CLUSTER: INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE
It is reasonable to assert that knowledge and information systems are under-developed in the Horn of Africa. Individuals, households and communities do not have low cost access to fundamental knowledge and information. Furthermore, ignorance undermines policy formulation, programme and project design and flexibility.
Rational investment in information and knowledge systems would enhance the efficiency of household resource use as well as that of sector investments. It is difficult to assess the economic and social benefits of information, or the costs of ignorance or lack of information. Hence, the returns to investment in knowledge are hard to quantify. Nevertheless, the region is notable for its paucity of data and of knowledge related services. In a changing World and highly unstable environment, information and knowledge must be a precondition for survival and prosperity. It makes sense to explore current and potential avenues for investment and reform in this critical area, with a view to strengthening existing knowledge and information systems, making them more extensive (broadening the coverage) and more cost-efficient
Information and knowledge systems underlie all the sector clusters of the strategy. In most sectors, information and knowledge systems entail backward and forward linkages information between and within institutions as well as discursive mechanisms.
There are three basic types of information and knowledge system:
1. Knowledge enhancement systems and services
2. Early Warning (EW) and Monitoring Systems
3. Management Information Systems (MIS)
There may be considerable overlap between these types of system, in terms of personnel, institutional responsibilities, physical infrastructure, information types and so on. For instance, local health workers may provide and use epidemiological information both for the formulation of preventative responses (EW) and for regular programme design and management (MIS).
Investments in these areas evidently help to strengthen knowledge and management information systems in specific sectors such as
· Social safety nets and social policy (Famine Early Warning, Poverty and Vulnerability Information)
· Agriculture (Crop and Livestock Pest and Disease EW and Monitoring Systems, Farmer Knowledge Systems, Agricultural Service MIS)
· Environment (Meteorological and Agro-meteorological Information and EW)
· Health (Public Health Education, Epidemiological EW and monitoring, Health Service MIS)
· Public Education (Education Service MIS)
· Administrative and Fiscal (Tax Information and Administrative Service MIS)
· Markets and Trade (Market Information Systems)
· Political Information (Political EW, Governance)
The sector-specific topics and investment relating to information and knowledge systems are defined under these headings. Here we look at the cross-cutting topics that are relevant to information and knowledge systems in all sectors. This cluster is likely to be of interest to all the operational UN agencies in the region.
All types of information and knowledge system require a human and physical network for communication within and between institutions. underling physical and institutional infrastructure for generating and communicating information and knowledge. Why are information and knowledge systems so weak in the marginal areas of the Horn of Africa? Five broad constraints can be identified.
First, there is a severe bottleneck in information and knowledge exchange between households and communities and service providers and other agencies. The inability of NGOs, Governments and UN agencies to establish direct and effective partnerships with local community structures is particularly evident in the pastoral areas, where outsiders are held in deep suspicion. This can, in part, be attributed to a long history of repressive, inappropriate or ineffective policies and programmes, which have not benefited the intended beneficiaries. They are, understandably, unwilling to provide sensitive but policy-relevant information for fear that it will be used to control their movements and limit their autonomy. In the long run, trust can be established through more effective and participatory programmes and services. To enable this, there is a need for innovative approaches to mobilising community knowledge and expression and integrating ethnic and clan structures in decision-processes.
A second obvious constraint to information and knowledge exchange is the lack of an appropriate physical communications infrastructure. Again, this problem is particularly acute in the marginal agro-pastoral and pastoral areas. In the past, this constraint could be attributed to the low feasibility and efficiency of providing wired telecommunications services in sparsely populated areas with mobile populations. Advances in satellite and cellular communications technology, and drastic reductions in the price of both voice and data technology, offer large potential for establishing mobile services.
Investments in communications have tended to be sector specific (for early warning, relief programming, animal health and pasture monitoring and so on). This is inefficient. A coherent strategy is needed to build unified systems, benefiting from economies of scale (for development and, crucially, maintenance) and offering the possibility of cost recovery.
In provincial/zone capitals and market terms, the strategy may test the idea of establishing communications centres, for the use of Government, civil society and private institutions. These centres could provide internet access and basic voice and data communications services, and, possibly, radio stations. They could also provide services for private individuals.
A third significant constraint to information flows relates to basic data on pastoral populations and resources. This can be attributed to inappropriate data collection methodologies as well as the resistance to providing information mentioned above – staff members of Ethiopia’s Central Statistical Authority have been murdered in the pastoral areas of Somali Region. Statistical methods, questionnaire design and sample frames are essentially designed for settled (crop cultivating) populations. Development of appropriate technologies will help to fill this critical information gap.
Fourth, despite the advances in web services in capital cities, information exchange between non-competing institutions (within Government, between Government, NGOs and donors, and to the private sector) remains weak. This may be attributed to inadequate co-ordination mechanisms and lack of access to cheap web-publishing facilities. The numerous initiatives to expand web-services to information providers need strong national and regional co-ordination. Moreover, there is a clear need for a politically powered move towards making Government information more broadly and cheaply accessible. In the case of official statistics, monetary incentives for publication are low, and, in most countries of the region official statistics are closely guarded secrets, a legacy of central planning. Co-ordinated finance in statistical development, combined with clearly defined cost recovery mechanisms may be used to increase the political and technical autonomy of statistical services, in line with developments elsewhere in the World.
Fifth, EW and MI systems are frequently designed without due attention to user needs, often based on models that are replicated from other countries. The systems have a tendency towards inertia. In the interests of cost-efficiency, demand-driven approaches are central, including user-oriented design processes and in-built user feedback mechanisms. The same is true of initiatives aimed at sharing knowledge with local communities. Too often, public education, extension and health information products reflect an outside perception of what constitutes knowledge, rather than local perceptions.
CLUSTER: DISASTER RELIEF AND RECOVERY
In this cluster we develop a strategy for effective disaster prevention, mitigation and recovery. In the Horn of Africa, despite substantial investment, humanitarian resources often fail to reach the right people at the right time. In the foreseeable future, there will be a continued need for intermittent relief interventions. In the context of a medium to long term strategic horizon, the central questions relate to response capacity. How can this be enhanced to make relief intervention more effective (in preventing famine and destitution) and more cost efficient?
The experience of the 1999/2000 emergency suggests that international and national response mechanisms have improved immeasurably since the 1984/85 tragedy, at least in Ethiopia, Kenya
and Eritrea. Nevertheless, the persistence of famine or high famine risk points to continued weaknesses. These areas of weakness and potential reform and investment are central:
Early warning systems should provide the basic informational base to relief interventions. Although early warning systems have mushroomed since the mid 1980s they fail to fulfil some basic criteria for effectiveness. First, the coverage of pastoral and agro-pastoral areas is weak throughout the Horn, reflecting the geographical concentration of the main players and a historic bias towards monitoring crop conditions and supplies (particularly cereals). Second, the numerous players sometimes fail to provide and single and plausible message, capable of stimulating decisive donor and government response. Numerous players with overlapping functions are clearly and inefficient use of resources. Third, despite recent moves away from traditional supply monitoring, there is still scope for enhancing the accuracy of EW outputs and their policy relevance, especially within the Government systems. Fourth, early warning systems benefit from continuity, but the main non-Government institutions are not permanent. Moreover, the sustainability of the Government systems is questionable. In short, investment in EW is more than adequate. The systems could be become much more effective through restructuring and refocusing. There are, of course, underlying constraints to data quality and timeliness, relating to the weaknesses of data collection and communication, especially in the pastoral areas (see LINK).
It has been argued that there is a “missing link” between early warning and response (donor, government and NGO commitments and programme delivery). In all the countries in the region, slow and inadequate responses have undermined the effectiveness of relief interventions. This can be attributed in part to the weakness of the information base. It also reflects breakdowns in bilateral and multilateral negotiations. Strengthening co-ordination and negotiation mechanisms in country is an important element of building response.
Internal logistics represent a constraint to timely and effective response in the region. This is partly related to the periodic blockages of critical corridors (through the Somali ports, Assab, throughout southern Sudan, and parts of northern Uganda, as a result of conflict. There are also physical off-take capacity constraints in some critical ports (i.e. Djibouti) and internal constraints and/or high transport costs, relating to the weak transport infrastructure. The conflict and infrastructure issues are discussed in (LINK), (LINK), respectively. A further critical element of the logistics systems related to commodity tracking systems. There are potential cost-efficiency improvements to be gained, especially through unified systems, given the economies of scale in system development and upkeep.
Even with the basic information and response capacity in place, lead times on donor pledges and government purchases from public funds tend to be lengthy. There is an argument for using emergency funds and/or physical food reserves as contingencies, though there is ample scope for improvement in the efficiency of these instruments. The strategy will consider the relative merits and demerits of regional, national and local level physical reserves and alternative financial instruments.
Assuming successful investment in basic response capacity, large gains can be achieved from medium term developments in the methods of intervention design and implementation. First, Excessive financial, economic and social costs may be attributed to lack of flexibility in provisioning (commodity choice, use of food rather than cash). Second, poor intervention design may, in some cases be indicative of a lack of a solid knowledge based, gained from past experience. Emergency relief interventions are rarely subject to ex post evaluation, and the evaluations that exist are not always made public. Third, targeting is typically haphazard, with very large exclusion and inclusion errors, suggesting that there is potential for gains in cost-effectiveness from investment in targeting mechanisms. Fourth, standards of relief intervention management and performance vary between locations, NGOs and recipient governments. Efforts are underway to enhance the self-regulatory capacity of NGOs, with a view to achieving common basic standards, but more efficient structures are still needed for monitoring and regulating bilateral government to government programmes. Further, the sub-contractual arrangements for programme implementation are far from transparent or efficient.
However relief interventions (with free handouts) are designed there are always preferable alternatives, especially for supporting low-dependency households and individuals who are capable of working. A critical area of medium-term relief strategy must be the expansion of permanent or semi-permanent structures for labour- and credit-based social safety nets (LINK).
A rapid transition from free relief distribution (of food aid) to activities that aim to allow people to support themselves through their own labour should ensure that the financial, economic and social costs of relief distributions are minimised. At present, there are political and practical feasibility constraints to launching rapid interventions for recovery and rehabilitation. The main constraints to effective response are the lack of a capable and fully co-ordinated institutional structure, a weak local knowledge base, and a notable lack of funding for recovery elements of relief programmes and for investment in rehabilitation. With restructuring, advocacy and some investment, these constraints can be reduced.
In all countries of the region, efforts
have been made to move away from free food aid distribution, towards
alternative interventions, especially for able-bodied adults and their
families..
The basic options for alternative interventions are:
· Labour-based interventions including food and cash for work serve to provide labourers a source of income in times of hardship, but also to build up local physical and social assets. They have become a central part of famine prevention policy in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and there are recent examples of food and cash for work in Kenya, Somalia and Sudan. However, the coverage and effectiveness of food and cash for work remain are currently too limited to form a comprehensive safety net for all people who are risk of famine and able to work, especially in the marginal pastoral areas.
· Credit and insurance based mechanisms including support to local financial mechanisms like ROSCAs[1]. These can serve both to protect people from short term consumption shocks, and to increase the productivity of their land and labour. While there are ROSCAs and other informal credit arrangements throughout the region, there has been little systematic support for developing local credit and insurance institutions and access to such mechanisms remains limited.
· Nutrition interventions such as school and hospital feeding serve the short term goal of preventing severe child malnutrition, but have the long term of advantages of (potentially) increasing school or clinic attendance for poor children, and increasing the chances of healthy mental and physical development. Usually donor-financed, nutritional interventions have been implemented in all countries of the region, but generally on a small scale and on an ad hoc basis.
These efforts are critical from several perspectives. First, if successful, they help to build the local human, social and physical asset base, whereas the impact of free food aid distribution is debatable. Potentially, alternative delivery mechanisms can address both chronic and acute dimensions of food insecurity and deprivation. Second, some of the labour and production disincentive effects of free handouts can be avoided through alternative types of intervention. Third, free relief distribution carries stigma and undermines individual dignity. Alternative intervention types are less prone to stigma. While enhancing relief response capacity is an evident medium term priority, in the coming years a progressive move from ad hoc relief response to permanent social safety net structures is critical.
The alternative programme options outlined here have a common feature. They are permanent or semi-permanent structures, require some element of long-term planning and permanent field presence. It is generally not possible to design and implement alternative programmes in response to risks and shocks, and in the initial stages of a quick onset disaster, it is out of the question. They are inherently more complex to implement than emergency relief programmes.
The emergence of social safety nets in the Horn of Africa has been constrained by these factors:
First, security constraints in much of the region basically preclude successful implementation and continuity (LINK to conflict resolution and security)
Second, the interventions require a permanent and relatively high institutional capacity. While some of the government capacity constraints can be skirted by devolving activities to NGOs, the private sector and, centrally, to local community structures, some investment in the knowledge base, communications and delivery capacity is necessary. Further, all the alternative programmes are essentially multi-sector, and institutional roles must be very clearly defined, so that expertise in specific subject areas can be exploited. Social safety nets fall between or across institutional mandates at both national and international level. This is particularly true of labour-based interventions, which require specialised knowledge of the assets (environmental, road building, local service structure) that are being created.
Third, these interventions, like pure relief programmes suffer from poor targeting as a result of an inadequate knowledge base, adverse political conditions and inadequate institutional structures for clean beneficiary selection. There is some potential for alleviating all three sets of constraints. A) A more systematic use of existing information, and enhanced local knowledge and information (LINK) can deepen knowledge of the location and distribution of poverty and food insecurity, enhancing identification of target groups. B) Institutional constraints to targeting may be reduced by more proactive (but regulated) involvement of local communities, and much more emphasis on self targeting rather than administrative screening. C) Political constraints to supporting programmes in the marginal areas can, in part, be overcome by advocacy, conditionality and combating entrenched misperceptions[2].
Fourth, there are major
fiscal constraints to establishing and maintaining labour and nutrition
interventions. Tthese
interventions require non-food resources. Indeed, for credit and labour-based
programmes, there is rarely a case for providing food in any form. Since much
of the resources come in the form of restricted food aid (i.e. food aid that
cannot be monetised to generate counterpart funds), the scope for non-food
provisioning and covering other programme costs is highly restricted. For
labour-based and nutrition programmes, thereThere
is a clear need to develop alternative donor financial mechanisms, possibly
reallocating resources that are currently used for emergency programmesand
to develop domestic resource contributions, including cost recovery.
External financial assistance for community-based credit and insurance programmes
is likely to be limited to seed money for basic set up costs,
and does not imply a long-term financial obligation if the institutions are
financially viable.