Anne Philpott/DFID

DFID’s Policy Director Nick Dyer met Mary Robinson earlier in the day and as well as discussing how we would work together towards the ‘Nutrition for Growth’ event on 8 June, she outlined her vision for wider use of clean energy in low income countries and how climate justice is a cause worthy of global solidarity.

UNICEF rounded off the day by launching a new report on the status of stunting worldwide and successful nutrition responses. The report reminded us that one in four children globally are stunted, robbing them of critical life chances in many areas of their lives and their mental and physical potential. 80% of these children live in just 20 countries making targeting of simple and proven steps easier such as improving women’s nutrition, early and exclusive breastfeeding, providing additional vitamins and minerals as well as appropriate food in pregnancy and the first 2 years of a child’s life. The report ends on a hopeful note showing that stunting is reducing in specific contexts. In Maharashtra state in India, the percentage of stunted children dropped from 39% in 2005 to 23% in 2012 largely because of support to frontline workers who focus on improving child nutrition.

On this hopeful note, Joe Costello, the Irish Minister for State for Trade and Development, spoke of 2013 being the moment to mobilise for nutrition. He linked this conference at the end of the Irish EU presidency with our own ‘Nutrition for Growth’ conference at the start the UK G8 presidency – and the need to continue to pitch high for delivery for the 870 million hungry in the world. The Dublin event highlighted just how far we have come to bring attention to the issue of malnutrition – and how we now need to tackle it.

A good friend of mine has started advertising her flat on Airbnb, a website that allows anyone that has a spare bedroom, owns a second property, or just want to rent their place out while they are on holiday to market it to others. Airbnb says its aim is to build a “trusted, collaborative marketplace”, and one of the main tools for doing so is their system of rating and reviews.

Rating and review systems aren’t new. They are the backbone of websites like Tripadvisor, Ebay and Amazon, to name a few. Amazon’s Founder and CEO, Jeff Bezoz has argued that these websites don’t just succeed because they have the rating and review systems – they succeed because they allow negative feedback as well. In the early days, Amazon was under pressure to delete negative customer reviews. But he took the view that customers would not come to Amazon to buy products if they didn’t trust Amazon, and knowing that negative feedback was displayed was critical to building that trust. Now that sellers know that they can get negative feedback, they have adjusted their strategies and improved their performance. They no longer put pressure on Amazon to delete comments, yet continue to advertise through Amazon.

My friend has had a similar experience with Airbnb. Initially, she was worried that she would get negative reviews from her guests because the water pressure in her flat wasn’t good. But, rather than wait for negative reviews, she decided to be upfront about the water problems when she welcomed the new guests. Now, all she gets is good reviews on her flat once her guests leave. By being open about the good and the bad, she’s now making a tidy little sum to pay for her holidays.

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about knowledge sharing, a topic that Indonesia has put on the agenda of the Global Partnership. Indonesia wants to stimulate the international community to find innovative ways to scale up and make knowledge sharing (known in some circles as technical assistance) even more effective in delivering development.

Sharing knowledge on health in northern Nigeria, credit: Lindsay Mgbor, DFID, 2012

Since I wrote the post, and discussing it with others, I’ve been wondering whether, in many ways knowledge sharing has marketplace-like properties – as experts have a clear product, their knowledge. In her 2010 Ted Talk, Noreena Hertz laments a number of problems with relying on experts. But whether or not we like experts, the fact is, that like many of the products Amazon sold or my friends flat, there’s an information gap (or, in economic speak, an asymmetry). Experts might have a view about good they are, but those trying to get the knowledge – such as government officials in developing countries – can’t easily assess their quality. Experts themselves also have no real idea how good they are in comparison to others. And there’s no “central list” of who are the best global experts on different policy areas like tax, or the environment.

If a lack of information about the quality of knowledge shared or technical assistance is a problem in development, then the system of inviting open feedback and review may be useful to emulate – creating an open marketplace for experts from all over the world and rating them online, based on real feedback from the users, particularly officials from developing country governments. Experts could even be organised in “hubs” for different policy areas, such as food security or green growth.

Does anything exist like this in development? I haven’t come across it. The South South Opportunity website has a great set of case studies with lessons learnt for each, but it doesn’t quite get to the heart of who was behind each project, or set out actual feedback.  Perhaps its because there are barriers to opening up such information, such as data protection or competition rules. That said, barriers might be overcome by looking in more depth at what Airbnb and Amazon have done to overcome similar issues. A truly “trusted, collaborative marketplace” might be well worth exploring, even if people are initially a little scared of negative feedback.

Did you know that Wikipedia had several predecessors? According to this article, there were plenty, but one of the main reasons they didn’t become as well known was because they didn’t explicitly relate themselves to a product that people already knew and understood – the encyclopaedia. They forgot that “content is king”, and tried to create entirely new products based on new technologies, without relating clearly to the underlying problem to solve – how to share knowledge.

I’ve recently been discussing the topic of “knowledge sharing” with colleagues from Indonesia. Wikipedia is probably the best known mechanism for knowledge sharing around the world. But, in development circles, knowledge sharing refers to a particular way that many emerging economies – from China to Colombia –support other developing countries. In the UK we call this type of support “technical assistance” or “capacity building”. Basically, it’s when a government official or consultant from one country shares information with another government official about successful projects, policy or legislation. It can take place as a visit, a conference, a series of meetings, or even a secondment from a week to months. An example recently launched in the UK is “IFUSE”.

Emerging economies tend to focus the knowledge they share around their own experience of development, and in this sense, knowledge sharing is, alongside loans for infrastructure and other activities, a major component of what is known as “south-south” cooperation. Institutions like the World Bank also offer technical assistance alongside their loans.

Government officials in Kenya share knowledge about health, Credit: DFID, 2008

I’ve been discussing this topic because at the most recent meeting of the Steering Committee for the Global Partnership, Indonesia’s Minister of Planning made a case for trying to scale up knowledge sharing and make it an even more effective way of delivering development.

Many problems have been identified with technical assistance in the past. But, as this paper illustrates, it’s hard to find real practical solutions to address the problems. Added to this, the view is often expressed, though not necessarily substantiated, that south-south forms of technical assistance can probably overcome the problems.

So I’ve been wondering whether the Wikipedia experience regarding its potential competitors can help.

Wikipedia’s founders probably felt that there wasn’t enough knowledge sharing going on. Encyclopaedias had limited distribution and were often expensive. In addition, the barriers to entry were high. There weren’t many people contributing to the few well-known editions of encyclopaedias around. So, the founders did two things. First, they created a free product that was open to anyone who had the internet. Second, and more importantly, they reversed the role of “gatekeepers”. In the traditional print profession, there are usually editors who make sure only the best pieces get published. Wikipedia reversed this completely. It let everything get published but behind the scenes introduced a handful of voluntary experts who unofficially made sure the important pieces were correct. By reversing the usual dynamic of “gatekeepers” and making barriers to entry as low as possible, Wikipedia drew on the largest possible knowledge base while maintaining an incredibly high standard.

How might this apply to knowledge sharing in development circles? Well, if scarcity of knowledge sharing is similarly a problem (though I’m not entirely sure it is), the Wikipedia experience suggests that scaling it up will not be as simple as devoting more money to it. This is because – as with general knowledge – “content is king”. The content of south-south forms of cooperation is experience. Hence, I’m not sure devoting more money would help. But making sure the barriers are as low as possible for people with experience to share their knowledge might help. So the question is how to make existing knowledge based on experience have a wider reach and last into the future. In this case, creating a Wikipedia-like tool for development work or some sort of tool to do more e-learning might be useful. ODI and SAIIA have, in the past, suggested that the G20 should explore something like this.

Indeed, some tools already exist. The World Bank recently launched an Open Knowledge Repository to consolidate thousands of its books, reports and research, allowing the public to distribute, reuse and build on its work. It hosts discussion forums on topics such as jobs. UNDP similarly facilitates 23 global Communities of Practice networks for development exports to support, learn and benefit from different experiences in different locations and environments. These tools may well need more awareness and support to scale them up, or they may need more of a radical re-think, like Wikipedia’s competitors did.

Wikipedia flourished because it filled a clear gap and related itself to everyday products and problems. If we’re going to fulfil Indonesia’s aspiration to make knowledge sharing in development really successful, a first step might be to learn from Wikipedia’s experience.

In 2010, two British survivors of female genital mutilation (FGM) and I started a charity called Daughters of Eve in order to mainstream the issue and change how it is addressed.  FGM has been a criminal offence in the UK since 1985, but it took another 20 years for it to be illegal to take girls abroad to undergo FGM in the 2003 Act. Countless young girls were taken out of the country – and some to London – to undergo FGM. However, as children, we had little power to do anything, while those that were charged with safeguarding us ignored the issue. The suffering of so many young women and girls that I saw growing up – and still do – is the basis of why I left the civil service in order to join the campaign against FGM. Growing up in the UK and travelling to Africa every year, where the largest population of women and girls affected by FGM live, I have had a unique insight into the campaign against it.

The recent episode of BBC’s Casualty which featured a strong FGM storyline was developed with the assistance of Daughters of Eve and three young people from Integrate Bristol. In this two-part story we follow a young woman dealing with the dangers of FGM. (Watch this Saturday’s episode on BBC 1 at 9.10pm).

FGM is child abuse and it is vital that front-line professionals who meet girls on a regular basis know exactly what the danger signs are and how to react accordingly. Children aren’t able to use legislation like an adult and can face misconceptions of FGM being carried out because their families ‘love them’ from the professionals they seek to protect them – the FGM legislation is not effective by itself.

It may seem that FGM is currently being talked about everywhere but the current media coverage has been years in the making and has taken countless meetings and doors being closed in our faces for us to get here. As a British survivor of FGM, I have witnessed the conversations about FGM over the years come and go, but what they all had in common was a focus on speaking to those either historically affected by the practice – or those that upheld and enabled it to happen.

For the most part, people have been discussing FGM as a cultural issue that happens in ‘lands far away’ and that we should educate those carrying it out. My view is that we need to step away completely from the terms ‘culture’ and ‘community’ and stop trying to make ourselves feel better about not doing anything by suggesting that FGM is based on ‘love’. This is one of the biggest misconceptions – and an extremely dangerous one too. FGM is not a loving act. It is violence against women and girls and any strategy for its elimination needs to be based in this framework.

Daughters of Eve is delighted to see £35 million made available by the UK government to tackle this issue in Africa and elsewhere, but we must make sure that experts on this issue are being listened to.  We should be learning from holistic models such as in Burkina Faso and Kenya, where recent Demographic and Health Surveys have shown prevalence rates to have fallen more than elsewhere (up to 30%). These models consider FGM to be violence against women and girls and are effective because they combine child protection and legislation, as well as educational measures, to empower those at risk or affected.

As a form of violence against women, FGM takes place because of structural inequalities in society – particularly gender inequality.  We need to empower and protect those at risk to make sure that it is eliminated. Any approach to end FGM which does not address these inequalities will only leave a vacuum for another form of violence against women – or for those who carry out FGM to say that it does not exist.

Progress is definitely being made. In Bristol, we have hundreds of young people who are not only standing up and speaking out about FGM, but questioning the role of women within their communities. They are being empowered with language that has not just changed their lives, but also those of their mothers. Women from a highly FGM-affected population are also calling it violence against women and girls and linking FGM to all the other forms of abuse they have experienced.  As one woman said: ‘If it is ok to cut a girl because she is a girl, then what you will do to her as a woman will be worse’. This change has not come easily for those of us that have stood up against FGM. We face death threats on a regular basis, we have been attacked on the street and lost people we once believed to be friends.

My personal aim is to afford young women the same privileges that I had and for them to understand that within them there is great potential.  I was freely educated and given the space and support to develop my identity. I was allowed to be me and not have a predefined culture projected on to me, which is sadly happening to girls today.

We need to all stand together and empower the girls who are seeking our support. As Tamasha says on Casualty, quoting a young women we have worked with: ‘It never stops hurting. It is always painful’. Let us not deepen that pain by undermining the bravery of those women and girls that come forward not only to tell their stories, but also to live a life of their choosing.

If I could wish for one thing to change as a result of the Casualty episodes, it would be for everyone to see the child in front of us as a girl asking for help and not part of an ‘other’ culture. As we say at Daughters of Eve, ‘If you save one girl you save a generation’.

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Please note, this is a guest blog. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of DFID or have the support of the British government.

Find out what the British government is doing to eliminate female genital mutilation.

After 18 months my time in Ghana is up. In the frantic rush to pack up, leave and say goodbye I thought I would write down some final thoughts.

A village in Northern Ghana. Picture: Henry Donati

Warmth – of the humid tropical sun, of stifling evenings – yes, but of people as well. The richly infectious sound of Ghanaian laughter, humour in the language itself; ‘obruni wawu’ is the name for the piles of second hand clothes donated by well-meaning Westerners for sale in every market – it literally translates as ‘dead white man’s clothes’. Akpteshie – the fiery sugar cane spirit – the favoured drink at funerals, also known as ‘kill me quick’ – a name that gives some clues as to its effects.Ghanaian friends and colleagues will strongly disapprove, but I think Francophone West Africa does seem to do the finer things in life rather better – food, music, fashion, beer… But you just need to look across the rest of the region to see how well Ghana does in some of the things that really are more important to people’s every day lives: ethnic and religious tolerance, a free press, an (in many ways) booming economy, a vibrant democracy. Ghana doesn’t have the wide open landscapes of Namibia, not the stunning landscape and wildlife of East Africa, not even the beaches and mountains of Sierra Leone or the skyscrapers and public transport of Abidjan.What it does have is a sense of pride in a cohesive national identity, in its democratic tradition. Not the scars of apartheid which still run below the surface of South Africa, nor perhaps the growing geographical and religious divides of other West African countries.

Wrought, perhaps, in the heady days of the 1950s and 60s after Ghana became the first African nation to gain its independence in 1957, this democratic sense was then submerged in murky periods of military rule, coup and counter coup through the 70s and 80s, before resurging in the 90s.

The current President, John Mahama wrote his memoirs My First Coup D’Etat about his time in these so-called ‘lost decades’ in Africa: years of authoritarian rule, stagnation in politics, the economy, the arts. But in it he writes about how for some people like him, these lost years actually became an awakening, a time they began to find their own voices. The book opens with the poignant memory of himself as a 7 year old boy returning home from school to find his home empty, his father had disappeared; a minister in Nkrumah’s government, he had been imprisoned following a coup. Mahama writes that this moment was an “awakening of consciousness”, a coming to the realisation that this was not how things should be, and a determination to try to change them.

Children at a village in Upper West Region. Picture: Henry Donati

Kenyan author Ngugi Wa’Thiongo wrote a brilliant Garcia Marquez-esque novel called Wizard of the Crow, which brilliantly satirises the venal African kleptocrat in a fantastical but politically astute way. It shows a wickedly imagined stereotypical image of an African leader in those ‘lost decades’, and one that still might strike a little close to home for some leaders today, but not in Ghana. It is a vision that does not seem to fit in Ghana’s political and democratic history, or alongside Mahama’s warm, personally felt memoir. The democratic tradition, the cohesive sense of national identity which had been forged in Ghana’s early years re-emerged as democracy returned in the 1990s; it’s a democracy that can be loud, discordant and messy, and works through complex overlapping webs of ethnic and political allegiance; but people really do feel like they have a voice. This sense of democratic pride came out most clearly to me in December’s Presidential elections. Taxi drivers vigorously debated the different parties’ education policies, security guards would listen to the radio rapt to the epic 4 hour (!) long Presidential debates (partly funded by UK aid).As an election observer (read my blog about it here), everywhere I went I saw lines, hundreds long, of people waiting patiently in the baking sun for the chance to cast their vote, old men who had queued out in the open since the night before to have the chance to vote when polls opened at 7am. It was a privilege to witness a small part of Ghana’s democratic history.

A new mother in front of her UK aid funded mosquito net

And even in 18 months, I think about the growth of Accra I’ve witnessed – every day a new building going up, every night a new bar or restaurant opening, and all the time the traffic gets worse, battered tro tros jammed full of people lumbering along the roads billowing out acrid smoke.I think about the dynamism of some of the young people I met – some born and bred in Ghana, some returning from studying abroad, or children of Ghanaians who are visiting the land of their parents for the very first time. Where 20 years ago the talented people were leaving the country, now many are coming back. And they are young, energetic, creative, entrepreneurial – I think of my friends who’ve built property businesses from scratch, started think tanks, built mobile applications.

And then I also think about the people this growth isn’t really touching at all – villages way out in Upper West region, hours from the nearest tarred road, clinic or electricity connection. Schools where teachers haven’t turned up, where children don’t have books.

Girls in a ‘School for Life’ class. Picture: Henry Donati

I think about my visits to UKaid-supported ‘School for Life’ classes. Seeing kids who had been forced to drop out of primary school, or who never had the chance to join in the first place, getting a second chance at education – something that should be every child’s right. Then meeting the parents, hearing them explain their determination that their children should have a better opportunity than they did.I think of the challenges ahead. A booming economy, but one still largely reliant on commodities and riding high on the first wave of reforms that came with democratisation in the 90s. Now as a middle income country Ghana really has to push for the second wave – reforming its public institutions and the way it manages its money, diversifying the economy – otherwise its progress will stagnate.I think about the contrasts. The juxtaposition of what seems to be tradition and modernity – chiefs in traditional dress welcoming you to their village, with one hand pouring the customary bottle of schnapps you’ve brought them onto the floor as an offering, and fiddling with their smartphones with the other.

Meeting the Asantehene – who went from working in Brent borough council to becoming King of the Ashanti – who leads one of Ghana’s biggest ethnic groups and a royal lineage going back 300 years, who inherited a palace and a bling gold jewellery collection that would put most self-respecting rappers to shame. (See here)

The variety of geography – rain-forested coastal Western Region, to verdant green and hilly Volta Region. The regions up north – the dry arid savannah where the harmattan wind sweeps in every January bringing the fine dust from the Sahara which filters out the sun. Here it’s a different world from the sprawling metropolis of Accra – mudcracked houses and dirt roads, subsistence farmers growing maize, cassava and rice.

View over Ghana’s Volta Region. Picture: Henry Donati

Visits to companies like Blue Skies – a firm previously supported by UK aid that works 24 hours a day taking fresh mangoes and pineapples from smallholder farmers and turning them into the packets of freshly chopped fruit you see on the shelves of Sainsbury’s and Waitrose a few hours later. And then less sustainable business models – towns I’ve been to in Ghana’s central region that are like the wild west, where small scale gold miners raze the ground and turn the rivers milky white with toxic chemicals as they dredge them in search of precious flecks of gold.

The author and his coach in Jamestown

My favourite place in Accra is the area around Jamestown –the oldest part of the city – ramshackle fishing villages, and crumbling colonial buildings. Famous for producing World Champion boxers (see here), I used to go there to learn boxing myself, picking my way across the courtyard littered with shattered tiles, broken bricks, and clapped out cars to find the Attoh Quarshie gym, a small dark room, with a couple of punch bags and a ring, and walls covered in tattered old posters advertising boxing matches. No fan or AC, only narrow windows, just wide enough to let the smells of smoked fish and burning rubbish in off the beach.I helped coach Ghana’s national rugby tournament as they played in a West Africa Sevens tournament. The World Cup this was not – the only support they received from the government was the loan of a minibus to take them to Togo (which broke down). The ‘athletes’ village’ was mattresses on the floors of the changing room, and they only had 1 supporter (who doubled as the bus driver). But the guys stood proudly singing the Ghanaian national anthem with tears in their eyes.

Ghana’s rugby team sings the national anthem. Picture: Henry Donati

I think about people we have lost – my friend who died in a traffic accident, relatives of colleagues and friends. Traffic lights that don’t work, street lamps that won’t light, roundabouts that cars don’t go round. Frustration, elation and enervation; plans that don’t work and work that doesn’t seem to plan. Endless battles with unreliable water, mobile reception, internet and electricity.

Rainy season – torrents of water pouring down, rapidly blocking storm drains, flooding streets. Green tomatoes, green lemons, mounds of dried fish, joints of meat with clouds of flies gathering overhead, chickens – dead, alive and everywhere in between. And when you drive out of town – towers of pineapples tasting sweeter than you could ever imagine, cracked open coconuts cool and refreshing inside. Fishing boats along the coast – giant hollowed out tree trunks painted in bright colours with bible quotations emblazoned on the sides. Fishermen with gnarled hands mending nets. Heat and sweat, lights out and traffic jams. Sitting in the back of a pick-up truck in the tropical sunshine, coated in layers of dirt, bones aching from potholed roads.

Fishing boats at Elmina

Driving through towns and villages on Sunday mornings, people flocking to church in their Sunday best –loud African print skirts, brightly polished shoes. Churches that are Anglican, Methodist, Roman Catholic – and every other denomination imaginable.

Roadside hawkers swooping in as traffic lights in town turn red – selling you fried plaintain, sachets of water and phone credit, but also items less immediately plausible as impulse buys. I’ve seen vendors selling stepladders, games of cluedo, broken mirrors, power drills and tummy trimmers.

I’m moving to London to work for DFID there. But I’m sure I’ll be back.

A child at a village in Northern Ghana. Picture: Henry Donati

Abubakari Sulemana Hafiz tells me about his journey from being an out-of-school child to now studying at the University of Ghana

Abubakari Sulemana Hafiz has a lot to be proud of. He is one of 11 undergraduates who are part of Ghana’s first cohort of veterinary science students at the University of Ghana. This achievement is even more impressive as until he was 14 years old, he had not been to school. Abubakari comes from Kumbungu district in Ghana’s northern region where many families simply cannot afford the opportunity costs of sending their children to school. While Ghana has been experiencing high growth rates, the north has been left behind – over the past decade the number of poor declined by 2.5 million in the south while it grew by 0.9 million in areas in the north. Abubakari explains that his story is common.

“Children are kept out of school so they can work to help support their families – selling goods at the market, doing manual labour on the farms, or rearing cattle.”

Until School for Life came to Abubakari’s village in 1999, he was living with his cousin and looking after their farm. School for Life is a NGO that provides an accelerated learning programme for out-of-school children, known as complementary basic education. Students attend three-hour classes, 5 days a week for 9 months, taught in their mother-tongue language. Founded in 1995, School for Life has been very successful at getting out-of-school children into school. Part of their success centres around the strong community involvement. School for Life offers communities the chance to run the 9-month programme, by appointing community members to form a school management committee.

“In every community where we start School for Life, we hold a large discussion forum where we explain what we do. If the community wants to start a programme, they go onto elect a committee of 3 women and 2 men who oversee the programme,” the deputy manager, Mr Braimah explains.

School for Life deliberately seeks to get women to take a leading role on the committee, and ensures that over 50% of the out-of-school children who enrol are girls. This is because more than half of girls in these communities are not in school (see my earlier blog post on our partnership with Camfed).

Abubakari grew up in a village like this in Ghana’s northern region

The committee is then tasked with ensuring that the children who signed up attend the classes, parents are kept informed of their children’s progress and the community gains a stronger understanding of the value of education. The strong linkage with the community does not stop there. The teachers, known as facilitators, are also recruited from the same communities in which they teach. The community has to appoint a facilitator who is trained by School for Life to teach the class and commits to personally ensuring that all the enrolled children attend.

The founder of School for Life, Mr Saaka, explains that the success of the programme very much stems from the fact that communities trust the people running the programme.

“Having a facilitator from the community, promotes high retention rates, excellent attendance, and quality engagement with parents and the community. The facilitator will go around to an individual family’s house if their child is not coming to the classes. There is also flexible school timetabling that allows children to support their family’s need to earn an income during the morning.”

School for Life has really worked to reduce the number of out-of-school children, currently at around, 500,000. From 1998 to 2007, it educated more than 85,000 children aged between 8 and 14. More than 90% of these students graduated from the program, and around 70% were integrated into the formal school system. In 2006, a 2 -3% increase in the national enrolment rate was attributed to the School for Life programme.

Abubakari commends School for Life and the Ghana Education Service’s close partnership to enable graduates to transition to regular school on completing the programme. Usually graduates enter into class 4 of primary school.

“Straight after, I went to Kumbungu primary school. My teacher knew that I was a School for Life graduate and really supported me to improve my English skills, and recognised that I enjoyed Maths. She was the one who pushed me to enter into the northern region’s Science and Maths competition where I came first. That really gave me the confidence to continue my education and go onto to senior high school, and become the first person in my family to go to university.”

A community facilitator from School for Life teaches the out-of-school children in his community how to read and write

DFID Ghana first started supporting School for Life in 2008. Since then, we have supported 38,000 out-of-school children to go through this second-chance learning programme. Based on the strong results, DFID Ghana is now supporting a scale-up of complementary basic education to reach 120,000 out-of-school children by replicating the School for Life model and partnering with other NGO-providers.

In addition to providing access, the programme will support the Government of Ghana to move the out-of-school agenda forward. The Chief Director (most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Education) Enoch Kobbinah, will chair the taskforce on complementary basic education. DFID will help strengthen the government’s ability to procure complementary basic education programmes through non-state providers and provide advice on the draft policy. We have also provided support to refine the existing package of government-approved teaching and learning materials. The well-known Indian NGO, Pratham has been sharing ideas and collaborating with School for Life to improve the teaching and learning materials. There will also be a large research strand to the programme: a longitudinal study will be carried out to track the out-of-school children supported over a ten-year period.  The study will fill in the evidence gap on out-of-school children looking, assessing how much they learn and the longer-term value for money of complementary basic education programmes.

Formerly out-of-school children are eager to learn

For Abubakari there is no doubt that School for Life’s complementary basic education programme has changed his life.

“It is hard to believe that I am now living in the capital, and studying veterinary science. I really hope to be able to help increase Ghana’s agricultural productivity, so we can grow more and do that more efficiently, and rear healthier animals. This will also help poor families, like mine, to be able to send their children to school.”

I have lots of family in Kenya, and a few days ago, my dad received the news that a cargo of furniture and other household goods that he’d shipped over was about to arrive at the port. To my surprise, he promptly booked a plane ticket to Kenya, and explained that it was cheaper for him to fly to Kenya and back than to leave the container at the port – as he would be charged high costs for each day that he left it there.

Before I began lamenting Kenya’s trade policy, I recalled a seminar that I’d attended a few weeks ago at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.  The seminar was entitled “Transparency: Tackling Poverty at its Roots”, and was opened by Mark Simmonds, the Minister for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and chaired by Michael Anderson, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for the UN Development Goals. 200 civil servants from all over Whitehall attended, and others from Moscow, Paris, Cape Town and Kinshasa dialled in.

I had gone along to the seminar to hear more about the rationale for the UK’s plans to promote transparency by governments and companies at the G8 Summit in June this year. I wanted to know whether the panellists thought transparency could really reduce poverty in developing countries.

During the seminar, one of the panellists Paul Collier, an economist most famous for his book The Bottom Billion (though my personal favourite is Wars, Guns and Votes) gave an unusual explanation for why he thought transparency was so critical to poverty reduction.

He began by noting that many developing countries, particularly in Africa, impose high trade tariffs, duties and other costs at their ports. This is why my dad had to rush to Kenya. However, Collier explained that this isn’t just because the countries don’t like trade or want to protect their local industries. He said it often comes down to the fact that trade taxes are easiest to track and collect compared to other types of tax, such as income and value-added taxes. Many countries have a narrow tax base, which in turn creates an incentive to hike up trade tariffs and duties to meet their spending needs.

The coast is clear at Kenya’s Mombasa port, credit: NazarethCollege, 2009

Collier therefore suggested, rather than pushing such countries to reduce their tariffs, that they should be helped to raise revenues from other sources. And a key means could be more transparency by companies.

Many large companies often have complex structures. These exist for many good management reasons but they can also be associated with tax avoidance. Though not illegal, aggressive tax avoidance indicates some effort to circumvent norms and rules put in place by countries for social benefits. Complex, opaque company structures can also be associated with wrongdoing, such as corruption and money-laundering (also known as “illicit flows”).

Coordinated action by G8 countries to increase transparency around the ownership of companies could help reduce the potential for tax avoidance and wrongdoing. It could also help identify when companies aren’t paying enough taxes. This will mean that developing countries have the chance to collect more company taxes and develop a broader tax base. It will reduce their incentive to rely on hiking up trade costs. The UK Prime Minister argued in a speech in Davos earlier this year that this will be good for business – creating a level playing field and providing governments with more tools such as cheaper trade to enable the private sector to grow.

My colleagues in HMT, BIS and DFID are currently considering, along with the UK’s G8 partners and other stakeholders, the best mechanism for achieving greater transparency by companies and governments – for example, how information should be gathered and to whom it should be made available. If you have any views, please set them out in the comments below!

It’s worth also noting that over the weekend, DFID’s Secretary of State Justine Greening announced that the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation will, at its first-ever Ministerial later this year, aim to build consensus beyond the G8 on actions to help developing countries raise more tax.

In the meantime, I’m hoping my dad manages to pick up his goods at the port in Kenya soon.  And I’m hoping there will be more seminars to help me and other policy makers better understand how agreements by the G8 and Global Partnership can really make a difference to development.

A guest blog by Susanna Moorehead, DFID West and Southern Africa Director, about her recent visit to a center for girls living in the street in Kinshasa.

During my recent visit to DRC, I witnessed life in the huge, vibrant but troubled capital city, Kinshasa.

One street in the Kimbanseke commune in Kinshasa
Picture: DFID DRC

In the tree-lined streets of Gombe, the diplomatic quarter on the banks of the Congo River, I discussed questions of governance, the mining sector, the business environment and donor coordination with the Prime Minister. Then, I travelled to Kimbanseke, the poorest commune of Kinshasa, a sprawling settlement of slum dwellings off the airport road. There, I visited a centre for girls living on the street supported by War Child UK *. I toured the centre and met staff. The 30 or so girls who live at the centre were engaged in a lively maths class; for many of them it is the first chance they have had to access any form of education. Finally, I had the opportunity to sit with eight of the girls and talk to them about their lives, experiences and the support that the centre offers.

Claudine’s story is typical: her mother died when she was 9 years old and her father married another woman. The family was poor and there was often not enough food. Claudine was accused of witchcraft and fled her home. She started to beg on the street. After a few days, she met an older girl, a yaya (big sister in Lingala, a Congolese language), who helped her to ‘look for money’ (initiated her into prostitution). Claudine earned between 500-1,000 Congolese Francs (US$ 0.6 – $1.2) per client and was obliged to give the money she earned to the yaya in return for food and protection. Claudine lived like this for 3 years. She was raped several times, including by soldiers based at the nearby camp. The last time she was raped, she became pregnant and fell very ill. The yaya brought her to the day centre for street children based in Matete to get medical treatment. Claudine now visits the centre most days. She has just started literacy lessons and after the birth of her baby, she hopes to start vocational training as a beautician. She dreams of being one of the country’s top beauticians and, one day, she says that she wants to use some of the money she makes to help other street girls.

War Child’s center for girls living in the street in Kinshasa.
Pictures: DFID DRC / War Child

According to aggregated development statistics, Kinshasa province performs well relative to other provinces of DRC and few international aid agencies support programmes there. Yet, scratch below the surface and a very different picture emerges. Everyday life is especially difficult for women and girls in Tshangu. In this situation, many women – especially adolescent girls – resort to risky livelihood strategies such as transactional sex and commercial sex work – sometimes encouraged by their own families; sometimes after fleeing from home. Locally-collected data** reveals high and increasing numbers of girls living and working on the streets and a widespread phenomenon of “filles-mères” (girl-mothers) in the district. These vulnerable girls and young women are often excluded from school, unable to access healthcare and exposed to HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and both sexual and physical violence. There are very few services targeted at them, apart from a few day centres and vocational training centres run by local or international NGOs.

War Child has set up a night ambulance gives support to the girls living in the street of the Tshangu district in Kinshasa
Picture: War Child

The project’s main activities are providing street children with support including a mobile ‘night-ambulance’ offering immediate access to medical and psychosocial support, a 24-hour drop-in centre, counselling, medical support and referral. Where possible, girls are reunified with their families or other long-term solutions are sought. Awareness-raising campaigns to promote awareness of children’s rights are being undertaken to tackle negative community attitudes towards street girls, so as to address stigmatisation and other factors preventing family reintegration, such as peer influence, behavioural difficulties, lack of income, lack of education and of employment opportunities. My experience in Kinshasa reflects some of the challenges facing both our programme and staff in DRC. On the one hand, we need to engage politically at the highest level if we are to support real change for the people of DRC. While on the other we need to have enough knowledge and understanding of how people live, and in particular, the poorest and most vulnerable, to be able to listen to their views, and respond appropriately. The Secretary of State for International Development, Justine Greening, recently announced a package of new measures to support women and girls living in poverty and has repeated her determination to step-up the UK government’s implication in front of the Commons. At the same moment, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Lynne Featherstone, attended the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York to make sure the UK plays a leading role in protecting women and girls rights.

DFID DRC is exploring ways of funding innovative work, specifically in relation to catalysing better results for women and girls. The challenge then, is how to use the lessons learned from this work to influence the policy and practice of key partners, as well as tackling damaging social norms and practices that leave Claudine, and thousands like her, with no other option but to live on the streets of Kinshasa.

Visit to the War Child center in Kimbanseke, Kinshasa
Picture: DFID DRC

A few months ago, DFID’s Secretary of State Justine Greening announced the beginning of a new, non-aid based relationship with India focused on trade and the private sector. Around the same time, David Cameron, announced a focus for the UK’s G8 presidency on changing tax, trade and transparency policies inside the UK and other G8 countries to have a positive impact on development. This new focus on “putting our own house in order”, in the Prime Minister’s words, will be the defining feature of this year’s development campaign.

But these two big announcements were not just about a specific UK mindset. They are part of a broader shift that is taking place globally. It is the shift from “aid effectiveness” to “development effectiveness”, which underpinned the establishment of the new Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation just over a year ago in Busan, Korea. The shift can be expressed more simply as a move away from concentrating on aid alone to address poverty reduction. It brings in a new focus on policy – for example trade and investment policy – and its effect on development.

A sceptical reader might wonder whether this shift is taking place simply because traditional donors such as the UK are under domestic pressure to cut their aid budgets. That pressure certainly exists, but in the UK the aid budget is being maintained. This year, the UK government will meet the 0.7% aid target, an ambition dating back to the 1960s. Meeting 0.7% is critical – because aid has a very necessary role, particularly in fragile and conflict-afflicted states where governments may not even be able to prioritise gathering other sources of finance for development – such as collecting taxes from citizens or business.

The fact is that the shift needs to take place because of changes in the economics of poverty. Ten years or so ago, reducing poverty was in many ways simpler than it is now. At the time, most of the world’s poorest people lived in low income countries such as Kenya. They lived in rural areas, and aid was one of the largest financial flows globally. Aid was the major tool to help address the needs of the poorest people around the world.

A decade on this is no longer the case. As Andy Sumner, a development economist at Kings College London, explains in this podcast, the majority of poor people no longer live in low-income countries. They now mostly live in middle income countries. In these countries, aid represents a declining proportion of budgets and overall income. Revenues from internationally traded commodities, such as oil and copper in countries like Nigeria and Zambia, far exceed aid flows. Many developing country governments are collecting more and more personal income and consumption taxes. Kenya’s tax receipts are equivalent to almost 20% of its GDP. Remittances are rising globally. Aid from the UK to Pakistan in 2011 was just over £210m, compared to the £627m sent from migrants in the UK to Pakistan.

This changed global setting, where all poor people no longer live in the poorest countries, and aid is no longer their main flow of finance, creates the need for a non-aid-based development relationship. But what should this look like? How can it take place?

Some economists, such as Acemoglu and Robinson, suggest that a non-aid-based development relationship is about ensuring good governance in low and middle-income countries. Others say it’s about ensuring that governments enable the private sector enough to stimulate jobs and entrepreneurship. The latter was a major feature of Greening’s speech at the London Stock Exchange on Monday, 11 March – but both approaches are important.

But the shift of poverty to middle income countries also brings with it a more direct role for governments such as London. Governments can work to make positive shifts in their domestic policy – in areas such as trade and investment. Though there is a great deal of evidence to gather on this, ultimately, these shifts are likely to be more transformational and sustainable for poverty reduction in a middle-income country such as India than aid, and can complement the good governance and private sector agendas.

That said, working towards more “development friendly” domestic policies is not an easy agenda. One of my first jobs in government was working on the economic effects that domestic British and EU farming policies had on development. The specific commodities I worked on – sugar, wheat, corn and soya – were critical to the lives of poor people all over the world. Yet years later, the battle over agricultural policy rages on in international forums such as the World Trade Organization. It is very difficult to change the status quo.

But the more that countries successfully reduce aid dependency, the more the pressure will build for synergistic policy relationships. Concentrating on aid alone will no longer be sufficient for development. And aid itself will have more impact and value for money where, for example, trade, tax and transparency policies are all pushing in the same positive direction.

The G8 and the new UK-India relationship represent the start of a new strategic agenda for effective development partnerships that reflect the more complex setting we now live in. My hope is that these first steps will be successful and extend to other policy areas as we move into the post-2015 world, including through the post-Busan Global Partnership.

This blog was first publised on the Guardian Development Professionals Network.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I recently travelled to Bamyan and Uruzgan to see whether Strengthening Provincial Administration and Delivery (SPAD) – a UK/Denmark funded programme – can make a difference there. Bamyan is a province in the centre-west of the country and famous for the monumental Buddha statues that the Taliban sadly destroyed in 2001. It is a beautiful province with lots of potential for tourism. It has azure blue lakes, majestic mountains and great cultural heritage, evidenced by the recognition of UNESCO.

The site of the buddhas in Bamyan

At the same time, it is a poor province: over half the population lives below the poverty line, compared to a third nationwide. Only one in five adults can read or write and just 14% of households have access to safe drinking water (National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment).

It was great to see during my visit that both government and elected officials are keen to improve the situation through the funds that SPAD provides. We heard how a relatively small amount of money can have a big impact which includes building wells or allowing government officials to travel around and inspect schools. We explained how the money will get to the province, starting by local people deciding on the most important priorities. This means people can also hold their government to its promises. It was great to discuss the programme with Habiba Sarabi, the only female governor in Afghanistan.

Members of a farming cooperative learn how to use new tractors. Picture: USAID SCR

While in Bamyan, we also met the beneficiaries of the UK and the New Zealand agricultural programme. Farmers explained how pleased they were with the faster harvesting of potatoes thanks to new tractors. Overall, the production of potatoes (Bamyan potatoes are now famous across Afghanistan) and wheat has doubled in the last few years. Read more about this project here.

I also travelled to Uruzgan, a remote and mountainous province, bordering Helmand and Kandahar, which is equally poor. Only 1% of women can read or write, and no children under two years have been vaccinated. Almost all children between the ages of six to 15 work, compared to every fifth child in the rest of Afghanistan.

In Tirin Kot, the capital, we met a large number of people including district governors and their deputies from three remote districts. They gave us a fascinating insight into their daily challenges, such as not having funding to buy stationery for their offices. Everyone we spoke to was eager to improve the situation and do their job better.

Meeting with provincial governors in Bamyan

All these meetings helped me understand local conditions better, and that helping the government provide better services to the people is the right thing to do. My colleagues have since been back to both provinces and seen that government officials have gotten together with local people to come up with plans for how to best use their budget, with the help of the Independent Directorate of Local Governance.

There is a lot of enthusiasm for the planning. Once this is complete and funds start to flow, we will see the impact, just like in Helmand!

We need accountability Mr. President!

Tanzanian President Dr. Jakaya Kikwete looked bemused as we greeted him with a classroom-like chorus; “Welcome to the education lab, Mr President!”

The education ‘laboratory’ was one of six that government leaders visited in a conference facility on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam.  Down the corridor, other labs were thrashing out topics including water, agriculture, energy, transport and revenue collection; collectively six (with education) priority sectors that need to dramatically improve performance and quickly deliver results needed for Tanzania’s sustainable growth and poverty alleviation.

The 2012 census charts a booming population – up a staggering 10.5 million to around 45 million people in just 10 years.  With the population projected to double in just another 26 years, that’s a lot more schools, roads, water pipes, electricity and food needed just to keep up, let alone create jobs and economic growth that can lift many more Tanzanians out of poverty.

The Big Fast Results initiative is a Malaysian concept that uses labs to bring together around 30 sector experts from a range of backgrounds to work collaboratively together for 8 weeks.  They diagnose constraints, identify strategies that can quickly improve the situation and then construct detailed implementation plans and budgets to deliver tangible change in the coming two years.  The process is being led and facilitated by a team from the Malaysian Prime Minster’s Performance and Delivery Unit PEMANDU that under Chief Executive Officer Dato’ Sri Idris Jala have achieved impressive results in their home country and are now eager to share the approach in a productive South – South Knowledge Exchange.

South South Leadership Exchange

A key lab concept I learnt was that in ‘labspeak’ we typically plan from 30,000 feet (high up in plane, no detail), but that a 3 feet plan (a very detailed large scale map, skimming the surface) is needed to make sure responsibilities are properly assigned and understood. Equally important is political buy-in to budget, release and monitor government funds to implement the plans. In week 3 of the lab I was astounded to see that the Vice-President came on Monday, the Prime Minister on Wednesday and a full presidential delegation on the Friday –  this was unlike any education planning event I had been to before!

Absent Teachers Piechart

Will it work or fizzle away to pipe dreams?  Well the sceptic in me was pleased to see the right issues being raised and some promising solutions proposed.  Teacher motivation is very low and leads to average teacher attendance rates of only 50% as a recent survey showed, no wonder student exam results have plummeted.   Both the President and the PEMANDU CEO welcomed low cost accountability measures (Tanzania has joined the Open Government Partnership under Dr. Kikwete).  Empowering headteachers with toolkits to let them truly lead and manage schools was proposed, balanced with publicly ranking school performance using traffic light colour schemes and scorecards.  Measuring the basic learning ‘3R’ skills of early grade students and offering remedial classes for those who had fallen behind also makes a lot of sense, but how will teacher training and extra study be rapidly organised and paid for?  Telling was another poster that highlighted the volume of funds, both government and development part that needed to be ‘unlocked’ from red tape that for two years had impeded the development of new community secondary schools.

Within another 5 weeks of the labs to run, I hope that the detailed, achieveable 3 feet plans emerge without crash landing and that the political leadership and goodwill generated can translate into action that can re-energise Tanzania to deliver for its people.  Spending a long time in South East Asia before my current ‘DFID Africa’ days, I have seen the Asian tigers in action and it will be most welcome to see the best of their approach be translated into transformative action for Africa.  Our regular sector dialogue and planning process has felt jaded and perhaps too driven by western donors at times, so perhaps this is what’s needed to get homegrown action that the government and people of Tanzania can believe in?

I wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t mention the fact that DFID is assisting to finance the Big Results Now! Labs, following a visit President Kikwete made to see the Malaysian approach in action.  We hope that it can inject some life and accountable results delivery into the Tanzanian development scene.   Hopefully I’ll be able to report something ‘big and fast’ in the not too distant future!

Around International Women’s Day recently, the PRT here had a number of female-focussed visits, including Baroness Warsi and the NATO Secretary General’s wife. Earlier in the same week, Justine Greening, the DFID Secretary of State gave a speech on the importance of tackling violence against women and girls in Afghanistan. Sat at my desk in the Helmand PRT office, this caused me to reflect on what it is like to be a woman here.

Many people think Helmand is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. While true that life for women in Helmand is conservative by Afghan standards – compared to Kabul, for example – these challenges also present different opportunities for women.

Afghan girls in an outdoor school lesson

Finding a voice for women, and changing attitudes to the roles women play, in a culture where they are traditionally valued in home-based roles, is challenging. It cannot be addressed by legal or judicial reform alone, or by imposing Western visions of equality on a society where even women have conservative views about their status. Here, cultural norms pose particular, often practical, problems – for example offices and schools having female-only facilities like bathrooms. These amenities come at a cost and are often more of a barrier than male attitudes towards women being educated or working.

Already Helmand has hallmarks of future potential: four women on the Provincial Council and 23 policewomen in-service, for instance. But more could be done. Like many places emerging from conflict, Helmand’s focus has rightly been on increasing basic security, improving vital basic services and stimulating economic growth.

As Afghanistan edges further towards the ‘decade of transformation’, I hope this work will expand to help other vulnerable groups who are at greater risk of violence, poverty and early death. This particularly includes women and girls, often from small rural communities outside the reach of government.

Helmand has already experienced great transformation. There are now over 26,000 girls enrolled in school from virtually none under the Taliban, and 67% of trainee teachers are female. Community interest and acceptance of innovative mechanisms like Community-Based Education are growing – DANIDA’s programme is running in three rural provinces and 47% of the students are girls.

In terms of healthcare, in a province with record-high maternal mortality – 59% of women receive at least one antenatal visit but only 18% have births attended by a health worker – there is more work to be done. This includes working to increase the number of community midwives by 150% through provision of a new Midwifery Training Centre funded by the UK government.

In the world of business, women are increasingly gaining the skills and business knowledge to run licit businesses. A DFID-funded vocational training scheme has graduated 1,918 women and girls since 2011 in tailoring, embroidery, computing and English. In Gereskh, these students now help poor girls attend school by making them school uniforms. Another DFID programme, run by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, has helped two female-run businesses to expand. One business now employs 30 local women to make clothes for men, women and children – and moved the shop from the back to the front of the house to attract more passing trade.

These are visible signs of women expanding their valuable contributions from their household to their wider community, in a way that conforms to local traditions. These might be small steps along a long pathway to a better life for women in Helmand, but they are brave, important and inspiring steps.

My name is Thomas Baylem and I work on the Education and Partnerships Team as part of the DFID graduate scheme. On 14th April, I’ll be running the Brighton Marathon to raise as much money as I can to support Riders for Health’s vital work in sub-Saharan Africa.

Last weekend, being the good grandson that I am, I visited my 94-year-old Gran out in the Essex countryside and naturally I took advantage of the chance to do some serious running away from commuters, traffic lights and tempting odours emanating from fast food restaurants.

I think it must have been around kilometre number 46 of the weekend that I suddenly realised the irony of my endeavour. It was just barely above zero degrees and, of course, I’d only packed some shorts and a t-shirt, so I was probably more or less hypothermic by this point. To compound my suffering, I was caked in thick mud from the waist up from when I had been forced to dive into a deep ditch about an hour earlier to avoid an oncoming Landrover that seemed determined to run me over. Freezing, hungry and starting to cramp up, I thought…why don’t they give me a motorbike?

Yes, I essentially intend to travel 42.195 kilometres on foot to help Riders for Health make sure health workers providing essential medical care in rural sub-Saharan Africa don’t have to.

A health worker with Riders for Health speaks to a mother and child. Photo: Riders for Health

Riders for Health provide vehicles (usually motorcycles) to health workers in some of the poorest parts of rural sub-Saharan Africa, which enables them to deliver vital health care directly to communities on a reliable and cost-effective basis.

But what’s really impressive is that they also provide training on how to maintain and repair the vehicles and build the capacity of their partners who gradually take on financial responsibility for maintaining the system. It’s a really effective model that generates a sustainable improvement in health service access.

Riders for Health train health workers to maintain their vehicles, gradually giving them the responsibility for their upkeep. Photo: Riders for Health.

DFID supports Riders for Health through the UK Aid Match scheme and pledged to match all funds raised through the charity’s recent “Two Wheel Appeal,” pound for pound. Following the enormous success of the appeal, this additional funding has enabled Riders to significantly expand programmes in Zambia and Kenya and mobilise more health workers than would otherwise have been possible.

If nothing else, my marathon training has proven the necessity of what Riders for Health do. After a heavy week of running in which I covered about 90km in total, I arrived at work on Monday sore and physically exhausted. However, the average mobilised health worker travels 250km a week without even breaking a sweat, providing a crucial lifeline to rural communities in the process.

I’ll be writing an occasional blog here to update on my training progress and talk more about the charity I’m fundraising for. You can also follow my progress via Twitter or Facebook.

Defending any form of gender-based violence (GBV) on the basis of tradition, culture or religion is no longer an option. Certainly, this is one of the strongest messages to emerge from this year’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York with Michelle Bachelet making it absolutely crystal clear that culture and religion must not be allowed to block proposals to eliminate violence against women and girls.

Last seen on the CSW agenda in 2003, violence against women and girls (VAWG) is quite rightly back in the spotlight. And now, more than ever, it is absolutely critical to achieve consensus on the conclusions of the session if we are to secure strong international commitment to take action. Timely also, is this renewed focus given the huge opportunity CSW has to influence how gender is incorporated and prioritised in a post-2015 framework.

At every single event I’ve attended so far at CSW social norms and how we go about transforming them is uppermost in people’s minds. Indeed, at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) we have been working for some time on building the evidence around how gender justice is invariably shaped by the formal and informal laws, norms, attitudes and practices that limit the attainment and exercise of women and girls’ capabilities. We know that just as gender inequality causes and compounds women’s poverty, so too poverty and marginalisation exacerbate gender inequality. It is a vicious circle that can only be broken by tackling the social norms and attitudes at the root which govern and shape women’s unequal position in society.

Tackling violence against women requires tackling social norms and values, as in this workshop run in South Africa by the NGO Sonke Gender Justice. Photo: Lindsay Mgbor/DFID

So in the spirit of this year’s headline topic, let’s take a closer look at how this is the case for harmful traditional practices affecting women and girls; and specifically, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C).

Harmful traditional practices include: acid violence, dowry and bride price, early/forced marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting, ‘honour’ crimes, corrective rape, female infanticide, and ritual sexual slavery. They are, for the most part, carried out without consent from the individual involved and are therefore some of the worst violations of human rights. They are a product of discriminatory social norms that aim to uphold cultural ideas about gender roles and social relations that ascribe women a lower status in society. Such practices are widespread across the globe, in some cases pandemic, and no country in the world remains unaffected.

FGM/C is a particularly controversial practice, and one that is gaining a great deal of renewed attention at the moment. Taking place in 28 countries in Africa, as well as in some countries in the Middle East and Asia, and in diaspora communities elsewhere (not least the UK), FGM/C has so far affected nearly 140 million girls and women. Its persistence is due in no small part to myths about hygiene and female aesthetics. It is also attributed to social pressures associated with control over girls’ sexuality, as well as traditional values regarding coming of age and transition to adulthood. The associated consequences can be devastating, as FGM/C increases women and girls’ vulnerability to HIV, infection, and birth complications, including fistula, a leading cause of maternal mortality in Africa.

FGM/C is also linked closely to early marriage, forced marriage and marriage by abduction. Girls from impoverished backgrounds are more vulnerable to harmful cultural practices, partially because of the link between them and girls’ perceived marriageability and associated financial pressures. Girls in these situations, as well as their female children, are unlikely to continue education or engage in other activities to enhance their capabilities beyond the domestic sphere.

Change is possible – FGC abandonment has been a relative success in Senegal. Photo: Liba Taylor/Panos.

In recent years, I’d argue that FGM/C has been approached with caution; almost reluctance. Considered to be an untouchable, immovable cultural tradition, its widespread and entrenched nature seemed to preclude action for change. Campaigns by organisations such as the Orchid Project, along with the success of Tostan’s Community Empowerment Programmes in Senegal where 5,300 villages have entirely ceased to practice FGM/C, have shown that it is possible to effect change. In the UK, concern over the 24,000 girls or so at risk of FGM/C domestically is mounting; a plea letter just this week by a young girl from Ghana desperate to avoid being cut has brought the issue to the attention of the British public.

Last week Lynne Featherstone announced at CSW the UK’s intention to invest £35 million towards ending FGM/C  in the world’s poorest countries. Encouraging as it is to see such commitment, what’s critical is to ensure that the money is spent effectively. What we need now is much clearer evidence around the types of interventions that work when it comes to tackling social norms.

So how do we even begin to change social norms? One thing that’s been reiterated time and again throughout the first week at CSW is the critical importance of involving men and boys as change-agents. Only by engaging them will men and boys recognise that gender equality benefits everyone in society and we can then begin to challenge traditional constructions of masculinity and femininity that underpin gendered discrimination and violence. Policies that encourage and normalise greater involvement of fathers in the care of their children, as well as education initiatives aimed at school age boys and girls are just a couple of examples of how this is being done.

The involvement of men and boys is critical in ending violence against women, such as in this community project in South Africa, where young men are given strong role models to help them avoid becoming involved in violence. Photo: Lindsay Mgbor/DFID.

In fact, what’s needed is an integrated approach that includes every member of society and gives individuals and communities the opportunities necessary to set the change agenda for themselves. All too often the agenda is defined at the top when in fact change is far likelier if all levels of society have had their say.

Nevertheless, it is the renewed commitment by states to women’s human rights agreements that sends the strongest to message to those that would seek to derail the hard-won gains made by the gender equality agenda. Another failure to achieve an outcome document (resistance by various conservative governments and the Vatican, which has a seat on the UN as a non-member permanent observer is already happening) is simply not an option.

If ever there was a time to stop treating the symptoms and actually tackle the cause of women and girls’ poverty – if we really want to make long-lasting and transformative progress – this is it.

As part of a four year UK aid supported study – Transforming the lives of adolescent girls – ODI have published a background note exploring the extent to which gender justice for adolescent girls is shaped by formal and informal laws, norms, attitudes and practices that limit girls opportunities and chances in life. Click here for more information.

You can add your voice to UK Aid’s pledge campaign for UN action on violence against women here