International Development Sub‑Committee on the Work of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact
Oral evidence: ICAI's review on DFID’s governance work in Nepal and Uganda, HC 1503
Wednesday 24 October 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 24 October 2018.
Members present: Paul Scully (Chair); Lloyd Russell-Moyle; Henry Smith; Stephen Twigg.
Questions 1 - 43
Witnesses
I: Tina Fahm, Lead Commissioner, ICAI; Nigel Thornton, Team Leader, ICAI; Nick Dyer, Director General, Economic Development and International Relations Division, DFID; Chris Murgatroyd, Governance Policy Adviser, DFID.
Witnesses: Tina Fahm, Nigel Thornton, Nick Dyer and Chris Murgatroyd.
Q1 Chair: Thank you very much to everyone for coming. We are dealing with ICAI’s review on DFID’s governance work in Nepal and Uganda. As ever, I will kick off with a question. I know we are 10 minutes late starting, so we will try to keep it a bit snappy but, if you want to have any words of introduction, please feel free. Tina, you stress in your review that findings in Nepal and Uganda are not necessarily transferable to other countries. Do they at least have implications for broader DFID programming?
Tina Fahm: Absolutely, yes. Thank you very much for inviting us to present our review. For this review, given that we are looking at governance, in reality it takes many years to realise the impact from governance programming, which is why we chose to focus on two countries. But, from the five recommendations that we have made in this report, you will see that they have wider implications both across DFID’s wider governance portfolio and wider programming, I am pleased to say.
Q2 Henry Smith: ICAI found that much of DFID’s governance work rests on potentially dubious assumptions. DFID assumes, for example, that helping marginalised communities interact with local government reduces conflict risk, that building the capacity of NGOs encourages democratic participation and that improved public financial management leads to increased expenditure on development. What are you doing to test these assumptions? This is to DFID, really.
Nick Dyer: Chair, you invited us to make a general comment. Can I make a general comment?
Chair: Yes.
Nick Dyer: We believe that the evidence tells us, and all our experience suggests, that governance matters in terms of development outcomes. We very much welcome the report, which reaffirms that and shows that our work does have an impact on the ground. There clearly are some generic strategic challenges in this report for us, which I am sure we will get into today, but the report has come at the right time, because we are doing two things at the moment.
First, we are developing a strategic position paper, which sets out our approach and views on governance going forward, and we are in the midst of doing our country development diagnostics, which have a big governance component to them. It is a good opportunity for us to feed the lessons and recommendations into that, so thank you for that.
Chris Murgatroyd: Thank you for the question. The opening comment is around the fact that individual programmes will have their own evaluations. The sense we took from the report, which was really helpful, was about how we get into the governance portfolio as a whole and how we can demonstrate that the range of activities we are working on is having an impact. The specific questions about how it is we assess the impact on conflict and conflict prevention from working with local government is something that we need to test in more detail between the departments working on different parts of that agenda.
But there are ways in which the theories of change we work with for different parts of the portfolio allow us to test across different programmes. For example, the work that is going on in Uganda at the moment, through the portfolio and programme board, bringing together governance with social development and economics, gives us an overview across the sorts of things you describe, which would not exist otherwise.
Nick Dyer: All the aggregate macroeconomic evidence tells you that governance matters. Functioning democracies have better social outcomes. We know that social accountability processes help in terms of delivering better services. The challenge comes when you are translating that at the individual project level. The World Development Report 2017 interestingly quoted Gordon Brown, who said that, in terms of developing the rule of law, the first 500 years are the hardest
This takes a long time. It is difficult; it is contextual; it depends on the individual politics of the particular country you are dealing with. This really challenges us to ask a question about whether our existing linear processes for how we do projects fit into the governance context. This is the question and challenge we have been given in this report: are you doing enough adaptive programming? Do you understand adaptive programming? Are you applying it? Those are absolutely valid questions. As an organisation, we are increasingly bringing support to our colleagues in terms of how to do that better. It is a fair challenge. How do we design our programmes in a way that allows us to respond to the realities of the context and the politics we are dealing with?
Q3 Henry Smith: Mr Dyer, Uganda was mentioned. DFID described its post‑conflict development programme that operated in northern Uganda from 2009 to 2016 as “governance related”, yet the outputs of the programme were vocational training, housing for key workers and legal aid services. It is my understanding that the impact on peace and stability was never measured. In view of this, why was it described as a governance programme?
Nick Dyer: As the report points out itself, governance has an intrinsic value, in that it is good to do good-governance programming, and it has an instrumental value. Pretty much everything we do has a governance component to it, particularly if you take the approach, as we increasingly do, that this is about the political economy of change. In all our programmes, we generally find it easier to measure outputs than we do outcomes.
The test and the challenge with these things is whether what you are doing is sufficiently at scale to have an attributed impact in terms of your outcomes, and whether you have measured that line of sight between your outputs and your outcomes. It is clear in the example you give here. We arguably did not do a good enough job of demonstrating that line of sight, but it is a fair question for us to ask as to whether the collective effort we were making alongside what others were doing was sufficient to actually achieve that outcome, so it is a fair challenge.
Q4 Henry Smith: If I just may have one further question of our DFID representatives here today, moving to Nepal, DFID described its trail bridge programme, which operated in Nepal from 2010 to 2011, as “governance related”, yet the purpose of the programme was the construction of pedestrian bridges. Again, the impact on peace and stability was never measured. Why was it described as a governance programme?
Chris Murgatroyd: The background to that sort of intervention is very much in terms of community engagement and the way that those bridges open up access for people to markets and to particularly. As Nick mentioned, as we will perhaps come on to discuss in relation to the strategic positioning, in the way you think about governance as being for stability, growth and inclusion, the management and operation of those programmes is critical. The way you draw communities into the location and the construction of that kind of infrastructure really matters. Legitimately, I think we can attribute governance to the activities of that project. While it is not in the core governance portfolio, it is a good example of what it is we can achieve through working on local infrastructure.
Tina Fahm: To the point that has been made, lack of evaluation is a key finding from our review and one of the recommendations we make. The examples you have given are precisely where we were not content with the measurement of effectiveness that took place at the end of the programming cycle.
Q5 Henry Smith: As a supplementary to that, are you happy with the Government’s responses in these areas?
Tina Fahm: Yes. Of the five recommendations that we make in the report, two were partially accepted and three were accepted. Overall, the tone of the response was very positive. We know that work has started on implementation, so we are very pleased.
In terms of the first recommendation, which was partially accepted, DFID has given an example of work that is being done with regard to programming at country level. On the fourth recommendation regarding staffing, we were not too satisfied in respect of the references made to the home Civil Service staff. Overall it was positive, but we will look to see what progress is made when we do our follow‑up of this review in a few months’ time.
Q6 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Governance work requires a strong relationship with partner Governments, but according to this review DFID no longer really invests sufficient time in relationship building. What are you doing about this, particularly at the higher levels of Government?
Nick Dyer: One of the really interesting challenges in this report is the question around how our professional technical advisers use their time. There is a sense coming through this report, and in other parts of the organisation, that advisers feel that they spend a lot of their time doing programme management and not enough time doing relationship building, field visits and getting out of the office. It is variable across the organisation.
We should not apologise for investing increasingly in getting our project assurance right. The improvement in project management is absolutely the right thing to do. The approach to SROs, single responsible officers, for projects is absolutely right as well. I am a great believer that we and all our advisers need to link projects, programming and implementation together. Good policy is a function of understanding implementation.
Q7 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: The introduction of SROs increased the bureaucracy on them and reduced the ability for them to engage in more detailed relationship building. What are we doing to try to change that balance? We have to do bureaucracy, of course, and we have to do programme management, but we want to rebalance that.
Nick Dyer: SROs regularise the process and ensure that we have consistency in how we address projects, which is a good thing. We are doing a number of things. One of them is to build up our project management capability within DFID. We are trying to get advisers to recognise that, as the SRO, you are involved in the strategic engagement of a project but you do not have to do all the admin, all the assurances and all the detailed bureaucracy, as you put it. We have a project management capability. We have close to 900 project managers in the organisation now. We have created a project management cadre, a policy profession, within DFID.
As an example, in Uganda they have recently hived off their governance team as an individual team and they have a dedicated project manager, a programme manager, who will do that project management work to allow the advisers to have more time to get out and engage with Government and others. Getting that SRO process and expectation right and building the capability to support through the programme management cadre is an important part of releasing time.
Q8 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: The Ugandan model is important, but one of the criticisms from Nepal concerned the feeling that there was lot of engagement with civil servants but not with politicians. Is that being addressed by trying to prompt them to engage with varying levels of Government?
Chris Murgatroyd: I directly recognise the suggestion that there is a heavy investment in Civil Service counterparts, because that is where a lot of the work with Government will dock. You have another very good example from Nepal with the field management offices, the risk management office as it began, through the latter part of the insurgency, to make sure those relationships were underpinned in the places where it was most important. That would allow advisers to engage with an infrastructure and a set of relationships that they could navigate more easily.
We may come on to talk a little more about the importance of SAIC colleagues, staff appointed in country. But, as a model, it is about making sure that the focus is not just in Kathmandu at the Government level, but there is an opportunity to get involved in relationships, now at the provincial level and previously at the local level.
Nick Dyer: In Uganda, they were in the process of opening three new provincial co‑ordination offices. They are embedding people in the provinces who can then develop relationships with different political actors we do not normally engage with in Kampala. The point about SAIC staff is also important, and maybe we will come on to this. SAIC staff also have a whole range of networks and relationships that we draw on in our work.
Q9 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Do you feel those responses have addressed your concerns or that there is movement in the right direction there?
Tina Fahm: It is a very welcomed response but, from what we saw and reported on, those relationships were not as strong and robust as we would like to have seen. We are addressing a panel of politicians. I am sure you would appreciate the importance of influencing and relationship building. That can only happen if you are engaging with others at a similar level. I joined the visit to Nepal, and this was made very clear to me when we met with Government Ministers.
Nigel Thornton: Interestingly, we did a survey of 90‑odd of the Government’s advisers. They say that DFID is not getting best value out of their expertise, because they are spending more time on compliance tasks than their expertise warrants, to put it very bluntly. In fact, they could provide more value to the organisation by having these relationships and driving change through those relationships. Increasing time spent with beneficiaries and partners—I am looking at the survey now—was the top issue they said they wanted to change about the way they were working. It is not just an objective view from outside; it is also something subjective that the staff are reflecting back.
Nick Dyer: There are, of course, other people we work with in Uganda in building political relationships. The governance team in Uganda have now relocated so they are sitting with the political team in the Foreign Office, in the high commission. We are using the Foreign Office relationships to reach out in that way.
This comes back to the heart of our operating model and our staffing model. Again, I would not apologise for the increase in compliance tasks that we have introduced as an organisation. But there is a valid question, which we are trying to address by thinking through how we build up our programme management capability and programme management skillsets, to take the pressure off advisory staff, so they can spend more of their time doing the things we want them to do and they want to do themselves.
Q10 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: You seem to accept that you want to move in the same kind of direction and accept some of the criticisms. One of the criticisms I was a bit unsure about and wanted to ask about was in the Ugandan context. You stress the importance of engaging with politicians given the inevitable political transition in that country. When I was in Uganda last year, I was in the high commission with DFID and our political officers meeting with the President. It seemed like the governing party was just as entrenched as ever, from my meetings. Why do you think and say that this transition is inevitable? Do we need to be considering transition or are we right just to be considering how we work with the establishment?
Nigel Thornton: That is a very interesting observation. One is quite minded of Zimbabwe and the transition in Zimbabwe. If you had met with Zimbabwean leaders a year ago or 18 months ago, you would have said the same thing. When we talked to voices outside DFID in civil society, younger voices and academics, they were very conscious that there will have to be a change, and there is an expectation of change. There are tensions in that political context as a result of it.
Tina Fahm: As the lead commissioner for this review, if I step back, looking at DFID’s programming within the governance space, there was a concern that, particularly in the democratic governance space, supporting civil society, the UK Government had stepped back somewhat. This is what we heard. If you look at budgets, expenditure on supporting programming in democratic governance has been reduced quite significantly. It caused us to question somewhat the strategic direction and the strategic intent around supporting the democratic governance space.
Q11 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Did you want to respond to any of that?
Nick Dyer: As somebody who spent quite a lot of time in Malawi and first visited at the time when President Banda was probably in his 30th year in power and his 100th year of age, these things do change unexpectedly and quickly, but they also do entrench and carry on for quite some time.
In terms of the examples given in the report on Uganda and the democratic governance facility, it is probably worth exploring why we withdrew from that facility. The report points out that there were a number of bureaucratic challenges in the vicinity, with concerns around its management cost and potential fraudulent activities in it, which added quite a big burden. I would point out that, for a £100 million programme, every single support programme above £10,000 had to be approved within the project. Transactionally, it was very heavy.
But, from talking to the team, this is a good example of a living and real division of labour. You have eight other donors involved in this multi‑donor trust fund. Our withdrawal has not affected the size of the programme. In fact, in phase 2, the size of the programme has increased, rather than gone down. It has allowed us to reorient our Government’s efforts to areas where we think we have a comparative advantage and we can make a big difference. We are always challenged about deploying our precious effort in the best way possible. This is an example where we are deploying our precious governance effort without affecting the operations of ongoing programmes, which continued. In terms of the collective deployment effort of the total donor resource, I am not sure it is a bad outcome.
Tina Fahm: Notwithstanding the comments that Nick has made, we were aware of the management challenges; we came across those in our work. But it really caused us to question, within the overall governance programming, whether this was sending the right signals. This is traditionally an area that the UK has championed. We are talking about civil society organisations and people being able to hold their Governments to account. This is really important work at the heart of governance. Nigel visited; he led the team in Uganda. I wondered whether there were any further insights you could offer.
Nigel Thornton: It is interesting to hear what Nick has said. At the time, there were other challenges that DFID staff reported to us about the reasons why this had been cut. One of them was that the results were not easy to see because, as Nick and Chris have said, governance takes a long time and it is difficult to measure, whereas other programmes were able to demonstrate results more readily. The partners Nick has talked about all wanted DFID to stay, and stay engaged in the UKC[1], even if it was not providing money. There was a space for the UK to sit at the table and help shape the programme intellectually, as it had done. Quite a lot of the programme and management challenges that Nick has just alluded to were as a result of the designs the UK had been really strong in pushing forward. It was almost the UK’s responsibility to fix some of those, along with the Danes in particular. We were not convinced about that.
We were interested to hear other voices, both within DFID and in other parts of the UK Government, who were also not necessarily convinced that this was the right decision. I have absolutely no doubt that what Nick has said is true: that the programme has continued, that we will go back and find out about it, and that it will have been successful. The question is whether it was the right strategic decision for the UK to withdraw at that moment and not have a voice at the table on what is by far the largest democratic governance assistance programme.
Nick Dyer: As DFID, we get this a lot, both at the global level and in country. We are a big donor. We have capabilities that other donors do not necessarily have. Quite often they want us to do the job that they should in some cases be doing themselves. They are hiding behind DFID and our capability. We have to make choices. We do not have the resources to allocate everywhere that we want.
Q12 Stephen Twigg: I am sorry to interrupt. Who is the “they” in that sentence, Nick?
Nick Dyer: I mean other donors. Even though we are not in this programme in Uganda, if you talk to our teams, as I have done over the last few days, they will tell you that, through various programmes across the portfolio, either in the governance portfolio or the non‑governance portfolio, we are supporting 70 NGOs in Uganda through the DFID programme, many of which are about improving the accountability to Government. It is not as if we have completely withdrawn from this space.
Q13 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I know we have to move on, but the comment from Nigel is that there would have been an ability for us to stay involved, even if we were not a significant donor, to help with co‑ordination. Was there a significant cost for us to stay or was that option ever really considered, to stay without putting significant money in but making sure our influence was still felt?
Nick Dyer: Coming back to your earlier question, the cost is time.
Q14 Stephen Twigg: Nick, you referred earlier to adaptive programming. ICAI contrasted the Nepal office, which it felt was adept at this in governance terms, with the Uganda office, which it felt was not. Do you accept that? If so, how do you explain the contrast between the two country offices?
Chris Murgatroyd: Part of the contrast is due to the history and the context. The Nepal office is probably a leader in terms of the work that it has done, originally through the enabling state programme, which was not called an adaptive programme at the time. It allowed advisers to work on a range of issues through the overall strategic objectives, without setting out activities in detail. In that sense, it was ahead of its time. That culture in the Nepal office is very important, and that has followed through into the governance facility and the way in which they are now seeking to work with federalism.
I would not characterise it so starkly by comparison with the Uganda office. Again, colleagues there are very aware of the need to remain engaged and flexible. As Nick said, some of the work they are doing through the programmes is the successor, in a way, to the work that was going on through the DGF, including work on accountability and work with NGOs on tax processes to ensure voice and accountability. They are seeing the importance of the need for adaptive programming; it may just be that they are starting from a slightly different place. That is how we characterise it. We do not disagree with the comment that the need to invest in adaptive programming is incredibly important. All our colleagues in DFID Uganda would agree with that as well.
Q15 Stephen Twigg: Is there any response to that?
Tina Fahm: Yes, we welcome that response. This Committee will be aware of the vital importance of adaptive programming in development work. ICAI undertook a review of DFID’s smart rules earlier. This is something we constantly look out for. We saw some good examples, but we also saw huge areas for improvement.
Q16 Stephen Twigg: Do you accept the explanation that Chris gave in terms of the different contexts and history between Nepal and Uganda?
Tina Fahm: Yes. We looked very closely at the Uganda and Nepal contexts separately. Yes, I am content with Chris’s response, notwithstanding our final recommendation regarding the importance of adaptive programming.
Nigel Thornton: There is a context; Chris is absolutely right. There are a couple of additional points. The authorising environment is important. There has been the freedom to experiment in Nepal, as a result of a few things. One is that it was not quite in the eye of the central Department or, if I may say so, the eye of politicians in the same way that Uganda has been.
It is also about the proclivities of heads of office and individual staff, who created space and gave space over time. If one looks back over 20 years in Nepal, that had an impact. As has already been said, it is interesting that that authorising environment is now being created more and more from the centre, in the Department. That is very positive.
Nick Dyer: When staff are thinking about adaptive programming, they will ask themselves, “Do I understand what it is and how we go about doing it?” There is a growing body of guidance materials and examples, which we are now deploying. “Will I be supported in doing it?” This is about the authorising environment. The signal is very much a “yes”. Particularly in areas where it is non‑linear, complex or difficult and where things change and evolve with politics, you have to be adaptive.
There is another issue: “Can I really do the things I have been asked to, such as measuring things like value for money?” That is one of the challenges I pick out of the report: the value for money of adaptive programming. This is really hard. We are working with the ODI in trying to develop some guidance on it. But we are building our knowledge and experience of how we can experiment and choose the best option.
Q17 Richard Burden: I apologise for arriving late. In Nepal, it was reckoned that around 90% of programmes relating to governance either met their expectations or moderately exceeded those expectations. The comparable figure in Uganda was just over half. How would you explain that difference? Is it down to what we have just been talking about, their relative abilities to adapt to changing circumstances, or is it something else?
Chris Murgatroyd: Yes, it is partly that. There was also an acknowledgement that the portfolio quality scores were improving at the end of the period under review in Uganda, which we took as a positive sign. There are a number of other factors around these scores in the early part of a programme. Some of the procurement and commercial aspects of getting a programme up and running are more or less intractable. There will be an awful lot of detail in the different scores. Again, the comparison cannot be direct in that sense. You are right: the different contexts and the ways in which those programme teams were engaging, through established programmes in the Nepal case, perhaps, relative to the things the Uganda office was starting to try, may explain some of the difference.
Nick Dyer: I would be interested in the views of ICAI on why that was happening. One of the other issues that could be at play here, although I do not know, is whether there were different appetites for and experiences of risk in the projects. You might expect some portfolios to have different outcomes on the basis of the risk that had been taken within the portfolio. A question that comes out of the report is whether we have got this quite right in terms of risk and reward and whether we are taking enough risk. If you take risk, the reality is that you have to expect failure. There is a trade‑off there.
Q18 Richard Burden: From the data the report was able to uncover, there did not seem to be a very clear pattern to the reasons for the shortfalls in Uganda. I talked about just over half meeting or moderately exceeding expectations; about a third were rated as moderately below expectations. Given that there did not appear to be any clear pattern of reasons for why things were not apparently working as well on governance in Uganda as they have in Nepal, do you have a package and framework to improve performance there? If so, what is it?
Nick Dyer: In the organisation we now have reporting on a monthly basis against our portfolio quality scores. We know and we can track which projects are on or off track. We can catch them earlier than we used to be able to do, four or five years ago. We have a much more consistent process. Every month at the management board, where I sit, we see all the projects that are scoring Bs and Cs, i.e. are underperforming. Believe me; that drives questions in the organisation as to what is going on with this portfolio or these projects, whether we will get them back on track and whether we understand why they have gone off track. I would say we have a much more consistent process internally for understanding our overall portfolio quality.
Chris Murgatroyd: The project completion report generates a lot of rich information, which then helps to inform future programming. As an example from Nepal, I know the disparity perhaps tells a story, but the one programme the report identified has now generated a more successful approach to rural access. The trail bridge programme came to a close and now the successor programme, building on the lessons from those experiences, is much more successful. Our challenge is not just to work out the read‑across from the project completion information in Nepal, but to get it into other parts of the organisation so we can learn from it.
Nigel Thornton: One of the things that happened during the period was the rapid removal of budget support as a modality of support in Uganda after there was a scandal around corruption in the office of the Prime Minister. It was £39 million of assistance. In Uganda, that affected a whole lot of other programmes as well. It also affected the architecture of delivery for the UK and other donors, because everything had been hung around budget support. That was a particular timing issue.
Other than that, as you have said, in a way, each programme fails in its own way. We would have to go through each of those. My overall sense is that in Nepal, because of the civil war and because of the context, people have been more adaptive and more cautious in the way they have set targets. That has been a positive thing, and it is has enabled them to be achieved more readily.
Q19 Richard Burden: In Uganda specifically, but perhaps in terms of lessons for other programmes in other places, do they have a handle on identifying causes where programmes are not performing perhaps as well as they should? Going back to what I asked before, do they have a framework for judging why those things are happening and turning them around?
Nigel Thornton: There are the frameworks and the project completion reports. We would still say that more evaluation and lesson learning needs to take place, particularly at the portfolio level, which we have not seen. This point was made earlier at the other end of the table. Having that more structured feedback programme, which some of the diagnostic processes that DFID is putting in place will lead to, should improve some of this area.
Tina Fahm: This feeds directly into our recommendations. The point on evaluation has been accepted by DFID, but our first recommendation, which was about articulating with greater clarity and detail strategic approaches, particularly with reference to tools and methodologies around risk management and project management, was partially accepted. The discussion we have just had highlights the importance of that level of detail and oversight.
Nick Dyer: There is a mix of ongoing monitoring and ex-post evaluation. If there are problems to be picked up as we go, that is going to come through the annual reporting process. We would not want to wait until the end and the ex-post evaluation.
Q20 Stephen Twigg: Nick, earlier you said the Department was working on a strategic position paper on governance. Are you able to give us a sense of when that might be published?
Chris Murgatroyd: Yes, thank you very much for the question. It is going through internal approvals at the moment. We expect that it will be available before the end of this calendar year. As for the word “publish”, we are working at the moment to find the best way of ensuring the intention that the paper will serve. Particularly, as Nick has alluded to, we are working to make sure all colleagues—governance colleagues, other advisers and other members of DFID—are aware of the context and that they understand the shifts that are being made, relative to a major launch.
Q21 Stephen Twigg: In the framing and writing of the paper, is this purely internal or are you engaging with some of the stakeholders that work in this field?
Chris Murgatroyd: We are very much engaging with stakeholders. From that perspective, it is something that we are keen to share. At the moment we are not in the business of suggesting that DFID has an answer to a set of problems. You will see, when the position paper emerges, a willingness to deepen those conversations and to engage on these aspects of implementation, particularly around something we would call thinking and working politically, where, as you may know, there is a community of practice. How do we work with partners to take the contents of the paper forward?
Q22 Stephen Twigg: You have this “how to” paper, which we have discussed previously. Would it update that or is it a separate process?
Chris Murgatroyd: It is a separate process. It is trying to update this, building on each of those other products, from 2006, which was the last formal statement. There have been stocktakes and portfolio reviews, the last of which was in 2015. This is acknowledging and building on that while accepting that there is a very different context these days. In terms of what it is trying to understand, it is about trends and the way in which global processes and governance processes are moving. How does DFID need to adapt to that and work with partners in handling that?
Q23 Stephen Twigg: That is very welcome. It would be good, perhaps outside the meeting, for us to consider how the Committee might engage with that, either prior to the finalisation of the paper or once you have finalised it.
Chris Murgatroyd: We would welcome that.
Q24 Stephen Twigg: Thanks very much. I have some questions about governance advisers. As we know—this is a question for DFID initially—the governance advisers tend to do, as I understand it, two or three years in post. Is there a case for looking at allowing governance advisers to stay in post for longer so they can entrench relationships more fully?
Nick Dyer: Each person who goes overseas is subject to DFID’s normal rules for postings, which start with a three-year posting.
Stephen Twigg: Yes, I understand that.
Nick Dyer: In some places it is shorter, particularly in difficult places or insecure places, where it is not good practice to keep people for long periods of time. In practice, where people are in quite stable places with good facilities around them, they stay for longer. They stay for four or five years.
Q25 Stephen Twigg: Does this include the governance advisers?
Nick Dyer: I do not have the exact details on me, but I am sure we can both identify examples where that is the case. I understand the concern that there may be people staying for too short a period of time, but in practice people stay for longer where it is possible. That is why we particularly value the role of our staff appointed in country, because they have institutional memory; they have relationships, networks and experience that we can draw on, build on and blend together with the external home civil servants who come in.
Chris Murgatroyd: From personal experience in Bangladesh, as a governance adviser, I stayed for four years in the end because of that importance of the extra year allowing one to build on things, exactly as Nick has described. There is also a dynamic where programmes are running. At a particular point in that case, it was financial management, where continuity made sense. As we may come on to discuss, given the way in which various posts interlock, if somebody stays for an excessively long period of time it has knock‑on effects for other parts of the Department, so you need that ability to move as well as putting down some roots.
Q26 Stephen Twigg: We would recognise that there are certain contexts where you could not expect someone to stay for a longer period of time. Before I go on to the next question, did you want to respond on that specific issue, Tina?
Tina Fahm: Yes, thank you. As part of our methodology, we devised a survey for members of the governance cadre, which was very insightful in terms of our findings vis-à-vis governance advisers. I will pass on to Nigel in a moment to give more details on that, but suffice to say that we found staff who had longer experience, home civil servants who had longer experience, were much more effective. I was able to observe this in my trip to Nepal.
Q27 Stephen Twigg: When you say “longer experience”, you mean in that post in that place.
Tina Fahm: Yes, in that post in that place, not so much changing around. The other point that has been raised is regarding the staff who are appointed in country. Our survey found that only 6% of staff in the Uganda and Nepal offices who were at A1 level, which I believe is the highest level, had been appointed in country. Clearly, there is evidence of staff being appointed in country. But we make the point that, particularly within governance programming, relationships and knowledge regarding local customs and social norms are particularly important. The ability to engage in these challenging contexts could be made a lot easier by engaging such staff. In my experience in Nepal, I was able to witness this.
Q28 Stephen Twigg: You give us a specific example of where the Department had not followed the advice of in-country staff in Nepal and it had resulted in some sort of backlash from stakeholders and the local media. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Tina Fahm: It did. Before passing on to Nigel for the detail, I would say that it was something we encountered, but DFID assured us that it was an internal HR/management issue that it was dealing with. We noted that and we accepted it. However, the incident points to issues around staff appointed in country. This needs to be done carefully. Notwithstanding, it is still our recommendation that greater consideration should be given to appointing staff locally.
Nigel Thornton: Shall I just elaborate on that slightly?
Stephen Twigg: Yes.
Nigel Thornton: That was a slightly oblique reference to something that has now come through, which is that an individual was hired into DFID as a staff appointed in-country staff member who had political affiliations. That was pointed out by other local members of staff. Unfortunately, there was a social media communication that indicated those political affiliations, which would be unacceptable in the UK for a home civil servant or overseas. It actually would cause some embarrassment.
That individual has now left DFID. When that person was hired, other local staff pointed out that this would be a difficult and inappropriate thing to do. A decision was made that did not have sufficient sensitivity to the political reality around that individual and around the context, even though certain staff members had said that it would be inappropriate. It is slightly delicate and it is an HR matter, so I would not want to go any further into it, but that is a bit more of the background we are alluding to there.
Q29 Stephen Twigg: Can you respond to that insofar as you can, in that it is an ongoing matter?
Nick Dyer: I do not know the details of the case.
Q30 Stephen Twigg: If you could write to us, if necessary confidentially, depending on the progress of the case, that would be very helpful.
Could I ask DFID to respond more broadly on Tina’s point that in Uganda and Nepal only 6% of the more senior posts were held by locally hired staff? Is that typical? Do you feel that is too low?
Nick Dyer: Across the cadres, it is typical. I would agree that it is too low. Why is it too low? In part, it is because we are dealing with labour markets that are quite competitive. As people build their knowledge, experience and seniority, given our terms and conditions of service, which tend to be bang in the middle of the market, retaining people can be difficult. We make an effort in the governance cadre and other cadres to offer people training, technical quality assurance, mentoring and coaching. Unlike some other Government Departments, we allow our staff appointed in country to have international appointments in other countries, so they can build up their experience as well. We are making efforts to invest in our staff appointed in country. Personally, as one of the senior managers in DFID, I would like to see more senior staff appointed in country across the piece.
Tina Fahm: Greater diversity across the senior management grades would be very much welcomed. It would support efficiency and effectiveness within DFID. I would like to make a correction. The 6% was across the governance cadre and not just in Nepal and Uganda.
Q31 Stephen Twigg: Yes, which to be fair is what my notes said, so it is me who got it wrong.
Let me explore a bit more the background of those who are working in these important roles. ICAI’s survey showed that almost a third came from an NGO background, 13% were private sector consultants and another 13% had worked with multilateral agencies. By contrast, only 4% had direct experience of the delivery of public services and only 7% had worked for other Government Departments in the UK or abroad. Does that raise concerns? Would you prefer to have more people who had a background in public service delivery here or somewhere else, or more who had a background in Government Departments here or somewhere else?
Chris Murgatroyd: I agree that that diversity of background is very important. To give an example, I know the nature of the programme has now changed a great deal, but in the India context the SAIC colleagues who were appointed as governance advisers came with significant experience of working in Government, some even on secondment from the Indian Administrative Service. They came with experience not only of how the Civil Service operates but also, as district collectors at earlier points in their career, from the very sharp end of delivery. There was a really useful model there of colleagues who brought that real‑world experience, the understanding of how to navigate the Civil Service and the ability to engage with other colleagues from, say, NGO backgrounds. Some of the labels perhaps do not get at the richness the individuals themselves can bring but, yes, diversity is important.
Nick Dyer: I would add two things. First, there are examples where we just do not have the deep expertise you need in terms of delivery, and we will never have it, or it would be difficult to retain that within the organisation. We look to build capabilities and capacities, such as our work with HMRC or the Bank of England, where you can draw down people who have a particular experience or skillset.
We need to look ahead in terms of what skills we are going to need. The position paper that is coming out makes the point that, as the world around us changes, we are getting more involved in digital technology and the governance issues around the digital world, urbanisation and the youth bulge in Africa. We need to keep abreast of this and look ahead to see what kind of skills we need for the future, as well as the skills of today. We are always trying to do that.
Q32 Stephen Twigg: That anticipates my next question. ICAI’s review says that only 37% of advisers have been trained in tax, 36% in economic development and 27% in democratisation. Is this something you are addressing? Are you trying to increase the training coverage in those key areas of both democracy, economic development and tax?
Nick Dyer: In the governance cadre, there are competencies that each of the professional advisers needs to have. We help people build the competencies through a technical quality assurance system, where people who have one skillset mentor people who do not. In several of our programmes, we have professional retreats or conferences at the end of each year. We are developing and sharing evidence of what works and what does not work. That is the way we tend to try to do it.
But I would go back to this other point: in our workforce planning, it is really important for us to identify the needs, in terms of growing demands, and either try to bring those people into the organisation and train up those who have an interest, or seek other platforms where we can draw on the specialist advice we need at the time we need it. It is really important to get workforce planning right.
Q33 Stephen Twigg: I will come back to ICAI in a moment. One very specific finding in the review is that none of your people working in this field has a background working for a political party. I was interested to explore what your view is on that. Is the view that it would be quite a controversial appointment to make and therefore you would steer clear? Is it the case that people who have worked for political parties do not apply for these kinds of jobs? Is there a view? I can see a strength in having someone who has done party politics and understands how it works, but I understand that these are Civil Service appointments and you might be nervous about making such an appointment. What is the view on that?
Chris Murgatroyd: I would only echo what you have alluded to, which is the potential sensitivities. There is no attempt to avoid that experience, but it would be very context specific. We are aware of the fact that it will play differently in different contexts. I would highlight the work we do through, for example, Westminster Foundation for Democracy. We have relationships and partnerships that allow us to get into different spaces. Even if we were to recruit somebody in that guise, we may not get the same access or have the same freedom of manoeuvre inside the organisation as we do through developing those relationships outside.
Nick Dyer: It is an interesting question. I do not know what the answer is to whether people coming from political parties want to apply for the Civil Service; I have no idea. But, clearly, there are Civil Service rules for senior people in terms of party activity. I suspect that, for someone who has just come from a political party applying to the Civil Service, there might be some nervousness around whether they are still active in the political party and whether they would be able to fit within those rules. But in principle there is no reason why somebody who has a background in a political party should not be able to contribute to our work.
Q34 Stephen Twigg: I am certainly thinking and asking the question about a background in a British political party rather than a local political party. I realise there would be controversy if it was local to that country. Do you have any thoughts on this, Tina and Nigel?
Tina Fahm: I would echo the reference to the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, an organisation I have worked with for many years. That said, in terms of the governance cadre, we were overall quite impressed by what we saw. The survey added richly to our methodology. We got a very good response, at 56%. We were able to triangulate the evidence we received from the survey with focus groups. If I hand over to Nigel, he will be able to give some further insights.
Nigel Thornton: We also interviewed all the previous heads of profession, going back for the last 15 years. One thing that comes through when you talk to the previous heads of profession for governance is that the challenges of recruitment have got harder over time. It was felt that, previously, it was easier to recruit a broader range of skills from a broader range of sources, and that had got more difficult in recent times. We see that coming through in the cadres themselves, where there has been a move to build capability rather than buy it in, as might have been done previously. In terms of the workforce planning challenge that Nick has alluded to, that would be an interesting thing to bring in to that discussion as well.
Q35 Chair: Nick, according to the review, there was no evaluation of the overall impact of the governance portfolio in either country. How do you justify that?
Nick Dyer: Each country is not short of having examples where we are tracking whether a programme is on track. I do not think the report is saying that; I hope it is not, because we have an annual review process and a project completion report process that allows us to track the ongoing impact of projects. The question about whether we are doing enough evaluations in the governance space is a good one, which we need to reflect on.
We are in the process of reviewing our evaluation strategy in DFID. I have been given a list of up to 25 country evaluations in the governance portfolio that have been planned. Not all of them will happen, but there is a long list. We are having a look at whether we are going to do more in that space. Nepal is going to be the first example where we are going to do a research project to look at the overall country portfolio.
Chris Murgatroyd: That is right. From Uganda just last week there was a week‑long tie‑up between the central research and evidence team here in the UK and the governance team in Uganda, precisely to engage with stakeholders in country to think through the big research and evaluation questions, to make sure, as their current programmes come to an end, they are looking ahead and identifying the overall structure of the new programme with this in mind. The ICAI report has been really helpful in identifying the usefulness of that.
In our response, we comment that a theory of change for a governance programme is an interesting concept and one that we enjoy engaging on, but it is not always possible to have a single theory of change for what you would call all of governance. We have heard about other programmes that we want to keep an eye on as well. But that process of engagement was really helpful in driving that.
Q36 Chair: Talking about stakeholders, ICAI was saying that you should focus on the quality of the engagement, rather than necessarily the frequency of meetings. Is that something you would take on board?
Chris Murgatroyd: Yes, we would. That kind of event allows people to engage over a much longer period. It is not simply a half‑hour or one‑hour catch‑up with a key stakeholder; it brings them into a conversation about the future of the programme.
Q37 Chair: In Uganda, only four of the 21 governance programmes reviewed by ICAI had been subject to the programme-wide evaluation. In Nepal, the equivalent figure was six programmes out of 15. Why are those programme-wide evaluations so rare?
Chris Murgatroyd: Again, it is partly the history. Theories of change are now ubiquitous and mandatory, of course, in DFID programmes. In an earlier phase, the logframe process perhaps did not identify certain evaluation needs in the way that a theory of change does. That might be part of it. It may be also to do with the way the team at the time was thinking. Some of the ability to adapt and flex to events had not been predicted. That would be my assessment.
Nick Dyer: Every Uganda programme now has an evidence and learning strategy, which may well have been prompted by the report but is a positive.
Q38 Chair: I will come back to this in a second, but would that be the same with the project completion reports? They were not required for five of the 17 completed programmes in Uganda and for two of the 12 completed programmes in Nepal? Would that be for the same reason?
Nick Dyer: That is to do with the rules for project completion reports. Projects under £1 million do not have to do a project completion report. There was also a cut‑off date, when we introduced consistency in the application of project completion reports. That is what is reflected there.
Q39 Chair: When you are assessing value for money of governance programmes, could you be focusing more on the longer‑term impacts and the contribution to strategic objectives? Do you agree that you should focus more on those than on short‑term outputs? That is one thing that came up in the review.
Nick Dyer: This whole question is not just for governance; this is writ large across much of the work we do in DFID. It is a lot easier to measure our outputs, our effectiveness and our cost effectiveness than it is to measure outcomes. That line of sight from the attributed impact of our outputs to the outcomes is quite difficult to achieve. Looking, as we do in our countries, at progress against the world governance indicators, will our individual governance projects, some of which are quite small, lead to a direct shift in those indicators, given the lengths of time involved and the political processes and experiences that are needed to make change happen over a long period of time? I have my doubts that we can track that easily. It is partly a research question; it is partly an evaluation question. But it is a challenging one for us to address.
Tina Fahm: Nick is absolutely right: it is partly research; it is partly evaluation. Most importantly, it is about learning lessons. This review was based on three core evaluation questions about relevance, effectiveness and learning. DFID was marked down on learning from the theory of change and through evaluation, due to not looping those findings and what had been learned back into the programming phase.
DFID has been a long‑time investor in research on finding out what works in development. That is all well and good, but it is not going to have any effect if what is learned from the research, or practically, is not there and engaged with through learning. There really has to be much more and better commitment to engaging with stakeholders and staff through this learning process.
Q40 Chair: Is that a fair assessment?
Chris Murgatroyd: Yes, it is. Work is taking place now—we have enjoyed the opportunity to engage on this—to drill much deeper into DFID’s actual contribution to change. It is a process that is alluded to in the management response, where we will have a much more effective system that allows us to learn those lessons and to share them. As the commission suggests, linking indicators, including all the way up to the global level at SDG 16, is an incredibly tricky and complex task. As Nick says, it is about a line of sight to what we are trying to achieve internationally so that individual programmes can show their contribution.
Q41 Richard Burden: DFID has a large number of implementing partners in both of those countries, civil society organisations and others. You occasionally bring them together, but the evidence seemed to suggest that they are brought together to look at the requirements of DFID as a funder. Not much goes on in terms of regularly bringing implementing partners together to share their experiences and information, to inform DFID’s future work. One of the recommendations of ICAI was that you should do more of that. Would you agree with that?
Nick Dyer: I agree that there is a challenge for us in the way we run our business model, since we contract out quite a lot of the implementation, as to how we gather and learn lessons, for both ourselves and our partners.
The example that Chris just gave on the Uganda experience recently is a good example of what we can do. In Uganda, we are in the process of doing our country development diagnostic. We are in the process of thinking through the next phase of governance support. It is live at the moment. We are bringing together the researchers in the UK and stakeholders in Uganda. A group of 65 CSO—civil society—partners come in to have a conversation and debate about what that evidence and research tells us, so we can feed it into our ongoing design. It is a really good example of how we can do that well.
In terms of the broader relationships with our big suppliers, as part of our commercial reforms we are going through a key supplier relationship process where we are making a bigger effort to have ongoing relationships with suppliers both on the commercial and procurement side but also on the lesson‑learning side. We now extend that not just to the big contractors but also to NGOs. We try to stimulate a regular conversation with them about our lessons. We are trying to get at this, but the process that was undertaken in Uganda is a good example of where we can get that right.
Q42 Richard Burden: So I understand correctly what you were saying about Uganda, Chris and Nick, was the initiative to bring together partners to track the impact of research investments? Was it tracking research or was it bringing partners together to share their experiences and inform future programming? Was it both of those?
Nick Dyer: It was principally about bringing the researchers who are doing governance research on Uganda to Uganda, exposing the work and what the work is telling them, having a conversation and getting a debate going about whether the research is on the right track or sounds like it is developing the right findings. It is in order to have a debate and a conversation about that. I would expect that, and the conversations that arose from it, to feed into the evolution and design of the new governance programme in Uganda.
Tina Fahm: From our key informant interviews, we have some insights on this as well.
Nigel Thornton: It is quite prosaic in a way. This is about getting all the people who implement DFID programmes in the same room every couple of months and sharing experience so that collective knowledge can work for the collective good. That is programme management 101. That was not happening in either country, interestingly. Where it had happened, it was self‑organised. We are not talking about the highfalutin area of research; it is just about sharing experience as part of ongoing management, which should be standard but was not.
Q43 Richard Burden: Is that fairly low‑level bringing‑together of partners something you would consider doing more of in either of those cases? Does it happen elsewhere?
Nick Dyer: Going back to what I said right at the beginning, understanding implementation is absolutely critical for good policy design. You cannot design good policy unless you understand delivery and implementation. Finding ways to learn from those who are doing implementation is something we should certainly encourage.
Chair: Thanks very much, Nigel, Tina, Nick and Chris. That is the end of our questions. Thank you so much for an interesting discussion. I apologise again for the late start, but it was so interesting that we have even managed to land it in good time. Thank you very much again.