Technical backstopping and decentralization

What measures can LAs put in place to ensure that communities can receive technical expertise from national-level agencies even when the pace of decentralizing lags behind community commitments?

Community projects funded under the SAF have relied on district-level experts from line ministries.

With decentralization and the transfer of more functions from line ministries to LAs, discontinuities are likely to occur as LAs build up their capacities. It is conceivable that the Ministry of Finance could promote output-based development so that resources transferred to LAs are in line with agreed outputs as the LAs build the capacity needed for the various departments to operate smoothly and in an integrated manner. It is the potential of SAFs to become a mechanism to channel grants from the Ministry of Finance to LAs on ‘condition that they are used to finance community-demanded investments’ that holds most promise for successful decentralization. The SAF has the potential to provide a single LA Community Development Fund with a set of common rules for use by a number of agencies with resources for communities and LA development. Within the CDD approach, this will both achieve an alignment of LAs with the center, but also provide mechanisms for ensuring that

resources from Central Government (including contributions from various development partners working through the Ministry of Finance) can be accounted for in terms of (a) use as demanded by financial audits, (b) results in terms of outputs, and (c) impact in terms of service levels achieved.

This seems to be the key to making the CDD approach an integral part of implementing the PRSP, MTEF, and Decentralization so that the results are felt at national, LA, and community levels.

These seven challenges provide the team with a framework for approaching the next SAF design when more progress can be made in the integration of SAFs into LA operations and contribute to deeper decentralization while enhancing a democratic process for sustainable development.

Integration of SAFs into decentralized development should not mean the bundling of the knife and the yam back into the hands of the LA (or handing them both over to the community), but should lead to a better and clearer distribution of power, responsibility, and accountability over resources and decision-making. By building social capital and giving communities the space and the means to utilize that space optimally, the SAF creates opportunities for communities, LAs and Central Government to work together in the implementation of PRSP and achieve development goals articulated in various strategy documents such as the PRSP and MDGs. It is in this context that the next section explores the role of SAFs as mechanisms for allowing the poor to transist from

beneficiaries of charity to actors in the market.

Mainstreaming the CDD approach through a National Village Fund in Tanzania

The National Village Fund (NVF) is being set up as the main instrument under the second Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF II) to respond to community requests for investments that will assist specified beneficiary groups (poor communities and households, as well as vulnerable individuals) to take advantage of opportunities that can lead to improved livelihoods. Experiences from TASAF I indicated that approaching this via components (such as Community Development Initiatives, Public Works Programs, Social Support Projects, etc.) seems to drive subproject requests in line with what communities perceive can be funded, rather than what is actually of high priority. Rather than designing components under which subprojects can be fitted, the emphasis of the NVF is on having no components, but rather a fund with specific access/approval criteria that can be used to finance community requests as long as a subproject request:-

(a) Assists a community contribute to Tanzania’s Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) goals of:

- Reducing the number of people living on less than $1 dollar a day;

- Achieving universal primary education;

- Attaining gender equality in primary and secondary schools;

- Increasing the number of people with access to improved water sources;

- Reducing under-five mortality;

- Reducing maternal mortality; and

- Halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

(b) Can be shown to have been:

- The result of a verifiable and systematic extended-participatory rural appraisal (E-PRA) process;

- Done by the commuity with a mandatory minimum community contribution; and - Done within approved sector norms and standards.

Any activity that (a) fits within these parameters, (b) is under the US$30,000 NVF contribution per sub-project, and (c) has been approved by the appropriate authority can be funded. LA staff involved in the facilitation as well as desk and field appraisal will verify that community sub-project requests have followed the sector guidelines as they relate to issues of safeguards (environment and resettlement) and occupational health. Funds disbursed from the NVF will go into a Mfuko wa Kijiji/Shehia/Mtaa (MWK) thereby mainstreaming the community-driven development approach into Tanzania’s PRS.

The NVF has made provision for ear-marked funds which can be used to meet the needs of special groups (e.g.

vulnerable individuals, food insecure households with able-bodied adults, communities wishing to manage their natural resources better, such as forests or coastal/marine resources, persons affected by HIV/AIDS, etc.) by creating “windows”

where resources can be accessed on a demand-driven basis. This means that special facilitation will be required so that communities that have these specific needs can access these “ring-fenced" resources which must be exhausted before requests from these groups can be funded from the main NVF budget.

In responding to the CDD approach, the three SAFs have focused on the single feature of empowering communities; with the other four features playing a secondary role of ensuring that community empowerment takes place within the local and national contexts. This community empowerment has been through the use, stimulation and creation of social capital: which is preparing the poor to better participate in the market as providers of labour, goods, and services. This seems to be the springboard for a higher level of community empowerment beyond the SAFs. Other features of the CDD approach deal with the role of central and local governments in the delivery of services, and the SAF has had to tackle these issues in order to ensure that community actions remain an integral part of national

development. The experiences of SAFs in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda are being harnessed to inform Local Government reforms (in participatory planning, district-level financial disbursement systems, accountability mechanisms, etc.) and this process is evolving into some kind of Local Government Service Delivery Funds that go beyond SAFs and their focus on community empowerment. Linking decentralization with national poverty reduction strategies and community actions are persistent challenges, but the use of evaluations in SAFs could start providing the strands that allow this linkage.

3.4 Approach to SAF evaluations

The very design of SAFs poses two particular challenges to those designing a monitoring and evaluation system: (a) its demand-driven nature makes it impossible to specify what sectoral outputs it will fund until communities have put forward their requests, and (b) the multi-sectoral nature of community requests makes it difficult for the designers to provide a ‘clean’ evaluation with linear relationships between inputs, outputs, and outcomes.

Even with many years of experience with SAFs, evaluations remain a major challenge, especially when trying to match outputs with outcomes; to demonstrate in a quantifiable way that the presence of a SAF makes the reported difference in services.³³ Beneficiary assessments have been the main forms of evaluations for SAFs, but they are perceived as being ‘short on rigour’ as they often have no baseline data and rely mainly on qualitative information gathered through interviews and focus group discussions. In addition to beneficiary assessments, three types of SAFs evaluations are emerging:-

1. A systems evaluation to assess the quality of processes followed and the national socio-economic context (one was done for MASAF I) and complements the beneficiary assessments.³⁴

2. Impact evaluations comparing outcomes communities that got support with those that did not get any support (one is under way for TASAF I and will provide baseline data for TASAF II).

This is the closest we have so far got to a counterfactual, but it is different communities and therefore other variables could explain the changes.³⁵

3. Review of SAF interventions in terms of what drives sub-project choices, and how these fit into the long-term impact on poverty within the national poverty reduction strategies (currently planned for all three SAFs).

The Social Risk Management (SRM) framework is being used for the third type of evaluation; with a special focus on targeting and transfer mechanisms adopted by the SAFs in order to justify the integration of Social Protection as a cross-cutting issue in national poverty reduction strategies.

Currently under SAF, communities are ‘need-defined’ and instead of direct transfers to vulnerable individuals and households, the benefits are group mediated in order to manage the potentially high administrative costs associated with targeting.³⁶ The pressure on SAFs is to demonstrate that they can get assistance to vulnerable individuals and households using resources available to support the implementation of national poverty reduction strategies. SAFs have currently used community targeting and self-targeting in order to keep administrative costs low and minimize leakages. With the challenge of poverty reduction strategies and the need to demonstrate that SAFs can assist communities contribute to the national effort of achieving MDGs, SAFs are being pushed to consider other targeting methods (especially proxy means and categorical testing). In the three SAFs,

categorical testing has been applied to the category of orphans and chronically ill communities as long as the delivery of assistance is group-mediated. Households with malnourished children and those whose children drop out of school are being considered as beneficiaries that can be reached

33 It has been difficult to compare the results of a SAF intervention with those of a counterfactual – what the situation would have been without the intervention.

34 See Bloom, G. et. al. (2005) Poverty reduction during democratic transition : the Malawi Social Action Fund 1996-2001, IDS Research Report 56, Sussex, England, UK for one way of making this kind of assessment.

35 This study is considering the use of randomization, if the political risks of keeping funds away from ‘control communities’ can be managed.

36 This approach seeks to minimize errors of inclusion in environments of weak administrative capacities.

with conditional cash transfers (the condition being that the orphaned child stays in school and the malnourished child shows improvements in nutrition status).³⁷

SRM framework for assessing SAF-funded interventions

RISK Idiosyncratic Covariate

STRATEGY Prevention Mitigation Coping