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COVID-19 | How ‘COVID-19 hunger’ threatens the future of many by Jimena Pacheco

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Empty Plate

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses and lockdowns continue, even more people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition due to their inability to access nutritious food. The pandemic has revealed the importance not only of alleviating immediate hunger produced by the sudden loss of movement and restrictions to economic activity, but also the longer-term effects of a lack of nutrition arising from the inability to access or pay for nutritious food during the pandemic. Children are particularly vulnerable: the lack of an adequate diet can lead to persistent losses in health, education and productivity that can have lasting effects. The after-effects of the pandemic could be more severe than its immediate effects, writes Jimena Pacheco.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that the COVID-19 crisis will expose 265 million people to the threat of severe hunger. The effects of the increase of hunger worldwide could be more catastrophic than the virus itself on the long run. Hence, it is of the utmost importance to implement policies that fight the pandemic from a holistic and intertemporal perspective, including the challenges presented by the accompanying hunger crisis.

According to the IMF, the global economy will suffer a downturn of -3% in 2020, pushing 200 million people out of employment.[1] In addition, millions of self-employed and informal workers will suffer from the abrupt interruption of their income flows brought about by illness or measures to curb virus transmission, including total lockdowns that prevent the normal circulation of people, goods, and services. In addition to the contraction of household income, the prices of cereals and other foodstuffs have increased as a result of trade barriers and difficulties transporting goods due to the lockdowns. As a consequence, we observe a deterioration in the nutrient intake of the population.[2]

Both the quantity and quality of calories are affected. The disruption in food markets has decreased access to vegetables, fruits, and proteins. These food products are labour intensive and need good storage and good distribution logistics, all of which have been affected by the COVID-19 crisis. In addition to supply shortages[3], the mobility restrictions and volatility of the price of quality food products, as well as sudden income cuts, have pushed households to consume more perishable, cheaper, and less nutritious foods.[4]

But not only the direct effects of interrupted distribution chains are visible in the nutrient intake patterns of the poorest populations. The most vulnerable populations usually live in resource-poor countries with weak fiscal finances, tight health budgets, and high debts. The coronavirus crisis has led these countries to reallocate resources to fight the pandemic, leading to the neglect or interruption of state-driven food programs. Children who were able to receive a square meal at schools can no longer do so, and food- and cash-transfer programs have also been interrupted. The WFP estimates that the school closures and mobility restrictions have prevented 368 million children from receiving meals through school food programs worldwide—a devastating observation. While some countries have ensured that children remain fed, there are no data available on the coverage and quality of those alternative solutions.[5]

Poor childhood nutrition has lasting effects

It is not only the immediate hunger caused by the COVID-19 crisis that is worrisome. The insufficient intake of nutrients during childhood increases vulnerability to infectious diseases, and starvation leads to premature death. Those children who survive are likely to face the lifelong impacts of malnutrition. Malnutrition during childhood generates changes in an individual’s metabolism to save energy. Furthermore, women who have suffered starvation during childhood are shorter and have a higher probability of giving birth to babies with a low birth weight. Besides, children who did not have sufficient nutrients during childhood perform worse in school and are less productive as adults. All these mechanisms that are being fed by coronavirus responses will generate long-term impacts that are likely to persist for more than one generation if we do not counteract the ‘COVID hunger’ now.

The way forward: immediate action and long-term monitoring

The need for timely and adequate policies to prevent hunger and starvation is pressing. Bodies such as the FAO and WFP have suggested a number of measures that can be implemented to combat immediate hunger and a longer-term lack of adequate nutrition linked to economic losses and poverty. These include:

  • Installing emergency cash transfers that smooth the income shocks of the vulnerable households
  • Assuring the correct functioning of food markets by decreasing barriers for food trade
  • Improving dietary quality, among others, by assuring the access to vegetables, fruits, and meat at affordable prices in local markets, or increasing the quantity and quality of school meals
  • Supporting maternal services by strengthening public health services, especially regarding the access to nutrition supplements
  • Promoting homestead food production.

However, the implementation of these recommendations does not seem feasible in countries that are resource strapped and already fail to invest in quality nutrition, healthcare, and food-producing agriculture.[6] We need commitment from governments and international organizations to allocate enough resources to fight hunger today in order to avoid future costs for society. Furthermore, we have to assure that the response to the ‘COVID-19 hunger’ and the monitoring of its effects persist long after the pandemic has ended.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Natascha Wagner for her thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

[1] Also see https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_740877.pdf
[2] The situation is especially difficult in urban areas, where households are unable to smooth the consumption shock through household-level food production.
[3] There are even more channels that contribute to rising hunger and lack of food supplies—the pandemic stopped the movement of migrant workers involved in harvesting activities, resulting in a loss of production for many farmers because of a lack of workers to pick vegetables.
[4] Nutritious food can be 10 times more expensive than basic calories as a result of COVID-19.
[5] For example, in Madrid, the municipality controversially signed a contract with a fast-food provider to cover the meals for vulnerable children. Health institutions and families have raised complaints about the nutritional quality of these meals that the children received for almost two months. See https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2020-05-03/las-pizzas-de-ayuso-y-algunos-kilos-de-mas.html [in Spanish].
[6] World Bank data show that on average around 7% of a country’s GDP is dedicated to healthcare. For OECD countries it reaches 10%, while it is under 5% in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In the least-developed countries, the expenditure in healthcare is as low as 1% of a country’s GDP. See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.GD.ZS.
Title Image Credit: Jimena Pacheco

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

Jimena PachecoAbout the authors:

Jimena Pacheco is a development economics Ph.D. candidate at the ISS. Her research interests rely in development, health and education economics. Currently, she is working in the impact of negative shocks -economic and natural crisis- in human capital formation in Ecuador and Spain as main cases.

 

COVID-19 | Restaurants are empty, but the work continues: freelance food delivery in times of COVID-19 by Roy Huijsmans

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Freelance food delivery workers have largely had to make their own decisions about working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who are they? How has their work been affected, and how have they responded?

On Sunday 15 March at around 17:30, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced the closure of restaurants and bars as of 18:00 that same evening. I was out on the road riding for food delivery platform Deliveroo and had to pick up an order from the KFC in The Hague’s city centre a little past 18:00. When I arrived, the bouncer was in the process of making people leave the fast food restaurant and was preventing new guests from entering. He wasn’t planning on letting me in, either, until I showed him the order confirmation on my phone.

Meanwhile, a WhatsApp group for Deliveroo riders in The Hague was buzzing with activity as we tried to digest the announcement. An English-language news item summarising the prime minister’s announcement was shared. What would this mean for food delivery services, riders wondered? Many feared the worst. Indeed, already before 20:00 a first message appeared, informing other riders that another KFC restaurant in The Hague had also closed for deliveries.

Reflecting on this event a few weeks later, one rider recalled fearing that “my business was coming to a close”. Some started counting their savings and calculated for how long they could sit it out if deliveries came to a stop. A few other riders were more optimistic, though. One or two were even talking about an approaching ‘golden age’ if restaurants would remain open for deliveries only.

Staying, leaving, and getting back into it

A good number of those riding for Uber Eats and Deliveroo are highly educated migrants[1]. Platform-based food delivery work is relatively easy to get into—no knowledge of the Dutch language is required, the work is flexible, and the earnings can be good. Food delivery work is probably seldom the only reason why international riders come to or stay on in the Netherlands. Rather, it helps to realise other aspirations, including international education, generating funds for projects back home, while it also subsidises internships and pays the bills while riders look for jobs more in line with their education level.

Uncertainty about delivery work that for some is their main source of income and the health risks of doing this work in the times of COVID-19 led to at least one rider’s decision to leave the Netherlands when this was still possible, even though this meant going into a 17-day quarantine upon arrival back home.

Most riders stayed, often negotiating their decision transnationally. An Uber Eats rider from an Asian country was advised by his parents to stay in The Hague because back home many people were losing their jobs, including educated employees. Others had to put concerned families at ease who had read media reports about the devastating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. One way of doing this was by saying that the situation in The Hague wasn’t as bad as elsewhere in Europe and that they were permitted to carry on with their work because it was “classified as an essential service”[2].

An international student said he stopped riding initially when the partial lockdown was first announced because he was “kind-of terrified”. When he later learned that food delivery work was continuing, he resumed riding. “I found a way I could help during this confusing time by doing delivery work in my break time after sitting in my room alone for a long time with eyes glued on the laptop,” he said.

The COVID-19 crisis also affected some riders in unexpected ways. Collecting a ‘zoekjaar hoogopgeleiden’ permit (search year permit for highly educated migrants) at the Dutch Immigration Office (IND) proved difficult because its offices had closed. This affected some Uber Eats riders whose student visas had expired in the midst of the partial lockdown. Uber Eats then automatically deactivated their user accounts, and getting them to reopen them based on the documentation for their ‘zoekjaar’ permit[3] took many phone calls and led to various days without an income.

Making money while trying to stay safe

As freelance workers, it is largely riders’ own responsibility to stay safe. Both platform companies have implemented so-called ‘contact-free’ delivery procedures, but what this means differs from restaurant to restaurant and in terms of what is practically possible when delivering the food to customers’ homes.

Riders are very much aware that food delivery during the COVID-19 outbreak carries a risk. Especially in places where one knows things have been touched a lot by many different people (e.g. crowded student flats) and you have to touch that button or hold that door handle, “you know there is something wrong, but you have to [do it]”, one Deliveroo rider remarked. He tried to stay safe by using gloves when hand sanitising gel was hard to obtain and has been using a scarf that Deliveroo distributed as ‘free winterwear’ because the surgical masks available in the open market were disposable ones.

An Uber Eats rider echoed similar concerns and said “for me it [food delivery work] is not safe, but I try my best to make myself safe”. He did this as follows: “I always bring my kit [tissue, hand sanitiser, etc.], and keep distance”. His main concern was that he might pick up the virus and infect his housemates with whom he shares his accommodation: “if I go outside and get corona, they will get it, too”.

For Uber Eats riders, the first weeks of the partial lockdown were quite good financially. It was even referred to as a ‘golden age’ by one rider because of the temporary bonus schemes, such as getting an additional €5 after having completed four orders, and then an additional bonus for each subsequent order. For the Deliveroo riders, business has definitely been slower during the partial lockdown. One rider guessed that his earnings were probably down to half of what he usually makes, but he was hesitant to ascribe it to the COVID-19 crisis, as there were various other factors, too. Reflecting on the past few weeks, he concluded: “My job didn’t end, but it also did not turn out as good as I thought [that] it would. No!”

[1] The demographics of Thuisbezorgd, another food delivery platform, appear different. Another important difference is that Thuisbezorgd employs its riders and pays them an hourly wage, whereas Uber Eats and Deliveroo work with freelancers who are paid per order.
[2] The rider in question admitted he had not seen food delivery work listed as such, but he reasoned that “in my mind, I feel that people need to eat and if they order food, then this is essential”.
[3] Formally: ‘orientation year highly educated persons’.
Title Image Credit: Roy Huijsmans.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

Color 2 Roy HuijsmansAbout the author:

Roy Huijsmans is a teacher/researcher at the ISS, and a Deliveroo rider.

 

COVID-19 | How Kerala’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting inadequate responses elsewhere in India by Sreerekha Sathi

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The Indian state of Kerala seems to have addressed the COVID-19 pandemic remarkably well, limiting the amount of virus-related infections and deaths through its assertive approach. Kerala’s outlier position in India is well known, and its development model that differs from those of other Indian states might well be the cause of its successes in responding to COVID-19. Central to this development model—and the state’s response—is a well-functioning public healthcare system rooted in the state’s left-wing government. The rest of India and other countries can learn several lessons from Kerala’s government and its people, if they are willing to listen.

By the end of April, India’s coronavirus infections exceeded 40,000 cases, while around 1,300 people have died from the virus. India has been under a severe lockdown since 25 March, which due to the country’s socio-economic dynamics has caused many problems for working-class and unemployed people, especially for the large body of internal migrant labourers and marginalized communities, many without the resources to self-quarantine. Millions of Indians will face starvation due to a sudden loss of income as the lockdown has made it impossible for them to engage in economic activity. More than 90 percent of India’s population of 1.3 billion people work in the informal sector, while two-thirds of the population moreover have to get by on less than US$2 a day.

Kerala, a small state on India’s southern tip, was hit first and hardest. The state reported its first case of coronavirus (COVID-19) on January 29th, and by May counted 500 infections, however had only three virus-related deaths with a recovery rate above 90 percent. It is evident that the state with its population of 33 million people has had significant successes thus far in staving off the virus. Here, for example, there is no shortage of medical masks for health professionals, no lack of hand sanitizers, and people living in the state have not been running around trying to hoard basic necessities as has happened in rich countries like the United States. The story of the state’s success in controlling the pandemic has attracted global attention, particularly because this state in India, one of the poorest countries in the Global South, has managed to do what many others with vastly more resources have not been able to.

So how has Kerala been doing this?

The coronavirus epidemic hit the state as it was in the process of recovering from two majors disasters that occurred in 2018—severe floods and the spread of the deadly Nipah virus. These disasters shaped responses to COVID-19 by creating a readiness to respond to future disasters, so that when the coronavirus emerged, the state and local communities were dedicated toward collectively fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, knowing what was at stake.

When the number of coronavirus cases reached around 100, the state government’s popular health minister declared a campaign called ‘Break the Chain’ to fight the further spread of the virus. The campaign that reached deep into Kerala’s densely populated cities and villages was focused on sharing information about the virus and how to fight it by educating people on maintaining personal hygiene. The state government in a short time installed water taps in all important public transportation hubs and public offices and provided free hand sanitizers. It also informed people about the importance of social distancing and self-quarantining. Students from colleges and universities along with volunteers from different sectors were entrusted with the duty of producing facial masks and hand soap and distributing them through community institutions. This engaged public response is world away from the policies elsewhere in India and many other parts of the world that consigned people to their houses, leaving them to fend for themselves without providing adequate support.

As in other countries, while health professionals remain at the center of the fight against the virus, it is important to point out just how central the community healthcare workers in Kerala have been. The backbone of the fight have been women called Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and Anganwadi workers (Sreerekha, 2017) who are employed in the state’s social welfare schemes and who were able to reach every nook and cranny of the state’s numerous cities, villages, and towns to trace contacts effectively. Alongside these women workers have been the state police and fire departments as well as other emergency services who have helped the state fulfill services such as distributing essential medicines to non-corona patients.

Most importantly, state-backed community kitchens have been a lifeline for many hungry residents. For the first time in history, by the third week of March, Kerala opened community kitchens in every village and municipality of the state, providing free cooked food so that no-one would go hungry during the lockdown. This contrasts very sharply with the experience of poor people in many other parts of India, where they are left mostly at the mercy of NGO or volunteer help.

How Kerala does it differently

A well-functioning public healthcare system is at the core of the state’s response, the foundation for which goes back to the much popular, well-debated and critiqued Kerala development model (Ravi Raman, 2010). The state is led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), well known for its experiments with projects related to the grassroots decentralization of government and community-driven developmental planning in the 1990s. The Kerala development model does have its limitations, especially in addressing issues of gender and caste hierarchies and discrimination, and its successes have been achieved even alongside the pressures and compromises with liberal modernity. The state’s successes in fighting the pandemic though have been possible due to relevant steps taken on time and owing to the functional state mechanisms supplemented by the support and commitment of local community networks and an educated population.

With a very high number of expatriates and a big tourism industry the state needed to quickly implement restrictive measures. This has not been an easy path for Kerala, especially considering the fact that its officials are in a constant battle with the right-wing BJP central government. Time and again, the BJP central government has tried ‘to teach Kerala a lesson’ by cutting its funds or even halting the arrival of aid during emergencies. The right-wing party has until now failed to ever win any elections in the state.

Amidst all these dynamics, Kerala presents a useful lesson to the world as a state that even in the face of extreme adversity through sensitive and practical programs and with the support of a politically educated community has been able to take major steps to protect the interests of its residents, particularly marginalized and working class populations. Although the COVID-19 threat remains, Kerala has collectively mobilized to confront it. Kerala’s public healthcare system functions through effective local development measures and community and state networks to make it possible not only to tackle the COVID-19 threat, but also to protect the well-being of its people in so doing.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:IMG_4882

Sreerekha Sathi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Political Economy at at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University in The Hague. Her research interests span theories of women’s work, feminist critiques of development, feminist research methodologies and social movements in the global south, specifically South Asia.

COVID-19 | Revaluing essential workers by Karin Astrid Siegmann

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This year we are celebrating Labour Day in a very different way—the world we live in has changed dramatically over the past few months because of the COVID-19 pandemic and our collective and individual responses to it. As economies are shut down, many people are for the first time realizing that essential workers keep the cogs of societies oiled and turning. Yet many essential workers remain underpaid and underappreciated. We should realize that these workers are nurturers and deserve living dignified lives that can only be achieved if our economic system is critically examined and transformed.

A new hero has emerged in the wake of measures to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus: the essential worker. A global crisis like the one we are facing now raises our awareness about how essential care and food are for human flourishing. The underlying logic is very simple: essential workers are life-making rather than product- or profit-making. Care and food workers therefore top the list of occupations whose work is critical to the COVID-19 response that many governments have published.

Amidst collective clapping for nurses and radio spots praising the role of domestic workers for containing the coronavirus, it is easy to forget that today’s essential workers were the precariat of the old normal. Around the world, care and food workers find themselves at the bottom rung of wage and social hierarchies. In Pakistan, for instance, earning the minimum wage remains a distant dream for the vast informal workforce in agriculture and domestic service. For female workers, this income poverty is aggravated by a wide gender wage gap. Female community health workers called ‘Lady Health Workers’ have been recognised as key to the improvement in maternal and child health indicators in rural Pakistan since the 1990s. Yet, for many years, these vital medical professionals were paid ‘stipends’ at half the minimum wage and not offered regular contracts like other public employees.

This pattern is not much different in a rich country like the Netherlands where I live. Here, the majority of farmworkers are migrants from Central and Eastern Europe on zero-hour contracts. Their hard work in horticulture has turned agricultural export income in the Netherlands into the world’s second highest. Yet, their employment contracts provide neither work nor income security for themselves. Many domestic workers who raise their Dutch employers’ children and care for elderly persons are undocumented migrants whose precarious legal status prevents them from realising the few rights to social protection that they are entitled to. The status of their work is the tail lamp of common classifications of occupational prestige. Only sex workers fare worse in terms of social stigma, while their work satisfies the human ‘skin hunger’ that has turned into a veritable famine in the context of corona-preventing quarantine.

Thus, while symbolic and literal applause for essential workers reveal a level of cognisance of their importance, in fact, the coronavirus crisis even aggravates these workers’ precarity. More often than not, the additional workload for medical personnel and domestic workers to provide quality emergency care to infected persons and prevent further spread of the pandemic through cleanliness and hygiene is not balanced with overtime work compensation. Pakistan’s Lady Health Workers have even seen cuts in their anyway meagre compensation.

In addition, many migrant domestic and sex workers have lost their jobs, but their legal status and/or their occupation’s stigma imply that they are not entitled to government relief packages. Migrant food workers face a cruel choice between infection at work, in crammed transport or accommodation quarters where social distancing is impossible, or the loss of their job and livelihood. Leyva del Río and Medappa hit the nail on the head when concluding that: “The ‘heroes’ of this crisis, those who are sustaining our lives, are barely able to sustain theirs.”

While many observers now demand a revaluation of essential work in a new, post-corona ‘normal’[1], the examples above demonstrate that this is unlikely to be an automatic consequence of the new symbolic recognition of the importance of food and care for our wellbeing. In contrast, they flag that the ongoing crisis is likely to further erode life-sustaining activities. How can this revaluation be achieved, then?

Historically, higher wages, better social protection and more recognition have resulted from workers’ collective struggles. Falling through the cracks of government support in rich and poor countries alike, that’s what today’s essential workers are doing, too. In the Netherlands, for instance, organised migrant domestic workers and sex workers have set up emergency funds, called on clients to continue to support them for as long as the crisis continues, and demanded social security independent of immigration and employment status from the Dutch government.

Given the commonality of their concerns, if networked, these struggles have huge potential to shape a post-corona future that provides essential workers with the recognition they deserve. The call to listen to and take on board essential workers’ own insights in reforms towards greater labour justice and more nurturing societies is the shared starting point of many food and care workers’ organisations. They typically agree that the intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality and immigration status that condition the precarity of their work and lives need to be addressed head-on in moves towards greater rights and respect. Last but not least, a choir of diverse, yet, united essential workers’ voices is more likely to add volume to their demand for recognition, decent working conditions and inclusive social protection for all workers – and evoke positive public responses.

These suggestions are not some unworldly utopia, but reflect existing, encouraging practices. A few years back, I asked a Mexican domestic worker from Texas why she had travelled all the way to Ohio to join the rally of an organisation demanding justice for Florida’s migrant farmworkers. Her answer was: “They support our struggles, we support theirs.” The demand to value people over profit unites them.

These are some starting points for how the ongoing coronavirus crisis can teach our societies whose work matters most for nurturing humans. Let’s not waste this opportunity.

I am grateful to Thierry Schaffauser, STRASS for his thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this post.
[1] It is encouraging to witness that a diverse group of colleagues formulates and shares similar ideas (e.g. Ebata et al. 2020, Jaffe 2020, Koebe et al. 2020, Leyva del Río and Medappa 2020, Mezzadri 2020). The ideas outlined here are also in line with and specify the demands of broader visions for sustainable post-Corona scenarios (see e.g. https://www.degrowth.info/en/feminisms-and-degrowth-alliance-fada/collective-research-notebook/ , https://www.gndforeurope.com/covid and https://braveneweurope.com/manifesto-for-a-more-sustainable-and-fairer-netherlands-after-corona ).

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

photo-KarinSiegmann-fromISSwebsiteAbout the author:

Karin Astrid Siegmann is a senior lecturer in gender & labour economics at ISS.

In search of a new social contract in the Middle East and North Africa – what role for social policy? by Mahmood Messkoub

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Social policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is in urgent need of reform. Critiques of current social policy models point out their deficiencies in terms of coverage of population, entitlement to services, fragmentation of support for different groups and inadequacy of services provided, and above all a wasteful generalized/untargeted subsidy structure. The answer to these shortcomings not only lies in the redirection of resources from generalized subsidies towards targeted sectors and populations, but also in a broad rethinking and democratic dialogue on a new social contract and social policy models in order to improve coverage, entitlement, and the quality of services.

In 2019, mass popular protests shook several countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as protesters demanded an end to authoritarian rule and corruption and called for democracy and a decent life. The call for a decent life was not just a protest against the failure of states to alleviate poverty and improve living conditions, but was also seen as an opportunity for a change in the social contract. The protests illuminated a desire to move away from patronage and clientelism that eroded post-independence universalist ideals and social policies.

Some of these protests were triggered by a sudden jump in the price of basic goods (e.g. of bread in Sudan or petrol in Iran) that released the pent-up frustration with repression, corruption, a lack of accountability and deep-seated economic and social problems that have simply been cracked over by the ruling elite. People all over the MENA could easily identify with the Sudanese slogan of ‘freedom, peace and justice’ used in the protests, which would eventually topple the dictatorship of President Omar al-Bashir. Freedom, peace and justice are not only important for their own sake, but are also needed for a national debate on social policies that could meet people’s aspirations for better education, health, social protection, etc.

In MENA, social policies have been developed mainly as an integral part of the broad social and economic development agenda in the post-colonial period. Oil income provided resources to pay for healthcare, education, and extensive subsidies for the provision of food, fuel and energy to consumers. Non-oil producers also benefited from the oil income through labour remittances, foreign aid, and investment by the oil-rich countries. But in the 1980s, a low growth rate and the decline in oil revenues put the finances of the MENA countries to test. The region was ill equipped in terms of a skilled labour force and social insurance policies to compete internationally and diversify its economy. The existing social programmes mostly covered formal sector employees including those in the civil service. Large numbers of informal sector workers, rural residents, and agricultural workers had to rely on poor publicly provided services or fall back on meager family resources and charitable handouts of non-state providers in an informal security regime. The formal and informal social provisioning were based on a male-breadwinner household with negative implications for gender equality in law and in relation to entitlement to welfare and social support that was exacerbated by the low labour force participation rate of women.

In addition, state expenditures on social policy programmes are constrained by expenditures on generalized indirect subsidies, inter alia, to fuel, public utilities, water, and staple food sources.  According to one estimate, fuel subsidies account for nearly 75% of the total subsidy spending in MENA (Silva et al 2013). The higher income groups in general benefit most from these indirect subsidies except staple food, since the latter takes a larger share of consumption expenditure of lower income groups.

The existing social policy model of generalized indirect subsidies has failed to provide a solution to increasing poverty and vulnerability in the region, especially in periods of social and economic crisis. The reform of the subsidy structure should not only take note of differential impact of the indirect subsidies, but also has to be part of a broad social policy agenda.

The current debate on social policy in the region is about the reform and reduction of the indirect subsidy structure and moving away from a universal rights-based approach to social provisioning towards targeting poverty and improving social protection. Whilst cuts in indirect subsidies and strengthening of social protection are needed, it is essential that any targeting and social protection do not undermine the broad rights-based social policy agenda of public provisioning of health and education and rules governing the labour market to support employment that will improve the economic foundation of household economy.

There is also the all-important concern with the role of households and families to support themselves. In the absence of adequate family resources, there is a need for social policy measures that would supplement family resources and support the broad developmental agenda and ensure societal and macro-level inter-generational support. In this context, the most basic objective of any state intervention is to maintain and increase the resource base of households. This is particularly important if we take into account the changing demographics of the region: the lowering of fertility and ageing of the population. The MENA societies and families are ill prepared for an ageing population.

The Arab Spring and its counterparts in Turkey and Iran have been much more than a cry for freedom and democracy. It has also been a cry for social justice and against corruption that has aggravated capitalist inequality. The use of and access to public office for private accumulation, lack of accountability, and poor governance have all contributed to a sense of desperation and alienation of the population, especially the young. The region is in need of a new social contract. Social policy should play an important role in the design and implementation of this social contract.

What MENA needs is a return to the universalist social policy ideals of a developmental state but within a democratic political environment that promotes genuine popular engagement and participation, as well as transparency and accountability, in order to arrive at an inclusive and new social contract. The details and boundaries of this new social contract would be country specific and depend on the national political and economic developments.

This blog is based on the author’s recent publications:
Messkoub, M. (2017). ‘Population ageing and inter-generational relation in the MENA: what role for social policy?’ Population Horizons, 14(2): 61-72.
Jawad, R., Jones, N. and Messkoub, M. (eds) (2019) Social policy in the Middle East and North Africa: the new social protection paradigm and universal coverage. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar publishers.
Messkoub, M. (2020) ‘Social Policy in the MENA’ in Hakimian, H. (2020) Routledge Handbook on Middle East Economy. London: Routledge.
References:
Silva, J., Levin, V. and M. Morgandi (2013) ‘Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa’. Washington DC: World Bank.

About the author:

Mahmoud Meskoub is senior lecturer at the International Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University of Rotterdam), teaching and researching in areas of social policy and population studies. As an economist he taught for many years in the UK (at the universities of Leeds and London). His current research interests are in the area of economics of social policy and population ageing, migration and universal approach to social provisioning. His recent publications on MENA are related to social policy, the impact of recent financial crisis on the region, poverty and employment policies. He has acted as a consultant to ESCWA, ILO, UNFPA and the World Bank.

Image Credit: AK Rockefeller on Flickr

Inside Delhi’s Doorstep Public Services Delivery Scheme by Sushant Anand

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Informal brokers and middlemen are essential for the delivery of public services in India. In 2018, the government of Delhi launched a programme that seeks to formalise these informal public service providers through an external agency. Examing the programme, Sushant Anand finds that despite its rising popularity, traditional methods are still prevailing. He points out a number of challenges the government has yet to overcome.

My blog published in 2019 discussed brokers and their role in the delivery of public services. The Government of NCT Delhi (GNCTD) in 2018 launched a programme that seeks to formalise these informal public service providers through an external agency. While 40 services were covered in September 2018, this was soon increased to 70 (across 12 departments) by July 2019, and a scale-up to 100 was expected to be reached by the end of 2019. I take a look at the working of the doorstep delivery of public services project.

As part of the project, citizens can call ‘1076’ and book an appointment with a mobile sahayak (facilitator). The mobile sahayak visits the service seekers’ residence at the given time and collects all requisite documents for the service, submits these documents with the concerned department in exchange of Rs 50 as facilitation fees. The sahayak then collects the final certificate from the government department, and delivers it back to the citizen to complete the transaction.

The services in this project include provision of certificates from the revenue department, driving licences and related services from the transport department, and availing access to certain social sector schemes. Most of these services are in high demand, and it can take days for service seekers to apply for and obtain important documents that can be essential to get benefits from government welfare schemes.

As per an annual report card, the GNCTD claims to have been able to service approximately 99.5 per cent of the 2,00,000 requests booked. As many as 13 lakh calls (1.3 mn) were made by the public. The facility currently operates with more than 125 mobile sahayaks, 100 call centre executives, 11 supervisors, 35 dealing assistants and 25 coordinators[1].

The institutionalisation of informal broker practices does incentivise assistance to the general public, however, there still are some teething issues observed through a year of the project’s operations.

  • Technical readiness: The launch of the scheme was accompanied by a series of glitches in the system due to fluctuating demand and the backend team modified the software multiple times. The mobile sahayaks and the call centres were also initially working in silos, and delivery of services reportedly suffered due to lack of coordination.
  • Traditional methods are still more popular: While the scheme was primarily launched to minimise the complexity of Government to Citizen (G2C) services from multiple departments through intermediaries, it was seen that more than 50 per cent of applications were still made directly at the window.
  • Rationalising resources: The scheme also faced issues with respect to planning its human resource base as most sahayaks initially quit their jobs due to low wages, and it was difficult to replace them. Among the requirements was for sahayaks to have their own motorcycle for conveyance, which is difficult to fulfill.
  • Understanding scale: Even as 1.3 million calls were made to the toll-free number, only 200,000 requests were booked and 150,000 were successfully resolved. While the churn rate of successful completion was high, it appears that the scale and demand of services was underestimated, resulting in only 15% cases being booked out of the total calls received.

Source: Hindustan Times, 16 July 2019

All the challenges have important lessons. Donald F. Kettl, a scholar of government and administrative reforms, has suggested that New Public Management (NPM) (such as the doorstep delivery of public services project) aims to “remedy a pathology of traditional bureaucracy that is hierarchically structured and authoritatively driven”. The accommodation of the role that brokers have played in service delivery in this case can be considered as a good example of NPM techniques. The government has attempted to eliminate rent-seeking, and create a leaner, incentive-driven local administration.

Ketll suggests that the six key characteristics of the NPM approach are productivity, marketisation, service orientation, decentralisation, policy oriented and being accountable by design. NPM clearly articulates a result-oriented relationship, specifying performance in a clear manner.  This scheme was understood to be one-of-a-kind offering in India. While I would acknowledge it to be a constructive innovation by the GNCTD, the lack of technical capacity, public readiness and average resource allocation makes it less likely that the project will become a norm.

Any government service, when offered to the public, largely aims to ease public life or welfare, taking into account some degree of compatibility for uptake and reception by its beneficiaries. For a megacity like New Delhi, strong migration patterns, ad hoc living conditions for many, and the comfort associated with informal systems of access to public service delivery can become additional challenges.

This article was originally published by the Accountability Initiative, Centre for Policy Research.

 References
[1]‘Delhi Government delivered on 99.5% of doorstep service requests,’ Hindustan Times, 10 September 2019. Access it here.

sushant.pngAbout the author:

Sushant Anand is a senior officer at the Accountability Initiative. He has a vast spectrum of experience to work in areas including health, education, WASH, resource management and climate change in organisations like FICCI, IPE Global, Ipsos and TERI.
Sushant is a public policy professional by training and completed his MA in Development Studies from the ISS. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Death and torture in the Life Esidimeni cases in South Africa: avenues for accountability by Meryl du Plessis

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In 2015 the lack of attention to mental health care in South Africa made news headlines when 1,711 mental health care users dependent on assistance were forced out of state-sponsored private mental health care facilities. In what has been called the worst human rights violation since the end of apartheid, 144 of these transferred patients died due to neglect. A number of national and international legal mechanisms exist to hold the perpetrators accountable, but victims and their relatives may need assistance to be able to do so.

In 2015, the South African government decided to move 1,711 mental health care users dependent on assistance for their daily functioning from a state-sponsored private hospital group called Life Esidimeni into the care of other actors, including NGOs and hospitals not specialized in the care of patients, many of whom were suffering from severe mental illness that affected their ability to lead normal lives. Following the death of 144 mental health care users due to inadequate care and neglect, the South African government stated that this decision had been made in order to implement a policy of deinstitutionalisation, to satisfy financial auditing requirements not to use one service provider for lengthy, uninterrupted periods, and to save costs.

A remaining 1,418 persons survived, experiencing conditions that former Deputy Chief Justice Moseneke, the arbitrator in proceedings between the South African government and the families of the mental health care users, described as torture (paras 58 to 141). At the time of the arbitration award in March 2018, 44 of the mental health care users had gone missing in the absence of care, lack of food, water and sanitation and systems to keep track of where users were housed. News reports in March 2019 indicated that some users were still unaccounted for, although many had been traced with the help of police and the Department of Social Development.

Investigations point to rash decision-making and a lack of care

A report by the Office of the Health Ombud has described the provincial health department’s project in terms of which the transfers occurred as “done in a ‘hurry/rush’, with ‘chaotic’ execution, in an environment with no developed, no tradition, no culture of primary mental health care community-based services framework and infrastructure”.

According to the Arbitration Award, the South African government accepted liability and acknowledged that the actions of its officials and its agents contravened South Africa’s obligations under international law, the South African Constitution, 1996, the National Health Act 61 of 2003, the Mental Health Care Act 17 of 2002, and the government’s own National Mental Health Policy Framework and Strategic Plan.

The survivors and the families in the Life Esidimeni arbitration were awarded compensation of approximately R1.2 million (approximately €73,000) each in terms of the common law and in the form of damages for breaches of constitutional rights. Justice Moseneke also ordered the government to construct a monument to commemorate the suffering and loss caused by the government’s actions and to remind future generations of the “human dignity and vulnerability” of mental health care users. He furthermore ordered that government report to the Office of the Health Ombud and to survivors and their families on the contents, as well as the implementation of its recovery plan, which seeks to “achieve systemic change and improvement in the provision and delivery of mental health care by the Department of Health in the Province of Gauteng” (para 7a). Furthermore, Justice Moseneke ordered that the health care professionals involved in the killing and the torture of the mental health care users be reported to their respective professional bodies. Steps taken in this regard should be reported on to the Health Ombud and the claimants.

Pursuing accountability: two possible avenues

The steps taken by government above are arguably insufficient to ensure accountability. Apart from measures that the South African government can choose to implement at its discretion, which accountability mechanisms can be used by social justice organizations representing the victims and their relatives to address the crass disregard for mental health care users’ rights by government officials, health care professionals, and managers of NGOs involved in the Life Esidimeni case?

The Special Investigations Unit, the State’s preferred forensic investigations unit established in terms of legislation, has been successful in claiming back portions of the funds that had been improperly allocated to some NGOs. This was done after a presidential decree to investigate whether NGOs benefited improperly from the Life Esidimeni processes. However, no accountability has followed for government officials and health care professionals who were involved in taking reckless decisions and implementing such decisions. What are the options in this regard?

Firstly, accountability in the form of criminal prosecutions is possible, although the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has stated that there is insufficient evidence for criminal prosecutions. However, evidence can be gathered through inquests into the deaths by courts, which have been ordered by the Arbitrator.

Moreover, if the NPA maintains its refusal to prosecute those involved in the deaths and torture, there is the possibility of private citizens instituting prosecution proceedings in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act, although the costs involved make this a prohibitive process for most persons. Funding options for private prosecutions include NGOs and private donors. Without funding and legal assistance, it is highly unlikely that it is an avenue that families would be able to pursue.

Secondly, if domestic remedies are unsuccessful, there is the possibility of laying a complaint with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in terms of, inter alia, articles 3, 15 and 16 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.  South Africa ratified the Convention, together with its Optional Protocol, in 2007. However, the Committee may only make “suggestions and recommendations” after considering a complaint (art 5 of the Optional Protocol). Unless there are political or economic repercussions that flow from adverse findings by the committee, it is my view that it is likely to be a weak accountability measure.

These are two possible avenues in the continuing struggle to ensure accountability for the deaths, pain, and suffering caused by the South African government’s, health care professionals’ and non-governmental organizations’ actions in the Life Esidimeni cases. While the report of the Health Ombud and the arbitration award have suggested repercussions for some of the health care professionals and state officials who neglected their duties, it remains to be seen whether the individuals whose actions caused the deaths, torture, and trauma of mental health care users and their loved ones will be held accountable.

Du Plessis photo for blog.jpgAbout the author:

Meryl du Plessis is a senior lecturer in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2019, she participated in an Erasmus+ sponsored fellowship programme at the International Institute of Social Studies.

More legal flexibility needed for Syrian refugees living in Jordan and elsewhere by Dina Zbeidy

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Painting of a refugee

Jordan is home to some 700,000 Syrian refugees who are trying to adapt to Jordanian laws and customs, including the legal requirement and social expectation to register a marriage. Dina Zbeidy argues that while the precarious legal and economic status of Syrian refugees in Jordan plays a part in preventing them from registering their marriages, development organizations can play an important role by shifting their focus to addressing structural obstacles Syrian refugees face and by challenging the problematic legal system.

Marriage registration is mandatory in many countries, including Jordan, and its importance is inscribed in various international conventions.[1] The non-registration of a marriage has a number of grave consequences in Jordan specifically, since, here, lineage and nationality pass through the father. Therefore, marriage registration is needed in order for children born in Jordan to receive a legal identity and gain access to various rights and services. Indeed, one of the main concerns among organizations and officials revolve around the fact that non-registration can lead to children lacking a recognized national identity[2].

In Jordan, development organizations and Jordanian officials debate the negative implications of the non-registration of marriages among Syrian refugees. However, they often miss the point and their argumentations diverge from the concerns and daily experiences of Syrians themselves. In 2016, I conducted over ten months of fieldwork as part of my PhD research on marriage practices among Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Jordan and the work of development organizations on the topic. I noticed that Syrian refugees were often concerned with navigating the legal and social obstacles they faced due to their recent displacement. While most of my respondents were aware of the legal obligation to contract a marriage through court, they often did not have the means to do so, and were worried about the negative image Jordanians held towards Syrians because of their different marriage practices.

The fact that some Syrian couples in Jordan do not register their marriages stems from a variety of factors. One factor is the different legal system they were used to in Syria. While according to Syrian law marriages should also be concluded through the court, in practice most Syrians concluded what they term a zawaj sheikh, that is a marriage concluded by a sheikh and fulfills the Islamic requirements of a marriage, but is not officially registered at court. The couple usually registered the marriage at a later stage, often after the birth of their first child.

In addition, many Syrians in Jordan faced difficulties obtaining the necessary legal documents. Especially young Syrian men were reluctant to seek the assistance of the Syrian embassy as they were wanted in their country for military service. Moreover, for the majority of Syrians who struggled financially, the high costs in documentation and transportation formed another obstacle.[3]

While most Syrians were aware of the requirement to register a marriage, the obstacles they faced did not lead them to refrain from getting married. Having lost loved ones due to war, and away from family members dispersed around the region, marriage provided them with one way through which they could build a new life in displacement. Respondents stressed the desire to start their own families and make a home for themselves amidst their precarious conditions. Therefore Syrians have tried to find ways to circumvent the legal obstacles to ensure that they can still get married.

Structural obstacles must be addressed

Syrian refugees thus face a number of challenges when it comes to complying with Jordanian laws on marriage registrations. But what development organizations and Jordanian officials fail to highlight is the problematic legal system itself. Interventions of organizations focus on spreading awareness around the legal requirement of marriage registration through workshops and explaining the consequences of failing to do so. By doing this, they place the responsibility for change on the shoulders of refugees themselves instead of addressing the structural obstacles refugees face, or calling for Jordanian officials to facilitate marriage registration for refugees who lack the means to do so according to the current regulations.

Moreover, harsh laws related to the recognition of newborn infants pending marriage registration status are particularly problematic. Bearing children outside of an official marriage is still a taboo issue on which organizations choose not to publicly campaign, leaving the patriarchal legal system unchallenged. In order to alleviate the burden placed on refugees, it is necessary to place the focus for finding a solution on the Jordanian legal system itself. This can be done both by taking into account the specific obstacles refugees face due to their displacement, and by addressing women’s vulnerable legal status in Jordan when not officially married.

Dina Zbeidy will hold a seminar about the Marriage Registration in Jordan at the ISS on November 26.

[1] See for example Article 3 of the UN General Assembly Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages, and Article 16.9 of the Convention of Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

[2]In my interviews with employees of Jordanian development organizations, the scale and impact of unregistered marriages became apparent. I was told about a case of a Syrian couple living in Jordan who had concluded  a marriage according to Syrian custom. When the wife went to the hospital to deliver her baby, she was asked by hospital staff for her marriage contract. When she was unable to provide them with one, social services took her newborn baby away and the husband was arrested. While the law discusses the status of an ‘illegitimate child’, it does not mention the removal of a child. Nevertheless, this practice seems to be a regular occurrence.

[3] As mentioned by my respondents and according to the Registering Rights Report (2015).

References:
Nimri, Nadeen. 2017, February 28. To Give Birth to a Child outside of Wedlock in Jordan. Raseef22 (Arabic).
Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC). 2015, October 15. Registering Rights: Syrian Refugees and the Documentation of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Jordan. Cambridge: IHRC, Harvard Law School
Part of the arguments and ethnographic data in this piece were discussed and published in the following article:
Zbeidy, Dina. 2018. “Marriage Registration among Palestinians and Syrians in Jordan: Debating Identity, Society, and Displacement.” Sociology of Islam, 6(3), 359-380.

Image Credit: DFID – UK Department for International Development on Flickr. The image was cropped.

dina-zbeidy.jpgAbout the author:

Dina Zbeidy is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her PhD research focuses on marriage practices and discourses among civil society and refugee communities in Jordan. She has over eight years of professional experience in non-profit work in Palestine and the Netherlands. She currently teaches social sciences and conducts research on topics related to law and justice at the Leiden University of Applied Sciences.

 

 

Do skill building training programs improve labor market outcomes among rural youth in India? by Bhaskar Chakravorty

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In India, 54% of the country’s population is below the age of 25 and faces a high rate of unemployment. The government of India is implementing job-linked skill building training programs to improve labour market outcomes among disadvantaged rural youths across India. The study[1] conducted in rural Bihar suggests the outcomes to be short-lived while caste discrimination and low paying job placements play a crucial role in negating the initial returns of the training.    

India is an example of a developing country facing a pressing need to devise strategies to provide regular employment to its youthful population. India is among the youngest nations in the world, and the expected ‘bulge’ in the 15–59 age group over the next decade offers an opportunity but also a challenge. The opportunity stems from the expected global shortage of 56 million young people (15–35 years), and India could potentially serve as a worldwide sourcing hub for skilled manpower (Ministry of Labour and Employment 2014). On the other hand, a failure to provide opportunities to the youth population as they enter the labour market may translate into a ‘demographic disaster’ rather than a dividend.

The twin challenge of creating jobs while at the same time bridging the skill gap is well recognized by the Indian government. Consistent with this policy priority, on September 25th, 2014, the government launched the ‘Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushal Yojana’ (DDUGKY), a program for training, skill building and job placement intended for rural youth from poor families.

The scheme implements skill development through a public–private partnership mode, whereby registered private sector partners or project implementation agencies (PIA) plan and implement skills training and placement program for participants. The scheme is supposed to train rural youths of the age group 15–35. They are eligible as candidates if they belong to below poverty line (BPL) category or any member of the family is a member of a self-help group (SHG). Depending on the course, the training can be of three, six, nine or twelve months. Training courses offered by the PIA are approved by the National Council for Vocational Training (NCVT) or Sector Skill Councils (SSCs). Post-training, PIAs are required to place a minimum of 70% of trained individuals in jobs which offer regular monthly wages at or above a minimum monthly wage of Rs. 6000. Post-placement financial support of Rs.1000 is provided to the on-job candidates for a duration of two to six months.

The intention of the DDUGKY and other similar skills training programs is to attenuate unemployment and poverty, but this is possible only if social structures do not hinder voluntary participation in the program. If there are differences at the level of program accessibility based on caste, gender or other social markers, either in program participation or in job placement after training, then increasing government spending and augmenting the supply of trained individuals may achieve little towards the final goal of enhancing welfare and equity.

To understand whether skill building programs improve the labour market outcomes and social mobility among disadvantaged youth, the study was conducted with 263 DDUGKY participants of a three-months residential training program and 263 non-participants in mid 2016 in the Darbhanga district of Bihar, India.

The analysis of the findings is based on comparing individuals who had attended a training course sponsored by the scheme (termed “DDUGKY participants”) with individuals who had applied but did not eventually attend the training (termed “non-participants”). Analysis showed that the scheme is very well targeted, and more than 90% of those who attended the training and showed an interest in the scheme belonged to below-poverty-line families. While the NGO appeared to have well-qualified personnel, the bulk of the participants (64.6%) were not satisfied with the training they had received. With regard to employment effects, 42% of the graduates were placed immediately after the training, which translates into a 29% percentage point impact of training on employment.

However, these gains were short-lived and within two to six months after training, the impact of the scheme on employment was statistically not different from zero. About a third of the placed graduates left their jobs due to caste discrimination and a third exited as the salaries offered were too low to cover their expected living costs. While employment effects were zero, the training did help graduates move from agricultural to non-agricultural positions.

In conclusion, the analysis presented here focused on one training course in one district of rural Bihar. While this study does not paint a very optimistic picture of scheme-induced employment effects nor is it overtly negative about the scheme itself. Indeed, in the current case the positive effects of the scheme appear to have been partially undone by deep-rooted discrimination. It is entirely possible that other courses offered in other parts of the country are able to achieve higher placement rates and that trained graduates are not subject to post-placement discrimination.

Notwithstanding this possibility, what this study highlights is the urgent need for credible analysis of the slew of skills and job training programs that have recently been launched by the government. These should focus not only on initial job placement but also examine employment status after a time lag. Finally, while simply dictating job creation through such skills training courses and demanding 70% placement is unlikely to succeed, the analysis presented here shows that employment effects in the range of about 15% are likely to deliver a nonzero return.

[1] MA Dissertation (2015-16) at International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

Image Credit: Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

About the author:

BhaskarBhaskar Chakravorty is a development professional with more than 13 years of experience working on a range of development issues. At present, he is pursuing a PhD at Warwick Institute for Employment Research (IER) and is a Chancellor’s International Scholar (CIS) at the university. Previously, he completed a MA in Development Studies with specialization in Poverty Studies and Econometric Evaluation of Development Policies from the ISS. He was awarded the prestigious Joint Japan World Bank Graduate Scholarship (JJ/WBGSP) for undertaking the MA program.

 

 

 

Does attending preschool benefit Indian children at a later stage? by Saikat Ghosh

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Colourful pens

Despite having one of the world’s largest early childhood education and care program named ‘Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS)’ in operation since 1975, the impact of such provisions on children’s later development is still largely unknown in India. Empirical evidence from India suggests that attending preschool makes children more sociable but does not improve their cognitive ability.

Does Early Childhood Education (ECE) matter?

Childhood is the most important phase of human life and the strong foundation made during the early years can lead to improvements in children’s cognitive and social development. It has already been witnessed that ECE contributes substantially to children’s development and well-being and children attending early education programs is associated with improved performance in school1, 2. ECE is considered extremely effective for children from disadvantaged backgrounds as it can narrow the gap in early development between children from different socio-economic classes3.

On the contrary, evidence also suggests that early, extensive, and continuous nonmaternal care may have some development risks for young children and the larger society4, 5. Although ECE may increase cognitive skills at school entry, it may also increase behavioural problems and reduces self-control6. Therefore, there also exist some sort of disagreements regarding the effects of ECE programs on children’s development.

Based on the above backdrop, a study was recently conducted to understand whether attending preschool provide any benefit to children at the later stage of their life. Based on a sample of 1369 first graders, the study took place in India which is home of approximately twenty percent of the world’s child population in the age group of 0-6 years. The key question asked in this context was: do the children who attended preschool possess greater skills at the primary school level? Children’s accumulation of cognitive and social skills was assessed by respective class teachers using twelve indicators such as their attention towards class, ability to remember lessons, friendliness towards peers, etc.

Does attending preschool help Indian children?

The results from the study suggest that the ECE provisions in India are able to contribute to child development, but only partially. Children who attended preschool were found performing better, but this association was not uniform over different skill types. Although attending preschool seems to help children in improving their social skills, there was no such effect with respect to cognitive skills. Furthermore, in contrast to the parental notion about the private preschools being better than the ICDS ones, there was no such evidence found of any of the preschools having a relative edge over the other.

Given the fact that not only preschool attendance but also the quality of the preschool matters, one can hold the quality of preschools in India as responsible for not being able to provide any cognitive incentive to children. The focus of the ICDS programme seems more on the feeding aspects than on promoting behavioural change in childcare practices. The people responsible in these settings are often not very well educated and do not have the required skills to take on this responsibility7( p.30). Besides, the curriculum followed in the private preschools were also criticized for its quality and suitability for children8, 9. Therefore, both types of preschools seem lacking the quality to contribute to children’s cognitive development.

On the other hand, regardless of the quality of care and curriculum, attending preschool allows children to interact and communicate with peers and integrate themselves. Normatively, first friendships are established during the preschool years, and the acquisition of social skills such as helping and sharing, etc. during preschool predict later school engagement and academic success10, 11.

Therefore, by providing an improved and more scientific curriculum to the children, ECE provisions in India can help children in greater skill accumulation. Taking into account that parents mainly send their children to preschool for early education and school readiness12, emphasizing on the educational component of the ICDS programme could attract more parents towards it. Given the fact that the ICDS programme is mainly targeting the marginalized section of the society, expanding its coverage and improving the quality of service provisions would certainly help children from the disadvantaged backgrounds to build a strong foundation.

References:
  1. Weiland, C. & Yoshikawa, H. (2013). Impacts of a prekindergarten program on children’s mathematics, language, literacy, executive function, and emotional skills. Child Development, 84(6), 2112–2130.
  2. DeCicca, P. & Smith, J. D. (2011). The long-run impacts of early childhood education: Evidence from a failed policy experiment. National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper 17085.
  3. UNICEF (2016). The state of the world’s children: A fare chance for every child. Retrieved from: https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/UNICEF_SOWC_2016.pdf
  4. Belsky, J. (2002). Quantity counts: Amount of child care and children’s socioeconomic development. Development and Behavioural Pediatrics, 23(3): 167-170.
  5. Belsky, J. (2001). Developmental risks (still) associated with early child care. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry & Allied Discipline, 42(7): 845—859.
  6. Magnuson, K. A., Ruhm, C. J. & Waldfogel, J. (2004). Does prekindergarten improve school preparation and performance?. NBER Working Paper No. 10452
  7. UNESCO (2006). Select issues concerning ECCE India. Paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2007, Strong foundations: early childhood care and education.
  8. Kaul, V. & Sankar, D. (2009). Early childhood care and education in India’. New Delhi: NUEPA.
  9. Swaminathan, M. (1998). The First Five Years: A Critical Perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India. New Delhi: SAGE.
  10. Howes, C., Hamilton, C. E., & Philipsen, L. C. (1998). Stability and continuity of child-caregiver and child-peer relationships. Child Development, 69, 418–426.
  11. Ladd, G. W., Price, J. M., & Hart, C. H. (1988). Predicting preschoolers’ peer status from their playground behaviors. Child Development, 59, 986–992.
  12. Ghosh, S. (2019). Inequalities in demand and access to early childhood education in India. International Journal of Early Childhood. DOI: 1007/s13158-019-00241-8

    Image Credit: Jay Galvin on Flickr

About the Author:

saikatDr. Saikat Ghosh is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LifBi), Germany where he is leading a project focusing on early childhood education in India.  He is a former ISS Graduate (2011-12) and awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Bamberg in 2018. His research interest centers on poverty, education, inequality, and social policy analysis with a particular focus on developing countries. Formerly, he has worked for the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS), Germany, UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, and the State Government of West Bengal, India.

Brokering India’s public service delivery by Sushant Anand

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Informal mediation peopled by brokers, touts, middlemen has over the years embedded itself within public service delivery. Even as they are not within the government system, brokers have come to play an important role, and have reshaped it. The Municipality of Delhi is no exception. Through this article I discuss as to who are these people, and how do broker practices impact governance?

I met Pankaj Sharma, 36, while researching a paper on informal institutions. For the past 15 years, he has been assisting people to complete their documentation for any work they may have at the zonal office of New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) in Karol Bagh, a popular locality in the national capital of India. He is not employed by the government, and carries out his business sitting on a boulder or under a tree. He likes to be known as a consultant, but came into this line of work by accident as a result of unemployment.

Driven mainly by patronage networks, brokers, fixers or touts behave as ‘gatekeepers’ may block or expedite access to public services based on the payment of a fee based on his/her special position as an access provider (Kumar & Landy, 2012: 130-131). Brokers and other such informal networks effect a new understanding amongst citizens seeking to make use of public services – services that are out of reach for citizens if not for them.

With respect to the citizen’s services at the South and North Municipalities of Delhi, service seekers had trouble finding their way in the maze of departments at the institutional premises, and thus preferred approaching the broker at a nominal fee. The officers within the institutions viewed these brokers as a complementary part of the service delivery owing to the fact that these are legal consulting type entities. The brokers themselves, however, felt that they should be institutionalised as service partners due to the high volume of services seekers, usual technical glitches, steep learning curve for officials to keep up with systemic interventions, and the general acceptability of the public.

The Helmke & Levitsky (table below) framework of 2004 offers an understanding of the linkage between the existence of informal institutions and formal government systems.

graph

The typology provided by Helmke and Levitsky (2004: 728) is based on the outcomes of informal rules and effectiveness of the formal rules in a given context. The outcome variables dictate whether the result of these rules are in line or against what one may expect from strict adherence of formal rules. The effectiveness variable on the other hand is the extent to which the formal rules are realised in practice. It is understood that where the rules and procedures are ineffective, the probability of enforcement will be low (Helmke and Levitsky, 2004: 728).

The study findings based upon service-seeker surveys & interviews confirmed a direct dependence on these brokers outside any and every municipal office in New Delhi. A sample of 30 service seekers across two municipal zone offices conveyed that 80% of them usually approached brokers to speed up the process of their work at a minimal fee irrespective of their economic status. While the less educated clients seemed more vulnerable to exploitation, the educated, upper class clients too waited for their turns for calculation of property tax, if not for arrangement of paperwork to obtain birth/death certificate. There seemed to be a process oriented equilibrium where an imperfect system seemed to be working well, both at supply and demand side.

The modus operandi of broker-led governance was further mapped against the recent doorstep delivery of public services policy initiated by the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) to understand the inherent complexities in the system of delivery of public services. The doorstep delivery of public services was a set-up where mediation was institutionalised as part of the system to prevent exploitation of service seekers by the brokers who established ‘temporary power centres’ that could exacerbate access problems (Media reports in 2017-18). The public institution arrangement had been plagued with weeding brokers and touts, especially to ease the citizens off the red tape myriad, information asymmetries and bureaucratic violence (Gupta, 2012) especially in matters related to water, electricity and transport authorities.

Mediated governance has no accountability to its users but brokers are usually risk averse and efficient in delivering services to ensure the leverage of positive marketing and, maintaining their space in the ‘mediation market’. In other words, the system is far from being transparent as nobody knows the legitimacy of the means used by fixers. The mediation of public services may well be offering services to citizens at a price in the short-term, but it is a larger reflection of the lack of capacity, complacency and poor design of service delivery systems in the long-run.

This is a shortened version of an article published here by the Accountability Initiative, Centre for Policy Research.

 References
Gisselquist, R.M. (2012) Good Governance as a Concept, and Why this Matters for Development Policy. WIDER Working Paper
Gupta, A., 2012. Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. Duke University Press.
Helmke, G. and S. Levitsky (2004) ‘Informal Institutions and Comparative Poli-tics: A Research Agenda’, Perspectives on politics 2(4): 725-740
Kumar, G. and F. Landy (2012) ‘Vertical Governance: Brokerage, Patronage and Corruption in Indian Metropolises’, ‘Vertical Governance: Brokerage, Patronage and Corrup-tion in Indian Metropolises’, Governing India’s Metropolises, pp. 127-154. Routledge India

 

sushant.pngAbout the author:

Sushant Anand is a senior officer at the Accountability Initiative. He has a vast spectrum of experience to work in areas including health, education, WASH, resource management and climate change in organisations like FICCI, IPE Global, Ipsos and TERI.
Sushant is a public policy professional by training and completed his MA in Development Studies from the ISS. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do teachers discriminate in occupational expectations and grading? by Shradha Parashari

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Marks assigned by teachers tend to motivate students, have bearing on their career choices, admission to universities and affect students’ self-esteem. Existing literature shows that teachers may hold preconceived stereotypes and implicit biases based on their students’ ethnicity, caste, class, and sex, which influence the grades that the teachers award. Consistent with that, my own research among 120 teachers in 8 private and 11 Indian government schools found evidence of teacher discrimination on the basis of students’ caste and socioeconomic status. 

Marks assigned by teachers tend to motivate and incentivize students (Van Ewijk, 2011). Even basic in-class tests are important for students and in the long term are likely to have a bearing on their career choices (Hanna and Linden, 2012). Lavy (2008) points out that marks given to students by teachers not only determine students’ class ranking and admission to universities, but also act as a reward or punishment that can either boost or lower students’ self-esteem.

With regard to teacher influence on test scores, existing research suggests that teachers hold preconceived stereotypes, implicit biases that affect teachers’ expectations based on students’ ethnicity, socio-economic status, caste, sex and physical attractiveness which may influence the grades that they award. Psychological research shows that teachers may look hard for errors while marking essays or tests of minority students so that the results conform to their expectation. That is called an expectation confirmation bias (Sprietsma, 2012).

Experimental studies in the economics literature confirm this. For example, Hanna and Linden’s (2012) study on India shows that teachers assigned lower marks to low caste students relative to high caste students. Similarly, Sprietsma (2012) shows evidence for Germany of low marks assigned to essays written by students with Turkish names relative to essays by students with German names. Tenenbaum and Ruck (2007) find that US-American teachers hold lower expectations for minority African-American students relative to their Caucasian peers.

Consistent with these findings, my own research in 8 private and 11 government schools among 120 teachers in Delhi found evidence of teacher discrimination in occupational expectations (expectation of career paths of students) and grades awarded on the basis of students’ caste and socioeconomic status. To uncover this discrimination, I utilized a randomized experiment.

The experiment of the study was conducted in three stages. In the first stage, students were randomly selected and invited to write essays on the topic “My future career ambition” in which student’s described their background, occupational paths/career paths and challenges to achieve those career paths. In the second stage, I randomly manipulated students’ caste and socioeconomic status on the set of essays. The last and third stage involved visiting schools and requesting teachers to mark essays on a score of 100 and rate occupational expectations (expectations about student’s career paths) on a score of 5. The findings from my research are in line with existing literature on teacher discrimination in schools.

Discrimination confirmed

I found that teachers discriminate in holding occupational expectations and grading. Teachers assigned lower occupational expectations for essays assigned to low caste and low socio-economic status relative to high caste and high socio-economic status. However, high socio-economic status mitigates the effect of low caste. Consistent with this bias in occupational expectations estimates show a bias in grading which is consistent with Sprietsma’s (2012) findings that lower expectations of teachers against  minority students might further perpetuate discrimination in grading.

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Figure 1 and 2: Mean teacher’s occupational expectations and Marks

Essays assigned low caste and low socio-economic status characteristics are assigned 3.64 points lower marks relative to essays assigned to high caste and high socio-economic status. Given the ultra-competitive nature of schooling in India and the importance of grades in determining access to higher education, a 3.6 point disadvantage is substantial. There is also a trade-off between caste and socio-economic status. Belonging to high socio-economic status lowers the extent of discrimination faced by low caste students as marking bias falls by 0.8 points for low caste and high socio-economic status students. The research further explains the origin of these results and finds that the discrimination against low caste students arises from a majority number of high caste teachers in the sample and not from the low caste teachers.

Conclusion

Education has the power to transform lives of students who belong to minority classes and castes. However; they may not be able to reap advantage of education if teachers discriminate in occupational expectations and grading. Since discrimination is associated with feelings of inferiority among students and low self-esteem adversely affects their admission to universities, their career choices and their overall development (Hoff and Pandey, 2006), teacher discrimination is a matter of concern. There is an urgent need for proper training mechanisms in schools that address teacher discrimination, requesting teachers to take implicit bias tests, educating teachers about stereotypes and implicit bias that might bias teachers’ expectations against minority students and perpetuate discrimination in grading. Further formulating a policy of standardized objective grading can also aid in minimizing discrimination in grades awarded.

Link to the author’s research paper: https://www.iss.nl/en/news/teacher-discrimination-occupational-expectations-and-grading-shradha-parashari

References
Casteel, C.A. (1998) ‘Teacher–student Interactions and Race in Integrated Class-rooms’, The Journal of Educational Research 92(2): 115-120.
Ferguson, R.F. (2003) ‘Teachers’ Perceptions and Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap’,  Urban Education 38(4): 460-507.
Hanna, R.N. and L.L. Linden (2012) ‘Discrimination in Grading’, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 4(4): 146-168.
Hoff, K. and P. Pandey (2006) ‘Discrimination, Social Identity, and Durable Inequalities’, American Economic Review 96(2): 206-211.
Lavy, V. (2008) ‘Do Gender Stereotypes Reduce Girls’ Or Boys’ Human Capital Out-comes? Evidence from    a Natural Experiment’, Journal of Public Economics 92(10-11): 2083-2105.
Sprietsma, M. (2012) ‘Discrimination in Grading: Experimental Evidence from Primary School Teachers’,            Empirical Economics 45(1): 523-538.
Tenenbaum, H.R. and M.D. Ruck (2007) ‘Are Teachers’ Expectations Different for Racial Minority than for European American Students? A Meta-Analysis.’, Journal of Educational Psychology 99(2): 253.
Van Ewijk, R. (2011) ‘Same  Work, Lower Grade? Student Ethnicity and Teachers’ Subjective Assessments’, Economics of Education Review 30(5): 1045-1058.

Image Credit: Shradha Parashari

ShradhaAbout the author:

Shradha Parashari is an ISS alumna of the 2017-18  MA batch and a Research Associate at Energy Policy Institute at University of Chicago-India. This blog is concerned with the author’s award-winning research that was conducted under supervision of Professor Arjun Singh Bedi and Professor Matthias Rieger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nepal’s school-merging programme goes against the right to education by Nilima Rai

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Nepal’s government is increasingly merging schools due to shrinking population numbers in its rural areas, arguing that this will improve the quality of education. However, as Nilima Rai points out, reducing the number of schools actually has an adverse impact on children in remote areas. Hence, the government policies interfer with the children’s right to education.

The Prime Minister of Nepal and his government has named the quality of education in public schools as the topmost priority, with a promise of developing Nepal as an international educational hub. Accordingly, the Nepal Government is aspiring to ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, with a proposed target of an enrolment rate of almost 100% by 2030.

So, the governmental authorities believe that merging schools will help to improve the quality of education in public schools. However, it is necessary to understand whether the existing education policies and infrastructures of public schools, particularly in remote areas of Nepal, are inspiring children’s enrolment, or whether it has an adverse impact on them. This article is based on the informal conversations with people I met during my visit to Annapurna Base Camp and a governmental official of Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) Nepal, reflections of different field visits (other research purposes), and policy reviews and grey literatures relevant to Nepal’s education system and children’s rights.

Context of the Study

I met a girl, three or four years old, in a small teahouse. Like any kid, she was happily playing outside her house. I asked her mother, the teahouse owner, if she went to school. Her reply evoked introspection: “Yes, she does, but she just came home a few days ago for the Dashain vacation.” Wasn’t she too young to leave her mother to travel far just to join school?

Later, I discovered that the little girl was staying with her elder siblings in Pokhara (17 miles away) to study, since the neighbourhood primary school had merged with another school and was now located some distance away. Her story is not a new phenomenon, particularly in the remote villages of Nepal where school-merging policies and programmes are being implemented.

Implications of School Merging Policies on Children’s Education

Consequently, the implications of the existing education policies in sparsely populated areas of Nepal are evident. A large corpus of literature on migration and remittances suggest that remittances have improved the living standards of remittance-recipient households and led to internal migration, mostly for the children’s education, because student numbers in remote areas have dropped. To address the decreasing number of students in public schools, the government introduced the School Merging Implementation Directives 2014, but the long-term impacts of school-merging policies on children were not considered prior to its design and implementation.

The Directives followed the scheme to restructure the education system from classes 1 to 12 by creating uniformity as per the School Sector Reform Plan 2009-15. According to the Directives, schools located within 30 minutes’ walking distance from home and serving a small population, that are unable to meet the minimum criteria of a full-fledged foundation, primary or upper primary school, can be merged together and run as a full-fledged school. According to the Status Report 2014-15 of the Department of Education, out of the 35,223 schools in the country, 443 schools were merged with neighbouring schools, 627 were closed, and 43 were downsized. This number might have increased since then.

The provision of merging schools located within 30 minutes’ walking distance from home overlooks the grim realities of a difficult topography and the absence of transportation in remote areas. The addition of 15-20 minutes to the commute time has exacerbated the children’s problems and increased the chance of dropouts. Taking into account the widespread poverty in Nepal and the country’s dependency on intensive agriculture, the Government of Nepal (Ministry of Health and Population and Ministry of Education) in support of different UN agencies and INGOs introduced the mid-day meal programme to support families in need and encourage children who have to walk long distances to school simply in search of enrolment. Due to irregularities and the insufficiency of such programmes, cases of children not getting the mid-day meal exist.

Children’s Rights and School Merging Policy

It is said that the practice of merging schools is intended to enhance the quality of education by centralising scattered resources, but it is very crucial to assess the feasibility for each and every child before merging schools. When schools are merged, children have no alternative but to quit school, endure the hardship of commuting over longer distances, or leave their parents and live in another place.

Hence, my study finds that the school-merging programme goes completely against the children’s right to education. When seen from the lens of child rights and the perspective of local communities, it has actually aggravated the children’s problems and driven them away from school. Therefore, it is imperative to analyse the long-term consequences of such policies on children’s education and exercise to find a better and comprehensive solution.

This post is a summarised version of the author’s article in the Kathmandu Post.

Image Credit: Simona Cerrato on Flickr.

nilima.jpgAbout the author:

Nilima Rai is an ISS alumni. She is currently working for CESLAM on various research studies, and previously worked for several National and International NGOs. Her primary research interests are issues of International/National migration and labour, forced migration, ethnic relations, and gender issues
.

Striking for a transformative university by Karin Astrid Siegmann and Amod Shah

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Budget cuts in higher education limit universities’ transformative potential. A big strike is therefore planned in the Netherlands for all sectors of education on 15 March 2019. This strike follows demonstrations amongst others by university staff and students in The Hague in December 2018. This post is a conversation between ISS PhD researcher Amod Shah and senior lecturer Karin Astrid Siegmann about what motivates them to participate in the protests.

Karin: So many people came for the demonstration in The Hague—many more than I had expected! There were 1,000, some say even 2,000 people. What motivated you to join, Amod?

Amod: I was very impressed at the size of the demonstration, too. Being part of an educational institution, an element of solidarity motivated me to join. And there are very real impacts of these proposed cuts on us as PhD researchers. We are already in a situation where there is limited capacity for PhD supervision and training because academic and administrative staff are stretched and need to balance research and teaching responsibilities. The budget cuts aggravate that. There’s also a broader discussion to be had: these cuts are huge and structural. What does that mean for the university?

Karin: I see people without permanent contracts and tenure often don’t dare to speak up, criticise, or do anything that would distract their attention from getting those publication points necessary to get tenure. Overall, I see a move towards the neoliberalisation of universities: universities are more and more managed like ‘knowledge factories’. There’s more attention to quantifiable outputs than to the contents of your research, the meaning of what you teach, and of your research for society. To me, a public university should be a space where people manage to think out of the box, creatively for a better, more just society.

In my research and teaching, I use Polanyi’s work quite a bit. He looked at European societies from the perspective of efforts to commodify everything in society, driven by business interests and also pushed by governments. I see similar dynamics in the neoliberalisation of universities. Yet they are a space that should not be commodified in a healthy society. The effort will backfire, I think. But Polanyi also perceived simultaneous counter-movements by ordinary people, by social movements. I see the protests as such a form of resistance.

Amod: Very real conflicts of interest are created when, instead of government funding, you rely on a private organisation, foundation, or company to provide funds for research.

Karin: ‘Conflict of interests’ puts it very politely. I see an increasing influence of corporate interests that want to uphold the status quo. For instance, I see many more calls for research on climate change adaptation rather than what can be done to prevent climate change. That allows us to not question a westernised consumerist way of life, a dogma of economic growth.

For the ‘knowledge factory’, a similar model is being implemented not only in universities but also other sectors, such as in healthcare or in government offices where you should care about the public good rather than higher productivity. This model works through individualisation and competition. It provides disincentives for people to collaborate, but also encourages them to recycle their own work in order to make a career.

Such an individualistic model also makes it easier within institutions to divide and rule and silence critical voices. Michael Burawoy has written a really interesting class analysis of how a university manages to silence protest against new public management restructuring by dividing academic staff from admin staff, through the provision of some privileges to academic staff.

Amod: This is a very good point! As a former MA student and now as a PhD researcher, I see that playing out at ISS, too. By creating such differences—that as a PhD student you are not a student but you are not a staff member either—you intentionally or unintentionally harm the ability for people to collaborate.

We are of course aware that there are funding pressures, but it’s important not to let go of the ethos of a university that contributes to social change. There should be space for collaboration, to think more broadly, not to be oriented solely towards the next publication, or finishing your PhD or getting a job. There are universities and spaces where people are trying to get away from this rat-race kind of orientation The University of Gent is one example: their new system for faculty evaluation de-emphasises quantitative metrics and focuses on what faculty members are proud of[1]. There are real examples out there about how things can be better—these are not ideas which are just up in the air.

Karin: Yes, I was really touched by that example. Another example I have heard about is the planned cooperative university in Manchester. Because of the increasing privatisation in universities, students don’t have the funds to study. That way, universities becomes a more and more exclusive space. With a cooperative university, they want to develop an alternative model with students and staff as the main stakeholders.

Amod: For me, what’s happening in the Netherlands is symptomatic of a more global phenomenon, of the state withdrawing from higher education. What do you think?

Karin: I just referred to Burawoy’s class analysis of neoliberalised universities. I heard him speak about that two years back in Lahore, Pakistan, at a private university. I found it so interesting that somebody coming from a public university in the US presented an analysis that spoke both to the situation of students at a private, elite university in Pakistan and somebody like me who is teaching at a public university in the Netherlands. Very different contexts, but his observations rang a bell for so many people in the audience.

Amod: I would add to this the idea of the university as an egalitarian space, where people from very different backgrounds are able to come and study together. I think that’s a hallmark of public education across the world. This egalitarian space is one of the first casualties of the privatisation and neoliberalisation of higher education. I see that a lot in India now, with the mushrooming of expensive private universities.

Karin: I think even in the publicly funded universities in countries that claim to be very egalitarian like the Netherlands, you very often see the reproduction of class, racial, and gender hierarchies. I don’t pretend that right now public universities are egalitarian spaces. But in private universities, it is very clear that the customer-pays principle rules. Whereas in public universities you can contest that, and there’s space to demand more inclusiveness.

Amod: I agree. I think that’s what these protests are about—maintaining a space for contestation in the public higher education system.

Karin: So, we will take to the streets again on 15 March?

Amod: Yes!

The 15 March demonstration at Malieveld, The Hague will start at 12:00 (noon) and will continue until approximately 13:30.

[1] We would like to thank Zuleika Sheik for sharing this information.

Image Credit: Alice Pasqual on Unsplash

About the authors:

csm_5abd70057687ec5e3741252630d8cc66-karin-siegmann_60d4db99baKarin Astrid Siegmann is a senior lecturer in gender & labour economics at ISS.

 

 

 

amod-photoAmod Shah is a PhD candidate at the ISS.

 

Are we ready for the robotic revolution? by Oane Visser and Pieter Medendorp

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Japan has a hotel where guests are served by robots, and in Australia self-driving tractors autonomously harvest crops, day and night. Robots help with care for residents in some Dutch nursing homes; once in your house, they can order you a taxi, order your food, or mow your lawn. Robots of all shapes and sizes are beginning to penetrate our lives. Do they generate smarter, happier lives? What are the implications of a robotic revolution for our freedom and autonomy? 

For long, views on future robotisation in films, novels and public debate have been divided between utopian and dystopian visions. In 1921, robots appeared in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek; the word is derived from the Czech word ‘robota’, which translates to ‘toiling and servitude’. In ‘I, Robot’—Isamov’s classic 1969 science fiction novel—robots start off as a helpful comrades, but end up controlling humans.

Discussing the positive effects of robotisation, next to convenience—such as robots taking over household chores—medical applications come to mind. Robot radiologists could be analysing your X-rays possibly much better than your doctor. Robotic surgery is already common practice, easing a surgeon’s work. Rehabilitation robotics makes good progress and helps the paralysed to walk. New research shows paralysed patients who steer robotic arms and legs with their thoughts, based on the decoding of the neural signals that are converted into robotic guidance. Concurrently, advances in robotisation cause concerns about the expansion of surveillance and the erosion of (mental) privacy and identity.

When discussing societal impacts of robotisation, two starting points could be helpful. First, we should look beyond visible incarnations of automation-like robots. The algorithms within robots are increasingly central in everything we do online, as well as within the internet of things, from machines, cars, refrigerators to smart cities—everything gets connected and exchanges data. Second, a distinction between a person’s role either as consumer, employee, or citizen facilitates the categorisation of the manifold effects of such automation.

Algorithmic society

As (online) consumers, we tend to be winners. An ever-increasing range of products is just a mouse click away due to the rapid sophistication in online ordering algorithms and the massive investments in the ‘last mile’ of consumer product logistics. ‘The client is king’ already seems outdated; the consumer is turned into an ‘emperor’. The flipside of this apparent consumer Valhalla with almost real-time delivery constitutes the worsening labour conditions of workers in the value chains enabling it. In the distribution centres of companies like Amazon, underpaid workers often operate under a regime of unrealistic work targets, rigid digital surveillance, and a work pace that is set by robots. Even farms are affected—in India, the rise of e-agriculture has been found to contribute to agrarian distress (Stone 2011).

As citizens, our agency and physical and mental privacy seems to be increasingly under threat as both Big Tech and governments try to target or nudge citizens with algorithms which are unregulated and lack transparency. Think about the targeted advertisements in your web browser for weeks after visiting once an online shoe store. It is increasingly difficult to escape individual media bubbles or corporate surveillance, let alone the mass surveillance of those living under authoritarian regimes. In such an algorithm-led society, will people end up as emperors without clothes?

2018: a watershed year

Looking back, 2018 seemed a watershed in the public debate. It shifted from Tech companies as drivers of technological innovation (for consumers) and subsequently freedom (benefiting us as citizens), to these companies’ troublesome record in preventing fake news, let alone respecting privacy and democracy. With a recurring pattern of irresponsible conduct regarding privacy and fake news, Facebook has come to symbolise the downsides of an algorithm-led society.

Regarding the impact on us as employees, international agencies like the OECD recently issued unsettling reports on the effects of automatisation for labour, which are likely to exacerbate inequalities both within countries as well as between the Global South and North. Finally, policy action has been stepped up in the past year, with the EU taking the lead for instance with the GDPR regulations on privacy and law proposals to curb the excessive power of Big Tech.

Robotisation has arrived and will continue to change the way we consume, work, and live. As with all technologies, it can be used for good and for bad. Robotisation can be used to augment us, help us innovate, and can help address many of society’s grand challenges, yet it can also put us in undesirable competitions, eroding privacy, dignity, and identity. To make robotisation, algorithms, and data science beneficial and inclusive, it is time that governments, tech companies, civic organisations, hospitals, ethicists, and (social) scientists start having a serious dialogue on how to make this digital revolution ‘the best rather than the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity’.[1]

[1] We loosely paraphrase Stephen Hawking [hyperlink: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-best-or-worst-thing-to-happen-to-humanity-stephen-hawking-launches-centre-for-the-future-of%5D

Image credit: Franck V. on Unsplash

About the authors:

Photo_PieterMedendorp_sept2018Prof. dr. Pieter Medendorp is a professor of Sensorimotor Neuroscience, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Director Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

 

Foto-OaneVisser-Balkon-1[1]Dr. Oane Visser (associate professor, Political Ecology research group, ISS) leads an international research project on the socio-economic effects of -and responses to- big data and automatization in agriculture.

Development Dialogue 2018 | Who decides who gets social protection? by Maria Klara Kuss

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Colourful pens

Social protection interventions have recently been scaled up in sub-Saharan Africa. While international aid donors have invested much money, time and effort into the policy design phase, the real politics start to unfold during its implementation phase. This is when people experience who will receive benefits and who is excluded. What can the case of Zambia tell us about the political debates  on who ‘deserves’ social protection and who does not?

THE POLITICS OF IMPLEMENTING SOCIAL PROTECTION

In sub-Saharan Africa, the social protection agenda has been largely driven by international aid donors who have invested many resources into influencing the design and scale-up of these interventions. It is therefore not surprising that much evidence exists on the positive impacts of social protection interventions on a range of indicators (e.g. on poverty, health, and education). Moreover, recent research into the politics of social protection has shed light on the political drivers of the expansion of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, much attention has been given to the policy design rather than the implementation phase.

This can however be particular misleading in in the area of social protection. This is because the deep politics – and thus the negotiations for social justice – unfold after its implementation. This is when it becomes more visible for the public who will and who will not receive those benefits (see Grindle & Thomas, 1991). This can be illustrated by the findings from my PhD research that analyses the politics of implementing social cash transfers (SCTs) in Zambia.

SOCIAL CASH TRANSFERS IN ZAMBIA – A RICH HISTORY IN TARGETING

In Zambia, around 54% of the population lives in poverty, and almost 41% in extreme poverty (CSO, 2015). Similar to other African countries, most of the country’s poor (77%) live in rural areas (CSO, 2015). To reduce poverty and eradicate the intergenerational transmission of poverty (see MCDMCH, 2012), international aid donors have supported the Government of Zambia in initiating different SCT schemes. Since 2003, in total four small-scale SCT schemes were piloted – each targeting different groups of poor people (e.g. children, female-headed households, old people, and people with disabilities or chronic diseases). These schemes were strongly driven by Zambia’s aid donors while the Government of Zambia has long remained reluctant in taking the schemes beyond its pilot phase.

Finally in 2014, the Government of Zambia took the vital decision to introduce a single nation-wide SCT scheme. The commitment to implement a single SCT scheme meant that the Zambian Government took a vital decision about whom they considered most deserving of receiving support in form of SCTs. The proposed targeting approach of the new scheme included a range of household compositions such as households with old people, people with disabilities, as well as households with young women caring for children. Given the variety of households included, the new SCT scheme was named ‘the Inclusive Scheme’.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE IMPLICATIONS OF ZAMBIA’S ‘INCLUSIVE SCHEME’

The targeting approach together with the formal policy objective of the ‘Inclusive Scheme’ signalled a potentially transformative change of Zambia’s welfare regime with its underpinning values of social justice. This was because it included young women and their children who previously did not receive any benefits. My research findings however indicate that the Inclusive Scheme did not result in a transformation, but rather in the continuation of Zambia’s political settlement with its values of social justice.

Only shortly after the implementation of the scheme in local communities, strong local opposition emerged because as it became clearer who would and would not benefit from the Inclusive Scheme. A series of debates about the deservingness of young women and their children followed. But instead of transforming the perceptions of powerholders about their deservingness, the powerful local resistance resulted in a drastic change of the targeting approach of the Inclusive Scheme. This fundamentally changed the values of social justice that underpinned the scheme.

THE DEEP POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROTECTION

In order to understand the deep politics of social protection, it is therefore crucial to pay attention to the implementation phase. This is not a phase where decisions are carried out in a bureaucratic manner, but where political reactions are likely to occur since the implications of the policy design become apparent. People will understand who will be included and who will be excluded from receiving social protection benefits. If these policy ideas are competing with people’s perceptions of social justice, local opposition is likely to emerge. This can pose a threat to the sustainability of the initial policy design with its underpinning values of social justice and thus compromise the investments made during the design phase.

­­­­­Disclaimer:

This blog article builds on the findings of PhD research by Maria Klara Kuss which analyses the negotiations of Zambia’s welfare regime and is based at the United Nations University MERIT’s Graduate School of Governance at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. For more information see: Kuss, M. K. (forthcoming). After the scale-up: the political drivers of sustaining social protection in Zambia. GIZ policy brief. Eschborn: GIZ.

References:
CSO (2015). 2015 Living Conditions Monitoring Survey Report. Lusaka: Central Statistical Office.
Grindle, M., & Thomas, J. (1991). Public choices and policy change. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
MCDMCH (2012). Harmonised Manual of Operations. Social Cash Transfer Scheme. Lusaka: Ministry of Community Development, Mother and Child Health.

This blog article is part of a series related to the Development Dialogue 2018 Conference that was recently held at the ISS. Other articles forming part of the series can be read here,  here , here, here and here.

About the author:

PhotoMKussMaria Klara Kuss is a PhD fellow in Public Policy and Policy Analysis at the United Nations University MERIT’s Graduate School of Governance – supervised by Allister J McGregor (Sheffield), Mark Bevir (UC Berkeley), and Franziska Gassmann (Maastricht). She is also affiliated to the African Studies Centre at Leiden University (ASCL). Her PhD research is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on anthropological and sociological approaches to public policy analysis. It analyses the de facto negotiations of Zambia’s welfare regime with a focus on the transformative impacts of social cash transfers.

Development Dialogue 2018 | Social cash transfers: the risk of Malawi’s donor dependence by Roeland Hemsteede

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Social cash transfers are becoming more popular, especially in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. But what happens when the government does not support these programmes? Roeland Hemsteede shows that in Malawi, the dependence on donor funding and lack of government buy-in pose a risk to hundreds of thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on these transfers.

Direct cash transfers to the poor and vulnerable are rapidly gaining popularity around the world, reaching 750 million to 1 billion people, including many in sub-Saharan Africa. They typically aim to improve the welfare of beneficiaries as well as to increase their investment in human capital (Arnold, Conway, & Greenslade, 2011).

Malawi’s Social Cash Transfer Programme (SCTP) targets the ultra-poor and labour constrained and reaches 10% of the population. Currently, it reaches 276,063 beneficiary households with a total of 1,159,691 members. While national leadership is seen as essential to development processes, the SCTP bears all signs of being donor-driven, with limited buy-in from Malawi’s political elites. This jeopardises the long-term future of the SCTP. This blog explores some of the causes and consequences of this limited buy-in.

SUPPORTING MALAWI´S SOCIAL CASH TRANSFER PROGRAMME

The funding landscape for the SCTP is highly fragmented (Hemsteede, 2017). Donors fund the transfers in 27 out of Malawi’s 28 districts, while the Government of Malawi (GoM) funds the remaining district. This GoM funding is the result of one donor requiring 10% counterpart funding, yet its provision has been irregular. Several other development partners provide technical assistance to the two GoM ministries that are involved.

WHY THE DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITY LIKES THE SCTP

The development community sees the SCTP as the ‘golden boy’ of social protection in Malawi. It is generally well run and the impact evaluations are positive (Handa, Mvula, Angeles, Tsoka, & Barrington, 2016). The GoM realises that donors like the programme, which contributes to its reluctance to finance it; after all, many programmes that donors are less interested in also need funding. Meanwhile, the donors are happy to retain strong (financial) control over the cash transfer, not least because of the ‘cash gate’ scandal.

‘Cash gate’, a large corruption scandal uncovered in 2013, strongly damaged donors’ confidence in Malawi’s public finance management. As a result, many donors felt that providing direct budget support was no longer acceptable, but project support was still an option. The SCTP was such a project, as much of its finances are managed by an independent consultancy firm that is hired by one of the donors. Moreover, the idea that the money directly went to beneficiaries appealed to donors. As a result, funding for the SCTP increased, but the system operates almost completely in parallel to the government’s own systems.

PERCEPTION OF POLITICS

Politicians in Malawi, who ultimately control budget allocations, are less enthusiastic. In my interviews with them, they frequently voiced the opinion that money should rather go to the ‘productive poor’ and that cash transfers were not a good solution—an opinion also held by others (Hamer & Seekings, 2017; Kalebe-Nyamongo & Marquette, 2014).

Members of Parliament also often criticised the SCTP’s implementation, arguing that as representatives of the people, they should have a role in the targeting of beneficiaries, and that it bypassed government’s systems, making it hard for them to maintain oversight. All this contributes to a situation whereby some politicians feel that they don’t own the SCTP and that it is a ‘donors’ thing’.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NATIONAL OWNERSHIP

My data point to at least three major reasons why national ownership of the SCTP should be important.

  • It is essential to ensure the sustainability of the cash transfers.
  • Leadership is essential for domestic and international resource mobilisation.
  • As part of Sustainable Development Goal 17, the Paris Declaration, and the Accra Agenda for Action, governments should lead their development priorities.

In the case of the SCTP, however, the development community drives the programme by controlling the funding and technical knowledge. The two involved ministries: the Ministry of Gender, Children Disability and Social Welfare, and parts of the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, appear strongly committed to the programme, but their hands are tied by the lack of resources.

CONCLUSION

The SCTP resulted from a strong push by development partners, who funded its creation and expansion. They strongly influenced its design and the decision to create parallel structures for managing the SCTP. Malawi’s political establishment meanwhile feels little ownership over the programme. Without this sense of ownership, they are unlikely to ensure the sustainability of the SCTP. This poses a risk to the hundreds of thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on the SCTP if donors reduce their funding in the future.

References
Arnold, C., Conway, T., & Greenslade, M. (2011). DFID Cash Transfers Evidence Paper. Policy Division Papers.
Hamer, S., & Seekings, J. (2017). Social protection, electoral competition, and political branding in Malawi (No. WIDER Working Paper 99/2017).
Handa, S., Mvula, P., Angeles, G., Tsoka, M., & Barrington, C. (2016). Malawi Social Cash Transfer Programme Endline Impact Evaluation Report. Chapel Hill.
Kalebe-Nyamongo, C., & Marquette, H. (2014). Elite Attitudes Towards Cash Transfers and the Poor in Malawi. Research Paper 30. Retrieved from http://publications.dlprog.org/EliteAttitudesCTs.pdf

This blog article is part of a series related to the Development Dialogue 2018 Conference that was recently held at the ISS. Other articles forming part of the series can be read here and here.

About the author:

Profile RoelandRoeland Hemsteede is a PhD student at the University of Dundee in Scotland, United Kingdom. In his research he explores how power relations at the national and international level affect the design and implementation of cash transfer programmes in Malawi and Lesotho. Previous blogs on this subject have been published on SocialProtection.org and can be found at http://socialprotection.org/learn/blog/authors/author/1338/latest-posts. Roeland obtained his Master degree (by Research) in African Studies from Leiden University in 2013 and took several extra-curricular courses focussing on the political economy of development at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague in 2012/13.

 

Development Dialogue 2018 | Do children entering preschool early develop more quickly? by Saikat Ghosh and Subhasish Dey

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Colourful pens

Despite fierce debate among scholars regarding the age at which children are ready to enter preschool, the issue remains contentious. This article based on an empirical footing argues that earlier preschool entry is better for children living in developing countries like India, as it can help to ‘level the playing field.’

ENTRY AGE: A LONG-DEBATED ISSUE

There is considerable debate regarding the age at which children are ready to enter preschool. However, scholars seem not to have been able to reach any conclusion regarding the link between children’s development and schooling age. There are two principal views on this issue that shape the age-of-entry debate both at the policy and practice level: First, entry with maturity, and, second, entry followed by maturity.

The first view is a maturational point of view that expects the child to be mature and ready for school. Reaching only a specific age does not ensure that a child is ready for school, nor does it guarantee a specific level of development. The conventional wisdom is that older children are more likely to have the necessary skills and maturity to succeed in school and therefore learn more in each grade (Cmic & Lamberty 1994; Krauerz 2005; Graue & DiPema 2000). Therefore, advocates of maturational view propose a delay in entrance to kindergarten for a child who is not ready, and such delay gives the child an extra year to become developmentally ready. This trend was described by the phrase “graying of kindergarten” (Bracey 1989), which is recently known as “redshirting” (Katz, 2000).

On the other hand, people holding the alternative view believe that the only determining factor for entry into kindergarten should be chronological age. This entry criterion is exogenous and less susceptible to cultural or social biases (Brent et al. 1996; Kagan, 1990; Stipek 2002). Besides, development is uneven and multidimensional, and thus, a threshold cannot be identified, as children’s level of development varies across different dimensions and children are not likely to achieve the level considered important for school success in all domains at the same time (Stipek 2002: 4).

Yet, very little is known in the context of developing countries, and whether the variation in the age of entry in preschool has any impact on children’s later development is still an open question. The authors took the initiative[1] to explore the same debate in the Indian context. As children from developing countries like India face several challenges from the very beginning, therefore, it is utterly significant to examine whether early entry in preschool provides them with an edge.

DOES AGE OF ENTRY MATTER?

The answer in this context is yes, it matters, and it is evident form the study that the age of entry into preschool is utterly significant for children’s later development. Empirical evidence indicates that early entry into preschool may help children to acquire better cognitive and socio-emotional skills. The study has also found significant variation in children’s development depending on their socioeconomic background viz. parents’ level of education, their ethnic origin, etc. Considering the socioeconomic and cultural background of Indian society (as reflected within the household and parents characteristics), the results suggest that early entry into preschool has significant effects both on social and cognitive development of the child at least after a one-year completion of primary education. Therefore, the study advocates in favour of early preschool entry which has been referred by the authors as ‘Green-Shirting’.

Considering children from developing countries, where various forms of inequalities are already present, several differences may exist between children of lower socio-economic status and those of higher socio-economic status even before they enter preschool. Therefore, it is particularly necessary to provide children with a strong foundation from the very beginning so that these early disadvantages can be tackled.

Early childhood education and care provisions can be important intervention for children’s development. For example, the publicly provided preschool education in India, known as the ‘Anganwadi Centre’, which is the predominant type of preschool in India, represents an important and an effective initiative in ensuring both the social and cognitive development of children in the later stage of their life. Early entry into preschool and therefore, longer preschool experiences, can help to ‘level the field.’

[1] The study on which this article is based was carried out by the authors in India and is based on a primary data of 1,369 households. Ten different parameters were used to measure children’s development, which was further disentangled into cognitive and social development.
References
Bracey, G. (1989). Age and achievement. Phi Delta Kappan, 70(9): 732.
Brent, D., D. May & D. Kundert (1996) ‘The incidence of delayed school entry: A twelve-year review’, Early Education Development 7(2):121-135.
Cmic, K. & G. Larnberty (1994) ‘Reconsidering school readiness’, Early Education and Development 5(2): 91- 105.
Graue, E. & J. DiPerna (2000). Redshirting and early retention: Who gets the gift of time and what are its outcomes?. American Educational Research Journal, 37(2): 509-534.
Kagan, S. L. (1990). Readiness past, present and future: Shaping the agenda. Young Children 48(1): 48-53.
Katz, L. (2000). Academic redshirting and young children. ERIC. Washington, DC, Office of Education Research and Improvement.
Krauerz, K. (2005). Straddling early learning and early elementary school. Journal of the National Association for the Education of Young Children 64(3): 50-58.
Stipek, D. (2002). At what age should children enter kindergarten? A question for policy makers and parents. SRCD Social Policy Report 16(2): 3-16.

This blog article is part of a series related to the Development Dialogue 2018 Conference that was recently held at the ISS.

About the authors:ghosh

Dr. Saikat Ghosh has recently received his doctorate from the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research interest centres on poverty, education, inequality, and social policy analysis with particular focus on developing countries. Formerly, he has worked for the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS), Germany, and UNU-WIDER, Helsinki. He also served the Government of West Bengal, India for six years between 2007 to 2013.

deyDr. Subhasish Dey is an Associate Lecturer at the Economics Department of University of York, UK. He is an applied microecometrician working in the field of development and political economy. He completed his PhD in Economics from University of Manchester in 2016. His research interests include social protection programme, impact evaluation of social policies, electoral politics, affirmative action and routine immunisation. He served government of West Bengal for five years between 2003 and 2008 in education and Panchyat and rural development departments.

The Orphan Industrial Complex comes home to roost in America by Kristen Cheney and Karen Smith Rotabi

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The recent removal of migrant children from their parents at the southern US border has caused great public outcry, but Kristen Cheney and Karen Smith Rotabi argue that it could become another incarnation of the Orphan Industrial Complex that glorifies ‘child rescue’ and the charitable commodification of children without parental care—one that actually produces orphans for a hungry adoption market through dubious legal means.

What is happening to migrant children is egregious and yet predictable: children separated from their families and moved hundreds of miles away to foster homes—by an adoption agency with ties to US Secretary of Education Betsy de Vos.

To those who are appalled by this move by the Trump administration, the situation is unconscionable and ‘not who we are’ as Americans (though there are numerous historical cases of intentional family separation by the state).

To those of us in children’s studies, however—and particularly those of us who study orphanhood and adoption—it was only a matter of time before the Trump family separation policy crossed paths with the Orphan Industrial Complex.

The Orphan Industrial Complex

The Orphan Industrial Complex (OIC) is the charitable commodification of children without parental care. It is driven by persistent narratives of “orphan rescue” that not only commodify orphans and orphanhood itself but that frequently spurs the “production” of “orphans”, resulting in child exploitation and trafficking (Cheney and Ucembe forthcoming). The OIC includes such activities as fundraising for orphanages, orphanage volunteering, and international adoption.

The OIC has largely been operating internationally, driven by North American and European desires for children and/or experiences with orphans abroad (Cheney and Rotabi 2017). Now that we are seeing young children at the doorstep of the US, the next chapter in a long story of child abduction into adoption is currently being written—this time domestically.

Adoption scholars and children’s advocates have been speculating on social media that the plan is (and has likely been all along) that they move the young children far from their parents at the border, charge an absurd amount for fostering and/or reunification that the parents can’t pay—either because they just don’t have the money and/or are still in detention—then when they can’t pay, the authorities declare the children abandoned and available for adoption. This has happened before, and make no mistake, it is happening as we type. And it is perfectly “legal”, in that the courts are sanctioning these actions; indeed, they are enabling the stealing of children against the will of their parents.

Bethany Christian Services of Michigan, an adoption agency with ties to billionaire Education Secretary Betsy de Vos and a history of coercive adoptions, has placed approximately 80 children in foster care thousands of miles from the southern US border, where some of the parents are detained while other parents have already been deported to Central America. Bethany and other agencies have government contracts to provide so-called “foster care” while reunification strategies are sorted. We submit, why would a large-scale adoption agency be trusted with such a critical and essential task all those miles removed from the location where the child was separated from their parent(s)?

Tackle the enabling environment first

Because the courts are so often complicit in child stealing, it is difficult to actually talk of “illegal adoptions”. That is why Cheney told the UN HRC Council last year that using the law to battle “illegal adoptions” is not enough; we need to address the enabling environment that is undergirded by “child rescue” and “better life” narratives that justify helping ourselves to the children of the poor and desperate. These discourses are also what undergird the OIC, thus perpetuating such violence against children and families. As we know from previous experience, there are people out there who have no scruples about adopting the children separated from their detained and deported migrant parents—many of whom came to the US with their children to protect them from violence and instability at home—and in fact there are whole social movements dedicated to adoption.

Yet, a number of the families crossing the U.S. border are actually eligible to apply for asylum based on societal violence: asylum seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are over-represented in the recent influx. All three countries suffer notorious gang violence and other problems that rise to the definition of persecution when an individual or family is targeted. Ironically, US government policies have fueled poverty and violence underlying the requests for asylum from the region (Costantino, Rotabi and Rodman 2012). Gang violence is just one symptom that has, in turn, pushed some of the region’s most vulnerable people to immigrate northward for safety (Carlson and Gallagher 2015).

Rather than being welcomed at the border as asylum seekers, they are charged with a misdemeanor for illegal entry to the US. To make matters worse, there are credible stories of immigration agents coercing parents with threats of child adoption if they should file for their rights to seek refuge. As the U.S responds to asylum seekers and others with such a heavy and uncaring hand, Federal Judges are now weighing in: a recent court order requires the children affected and in foster care to be quickly reunited with their families. However, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fought the court order—and lost. Nonetheless, this mean-spirited delay of the court judgment being realized inevitably will prolong the waiting game which is a potential means of child abduction into adoption through the courts. All too often, when a challenge to separation finally comes to court, judges have ruled that a child has lived with a foster family for long enough that they have emotionally attached to the new family. On the basis of the best interests of the child, legal judgments favoring adoption rather than returning a child to their parents have prevailed. This has already happened in notorious cases of child abduction into US adoption from Guatemala (Rotabi and Bromfield 2017).

In the case of an organization like Bethany, they typically serve the very hungry adoption marketplace rather than facilitate parent-child. While Bethany can and should mobilize to change its case management model from adoption to reunification, the clock ticks on the family lives of vulnerable children.

The dark side of adoption

It may look like some of the children adjust well to their new homes and families, but let us tell you what is going to happen if we do not stop it: the older children will likely not adjust well to being ripped from their parents and told they have new families, so those adoptions are bound to “fail”, with kids running away, ending up cycling through multiple foster homes, or worse. For younger kids, the memories of their families and the harrowing journey they have made with them will likely fade over time as the children get adjusted to their new homes. But imagine how they will feel as they come of age and learn the true circumstances of their adoptions; that they were essentially stolen at the border from a parent(s) who carried them for thousands of treacherous miles seeking safety from the very violence instigated by the US. Older adoptees have been devasted to learn of such questionable reasons for their international adoptions, and it can lead to a dissolution of their relationships with their adoptive parents as well as incredible emotional difficulties that come with such a revelation: adoptees, for example, have high rates of depression and suicide.

Many adoptee advocates note that adult adoptees are often driven to learn more about their origins, as an integral part of their identities. In fact, origin tourism has become another facet of the OIC, marketizing adoptees’ need to search for their birth families (Dorow 2010, 78). Nonetheless, one of the strongest recommendations to come out of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy held at the ISS in 2014 was for preservation of records in adoption so that when the time comes for individual adoptees to search for their original families, they will have access to the vital information necessary.

If we cannot stop this from happening now, we need to make sure this injustice is well documented so that sooner or later, it can be righted, and these children can finally be reunited with their families.

References:
Carlson, Elizabeth, and Anna Marie Gallagher. 2015. “Humanitarian Protection for Children Fleeing Gang-Based Violence in the Americas.” Journal on Immigration and Human Security 3(2), 129-158.
Cheney, Kristen E., and Karen Smith Rotabi. 2017. “Addicted to Orphans: How the Global Orphan Industrial Complex Jeopardizes Local Child Protection Systems.” In Conflict, Violence and Peace, edited by Christopher Harker and Kathrin Hörschelmann, 89-107. Singapore: Springer Singapore.
Cheney, Kristen, and Stephen Ucembe. forthcoming. “The Orphan Industrial Complex: the charitable commodification of children and its consequences for child protection.” In Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification, edited by Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Costantino, Rosalin, Karen Smith Rotabi and Debra Rodman. 2012. Violence against women and asylum seeking: Global problems and local practices applied to Guatemalan women immigrating for safety. Advances in Social Work 13(2), 431-50. Available at http://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/advancesinsocialwork/article/viewFile/1974/2465.
Dorow, Sara. 2010. “Producing Kinship through the Marketplace of Transnational Adoption.” In Baby Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families, edited by Michele B. Goodwin, 69-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rotabi, Karen Smith, and Nicole F. Bromfield. 2017. From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy:  A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers. Abingdon: Routledge.

About the authors: 

Headshot 02 17.pngKristen Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at ISS. She is author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification.

Headshot_Rotabi_CSUMB_Fall2017.jpgKaren Smith Rotabi is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Work at California State University Monterey Bay. She is co-author of From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy: A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers and co-editor of Intercountry Adoption: Policies, Practices and Outcomes.

Cheney and Rotabi co-organized the 2014 International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy at ISS.

The role of the media in promoting water integrity: the case of Ghana by Abdul-Kudus Husein

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Ghana’s water utilities are undermined by corruption, impeding the ability of millions of Ghanaians to access safe water resources. The media can play an important role in pushing back corruption in several ways. But often, the media’s potential as watchdog is not fulfilled. This article highlights the key challenges that the Ghana’s media sector faces and argues that it is not likely to ensure greater water integrity without support from the government, the private sector, and civil society.

It is 6am on a Saturday morning and Charity Abiamo, a street vendor of oranges, is on a daily mission with her three children to find water. Charity and her children live in Abofu, an informal settlement situated between Achimota and Abelemkpe in Accra, Ghana’s capital.

Charity leads the way in the alleys of Abofu carrying a black plastic container, with her one–year-old child strapped to her back whilst her two other children follow her carrying two yellow jerrycans known as ‘Kuffour gallons’. These yellow one-gallon containers, which have become a symbol of the water shortage in Ghana, were named after the country’s former president, John Agyekum Kuffour (2000–8), under whose rule Ghana experienced a severe water crisis.

The journey from Charity’s home to the source of drinking water, a large drainage channel connecting to the Odaw River in Accra, takes between 10 and 15 minutes. As Charity arrives, other families are already at the Odaw drainage channel, stretching over the edge with their containers to collect water from an overflowing algae-infested pipeline. Charity claims she uses the water for cooking, drinking and washing, despite the water not being treated considering the lack of suitable and safe alternative water sources.

Accra’s water problems

Accra, Ghana is a fast-growing urban area that is facing considerable planning challenges including access to clean water owing to its rising population. With a current total of 4 million, the city’s population is expected to double by 2030, further compounding the water situation as illustrated by Charity.

Water supply to urban populations in Accra is assigned to the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL). Water is provided for inhabitants of these regions using a piped rationing system managed by the GWCL. Additionally, there are private tanker services to provide water to areas that are not served by the GWCL. Despite these measures, both high and low income earners in Accra still face a great challenge in accessing water. High-income earners in areas with piped water connections even purchase large water-storage vessels, such as the ‘poly-tank’, to store enough water to last them a week or more. Those in the low-income bracket rely on small, unhygienic storage systems and informal vendors such as the water-tanker services, community standpipes and boreholes for their daily use.

Poor integrity contributes to water woes

In an article published by Bloomberg, Moses Dzawu (2013) argued that many of the GWCL’s problems can be attributed to weak and outdated pipes, which fail to support the mass production and distribution of water to certain parts of the capital, as well as poor management, a lack of transparency and accountability, and corruption.

Similarly, Peter Van Rooijen (2008) maintains that corruption, together with a lack of transparency and accountability, is a key challenge hindering the GWCL’s effective operation. Corruption in the water sector in Ghana takes many forms, from misappropriations of huge sums of money to illegal connections and consumption of water. Indeed, stories of corruption have always dominated the media space in Ghana.

The link between media and integrity

The media, along with other agencies, plays an important role in corruption detection and promoting transparency and accountability in the water sector. Scholars argue that Ghana’s media has contributed largely to the country’s democratic efforts by holding the state accountable, promoting citizen education and participation, and monitoring state institutions.

In fact, in 2001, the media, together with the Integrated Social Development Centre (ISSODEC), successfully opposed a World Bank-backed project to fully privatise the GWCL. This effort was largely carried out through increased media reportage, in order to educate the public on the dangers of such privatisation (Amenga-Etego and Grusky 2005: 275).

The media is widely regarded as a defence against abuses of power; excessive politicization of national matters in the Ghanaian media is therefore very worrying. The lack of coverage and at times biased coverage on corruption or lack of integrity show that there is still a way to go before the media plays its potential role of encouraging and catalysing change within the water sector.

Challenges for the media on water integrity

The Water Integrity Network (WIN) supports and connects partners, individuals, organisations and governments promoting water integrity in order to reduce corruption and improve water-sector performance worldwide. In its Water Integrity Global Outlook 2016, it maintains that in order to fight corruption in the water sector there is a need for people to first recognise that corrupt practices exist. Local and national media both have an important role to play in bringing issues of corruption to the attention of civil society, the public and policymakers, to ensure that action is taken through policy or advocacy.

Several things come into play here: first, ownership of the media can play a role. The question of whether the media is independent or state-owned influences the extent to which it can be critical about the level of corruption in state institutions. State media tends to be less critical of government institutions, whilst the private media will most likely be more critical.

Furthermore, the amount of resources available to journalists may influence how effectively the media is able to act as a watchdog in fighting corruption. Ghanaian reporters are often poorly paid, under-resourced and lacking in training. As a result, journalists in Ghana find themselves susceptible to bribery and self-censorship.

Aside from low salaries, the Ghanaian media also suffers from weak capacity. There is a lack of adequate training and mentoring for thousands of journalists in the country in general and in specific the water sector, even though some donor organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have attempted to train reporters. Most of these attempts have, in fact, been frustrated by a lack of commitment from the journalists themselves.

The social media debate

Social media presents opportunities as well as challenges for the future of the news media in promoting integrity in the water sector. It offers many people new ways of networking, and of sharing and receiving information outside of the mainstream media such as TV, radio and newspapers.

Social media can serve as a mechanism to ‘name and shame’ corrupt officials and share information on corruption using blogs and corruption-reporting platforms such as ‘I PAID A BRIBE’ by the GII in Ghana. This online platform helps to collect anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid, and bribes that were expected but not forthcoming.

Looking ahead

The watchdog role of the media does not end at producing information about misbehaviour, but also concerns how that information is used to hold people accountable for their actions. A government must know that people want responsiveness and wish to hold those in power accountable for their actions. A country’s media is likely to have a minimal effect on corruption if it tows the political line or fails to obtain the necessary support from the government, the private sector and civil society.

If the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 on water is to be achieved, the issue of water integrity should be taken more seriously by the media because it plays a key role in various aspects of the SDGs.

It is important that new initiatives are established where the media is further encouraged to take a keen interest in reporting on water related issues. International non-profit organisations, such as WIN, as well as other civil-society organisations have a role to play in ensuring that journalist networks are supported to report on these issues. It is important that the interest of journalists in reporting on such issues is sustained, which could be done through involving them in training courses or broadening their knowledge and awareness on integrity issues in the sector. The government has a role to play in ensuring that the space for the media remains open and that their safety on reporting on sensitive issues is assured.

International non-profit organisations, such as WIN, as well as civil society organisations should intensify their efforts in supporting the media to report on water issues. Journalists who show an interest in the water sector should be given the opportunity, through training courses, to broaden their knowledge and awareness of integrity issues in that sector.

Finally, there is a need for enhanced monitoring mechanisms to be utilised by citizens, civil society and the media in order to strengthen accountability and transparency, and to ensure value for money in water-service delivery.

This post is a shortened version of the original article that can be found here

33591844_10216565409229217_4810907646955618304_n.jpgAbout the author:

Abdul-Kudus Husein graduated from the ISS last year with a MA degree in Development Studies. He is currently the Communications Officer at the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC). His professional portfolio includes communication and fundraising with civil society and the private sector. He has over 10 years experience in generating and implementing positive offline and online messages to engage audience and stakeholders and strong long term commitment to public policy, governance, participatory development, communications for change and local economic development.