JOINT COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS debate

Irish Aid Programme in Malawi: Discussion.

Chairman

When discussing this committee's work programme for 2008, it was agreed that we would continue our examination of Irish Aid programmes in Ireland's programme countries. During the life of the previous joint committee, we completed detailed reports on five of the nine programme countries, namely, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Timor Leste, Uganda and Vietnam. During this Dáil we hope to complete reports on the remaining four programme countries, starting with Malawi.

We received a large number of submissions from NGOs which have an interest in and are active in Malawi. I am most grateful to these NGOs for their comprehensive and detailed submissions on the work they do in Malawi. These contributions will add immeasurably to the quality of the joint committee's report. Due to the number of NGOs active in Malawi, it was not possible to have all of them make oral presentations at one meeting and it was agreed we would hold two meetings.

Members will recall the first meeting was held on 8 May when we heard presentations from Irish Aid, Concern, Trócaire and the Irish Missionary Union. Today, during our second meeting on Malawi, we will hear presentations from GOAL, Oxfam, UNICEF, St. John of God Hospitaller Services and Wells for Zoë. I welcome the representatives from these NGOs.

As I mentioned, this committee has produced reports on five of Ireland's programme or priority countries. These reports were prepared through a process which began with discussions in this committee on Ireland's aid programme to the country in question. The discussions follow from submissions made to the committee by Irish Aid and Irish NGOs working in the country. These presentations and submissions are invaluable in the committee's report.

Malawi is a small and desperately poor country in central east Africa. In 2007, it was designated as Ireland's ninth programme country. Last year, Ireland opened an embassy in Malawi's capital, Lilongwe, to implement Irish Aid's development programme. Deputy Peter Power, the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs with responsibility for Ireland's aid programme, formally opened the embassy a few weeks ago during the course of a visit he made to Malawi. During the visit he announced that this year, Ireland will commit €10 million to Malawi in bilateral assistance. He also announced an additional €4.5 million will be allocated to Irish NGOs working in Malawi.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world and in every standard statistic used by the UN to measure a country's level of development, Malawi comes near the bottom. It's per capita GDP is $667. It ranks 164th out of 177 in the United Nations development programme’s human development index. Life expectancy is 46.3 years and 83% of the population lives on less than $2 per day. A total of 14% of the population between the ages of 15 and 49 are HIV positive and more than 550,000 of its 1 million orphans lost their parents through HIV.

On top of these stark and terrible statistics, Malawi faces other enormous problems. Since 2002, Malawi has suffered severe food shortages and famine on a number of occasions as a result of its failure to produce enough food following adverse weather conditions. It is against this brief and grim summary of what life is like in Malawi that we will continue the process of preparing the committee's report on the country.

Prior to commencing, I advise the witnesses that whereas members of the House enjoy absolute privilege in respect of utterances made in committee, witnesses do not enjoy absolute privilege. Accordingly, caution should be exercised, particularly with regard to references of a personal nature. I am sure everyone here will do this anyway but this is to ensure everyone is forewarned.

Presentations will be made by Mr. John O'Shea from GOAL, Ms Kate O'Donnell from Oxfam, Mr. John Mitchell from St. John of God Hospitaller Services, Ms Laura Collins and Ms Melanie Verwoerd from UNICEF and Mr. John Coyne from Wells for Zoë. I will begin by asking Mr. John O'Shea to make his presentation on behalf of GOAL.

Mr. John O’Shea

I thank the Chairman. I realise the committee had a meeting on Malawi several weeks ago and I am sure all of the substantial issues were covered. If the truth be known, I would rather be here to speak of more pressing needs in Africa such as the situations in Ethiopia, Darfur and Zimbabwe and perhaps the committee will invite me back at an early stage to discuss these.

The Chairman provided us with most of the statistics which matter with regard to Malawi. GOAL works in what is supposed to be the poorest part of Malawi, namely, Nsanje in the south. It has a population of 260,000 and little if any development has taken place there in recent years. It is hostile terrain and it is difficult for the Government to get people to work there. The Irish Government is not the only entity with decentralisation problems. We are the dogsbody down there and within reason we do whatever the women for the most part ask us to do. We are involved in health, education, orphans, AIDS, food, security and livelihoods.

We were involved in major food distribution as malnutrition rates in Malawi are soaring, particularly in our area. However the World Food Programme was forced to abort this due to lack of funds. This is a serious issue because with the help of organisations such as GOAL, the programme was reaching large numbers of people. The situation in Nsanje will deteriorate rapidly in the coming months unless it receives a massive injection of food.

Many of the problems experienced in Malawi are shared by most African countries. However, in Malawi vast tracts of land are used to grow items which cannot be eaten by the local population, mainly tea and tobacco which go straight to Japan. It means the Government receives plenty of money but, as all committee members know, very little of this ever percolates down to the people in desperate need.

Hundreds of thousands of people are always expecting somebody to come along and feed them. If this does not happen we will have a serious food problem. As the Chairman pointed out drought and rains recur on a regular basis in Malawi. Preparing for these disasters is another task which must be done. However, it is done in a poor way at present. In the coming months and years, the people of Malawi will continue to require major assistance from outside.

They are not helped by the fact that corruption is endemic. It was reasonable — if corruption can ever be deemed to be reasonable — some years ago but it worsened considerably at the turn of the decade and a number of countries, notably Denmark and Britain, as well as the EU, cut off funding because of the corruption. The President, who was in office for two terms, was arrested and is now trying to return as President for life. The current President has changed parties, which is not allowable under the constitution, but he has done so anyway. Governance, as is the case in many countries, is an enormous problem and the lives of the people are not top of the agenda.

The Irish Government decided to allocate €10 million for aid to the people of Malawi, although it did not specify that in the hand-out. I wonder if the money is for the people of Malawi or is aid. At a time when people are starving and in desperate need of food, I would say rank and file Irish people, particularly at this moment in our history, will find it very hard to comprehend why we are giving €2 million for a census and €1 million to help with elections which are notoriously corrupt on the African continent, as we all know. I urge this committee to ask the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Ministers responsible to revisit that decision. If that €10 million was given in one fell swoop to the World Food Programme to purchase food on the open market and feed the people, it would do more good than funding a census or an election.

This is one of the reasons we in GOAL are fundamentally opposed to government to government aid. Such aid is not spent on what we want to see happen in those countries, but on what their governments want to see happen. I do not believe anybody in the Irish Government wants to give €3 million in that way. I note that we are also giving €110,000 to reform the United Nations in Malawi. I would have thought the United Nations is a big boy and able to look after itself. If it needs reforming, it should reform itself or else do what we all want it to do, namely go out of business and let another organisation do the job properly. It is a little pathetic of the Irish Government, at a time when people are starving, to allocate €110,000 of taxpayer's money to the UN.

The Irish people do not know this, however, which is very sad. If they were really aware that we gave money in that way, they would not like it. It might be a sensible idea for this committee to suggest to the Government to do with Third World aid what we did with the Lisbon treaty and ask the people if they are happy to see their hundreds of millions of euro routed through some of the most corrupt and brutal regimes on the planet. It would be interesting to see what the Irish people think of that. The Government never got a mandate to use this money in the way it is using it. It uses the money exactly the way it wants, without reference to the Irish people. I wonder how the people would feel about that.

That said, for a relatively small agency working on the ground in Malawi, we are able to achieve quite a lot, without the interference of local government. We tend to get on very well with the people in the various institutions of government, such as they are, on the ground. It is very hard to get anybody to work in the southern part of the country. Malawi is in desperate need of aid and we will certainly stay there as long as it is safe to do so and provided our Government continues to help us. There is no doubt that it is the poorest of the poor who are benefiting from the support we give. In many respects, it is a success story in a small part of the country but I am very worried about the overall situation, as the famine begins to bite.

Chairman

We will have questions afterwards. We will hear the various contributions first. I call Ms Kate O'Donnell from Oxfam.

Oxfam Ireland has existed as an independent organisation since 1998 and is one of 13 independent affiliates of Oxfam International. Our partnership with Irish Aid continues to be important for Oxfam Ireland. Over the years, we have received humanitarian funds, HIV and AIDS programme funds and long-term development funding through the block grant and the civil society development fund. Along with our own fund-raising, this has enabled us to expand our overseas programme. We are now moving towards a multi-annual programme scheme relationship with Irish Aid which will enable us to further develop our programme work.

Oxfam has been working in Malawi since the 1990s and since 2002, Oxfam Ireland has been part of the joint Oxfam programme there. This programme focuses on improving and sustaining the livelihood of poor and vulnerable people in selected districts in southern Malawi in the context of growing vulnerability from chronic food insecurity and the continued impact of HIV and AIDS. Given Oxfam's commitment to working in Malawi, we very much welcome the fact that Malawi has recently been accorded priority country status by Irish Aid and will now receive increased support from the Irish Government, which will benefit the people of the country. We are also delighted that the Irish Embassy has been officially opened in Malawi.

As the committee has already received much of the background and baseline data on Malawi in the previous sitting and today, I wish to raise general issues before elaborating on the Oxfam programme work in that country. In Malawi, the cancellation of external debt has resulted in an interest saving of $115 million and there has been a consequent increase in the country's national health budget. The extra resources in the national health budget are still not sufficient to meet all of demands on the services but a trend of increasing the health budget has been set. This is progressive and demonstrates how external debt cancellation can benefit the people in a country.

Climate change is now posing huge problems globally and research indicates that it is the poorest of the poor who are most vulnerable to its impact. Malawi is already feeling the effects of climate change, as rainfall patterns, amounts, timing and duration become more variable. Adaptation to climate change in Malawi and elsewhere will require increased attention and funding in the future.

Oxfam Ireland adopts an integrated approach to development and is active at many different levels. In Malawi, our approach means that we make explicit links between our humanitarian and development work. We support work at community, national and international level. The programme work that we support provides the basis for much of the advocacy work that is undertaken by our partners on vital social and economic issues. Co-ordination with Oxfam affiliates and other agencies is an important consideration for us to enable learning to take place, to avoid duplication of effort and to ensure value for money.

The joint Oxfam programme in Malawi consists of the co-ordinated and combined support of five affiliates of Oxfam International, including Oxfam Ireland. As well as implementing development programmes, we have supported the development of civil society in Malawi over the past ten years. Since last year, the Malawi Oxfam programme is implemented entirely by local organisations and partnerships. This major move ensures that the joint Oxfam programme in Malawi really addresses what people in Malawi identify as priorities. The programme focus is on the districts of Blantyre, Balaka, Phalombe, Thyolo, Mulanje and Chiradzulu in southern Malawi for field level operations, while supporting national level partners on advocacy issues. The joint Oxfam programme in Malawi has the following five key programme areas: livelihoods promotion and protection; HIV/AIDS and access to basic social services; emergency preparedness and safety nets; governance; and gender equality.

Under the heading of livelihoods promotion and protection, agriculture is the main livelihood for people in Malawi and employs the highest percentage of the population. HIV/AIDS continues to reduce the availability of family labour for agriculture and additional challenges in recent years include adverse weather conditions due to climate change, land degradation, unfavourable market forces and low use of agricultural inputs. The Oxfam programme has identified two key areas of work to tackle these issues. The first is to increase agricultural production. Farmers are diversifying production to reduce dependence on maize and are growing cassava, sweet potatoes, legumes and cereals such as sorghum and millet. Through schemes for seed multiplication, farmers are accessing seeds for crops that are drought tolerant, high yielding and early maturing. Small scale irrigation schemes are enabling farmers to grow winter crops, thereby giving them two harvests from their land in a year. Soil and water conservation techniques, such as contour ridges, composting and agro-forestry, are being promoted to tackle soil degradation.

The availability of subsidised agricultural inputs is a big factor in increasing crop production. For many years in Malawi, the World Bank and other donors have pushed for greater market liberalisation but this strategy failed and subsistence farmers ended up with the worst of both worlds. The Government no longer helped and the private sector failed to develop. Over the past two years, however, the Malawian Government has introduced a subsidy on fertiliser, distributing 3 million coupons to enable farmers to buy fertiliser for a quarter of the market value. The impact of this subsidy has been dramatic and is estimated to account for a 20% larger harvest than would have been the case without the subsidy. Oxfam supports the Civil Society on Agriculture Network, CISANET, in its advocacy work on these issues. The World Bank has now recognised the contribution this input subsidy has made to agricultural production in Malawi. In future, the Malawian Government needs to be supported in rejecting policies that are not in its people's interests.

Livestock production, including goats, rabbits, poultry and cows, has been promoted to build the asset base for poor and vulnerable households and new work will start this year on establishing integrated fish farming and crop production. The water stored in fish ponds will be used to extend crop production during the dry season, thereby increasing total production.

The second element of livelihoods promotion and protection is increasing access to markets. The programme supports the formation of farmers' groups at community level to build farmers' capacity for adding value to produce and making market links. Oxfam's civil society partners in Malawi have analysed proposals by the European Union for economic partnership agreements and see them as being detrimental to small holder farmers. These organisations have engaged in a campaign to say "no to economic partnership agreements" as currently proposed by the European Union and are engaged in alliance building around this issue in the country and regionally in southern Africa.

The second area of our work is HIV/AIDS and access to basic social services. Although the rural areas have lower prevalence of HIV/AIDS, they are shouldering the highest illness and social burdens. Country-wide there is only one doctor and 26 nurses per 100,000 people and this is exacerbated by high staff mortality among health professionals.

Access to anti-retrovirals, ARVs, is a key issue in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Malawi has made substantial progress in providing free anti-retroviral drugs to its citizens. In 2004, 6,000 people had access to ARVs but by September 2006, 70,000 people out of a total population in need of 170,000 were accessing ARVs and by October 2007 the numbers accessing ARVs had risen to 115,000. However, this still only represents 68% of those in need. A number of obstacles remain in the way of equitable access to essential medicines in Malawi. Local civil society partner organisations have galvanised to campaign around this because they see it as a winnable issue that will lead to great changes in peoples lives. The campaign aims to ensure that the Government's health budget continues to increase and that it will allocate a minimum of 15% of the national budget to health, in line with the Abuja Declaration. It also focuses on developing an improved drug management system and carrying out budget and resource tracking to increase accountability and improve accessibility of essential drugs in rural areas.

In the southern districts of Blantyre, Balaka, Thyolo, Phalombe, Chiradzulu and Mulanje, the Oxfam programme supports initiatives for HIV/AIDS prevention. HIV/AIDS services are also supported, including HIV counselling and testing, peer education and the establishment of youth friendly health services, community home based care and community based child care centres. Home based care volunteers have been trained and provided with kits to enable them to look after people in their own communities. Efforts are now being made to link these home based care services to Government supported work at district level, so that the Government takes more responsibility for community home based care.

Improved access to education for orphans and vulnerable children is another important element of the programme. Although there is free primary education in Malawi, pupils are required to pay other user charges, which has made it impossible for some children to attend school. The programme partners are lobbying the Government to remove these charges, as well as the requirement for uniforms, so that orphans and vulnerable children can attend primary school. At second-level, school fees continue to apply and the Government is being asked to increase the number of bursaries for the most vulnerable children to enable them to attend school. At community level, the programme is supporting vocational training and provides starter packs of tools to enable youths to set up their own small businesses.

In regard to emergency preparedness and safety nets, climate change is impacting on agriculture, particularly in respect of poor people across the region, and Malawi has experienced a number of food crises in recent years. Lessons learned from the 2002-03 food crisis and the growing impact of HIV-AIDS have resulted in a shift in the Oxfam programme, with a greater focus on understanding and responding to vulnerability. When the 2005-06 food crisis hit Malawi, the programme was able to use the lessons it had learned to improve the humanitarian response both in terms of targeting the most vulnerable and the type of response. The current programme operates within a context of chronic food insecurity and vulnerability, so it is strengthening its capacity to assess and respond to crisis.

The Oxfam programme again adopts a twin track approach to the issues of emergency preparedness and safety nets. On the one hand, the programme partners are working directly with communities to strengthen their resilience and improve the capacity to respond to emergencies, while on the other, the programme works with organisations advocating the further development of the Government of Malawi's social protection policy.

Regular parliamentary and presidential elections have been held in Malawi, and the next national elections are due to be held in May 2009. However, local government elections have not been held and decentralisation plans have dragged on for years without much progress. In Malawi, decentralisation is seen as a key factor in increasing the efficiency and responsiveness of the local governance structures. The programme works with partners to increase their capacity to influence full implementation of the decentralisation policy and governance structures at the lowest local level so that the poor and marginalised can participate in governance. Partners also advocate for improved responsiveness of governance structures to citizens. The Malawi Economic Justice Network, the Malawi Health Network and the Civil Society Agriculture Network carried out budget analyses to provide people with information that can be used at local level to demand accountability.

The capacity of partners to carry out budget tracking and monitoring is being developed. This has been done primarily within the health sector, where local organisations are now able to track health expenditure at different levels to see where the budget is being spent. The programme also supported radio listening clubs where community voices are heard and government services have responded in some areas of service provision.

The fifth area of our work, gender equality, cuts across all our programmes but also has a specific focus. Gender disparity remains a development challenge in Malawi, where women are still disadvantaged. These gender inequalities are restricting economic growth, exacerbating poverty and undermining democracy by denying women and girls the full enjoyment of their human rights. The policy environment for gender equality in Malawi is progressive but the challenge remains for these policies to be implemented to make meaningful change in the lives of women.

The Oxfam programme gender equality focus is on reducing gender-based violence, improving women's participation in decision making and reducing women's and girls' vulnerability to HIV and AIDS.

Partners, such as the NGO Gender Network, have monitored the implementation of the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act 2006. Media campaigns have been supported to popularise this new law. At community level there is awareness raising, and work is ongoing with police victim support units. Partners continue to promote the introduction of legislation to protect widows from land grabbing. The Deceased Estates Bill has been in the pipeline for a long time and is still meeting with resistance, and women are suffering as a result.

According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development the national representation of women is only 14%. The programme works at community level to support women in leadership in all activities. In Malawi there is a national programme on women's participation in decision making, which will be very active during the coming year in the lead up to the May 2009 elections. Support will be given across parties to support aspiring women candidates to ensure that more women are able to stand for election, and to try to increase the percentage of women in parliament.

This presentation has touched on a wide range of issues that have been identified as important by people in Malawi. The issues are complex, the environment is dynamic and our responses need to continue to evolve. With debt cancellation and increased aid to Malawi more resources can be devoted to addressing the challenges facing that country. Co-ordination and sharing of information are important, and co-ordination is now taking place between Irish agencies on the ground in Malawi. We in Oxfam Ireland look forward to continuing working with the people of Malawi, Irish Aid and other agencies in supporting continued development in Malawi.

Mr. John Coyne

Since my organisation's name begins with a "W" I thought I would be last.

Chairman

I would never do that to Mr. Coyne. I am a "W" too.

Mr. John Coyne

We look like new kids on the block and a very small cog in this amazing wheel. I will tell the committee a bit about us and what we do. Wells for Zoe has been registered as an NGO in Malawi since May 2008. We have been working under the radar in northern Malawi since June 2006. We do not consider ourselves a charity or in the aid business. We believe in a hand up without hand outs and that inspiration is much more valuable than charity. Our focus is on the provision of clean drinking water, using hand-dug wells and a low-cost, low-tech, sustainable, PVC hand pump. It is important to say that in northern Malawi we can provide clean water for life for a person for €1. We work in rural areas within approximately 50 km of Mzuzu. We are trying a trickle-up approach. All our planning and training happens on the spot, in the fields. Our office is still mobile; Skype and Google Earth are excellent. The founders pay all expenses, so there are no donor issues on administration costs. Our programmes include water storage, irrigation, a seed bank, fruit tree propagation, a 0% interest micro-credit scheme, a compost-making and green manure system, chicken rearing, a few fish tanks, school building which is the latest programme, pump manufacture — due to happen in August, tree planting and a little marketing. We work in approximately 40 villages and have 26 employees, half of whom are full-time, none white, most illiterate and 70% women.

Having listened to the two previous speakers, northern Malawi is quite a different place, so it is important to introduce it. Northern Malawi is approximately 30% of the area of the country, with approximately 12% of the population. A typical village can have probably ten related families living in thatched mud huts, scraping by on what might be called subsistence agriculture. The staple diet is nsima, a maize flour. It is the most horrible tasting stuff I ever ate. They also grow beans, pumpkins, cassava, tomatoes and potatoes in small quantities. Cassava does not grow that well in that it takes a long time for it to develop because our area around Mzuzu is approximately 1,300 m above sea level, so it is cooler. There is never enough food and there is a hungry season every year. Tobacco is the cash crop, with high fertilizer and labour requirements. If the price is high, they use less land for maize, which is normal enough. There is little generational, agricultural knowledge about food other than maize, which is grown, once a year, in the rainy season. Such is the depletion of the land that maize will fail without chemical fertilizer. I have a little calculation in my presentation and if somebody wants to talk about it later, I am happy to do so. There is one rainy season but they do not store water. Seed varieties are few and expensive. They do not save seeds because the seeds are hybrids. There are few cattle. Donkeys or horses are unknown. Almost all cultivation is done by women, by hand. Wives are paid for, so they are expected to collect all water and firewood, have up to ten babies, and in between are responsible for all the food, from seed to plate. Corruption is an issue.

I will describe the issues and solutions we have identified. The main issue we have taken on is water. Water is very often a smelly, disease-infested liquid. Women walk miles for it and girls stay out of school to collect it every day. The pumps we find are broken and most of them are incapable of village level maintenance. There are dropping water tables. Our solution has been with the help of an amazing man from Cranfield University, Professor Richard Carter, a veteran of water in Africa and adviser to Mr. Bill Gates. He came and looked at it and we decided this Canzee pump, designed and made in the north of England originally, is the solution. One just screws it in. The people dig the well and build the bricks. When we make it out there in August the pump will cost approximately €35 plus €65 for the cement we give them, a total of €100. We have up to 400 people using wells like this.

There is only one rainy season and they do not store water. It just trickles away. The solution is that they build simple earthen dams, at no cost, except the labour. These can store enough water for the period from June to November, when the rains come again. We use earthen irrigation channels, which are called levadas in some places, and let the water run. There is no cost. In the north they tend not to use the wet, soggy land, called dambo, they have there. We are using these dambos and they can get two extra crops per year along with their maize.

Vegetable seeds are scarce and expensive. Last year in November we realised seeds were a problem so we bought six acres of land and established a seed saving and research programme using open pollinated plants. The Irish Seed Savers Association in Scariff is one of our sources and we got seeds from as far away as Santiago. We save seeds, give them to farmers and teach them to do the same. We are achieving some amount of biodiversity.

Fertilizer is a serious issue with the poor people. The land we work with is seriously depleted after years of artificial chemicals and no input or organic matter has left it fairly useless without expensive fertilizer. Even when subsidised it is very expensive to the people we deal with and corruption is a major issue. If one begins in the south in the early period of the year and moves to the middle, by the time one reaches the north, most of the coupons are gone. It is a simple fact of life. We started by using a system whereby we do not work with people if they do not compost. Our latest version of this has been going for green manure using six or seven varieties of leguminous plant. With the compost we can make from the material from one growth season, particularly the velvet bean seed, we get approximately the equivalent of a pound of cow manure per hectare, which is easily suitable for at least doubling the output of maize.

There are a few other points in my presentation but my time is constrained to ten minutes. We have found two trees that grow quite well in northern Malawi, Moringa and Jatropha, and we are researching them. We feel confident that with Mzuzu University we will be able to produce bio-fuel on the most marginal of soils in the north. We find that knowledge of the simplest agricultural and irrigation techniques are lacking in rural communities.

In August we will start building a residential, agricultural and technical college. These are loose terms but the residential area will be one step above where they live. The college will be for illiterate women, because that is what most of them are, and a few good men because they are there also. All of the people there will be Malawians and they will be lecturing on what they have learned in the past two years. This is a simple business of holding hands and we have found it effective.

Deforestation is a major problem because, contrary to what the government thinks, everyone makes charcoal. I hate to see women and children walk for miles carrying branches on their heads. Seeds for forestry, acacia and so on, are very cheap. We buy seeds, give them to them, help them with the seedlings and the planting of trees and this is all working very well. This is small-scale but it is useful at its level.

One may look at the website to see a school we tackled this year and it must be seen to be believed. Schools may lack walls, a roof, furniture and copybooks — they always lack furniture and copybooks. For our last venture we brought out a group of ten students from the Dublin Institute of Technology and they saw the school in question. The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would not allow one put one's dog or cattle in such a place. We inspired a community to build a three-classroom school in two weeks. The DIT students contributed €2,700 and the school is being used by 300 children. The scale of finance involved is so low that if we mentioned this scheme to the Minister for Education and Science he would want us to start building schools here. These simple structures are not up to our standards but they are significantly better than what they had.

My wife is involved in education and this year we searched for 500 books for special education. She spent 25 years working in special education and has retired. She is now involved in a programme of on-the-job training for teachers who have no training. There is a great teacher training college but, amazingly, most teachers work for NGOs rather than in a school. They are paid well so they move. It is similar to the fact that there are more doctors in Manchester than Malawi and it is a sad affair.

We believe visitors will be great for our area. Rural people have no sense of how to rescue their own lives and the problem is they do not know how to get over things. They have developed a kind of learned dependency and may wait for the government to intervene but it does not. They may wait for an aid worker to intervene and may lie awake paralysed by what they cannot do. We do not offer money, we give a hand up and occasionally seeds. This is all part of a long-term micro credit scheme. No interest applies but whole communities are responsible to pay back loans.

The ability to inspire people is a powerful weapon; this applies to the world's biggest companies and it applies to Malawi. We aim to get people on the road to self-sufficiency — we do not wish to make beggars of them. We tell them not to wait for coupons and help from the Government. We tell them to get on with their programmes which, for people involved in agriculture, revolve around fertiliser. We believe that green manure has great potential. The legumes we are getting at the moment are fairly drought resistant and produce a great deal of nitrogen in soil. We find that linkages are amazing in Malawi.

In 2005 I went to Malawi with a group of students and teachers from Self Help Development and when I got back I spent six months on the Internet and phone talking to agencies involved in water in Africa, particularly Mzuzu. Nobody told me anything and that is a sad situation. It was as though the Official Secrets Act applied to these people because they could not tell anyone anything. I received a number of responses and e-mails and three were from organisations that suggested I should pass on the money to them because they are the professionals. All the time I get the response, "What would you know about Africa?". I am trying to make it my business to know about an area that is within 50 km of Mzuzu. What we have achieved so far, in terms of the people we are working with, is all I intended to do when this started. Small people should not be ruled out and I am very appreciative of the invitation to this committee meeting because we are out of our depth in terms of scale. There is a place for our organisation. A person in RTE asked what we are doing, said people who know what they are doing have been in the region for years and suggested we should leave this work to them. That is the first comment we tend to get.

In terms of what I am doing in response to all of this, I get around 40 e-mails per week from people asking about the area, the weather there, the altitude and Mzuzu. We work with around 20 organisations and a new one was added this morning. Mr. John Mitchell will talk about this later. We started with the St. John of God organisation because it was there. When we went Brother Aidan Clohessy was there and he gave us assistance, vehicles, accommodation and advice. That remained the case up to and including this summer but we will now build some accommodation ourselves.

We work with an amazing Tipperary man called Fr. John Ryan who has been there for 29 years. We found him not by being in Mzuzu, because nobody told us about him, though he is a professor in the college, but through a woman named Johanna Fitzpatrick, who has a family operation called Small Change that provides assistance and support there. The Small Change organisation is from Cork and we will not hold that against Ms Fitzpatrick. Just to put more pressure on me today she decided to fly up from Cork this morning to see what is going on and she is in the Visitors Gallery.

We also work with a Presbyterian group called Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, CCAP. It uses a dinosaur-like pump that it keeps putting in because it gets funding from the United States. That pump fails most of the time and 60% of that group's pumps fail on any given day. We got a modification for it — the well part is now ours — so Brother Aidan Clohessy is delighted because he says we are converting some of the Presbyterian pumps to Catholicism. We will probably sell them 500 pumps this year, when we manufacture them, at, hopefully, more than the €35 it costs us to make them. It all goes back into the kitty anyway.

This morning I got an e-mail confirming that a group called Ripple Africa will be delighted to have us on board as partners. It involves a couple from England who have planted 1.5 million trees by the lake in Malawi in the past couple of years. They have the same general philosophy as us about what should be done.

Northern Malawi needs a very green revolution. Any solution to problems in Northern Malawi must be conceived, designed, structured and implemented by the rural poor. They may be illiterate but they are not stupid. They must be allowed to build on what they have. I am new on the block and may be missing things. When I go to a village in Northern Malawi it is evident that 40 years of donor aid has had no impact. I therefore suggest to the committee that donors should look at other ways of spending their money. Can big organisations do this? Many Irish organisations went into Africa on the basis of disaster relief and may not be as focused as small organisations. The great thing about Irish Aid is that it does not have an issue. We are not tied to anything and there is a wonderful team in the embassy. They are great people. What are we aiming for? My total focus is on poor people — the poorest of the poor. I have no interest in the Government of Malawi. We went there under the radar because I was advised not to get involved with those people as they would ask too many questions. They would ask what the pump was and what it would do. Instead, I was advised to show them afterwards, when it was working.

We need to consider chemical-based agricultural inputs. It is true that they do the job and they are quick. They will do a one-year job. However, we should have a long-term strategy. We should get our heads together in Ireland and consider Central America and South America. In Malawi only one crop is grown, which is maize, and there is a fallow season in which legumes can be grown. Poor farmers should be supported to achieve self-sufficiency at farm level through ecologically sound farming methods and perhaps livestock also, rather than being driven by market forces. Why do poor people who are starving need a market force to drive them? They just need to be fed at the start. Maybe they will become producers, but we should start by considering how to feed them.

Something that has long been neglected in Africa is indigenous crops. There are some wonderful ones. If there is a surplus they should be sold locally, not sent off to Japan, as Mr. O'Shea said. Why do we want to rule out so many things and send produce abroad? We are like the colonials. We are colonising Africa again. We think of it as trickle-up. We have a few needs. If we give Irish donors' or taxpayers' money to the people of Malawi, as I think we have — Mr. O'Shea asked this question also — we should insist on getting the best value for their money.

Mr. John Mitchell

I thank the committee for inviting the St. John of God order to explain what we do in Malawi and explain what the committee can do for us. The St. John of God order has been around for 500 years. We work in 50 countries around the world, mostly running general hospitals. This includes 11 countries in Africa. The service in Malawi was set up in 1995 by Irish brothers, including Brother Aidan Clohessy, to whom Mr. Coyne referred, and is still part of the Irish province. I describe it as Ireland's first and only province in Africa. We operate in northern Malawi which, as Mr. Coyne explained, is the equivalent of Connacht in Malawi, and we provide a specific and comprehensive mental health service.

We provide care and promote mental health in Mzuzu and the whole northern region. We provide aftercare, follow-up services, counselling services and support services in primary and secondary schools. We even go into the prisons and provide counselling and support to both prisoners and staff. We have outreach programmes from our centre in Mzuzu providing promotion and care in 11 outreach areas, some of them far from the centre. We have community-based rehabilitation clinics in a number of townships, looking after not only people with mental health issues but also those with learning disabilities, and we deal with a lot of epilepsy, which seems to be very prevalent in the area. We have a small psychiatric hospital with 26 beds — a short-stay residential treatment centre which we call a house of hospitality, which is probably a better title than "mental hospital" or some of the other words we use here. It is the only psychiatric hospital in the northern region and is a referral centre for a population of 1.5 million. We have a programme for preparing families for the discharge of patients and home visits after people leave the service.

The service is part of the Irish province, as I said, and is funded totally by money raised in Ireland. Tonight the people who work for me will be going around the country knocking on doors looking for standing orders to fund the service in Malawi. Somewhere between 15% and 20% of the money we raise in Ireland is used to provide the service in Malawi. That is the basic service we provide. I have been in the organisation for ten years and the brothers explained to me that they do not get involved in politics as their role in life is to pick up the pieces. My view is that there should not be pieces if at all possible and that we should try to change things in a more basic way. During the 2002 famine we were asked to raise €0.25 million to help the people of Malawi and we actually raised more than that. In fact, the staff of the organisation gave €140,000, which was quite impressive.

We set up a programme called Umsuma, which means "wholeness" in the local language. It is a food security programme. We provide loans to people. There is a range of people including staff, patients and the local poor, which represent almost all of the local people. Loans are provided to buy seeds and fertiliser and we also pay for agricultural expertise, which has made a significant difference. The loans have been paid at about 85%, so there has been almost total repayment. Six years later, these people, by and large, have not been hungry. We are refining the programme as we go along. I would love to see a transition from a subsistence farming programme to co-operative working and perhaps storage of produce so that these people could graduate to commercial farming. It is much easier to raise money for snotty noses and fat bellies than money to help people to become self-sufficient, but we will keep plugging away. We have also, incidentally, spread the programme to Sierra Leone, where 700 families are involved in addition to the 500 in Malawi, and we will shortly spread the programme to Ghana. Thus, we will have 1,400 families, which could be up to 14,000 people, who will hopefully not be facing hunger again in the foreseeable future.

Among the people who are benefiting from this programme are the clients, to use that awful word, of our centres. These are people who ten years ago would have been sent out to the bush because they would be regarded as having been infected with evil spirits, or treated with a collection of bones — or possibly the more modern local healers would have used Coke bottles. However, these people now own food and, it is to be hoped, will not be hungry again. They may also have a little bit of self-respect.

We work closely with Mr. Coyne. He said he was out of his depth but that is absolutely untrue. People like Mr. Coyne are the reason people use the word "inspiration". He is very inspiring and it is a great honour to work with people such as him. We both found it ironic that there was a lack of water next to one of the biggest lakes in Africa. It reminded me of an old H. G. Wells story in which savages froze to death on ledges of coal. There must be some way of making sure there is never a shortage of water in northern Malawi.

We also have a programme for street children. The street children are AIDS orphans in a strange way. What happens in many cases is that if one partner in a relationship dies there is a second relationship, and it seems no African man who is not particularly good at raising his own children wants to raise somebody else's children, so the children of the first relationship are put out on the street. Many of the children in northern Malawi would have come from as far away as Blantyre or Zomba, and they stay in the bus station. Recently there was a period in which there were no children in the bus station because they had all been repatriated, educated or otherwise treated properly. One of the great successes, from the point of view of sport, is that one of them recently made the national table tennis team. Little things like that can be very inspiring.

I shall summarise what we do and what we hope to do. Our work is in mental health care which costs €1 million per annum, in round figures. That money is raised from the people of Ireland. If we could get some help with that we could use some of the funds for our work in Ireland and also supplement what we do in other parts of Africa. We are not an agency and there is no middleman. Any money we raise goes from brother to brother and I am 99.9% sure that a brother will not steal. I would not trust a Malawian Minister with any of our money. None of it goes through a third party and it will certainly not go through the Malawian Government.

Our biggest project at the moment is the construction of a college of health science. We believe, and it is broadly accepted, we have the best mental health service in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa. We have the only B.Sc course in counselling and mental health science and we are building a college that will cost €2.4 million and will be linked to the university. Using the old Davis dictum, "Educate that you may be free", I believe that if local people can be educated to look after each other then the need for foreigners such as ourselves to be involved will not be there.

In the Dark Ages we lit up Europe with Irish colleges. It would be a nice gesture if the Government were to help us light up Africa by offering funding for a college of health science. We bought the land, we have the staff and the students and we will get the money somewhere else, if not here.

We constantly try to improve the food security programme. One of our most recent innovations is the provision of social housing by taking a few people — the number is increasing — out of the awful hovels in which they live and giving them decent little houses. We are also, with the help of Mr. John Coyne and his kind of people, trying to move people away from certain aspects of cultural colonialism. Maize is a example of cultural imperialism. Artificial fertiliser is another. I grew up with the smell of chicken shit and cow dung and there is a fair amount of smell in Africa. There must be some substitute for this fertiliser which sells at artificially inflated prices and is a gateway for corruption.

We will continue with the street kids programme. We set up a beautiful new school and members can see the photographs I have circulated. Our building is very impressive and is spotless. It is one of the few places in Africa not covered in the red dust of the continent because we have people employed to brush the dust away constantly. As testament to how impressive the building is, most of the country's politicians have been photographed outside it from time to time. These representatives, both national and local, try to give the impression that they helped fund the school. Our most recent building is a child development centre where children with intellectual disabilities are taught. We recently began a pilot programme on early intervention called Hortage which will train people to train others, each one helping the other.

That is largely what we do. We have a comprehensive mental health and intellectual disability service and have moved into the area of food security because the rationale of the Brothers was that a person who is neither hungry nor under stress is less likely to be a patient. When Mr. John Coyne came to Africa with me the first time he said that it was amazing to have achieved all this in 12 years. If we could get €500,000 a year for the next five years we could keep up this amazing work and help very poor people to help themselves.

Chairman

I thank Mr. Mitchell for his presentation. Our final speakers are Ms Melanie Verwoerd and Ms Laura Collins of UNICEF. Ms Verwoerd was appointed as UNICEF Ireland's executive director in April 2007. Before that she was a Member of the South African Parliament for the ANC. Dare I say when that was? I shall just say that she was the youngest woman ever elected. She was re-elected in 1999. In Ireland we know her very well because she was appointed as South Africa's ambassador to Ireland and did a great deal to help her country while serving in that capacity.

Ms Melanie Verwoerd

It is always very nice to be back again in a parliamentary environment. I was sitting here getting a little homesick. I thank the committee for the opportunity to present on behalf of UNICEF. I shall give a short introduction and my colleague, Ms Collins, will take over and speak specifically on Malawi from where she has recently returned. I believe I sound more Irish than she does but I promise that she is actually Irish and originally went over as part of the Irish UNV internship programme, then stayed on and worked for UNICEF. She is fresh off the ground in Malawi and will be able to answer questions on what we are doing there.

Chairman

That saved me because I had intended to say all that about Ms Collins.

Ms Melanie Verwoerd

On a slightly serious note that may not perhaps be appropriate, I must say that, as an African, I feel compelled to say that I know many African men who make great fathers. We would have seen a far bigger AIDS crisis if it had not been for the extraordinary generosity of fathers and mothers who take in other people's children.

I have some short pointers on UNICEF. As all members will know, we are an organisation that has been working for 60 years helping women and children, the most vulnerable in the developing world. We work in more than 150 countries and we like to talk about ourselves as a development or humanitarian organisation rather than as an aid organisation. We do emergency response work and do it very effectively. Statistics show that there are very few places in the world we cannot get to in about an hour in response to an emergency, as was seen recently in Myanmar. The moment the crisis hit we were on the ground and had staff and excellent resources inside the country. We were able to start working immediately and did not face the problems that other aid organisations experienced so tragically trying to get into the country.

The majority of our work, as will be evident in the Malawi presentation, is on more long-term sustainable solutions, for us to find the root causes of problems and then to work with local partners and, where appropriate, with governments to make sure that we can achieve long-term sustainability. I always say that ultimately we should try to put ourselves out of a job so that it is not necessary for other agencies or charities to come in and do the work on behalf of the developing world, particularly in Africa.

Given our size and the enormous expertise that our fieldworkers have — 86% of UNICEF staff work directly in the field — we have a phenomenal skills base and can work creatively and innovatively to deal with problems. As head of UNICEF Ireland, I can vouch that if an organisation such as UNICEF decides to do something we can do it in the millions or tens of millions. For example, last year alone we had 81 million vaccinations for measles world wide. That is the benefit of a bigger organisation. It also means that we can stay when other organisations often find it hard to sustain their operations. I like to say that if UNICEF leaves it is usually time to put out the lights in that country, even in a country such as Rwanda where we lost more than 21 staff during the genocide. The office there closed for just over a week. We do not leave unless the situation becomes completely impossible and we literally lose our staff.

One common misunderstanding about UNICEF concerns funding from the UN. We do not get any such funding and rely entirely on voluntary funding from the public and from bilateral funding from governments, such as Irish Aid. We received €25 million last year from Irish Aid, an increase of 160%, and the Irish public donated just under €5 million directly to UNICEF Ireland.

UNICEF often gets caught up in what I regard as the slightly populist UN-bashing that has become very fashionable lately. On this committee some time ago it was said that taxpayers' money was being sunk into anonymous UN funds which have no record of any efficiency. I can clarify that it was not Mr. O'Shea at that stage. It is important for us to say this is not the case in UNICEF; our administrative costs are low. I will provide some statistics. If we did not have funding from Ireland, 12 million children would not have received educational supplies. Some 2.4 billion doses of polio vaccines would not have been received. There has been 81 million children vaccinated against measles. Some €43 million worth of water and sanitation supplies would not have reached children, the most vulnerable of all. When referring to bodies linked to the UN it is important to mention the excellent and efficient work being done for the most vulnerable people. My colleague, Ms Laura Collins, will talk specifically about the work we do in Malawi.

Ms Laura Collins

More than half of the 13.2 million people in Malawi are under 18 years of age. The level of poverty there is difficult to believe. Consider the statistic that 52% of people in Malawi live on less than 50 cent per day. This poverty disproportionately affects women and children. As Ms Verwoerd outlined, our mandate in UNICEF is to address the needs of women and children.

I will outline briefly the context and content of the work UNICEF does in Malawi to address some major issues. Many statistics have already been mentioned today. There are many issues at a broad level and at geographically specific levels. UNICEF works within the context of the Paris declaration to support improved effectiveness of aid alignment, harmonisation and Government ownership, which is important. The strategy and framework for development in the country is led by the Malawi Government. This is called the Malawi growth and development strategy and has five strands. These are sustainable economic growth, social protection, social development, infrastructure and improved governance. These are the five issues that the people of Malawi and its Government have endorsed for all development partners. The NGOs and UN agencies have signed up to this strategy.

The United Nations — I am sure the committee is aware of the UN reform process — is moving towards one UN, which is a system of all UN agencies working together. Although Malawi is not one of the eight pilot reform countries, it has taken unprecedented measures to pull together the work of the UN to make aid more effective and to make the work of UN agencies and all of their partners more coherent. To this end the UN in Malawi wrote, developed and finalised last year a development assistance framework for the next four years in parallel with the Malawi growth and development strategy. This too has five strands, namely, economic growth, social protection, social development, a strand dealing with HIV-AIDS and a fifth on governance, human rights and gender. These five strands overlap significantly and there is a complexity, so whichever strand the work is within overlaps and impacts upon other areas.

I will discuss the high level of UNICEF work. We work in five specific units or sections — this number keeps coming up — namely, basic educational needs development, health and nutrition, water sanitation and hygiene, social policy, and orphans, vulnerable children and child protection. These address all of the major issues facing children in Malawi. In basic education, Malawi has 147% net enrolment for boys and girls according to the UN millennium development goal for enrolment in schools This has clearly surpassed the millennium development goal of 100%, but what does that say about statistics? The census was mentioned earlier. The importance of statistics, data, research and knowledge based on sound evidence for all of our programming is imperative. Beyond that enrolment statistic there are the educational achievement and completion levels. Some 26% of boys and 16% of girls finish eight years of primary school to the levels that have already been described. These are the issues we are trying to address.

UNICEF uses the child-friendly school approach which is a five-pronged approach addressing academic effectiveness, gender sensitivity, health and safety promotion in schools, providing water into schools and integrating gender and human rights across schools. There are others including methods of teacher training and providing furniture to schools but there are too many to mention here. UNICEF, working with the education ministry, has targeted the five strands at 20% of the schools across the country. It is intended to scale up this work over the next four years through the country program.

UNICEF Malawi's largest section deals with health. There are four major areas of work including child health, reproductive health and HIV-AIDS, nutrition and policy and sector reform, which is important. Many statistics have been highlighted about the HIV rates. Some 46% of children are stunted and 21% are underweight. UNICEF has contributed to achieving a drop in the mortality rates for children under five years of age. In 2000 it was 189 per 1,000 births and by 2006 this figure had dropped to 122 per 1,000. This was achieved through strategies such as an integrated management of childhood illness whereby such types of intervention as immunisation and vitamin A and de-worming tablets were provided throughout the country.

A programme called the acceleration of child survival and development is using this integrated approach with Government partners, NGOs and other UN agencies to specifically address the needs of the very young. The work on the mortality rate for those under five years of age is a reflection of that. We focus on the prevention of mother to child transmission and paediatric AIDS care. We address chronic and acute malnutrition and we support the Government in strengthening emergency and preparedness response throughout the country no matter what the issue.

In the water, sanitation and hygiene units we focus on integrated water and hygiene education and school sanitation. Some 20% of schools have hand washing facilities. One third of water points across the country do not work. We are also working for capacity strengthening and sector reform. We support the Government at national, district and community levels to develop its own sanitation programmes and strategies that feed into each other and which are community based and participatory. In doing this we aim to reach 2.8 million children in schools throughout the country over the next three years.

The orphans and vulnerable children unit focuses on the most vulnerable. These are the 1 million orphans specifically exposed to neglect, child abuse, exploitation, child trafficking and child labour. Some 29% of those between the ages of five and 14 years in Malawi are subjected to some form of child labour. There is no birth registration. We support the development of childhood based care centres, justice programmes and early childhood development. We plan to scale up all of these over the next three years.

The social policy, advocacy and communications unit works to support the Government and other agencies in developing social policy such as passing laws on birth registration, child labour, child trafficking, supporting and strengthening the response to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which underpins all UNICEF work. One of the major areas that has been piloted in the past year is the social cash transfer scheme, which addresses and targets the ultra-poor, namely, those who earn less than 50 cent per day. So far this pilot has reached 1,000 families and has been scaled up this year to three districts of Malawi. The aim is to further scale this up. Another area in which the social policy team works is called MASEDA, a social and economic database of information. This provides Government knowledge about exactly what is happening in the country.

There is a substantial range of work that UNICEF Malawi conducts at national level, specific regional level and at community level. The work in each of these areas is participatory. As Ms Verwoerd said earlier we are looking towards sustainable and effective use of aid and development and for all aid to be harmonised and aligned with Government priorities. We are working with all partners, including the UN, NGOs, Malawian and international bodies to ensure these partnerships remain strong, effective and continue.

Through the four-year programme we are aiming for 95% of children to be immunised with all antigens, 60% of children will every night sleep under insect-treated nets and 80% of those who are HIV positive will access anti-retrovirals. Some 80% of schools will be child-friendly, 80% of children will be able to access safe drinking water and the legal frameworks will be in place for registration and to develop capacity at Government levels. Our total programme budget for that over the next four years is $125 million.

Chairman

I thank Ms Collins.

Senator Ann Ormonde

I have listened very carefully and I thank all the speakers. I acknowledge and recognise the work done in Malawi to try to overcome significant problems. I refer in particular to the comments of Ms Collins, who spoke of the five areas, including education, health, nutrition and water projects. Is the expertise available to work in those areas? For example, the witnesses spoke about education and academic effectiveness. How can that be measured with so much to be done? It has been a colossal task to give people access to good nutrition and education but how can even a small amount of academic effectiveness be measured?

Deputy John Deasy

I apologise for leaving and I missed some of the presentations. From what I remember of the previous meeting pertaining to Malawi, everybody who came before us made the case that the money given to NGOs was well spent. The point was forcefully made and the people were asked some very tough questions about the impact the money received from the Irish Government was having in Malawi. I thought the responses were quite convincing, to a person.

I noticed Mr. O'Shea's remarks, as well as what Mr. Coyne has put in his presentation. They might have a different opinion. Mr. O'Shea has spoken about the €3 million going towards good governance in Malawi, as well as the money spent on the elections. In the last line of his submission, Mr. Coyne is effectively saying Irish taxpayers are not getting value for money in Malawi.

I must ask a general question about whether the money received from Irish Aid is having the impact it deserves. It is a very simple question.

Senator David Norris

Like Deputy Deasy, I must apologise as I had to leave for a period. I am sure former ambassador Verwoerd, in particular, will understand the obligations to appear in three or four places at the same time in a parliamentary building. I had the opportunity to hear the first part of what Mr. John O'Shea had to say and I personally would welcome him back at an early date to talk about the situation in Zimbabwe, which is extremely critical and requires forceful intervention. We are far too diplomatic in what we say about it. One thing I have in common with Mr. O'Shea is an almost total lack of diplomatic frills.

I listened with great interest to what Brother Mitchell——

Mr. John Mitchell

God no, I am a sinner.

Senator David Norris

Many people are sinners. A frock does not matter, one can always be a sinner.

Deputy John Deasy

So Mr. Mitchell is a brother.

Mr. John Mitchell

I am not.

Deputy John Deasy

I am kidding.

Senator David Norris

I just wanted to get it right. Mr. Mitchell was very passionate. Having read through the material, Mr. Mitchell is absolutely right about the impressive nature of the photographs. I was very struck by the elegance, cleanliness and design standards of the buildings.

I would not wish the witnesses to go away disappointed. People come to see me with different difficulties and I tell them to assume we will get nowhere and I can do nothing. Everything is then a positive. The witnesses, in much of what they have said, have made a passionate plea on the basis that if they had €500,000, for example, they could finish a project, etc. We are not a funding agency and we have no resources at our disposal. We can use some degree of influence and I am sure that what has been said will be useful in that way. I want it to be clear that we are not in that position, so there is no point in raising expectations or hopes. We may have some influence in terms of pressure, which I hope we will exert.

Turning to UNICEF, I am a big fan of the organisation and the work it does is absolutely outstanding. I do not share the dislike of the United Nations that many politicians find fashionable. There are many problems with it and it must be reformed but it is the best we have. We must improve it and there is no point in undermining it like John Bolton and other awful people have attempted to do. We must make it better.

I did not realise that no funding was given in this respect and I wonder why this is so. It sounds astonishing. It seems to me they are getting a hell of a bang for no buck at all in the UN. I am very glad it is supported by the Irish public and Government. I welcome the fact that there was such a substantial increase. The fact that 86% of the work is fieldwork impresses people and it is no wonder they give donations. They get results.

I have a couple of questions. How did the organisation get into Myanmar, which must have been exceptionally difficult as the regime really was appalling? Like many regimes, it wanted to control the rescue effort and aid to exploit it for its own political purposes, which is damnable.

My next question relates to Malawi. Perhaps I took it up incorrectly but I found the comment that there was no birth registration interesting. That must make things exceptionally difficult. For forward planning one requires data and if one does not have it, how can there be projections? I am very impressed with the comments about the inoculation programmes and so on but how does one know how many doses are required? Is there any way we can help in terms of instituting a programme? What would it cost? It seems relevant to have baseline information before one can proceed, so will the witnesses comment on birth registration?

Chairman

In the list given to us, the Minister has indicated he is making a substantial contribution to the gathering of economic data and statistics, which would certainly fit in with the questions raised. Mr. John O'Shea raised a regular thorn in all our sides in working in these areas, and it was also mentioned by Mr. John Mitchell, namely, the suggestion that no Minister could be trusted. I should make it clear the delegates were talking about the situation in Malawi rather than here in Ireland.

Senator David Norris

I would not trust them much here either.

Chairman

This is a perennial and significant problem. Generally, from what we have seen, the money can be controlled as well as possible, worked through NGOs and other groups and watched very carefully. We do not want to withdraw money. There is a great show in the newspapers at the time and if at all possible, we want to continue doing the work.

When one hears of the kind of work going on today in conditions of such enormous difficulty and terrible devastation and poverty, one could throw up one's hands and ask how much can be done. Here I would come back to Mr. John Coyne, who asked if we really appreciated what small groups and individuals do. There is no doubt that we very much appreciate this work and it all forms part of the contribution. Anything done for any one of the people involved is important, which is the reason we are involved generally.

In the case of the work being spoken of in this case, micro co-ops and micro-groups lead to bigger things. The education spoken about is so important and must start somewhere. Clearly, this requires much support. As the smaller groups go on, they will find themselves doing many of the same actions as other groups as there will be more demand for the work. Consequently, these groups will organise such work on a bigger scale.

With regard to the points made by Mr. John O'Shea, there is a significant and continuing problem. Countries which pulled out of contributions were mentioned, such as Britain, and Transparency International has been mentioned several times. The countries at the top of the list with Transparency International are where much of the money goes to. They are the banks which hold the money, as the bank is not held in Malawi in a big hole, Zimbabwe or elsewhere. It goes to banks in some of the leading countries around the world and will do so until we get to the point where we are prepared to tackle that issue. It has been tackled in Ireland, although it took a long time to get to that point. It is being looked at internationally at this stage.

Until that stage, the groups will not find the really big money. The small money is a problem in itself but the siphoning off of major money from contracts is a significant problem. I do not disagree with Mr. O'Shea in that respect, and he points to the difficulty involved. His own people are doing some good work on the ground, as are others. We have met with these people and seen the work they can do. The money expended is very well spent there and a very considerable amount of Irish Aid's money is spent through NGOs, missionaries and people directly on the ground.

At the same time we must improve the governance and get the political system going. That is the reason the elections would be particularly important. With the elections in 2009, we will be trying again to develop elections and the electoral system. It will not happen overnight. Many of those people have come here to look at how to behave in a democratic election system and when people are given a role and opportunity in opposition. We have seen in some countries that the opposition has not been given anything to do or any resources. We will try to get across that the opposition must be properly resourced and be able to contribute its knowledge. Irish Aid appreciates this and we must keep an eye on the corruption issue, as we are frequently reminded of it.

The college of health and science, mentioned by Mr. John Mitchell of St. John of God, has been noted, as well as his comments in that respect. We will take them up as education is significant, particularly that of women, as mentioned by Mr. John Coyne. I started by teaching in such a college in Ireland and there was a significant need for it at the time. It is a good many years ago now, probably before the former ambassador's time. It has an effect. One could meet grandchildren of the people who were taught and the idea has gone on through those families. When one sees the effect going through generations, one can see what is possible.

Action must be taken on two levels. We must ensure a country has democratic systems and governance and within that, we must help develop people. There are many issues we can talk about and all the contributions were very interesting and stimulating. I thank the delegation for the contributions, which were particularly interesting and valuable for our discussions. From what we heard today and our meeting on 8 May, the committee has made a good start in preparing its report on Malawi.

Yes.

Deputy John Deasy

Why is that? To get into specifics, is there evidence suggesting somebody is going to——

Mr. John O’Shea

My view is that the Irish Government should decide how best to use its money. Clearly, in this case the Malawi Government is calling the shots. If we asked 100 rank and file Irish people today if they would be happy with €3 million of their money — it is theirs after all rather than the Government's — being used for the purpose of helping an election and census, the Irish would know what African elections are about because of Zimbabwe, and neither would appear on the priority lists of any people when people are starving.

It is a criticism I have had for many years of the Irish Aid programme. We are routing the money through corrupt and brutal regimes, leaving a moral question, irrespective of what the Chairman has said about whether it is checked. That is irrelevant. One cannot help Adolf Hitler run his market garden if he is killing the Jews.

Mr. John O’Shea

This means money and skills are needed and I know the Irish Government has provided this in the past. I hope it will continue to do this in Africa, providing not only money but expertise to support processes in those countries. We cannot give up on it unless there is a better option than democracy. What can we do except keep supporting these countries in an effective way?

The question is not whether money is being spent but if it is being followed very carefully to ensure it is not used in a corrupt way. I am not working for Irish Aid but from what I have seen, Irish Aid is meticulous in following money to ensure it does not disappear into somebody's back pocket.

On the question of the census, I am reminded that in South Africa prior to 1994 we did a regular census as they are conducted in South Africa. The projections did not add up so when the census came out, the statistics were a couple of million short with regard to where we thought people were. We had an election afterwards and we joked that we found the 3 million people missing during the census because they all arrived to vote.

As Senator Norris indicated, if there are no proper statistics, how can the future of a country be planned? How can one decide where to spend if agricultural problems are not known, how many people are urbanised or rural, where people live, how many have HIV, the growth figures and demographics in HIV, etc? UNICEF, together with government statistics, know the infection rates for children or young people under 17, which is 14%. Now we know the crisis will continue, as these are young people with HIV. Worryingly, we also know from statistics that the rate is increasing, unlike in many other sub-Saharan African countries such as Mozambique, South Africa and others, where infection rates in the younger groups are starting to slow. This is a great relief.

If we did not have such statistics, what would we do? Ireland could not plan its future if it did not have a proper census, as we know. If we do not know how many non-nationals we will have in five years, how will we deal with immigration policies? This applies equally to Africa. Again, it is not only money but expertise which should be provided.

On Myanmar, we already had staff inside the country, which is a benefit of being so big and working extensively. We had a country office and because the country often has cyclones and floods, we were completely prepared for it. We have warehouses in Myanmar so we actually had stock there. There is no denying we experienced difficulties when we ran out of basic supplies but we were able to bring more into the country, although it was a long and tedious process. We were equally critical of the Government there when that started happening.

We could get more visas for staff but they were very limited. We started struggling more when we started facing the situation, which is inevitable, when we needed to let staff go out for a little while as they started to burn out. We struggled to get them back into the country as well. We are not denying that there were difficulties. There is a benefit when we are already on the ground, as we can respond effectively and fast and we did not have to enter the country as new entrants. Having said that, we were equally critical of and very angry at the government for slowing down the process as it did and continues to do to a large extent.

Ms Laura Collins

I will briefly comment on how academic effectiveness can be measured. It comes down to measurement with the framework of the United Nations development assistance strategy and the UNICEF country programme in Malawi, where expertise is divided as per the capacity of what the office in the country can do. A benefit of working within the entire government framework is that the different organisations, such as NGOs or national organisations with expertise in such areas, can do that. UNICEF, from the UN agencies, is the primary agency working in education, along with the WFP, which provides school feeding in some of the schools.

When it comes to measuring academic effectiveness, another benefit of being so large is that the child-friendly school framework is an international framework. There are measurements which we used that are internationally defined but are contextualised into Malawi through working with schools, communities, district education managers and the government. They measure achievement in school tests in both internationally measured and nationally measured facilities against skills and knowledge. These are the issues. Clearly, academic effectiveness improves when the children are happy, safe and all in school. That is the reason the approach is so multi-strategic.

I will comment on birth registration. There is no legal requirement for birth registration for every child and the current legal requirement dates back to 1904 or a similarly long time ago. UNICEF recently supported a four-year programme to put birth registration books in every community and trained people to fill those in. There were birth and death registration books. It currently heavily advocates the passage of that Bill in parliament, although it is a lengthy process. As has been mentioned, more engagement with governance and statistics will only enhance this process and speed it up.

I have a final word on the WFP and the food crisis in Malawi. As a UN agency working within the United Nations framework, the WFP is not running away or pulling out for lack of money. It is pursuing an aid strategy as part of the United Nations development assistance framework over the next four years. It is fully signed up to the Paris declaration and the effort is to promote government ownership and accountability and the running of all these interventions into food security.

Mr. John Mitchell

I will answer Deputy John Deasy's question. I cannot comment on the value of Irish Aid to ourselves as we have not received any so far. If we do, I can give an answer.

On the use of money for elections, I do not believe using money for elections is a waste. There has been a recent election in Sierra Leone which was pretty clean and I am reasonably hopeful the election in Malawi will be pretty clean. I started my working life as a statistician and although I am sure he does not remember, I designed and analysed the Chairman's experiments many years ago. To plan or research any issue without information is to shoot in the dark and waste time. Any money expended on a census is well spent, just as any money spent on a college of education would be well spent. We cannot spend all our money on spectacular issues, and certain basics are needed.

Mr. John Coyne

Just to correct the record — I do not know who mentioned that people were looking for money and suggested ways in which it could be better spent. I did not mention money. I am here to make a case for northern Malawi, which is neglected by the Malawians and by other people also. There are 1.5 million people there. I am pro-poor and only pro-poor. There is some political banter taking place in which I am not interested. I am here to represent the very poor people with whom I deal.

Last year I spent five months in Malawi. I work in villages and I know whether they are poor. I do not need statistics to know whether people are poor. I know the Government is not effective in northern Malawi in terms of distributing coupons. It is extremely inefficient and ineffective, so much so that most of the coupons used in northern Malawi in November of the year before last actually bought fertiliser that was sold to Zambia. Perhaps it is too far away. Maybe it is like Connacht where I was born. In my early years I lived almost at the level of the people I am dealing with now. I am very worried about the government, indeed all governments. I am a generally suspicious kind of person.

Some attempt should be made to have a trickle up policy in undeveloped countries. It might be fine here where one funds the rich. The reason I am in Malawi is because I benefited from various things also. If one funds the rich by giving them tax breaks they might employ people and will not spend all their money. If one funds the poor in some strategic way, not by giving them money because I do not believe in giving money to anyone, but by enabling them to develop; if one strategically places small amounts of money, many benefits can be derived from it. These people spend all their money; they employ other people so there are benefits in the right direction. I do not think we should send all our money intergovernment. There should be some place for the small person. I will not speak about statistics because one cannot disagree with statistics.

If all the people who have spoken here are going to do what they do, in terms of the numbers and percentages, 200% of the population will be treated. Over the past 40 years everyone has been sending money to Malawi. Where did it go? Why is Malawi not booming? Huge amounts have gone in — seriously more money than we got from Europe — and it is still going in. The UK is a huge funder. Tonnes of money is going in but what is happening to it? That is the only reason I ask whether it is effective and efficient in doing the job. Somebody should look at the overall figure. Sometimes I ask the villagers what happened to the euro I gave them last year. I explain that Irish Aid put money in here last year and I ask if they got it but they just laugh. Per head, all of the groups coming together are spending a huge amount of money. Is there overlapping or are there people who take it out of the cracks? I do not know but I have my doubts.

Ms Kate O’Donnell

I just want to answer the question whether Irish Aid money is being well spent in Malawi and if it is value for money. The money going in through Oxfam is well spent, very specific results of which are well documented. The whole idea of needing statistical collaboration for planning and evaluation is important. On the question of putting money into governments and if we are critical of a government — as people are of the Government in Malawi — how does one support people to enable them to bring their Government to account? That is the reason we would move towards further support to civil society. We are investing in civil society and in hardware of specific outputs of projects but we are investing in civil society as a long-term strategic sustainable approach to supporting people. We look at budgetary monitoring. When organisations within Malawi can monitor where the money in the health service went, whether it has been diverted from the district hospitals and how much is coming down to the clinic they have the power to make a difference with the Government. The funding that is going into the next election is very valuable. After 30 years of dictatorship in Malawi, civil society there is very young, it is just emerging and needs much support and growth. We cannot dismiss that. It will take time and mistakes will be made along the way. We need to nurture that civil society movement in Malawi.

Chairman

I thank each of the delegates for the trouble taken to prepare material for the committee and answering any questions asked. We hope to keep in touch until we have the report concluded. I thank the delegates for coming before the committee and helping us to prepare what, no doubt, will be a very important report. I wish you well in your continuing work.

The joint committee went into private session at 5.05 p.m. and adjourned at 7.15 p.m. sine die.

JOINT COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS debate - Wednesday, 2 Jul 2008

Irish Aid Programme in Malawi: Discussion.

Mr. John O’Shea

Ms Kate O’Donnell

Mr. John Coyne

Mr. John Coyne

Mr. John Mitchell

Ms Melanie Verwoerd

Ms Melanie Verwoerd

Ms Laura Collins

Mr. John Mitchell

Mr. John Mitchell

Mr. John O’Shea

Mr. John O’Shea

Mr. John O’Shea

Mr. John O’Shea

Mr. John O’Shea

Mr. John O’Shea

Mr. John O’Shea

Ms Melanie Verwoerd

Ms Melanie Verwoerd

Ms Laura Collins

Mr. John Mitchell

Mr. John Coyne

Ms Kate O’Donnell

JOINT COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS debate -
Wednesday, 2 Jul 2008