Leading Issues
 | Hector McNeill
Director
ADF |
Some lessons learned
ADF associates have considerable experience with international,
bilateral, national and private institutions which support
agricultural, environmental and regional economic development. Usually
these have followed a practice of large loans or smaller grant
provisions. Having analysed the outcome of the impact of some 40 years
of development efforts by international institutions, it is clear that
what has been achieved has fallen well short of objectives.
At
the risk of generalisation, projects which advance loans in excess of
1M Euros are immediately faced with the challenge of identifying
experienced managers on the one hand and maintaining transparency as to
the use of funds. Inappropriate staffing fosters poorly designed
projects, lack of transparency and, in some cases, corruption,
involving officials in international, governmental and private
agencies. Performance, the degree to which stated objectives are
achieved, is often compromised.
On the other hand the smaller, grant-based initiatives, have not
generally been geared to achieving sustainable development and often
have not supported adequate project participant training. Quite often
grant-based projects have lacked commercial feasibility as a result of
the inexperience of grant-givers, including many NGOs, in business
issues and they have often applied inappropriate selection criteria.
The inevitable outcome has been that in excess of 65% of
international and bi-lateral institutional development loans and grants
have not performed as expected (ex-ante). Frequently countries have
secured new loans to pay off old ones. One intepretation, on failed
development activities, is that this somehow reflects the culture of
the people they are designed to benefit. But then, in the case of large
loans, potential beneficiaries, that is farmers and rural dwellers,
have invariably not been directly involved in the decisions and
planning of the proposed activities; there has been almost no
participatory development. As a result there has been no individual,
group or community ownership of many government initiatives and
predictably, an unacceptable proportion of these initiatives have
failed.
Increasing gap in trained human resources
In some of the smaller European countries, there can be over 5,000
identifiable rural communities. There are not enough agricultural
economists nor rural development experts in Europe to have an effective
direct impact on participatory development at the level of application,
time and scale required. When one looks at the whole of the European
Union, there are not enough practitioners world wide. Europe's problems
are almost insignificant in their scale, when compared with the rest of
the world. One begins to appreciate the scale of the problem and to see
that in reality the current international efforts can not achieve much
in this essential area. It becomes plainly evident that allocating more
and more money, without addressing this qualified human resources
problem is a waste of resources, indeed, is is irresponsible.
No performance and debt isnt a good combination
The other important issue under international development is that
funding is provided largely in the form of loans which incur debt.
Combining debt with the lack of human resources capability is a
poisonous mixture and holds out little real prospects for those exposed
to this funding structure. Our AgriTrust division work has pointed to
non debt equity partnerships as being a more humane way forward. Our
DEX initiative is an initial step in this direction. We are now looking
into how we can launch effective training schemes to provide low income
communities with the know how required to manage income generating
projects supported by non-debt equity.
Increasing demand is diverting supply
There is an increasing shortage of experienced practicioners in
evaluation of what is known as Ex-Ante and Mid-Term reviews of a range
of national and regional plans under European Union Structural Funding.
These include agriculture and rural planning, regional plans, human
resources and other areas. New EU Regulations and the enlargement of
the European Union, is creating a significant rise in the demand for
these services. This in turn is increasing the local costs of
compliance with EU norms. We have become concerned at a trend (4th
Quarter 2008) which is drawing professional expertise away from low
income community-based projects, towards larger medium to large scale
projects and operational programmes. However, there remains a pressing
and unsatisfied need for competent individuals to help at the rural
community level. This is because of their importance in helping
mobilise people in seeking solutions to their own problems, to
stimulate local initiative, a cornerstone for the future stability of
European democracy.
Targeted training
In order to address these human resource bottlenecks the ADF is:
- setting up an
online roster for European free lance practitioners in project design
and evaluation, planning and decision analysis
- organizing an online training system for new practitioners who are
nationals of the current candidate countries to the European Union
Direct training for individuals from rural communities
As a matter of urgency and priority we will introduce an online
training scheme for young men and women at technician level. This is to
provide support for community-based participatory project
identification and design. The aim here is to provide training for
individuals from low income communities so as to increase their direct
supply. This training thread will be an integral part of the online
training scheme proposed above.
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