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You are here: Home / Resources / Impact Interviews

Impact Interviews

Promoting direct positive impact on global poverty is at the core of the ASAP mission. Our Impact Interviews aim to share information and best practices from academic efforts to influence poverty policy and civil society around the world, as a series of free online interviews and articles which explore the how-tos of promoting such impact. They can be both theoretical, exploring ways to conceptualize positive impact, and practical, offering compelling narratives about academics who have achieved positive impact through policy consultations, civil society campaigns and on-the-ground interventions.

The Impact series is intended to inform and stimulate dialogue around ways in which academics have and can positively influence poverty. We would welcome suggestions for other individuals or academic groups or teams to profile. If you would like to nominate impact-oriented academics, please contact us.


 

Impact Interview: Nicole Hassoun

2013-11-20 By ASAP Global

In this latest article, Rachel Payne profiles early-stage efforts by Binghamton University’s Nicole Hassoun to put public pressure on pharmaceutical firms to do more for people living in poverty. Read more of our Impact Interviews.

Nicole Hassoun, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Binghamton, is leading an ASAP-supported initiative to harness the power of socially conscious consumers to motivate pharmaceutical companies to meet the health needs of people in poverty. She has recently created an index that ranks drug companies according to their positive impact on global health. By informing consumers of which companies are making a difference and which are not, she hopes to stimulate demand for products linked to global health impact.

Hassoun’s Global Health Impact index ranks pharmaceutical companies by estimating the collective health impact of their malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS drugs and comparing it with that of other companies. In Hassoun’s model, a drug’s health impact is equal to need * access * efficacy—that is, the global amount of death and disability resulting from the disease the drug treats (need), the proportion of people who receive the drug out of those who need it (access), and the estimated effectiveness of the drug (efficacy).

The index is constructed so that companies have an incentive to invest in the development of medicines for neglected diseases and ensure that there is widespread access to and proper use of their products. Those companies with the best ranking would be entitled to display a Global Health Impact label, which would appear on all of their products—“everything from vitamins to cold medicine,” in Hassoun’s words. Like the Fair Trade label, the Global Health Impact label is intended to draw consumers towards more socially responsible companies.

Globally, one third of all deaths—18 million a year—are linked to poverty. People living in poverty often lack access to medicines both because they cannot afford them and because pharmaceutical companies lack adequate financial incentives to develop treatments for diseases that primarily affect poor people. Hassoun hopes that the Global Health Impact label will create a serious financial incentive for companies to make their products available to people in poverty and to invest in the development of new treatments for neglected diseases. She writes that if products with the Global Health Impact label capture just one percent of the market for generic and over-the-counter medicines, then there will be a $360 million incentive for companies to achieve Global Health Impact certification.

There are a number of other proposals for how to improve access to medicine for poor people, including grants to pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments for neglected diseases, funding to deliver medicines to poor people at reduced prizes, and Thomas Pogge’s Health Impact Fund. The proposal that comes closest to Hassoun’s is the Access to Medicines Index, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the governments of the UK and Netherlands, which ranks pharmaceutical companies on the basis of their efforts to improve access to medicines. This index takes into account a variety of activities carried out by pharmaceutical companies, including research and development, lobbying, patents and licensing, pricing, donations, public policy and market influence, and capacity building for product distribution.

Hassoun says that she is encouraged by the success of the Access to Medicines Index and adds that her own model has distinctive benefits. She argues that by focusing on the actual impact of pharmaceutical companies’ key innovations on the global burden of disease, using the best data available, her index gives a rigorous assessment of the extent to which companies’ drugs are improving the health of poor people.

Possible next steps for Hassoun’s project include a sensitivity analysis of the index and a pilot of the Global Health Impact label in grocery stores. In the pilot, Hassoun would measure the effect of the label on sales.

Hassoun put forward the idea of the Global Health Impact index in her 2012 paper, “Global Health Impact: A Basis for Labeling and Licensing Campaigns?”, which appeared in the journal Developing World Bioethics. In an article for the Council on Foreign Relations, Hassoun described the Global Health Impact project as presenting a middle path between condemnation of globalization on account of new global rules and institutions that, like the TRIPS Agreement, perpetuate poverty, and uncritical acceptance of globalized trade. Hassoun writes: “there are many coercive international institutions, like the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, that should be doing much more to help people avoid severe poverty, which requires changing many international policies. But there is also a role for individual consumers and companies to play in improving people’s lives.”

Hassoun says that she was motivated to take on the project of ranking pharmaceutical companies because believes philosophers are in a position to contribute to the debate on measuring health impact, by virtue of their training in logic and critical analysis. When she first came up with the idea for the index, she imagined that someone else would carry out the project and presented the proposal to graduate students studying health policy, hoping that one of them would take it on. However, she says she quickly discovered that these students tended to have their own ideas for improving health access and that if she was to see the project executed in the way she wanted, then she would have to do it herself.

Asked about the challenges of carrying out an impact-focused project as an academic, she said that she had been surprised by how much work it has taken to realize her plan for the index. Nevertheless, she says she hopes more students and young academics will attempt to put the ideas they write about into practice. Asked to give a piece of advice for people at the beginning of their academic careers, she suggested asking a lot of questions. Unless you make a point of learning from people working in the field that interests you, she warned, it’s easy to wind up far from the work that you had hoped to do.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: II

Nicole Hassoun: Harnessing Consumer Choice to Drive Global Health Impact

2013-11-20 By ASAP Global

In this latest ASAP Impact Story, ASAP Project Manager Rachel Payne profiles early-stage efforts by Binghamton University’s Hassoun to put public pressure on pharmaceutical firms to do more for people living in poverty. Details on ASAP’s Impact: Global Poverty project can be found here. The project shares insights on successful strategies and challenges faced by academics seeking to leverage their expertise into direct positive impact on poverty alleviation policy and practice. Nominations for profiles are welcome: please contact Luis Cabrera at a.l.cabrera@bham.ac.uk

Nicole HassounNicole Hassoun, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Binghamton, is leading an ASAP-supported initiative to harness the power of socially conscious consumers to motivate pharmaceutical companies to meet the health needs of people in poverty. She has recently created an index that ranks drug companies according to their positive impact on global health. By informing consumers of which companies are making a difference and which are not, she hopes to stimulate demand for products linked to global health impact.

Hassoun’s Global Health Impact index ranks pharmaceutical companies by estimating the collective health impact of their malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS drugs and comparing it with that of other companies. In Hassoun’s model, a drug’s health impact is equal to need * access * efficacy — that is, the global amount of death and disability resulting from the disease the drug treats (need), the proportion of people who receive the drug out of those who need it (access), and the estimated effectiveness of the drug (efficacy).

The index is constructed so that companies have an incentive to invest in the development of medicines for neglected diseases and ensure that there is widespread access to and proper use of their products. Those companies with the best ranking would be entitled to display a Global Health Impact label, which would appear on all of their products—“everything from vitamins to cold medicine,” in Hassoun’s words. Like the Fair Trade label, the Global Health Impact label is intended to draw consumers towards more socially responsible companies.

Globally, one third of all deaths—18 million a year—are linked to poverty. People living in poverty often lack access to medicines both because they cannot afford them and because pharmaceutical companies lack adequate financial incentives to develop treatments for diseases that primarily affect poor people. Hassoun hopes that the Global Health Impact label will create a serious financial incentive for companies to make their products available to people in poverty and to invest in the development of new treatments for neglected diseases. She writes that if products with the Global Health Impact label capture just one percent of the market for generic and over-the-counter medicines, then there will be a $360 million incentive for companies to achieve Global Health Impact certification.

There are a number of other proposals for how to improve access to medicine for poor people, including grants to pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments for neglected diseases, funding to deliver medicines to poor people at reduced prizes, and Thomas Pogge’s Health Impact Fund. The proposal that comes closest to Hassoun’s is the Access to Medicines Index, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the governments of the UK and Netherlands, which ranks pharmaceutical companies on the basis of their efforts to improve access to medicines. This index takes into account a variety of activities carried out by pharmaceutical companies, including research and development, lobbying, patents and licensing, pricing, donations, public policy and market influence, and capacity building for product distribution.

Hassoun says that she is encouraged by the success of the Access to Medicines Index and adds that her own model has distinctive benefits. She  argues that by focusing on the actual impact of pharmaceutical companies’ key innovations on the global burden of disease, using the best data available, her index gives a rigorous assessment of the extent to which companies’ drugs are improving the health of poor people.

Possible next steps for Hassoun’s project include a sensitivity analysis of the index and a pilot of the Global Health Impact label in grocery stores.  In the pilot, Hassoun would measure the effect of the label on sales.

Hassoun put forward the idea of the Global Health Impact index in her 2012 paper, “Global Health Impact: A Basis for Labeling and Licensing Campaigns?”, which appeared in the journal Developing World Bioethics. In an article for the Council on Foreign Relations, Hassoun described the Global Health Impact project as presenting a middle path between condemnation of globalization on account of new global rules and institutions that, like the TRIPS Agreement, perpetuate poverty, and uncritical acceptance of globalized trade. Hassoun writes: “there are many coercive international institutions, like the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, that should be doing much more to help people avoid severe poverty, which requires changing many international policies. But there is also a role for individual consumers and companies to play in improving people’s lives.”

Hassoun says that she was motivated to take on the project of ranking pharmaceutical companies because believes philosophers are in a position to contribute to the debate on measuring health impact, by virtue of their training in logic and critical analysis. When she first came up with the idea for the index, she imagined that someone else would carry out the project and presented the proposal to graduate students studying health policy, hoping that one of them would take it on. However, she says she quickly discovered that these students tended to have their own ideas for improving health access and that if she was to see the project executed in the way she wanted, then she would have to do it herself.

Asked about the challenges of carrying out an impact-focused project as an academic, she said that she had been surprised by how much work it has taken to realize her plan for the index. Nevertheless, she says she hopes more students and young academics will attempt to put the ideas they write about into practice. Asked to give a piece of advice for people at the beginning of their academic careers, she suggested asking a lot of questions. Unless you make a point of learning from people working in the field that interests you, she warned, it’s easy to wind up far from the work that you had hoped to do.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: II, Nicole Hassoun, Project: Global Health Impact Index, Theme: Global Health

Impact Interview: Paul Jackson

2013-10-16 By ASAP Global

Paul Jackson

In this article, Gabriel Neely-Streit interviews Professor Paul Jackson who heads the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Read more of our Impact Interviews.

Armed conflict, particularly in the domestic sphere, can have devastating effects not only in direct physical harms to individuals, but in its effects on poverty, health and in a range of related areas. When the fighting stops, an often precarious period of reconstruction ensues, involving also the re-integration of armed non-state groups into society. Over the past three years, conflict and reconstruction expert Prof. Paul Jackson has been advising authorities in Nepal on integrating some 20,000 Maoist former guerrillas into the Nepali Army or civilian life. Here, he discusses the challenges and rewards of his direct-impact work in Nepal and elsewhere, and how it has affected and been shaped by his academic research.

Q: How were you first approached about going to Nepal and what was your initial reaction?

I was a bit nervous mainly because I didn’t know very much about Nepal and I knew that the situation was sensitive. I was initially contacted by a couple of former students of mine who were involved in the peace process. They were both Nepali and had heard me talking about my work in Africa at some of the short courses we run at the university in security sector reform. One had been brought to the UK for a Chevening [scholarship] programme and the other for an SSR course. One of them worked for Saferworld at that time in Nepal and the other for a civil society organisation called Nepal Institute of Policy Studies (NIPS).

They invited me to come to Nepal because I could be regarded as neutral. The fact that I was an academic, that I was invited by the Nepalis themselves, and that I knew nothing about Nepal were all regarded as advantages in terms of being neutral.

Nepali Army troops

Q: How did you prepare for your first trip?

Well, I read a pile of reports and published papers to try and get a handle on the historical development of the Maoist movement and the context of the war. Since then I think I have read pretty much everything written in English on Nepal, including poetry, history and politics. I also try to read Nepali papers to follow some of the main developments. Twitter is also useful in this in terms of sending me updates on Nepali news.

I should also point out that I also rely on my friends in Nepal. Geja Sharma Wagle in particular is a good friend of mine as well as a work colleague, and I trust his judgement absolutely. This close relationship has been invaluable.

Q: What sorts of work did you do or meetings did you have after you arrived?

There was a series of meetings set up to discuss my role. I started as the international adviser to the Secretariat of the Special Committee on the rehabilitation and integration of the Maoist combatants. This then morphed in to a technical committee, which consisted of technical appointees of political parties who were tasked with presenting the politicians with solutions. My role was to act as an independent arbiter, and I spent much of my time talking about examples from elsewhere, interpreting the international language used and liaising with the international community.

We devised a method of holding meetings over weekends at retreats where we could take people away to hotels where we would meet and stay with each other for a few days. This allowed members of the committee to get to know each other and build trust.

Over the course of two years we went from the situation where the Maoists distrusted everyone and would not really say anything, to meetings where there was very open discussion about the issues and even friendship across political boundaries. The informality of the weekend meetings was important in this.

Q: What do you see as the main obstacles to the integration of Maoist militants?

I think it depends on who you are talking about. In my view I don’t see many of the officers wanting to integrate. Many of them already have other roles either within the party or within society more broadly.

The rank and file are very mixed. Like every insurgent army, there is a hard core of seasoned fighters, and it should not be forgotten that the Maoists held back the police and military for ten years, emerging from the war undefeated. In the early days I kept having to remind the military of this, since they had determined not take any of this ‘rag tag’ of rebels. In some areas, the Maoists were very competent, including intelligence and ambush. There are some excellent soldiers here – something that the military has recognised.

The main obstacle to integration itself is whether the Maoists can cope with a regular military life. At the same time, the Nepali military is depoliticised, so mixing the Maoists with the rest is very important. There were a lot of discussions about keeping some of the Maoists together as a group, but this was regarded as dangerous because they could become a separate force within the army (and the whole idea was to reduce the number of alternative forces in Nepal).

There are also some specific issues, not least the fact that many of the Maoists do not conform to the recruitment norms of the Nepal army, but also that there are a large number of Maoists (anything up to 20%) who are women, and gender issues are critical in all of this.

Q: How does the situation in Nepal compare to those you have encountered in your previous work in Africa?

The first thing to say is that I cannot imagine any post-conflict situation in Africa where the rebels would stay peacefully in camps for so long with such a low level of violence. This is down to the discipline of the Maoists but also the power of their ideology.

The other main difference is the discipline and structure of society more broadly, which is very regulated and organised. This has advantages but also disadvantages in terms of changing some of the norms. However, the Maoists have managed to bring about some of their social changes – many laws in support of women’s rights, mixed caste marriages, etc.

At the same time, whilst Nepal might be more disciplined, there are still some features that remain very unhealthy, including extra-judicial killings, impunity of certain families and castes, gender bias and grinding poverty. Nepal is one of the most unequal societies in South Asia — only Afghanistan is worse — so those who fought for the Maoists have a long way to go.

Q: Describe the progress made during your last visit to Nepal

Well, we had changed control of the Maoist army to the Government. We had agreed the conditions by which Maoist combatants could be integrated, and we had agreed on how those who chose to leave would be treated. The main problem was that the international community seemed to think that they would all go for rehabilitation, but this was never going to happen. After five years in camps they were not going to opt for more training. The problem was that for most of international community, this is what they wanted to do – not what was best for the Nepalis. In the end hardly any opted for rehabilitation.

I should point out that one reason why I got on with all sides was that my position was very much one of giving individual Maoists a choice about what to do. For the Nepali army this meant that people were choosing to join and not being forced to, and for the Maoists this meant a genuine choice.

Q: How do you envision Nepal changing in the next 5 years? What will your role be going forward? How will it change?

I don’t really have an official role going forward, although I have bid for funding to do some tracing of former combatants to see where they end up and what they are doing. This is usually the least well done bit of DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration). The aim is to take 300 former combatants and create a database of narratives of return to civilian lives.

The main challenges to Nepal are political really. Even issues with the police and justice are primarily political. The next five years will be dominated by what happens to the Maoist party, whether it can stay together and how it functions politically. Factionalism is a danger as is the main bugbear of Nepali politics – personal agendas.

However, the other political parties are not strong. The UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist party) has suffered from the Maoists eroding their traditional base, whilst the Nepali Congress has some good people but they all want to be leader and there is not a clear sense of direction or programme of reform. The NC is also handicapped by being regarded as close to the historical ruling class, which it is.

Politically, therefore, Nepal has a difficult landscape, further complicated by the social convulsions accompanying modernisation of what amounted to a feudal state.

Q: How well equipped did you feel as an academic for pursuing this sort of impact work – at the high levels of government, with a great deal at stake?

When I started, not at all. I have now being doing this for twenty years, and so I am more used to it and am probably regarded as someone who has opinions that are reasonably well founded on academic grounds, but also on practical experience. I find that I have a credibility with many people I work with because I have worked in many of the places I talk about, and that cannot be said for all of my colleagues. I also don’t tend to criticise things and then stop there – that’s easy. What is more difficult is developing ways forward, and I have always regarded my role as doing both rather than just carping from the sidelines.

Having said that, I am and have been critical of some approaches to state building, for example. The same can be said for the role of democracy and the way in which the international community operates democracy – goes in, intervenes, holds an election and then goes home. My criticism is not that democracy or the liberal state is wrong, but that you can’t just create a democracy in five years or less. Liberal states rely on underlying assumptions that do not hold in most of the world, but there are also real risks in alternatives to liberal approaches, [that is], there are lots of critics of liberal democracy, but just think about the alternatives. It is also worth pointing out that many of those critics benefit by living in liberal democracies.

I also have lots of moments where I sit back and think ‘what am I doing here?’ I have never been trained as a diplomat, but then again, whilst I draw on some similar skills and I work with diplomats, my role is to be an academic, and therefore to try to be as objective as possible.

Q: What lessons might you want to share with other academics who would be open to or interested in pursuing similar impact and outreach efforts?

I think I would always tell people to go for it if they are interested, but there are some things that academics might need to know:

* Policy makers do not all read academic papers. Find a way to translate complex ideas in accessible ways. This is not as easy as it sounds.

* It is immediate – you don’t have months to produce papers or reports. Learn to write quickly and concisely. I actually find this is a great discipline for clarity of ideas.

* I have never been told what to put in a report or had the experience of someone changing the wording, but this is partly because I avoid some things, not least compromising individuals whose jobs may be a risk. Depersonalise when you criticise and if you do criticise be willing to engage in discussion and defend your position. Policy makers might not all agree with you, but they are usually able and willing to engage in processes of improving approaches.

* Theory is not what policymakers want, but never forget that it is important. More than once I have stood up and explained aspects of Foucault to army officers. If you can explain why it is relevant (and do it in accessible English) then ideas remain really powerful. I have learned to do things like explain an idea and then only tell people afterwards that the idea is from a theorist.

* One invaluable aspect of doing his work is that I have access to more immediate and frequently more accurate information than most researchers. If I was a researcher then the chances of some of these people talking to me are remote. However, as someone who is an insider – as long as I use the information reasonably – then I get access to confidential information that is up to date, as well as the people actually engaged in this. What I mean by being reasonable is, for example, my promise to the Maoists that as long as the process was ongoing, then I wouldn’t write about them — but now they have said that they would like me to. This is about to allow me to write about them having spent a significant amount of time with the Maoist hierarchy and also the rank and file, which otherwise I would not have been able to do.

I think it might be difficult for someone to have the same career trajectory as me, particularly with the REF (Research Excellence Framework) system in the UK, but there are opportunities to engage. [The UK government allocates funding to universities in part based on the results of an assessment and ranking of their research produced, conducted about every six years.]

Q: Do you intend to pursue further your research into the effects of Glenfiddich on peace brokering?

There is always room for studying Glenfiddich! [Noted in a blog Prof. Jackson posted on his experiences in Nepal]

This came about because Nepalis drink whisky (usually bad whisky) in tumblers and they dilute it, i.e. they put in one finger of whisky and then fill the glass to the top with water. I used to take a different single malt for every meeting, and we would share it out. I banned them from using water and it made a great icebreaker!

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: II

Impact Stories: Paul Jackson on Helping to Re-integrate Former Rebel Fighters in Nepal

2013-10-16 By ASAP Global

Paul Jackson

Armed conflict, particularly in the domestic sphere, can have devastating effects not only in direct physical harms to individuals, but in its effects on poverty, health and in a range of related areas. When the fighting stops, an often precarious period of reconstruction ensues, involving also the re-integration of armed non-state groups into society. In this latest Impact Story profile in ASAP’s Impact: Global Poverty project, Gabriel Neely-Streit speaks with conflict and reconstruction expert Prof. Paul Jackson, who heads the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Over the past three years, Prof. Jackson has been advising authorities in Nepal on integrating some 20,000 Maoist former guerrillas into the Nepali Army or civilian life. Here, he discusses the challenges and rewards of his direct-impact work in Nepal and elsewhere, and how it has affected and been shaped by his academic research.

Q: How were you first approached about going to Nepal and what was your initial reaction?

I was a bit nervous mainly because I didn’t know very much about Nepal and I knew that the situation was sensitive. I was initially contacted by a couple of former students of mine who were involved in the peace process. They were both Nepali and had heard me talking about my work in Africa at some of the short courses we run at the university in security sector reform. One had been brought to the UK for a Chevening [scholarship] programme and the other for an SSR course. One of them worked for Saferworld at that time in Nepal and the other for a civil society organisation called Nepal Institute of Policy Studies (NIPS).

They invited me to come to Nepal because I could be regarded as neutral. The fact that I was an academic, that I was invited by the Nepalis themselves, and that I knew nothing about Nepal were all regarded as advantages in terms of being neutral.

Nepali troops in ranks
Nepali Army troops

Q: How did you prepare for your first trip?

Well, I read a pile of reports and published papers to try and get a handle on the historical development of the Maoist movement and the context of the war. Since then I think I have read pretty much everything written in English on Nepal, including poetry, history and politics. I also try to read Nepali papers to follow some of the main developments. Twitter is also useful in this in terms of sending me updates on Nepali news.

I should also point out that I also rely on my friends in Nepal. Geja Sharma Wagle in particular is a good friend of mine as well as a work colleague, and I trust his judgement absolutely. This close relationship has been invaluable.

Q: What sorts of work did you do or meetings did you have after you arrived?

There was a series of meetings set up to discuss my role. I started as the international adviser to the Secretariat of the Special Committee on the rehabilitation and integration of the Maoist combatants. This then morphed in to a technical committee, which consisted of technical appointees of political parties who were tasked with presenting the politicians with solutions. My role was to act as an independent arbiter, and I spent much of my time talking about examples from elsewhere, interpreting the international language used and liaising with the international community.

We devised a method of holding meetings over weekends at retreats where we could take people away to hotels where we would meet and stay with each other for a few days. This allowed members of the committee to get to know each other and build trust.

Over the course of two years we went from the situation where the Maoists distrusted everyone and would not really say anything, to meetings where there was very open discussion about the issues and even friendship across political boundaries. The informality of the weekend meetings was important in this.

Q: What do you see as the main obstacles to the integration of Maoist militants?

I think it depends on who you are talking about. In my view I don’t see many of the officers wanting to integrate. Many of them already have other roles either within the party or within society more broadly.

The rank and file are very mixed. Like every insurgent army, there is a hard core of seasoned fighters, and it should not be forgotten that the Maoists held back the police and military for ten years, emerging from the war undefeated. In the early days I kept having to remind the military of this, since they had determined not take any of this ‘rag tag’ of rebels. In some areas, the Maoists were very competent, including intelligence and ambush. There are some excellent soldiers here – something that the military has recognised.

The main obstacle to integration itself is whether the Maoists can cope with a regular military life. At the same time, the Nepali military is depoliticised, so mixing the Maoists with the rest is very important. There were a lot of discussions about keeping some of the Maoists together as a group, but this was regarded as dangerous because they could become a separate force within the army (and the whole idea was to reduce the number of alternative forces in Nepal).

There are also some specific issues, not least the fact that many of the Maoists do not conform to the recruitment norms of the Nepal army, but also that there are a large number of Maoists (anything up to 20%) who are women, and gender issues are critical in all of this.

Q: How does the situation in Nepal compare to those you have encountered in your previous work in Africa?

The first thing to say is that I cannot imagine any post-conflict situation in Africa where the rebels would stay peacefully in camps for so long with such a low level of violence. This is down to the discipline of the Maoists but also the power of their ideology.

The other main difference is the discipline and structure of society more broadly, which is very regulated and organised. This has advantages but also disadvantages in terms of changing some of the norms. However, the Maoists have managed to bring about some of their social changes – many laws in support of women’s rights, mixed caste marriages, etc.

At the same time, whilst Nepal might be more disciplined, there are still some features that remain very unhealthy, including extra-judicial killings, impunity of certain families and castes, gender bias and grinding poverty. Nepal is one of the most unequal societies in South Asia — only Afghanistan is worse — so those who fought for the Maoists have a long way to go.

Special Committee bannerQ: Describe the progress made during your last visit to Nepal.

Well, we had changed control of the Maoist army to the Government. We had agreed the conditions by which Maoist combatants could be integrated, and we had agreed on how those who chose to leave would be treated. The main problem was that the international community seemed to think that they would all go for rehabilitation, but this was never going to happen. After five years in camps they were not going to opt for more training. The problem was that for most of international community, this is what they wanted to do – not what was best for the Nepalis. In the end hardly any opted for rehabilitation.

I should point out that one reason why I got on with all sides was that my position was very much one of giving individual Maoists a choice about what to do. For the Nepali army this meant that people were choosing to join and not being forced to, and for the Maoists this meant a genuine choice.

Q: How do you envision Nepal changing in the next 5 years? What will your role be going forward? How will it change?

I don’t really have an official role going forward, although I have bid for funding to do some tracing of former combatants to see where they end up and what they are doing. This is usually the least well done bit of DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration). The aim is to take 300 former combatants and create a database of narratives of return to civilian lives.

The main challenges to Nepal are political really. Even issues with the police and justice are primarily political. The next five years will be dominated by what happens to the Maoist party, whether it can stay together and how it functions politically. Factionalism is a danger as is the main bugbear of Nepali politics – personal agendas.

However, the other political parties are not strong. The UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist party) has suffered from the Maoists eroding their traditional base, whilst the Nepali Congress has some good people but they all want to be leader and there is not a clear sense of direction or programme of reform. The NC is also handicapped by being regarded as close to the historical ruling class, which it is.

Politically, therefore, Nepal has a difficult landscape, further complicated by the social convulsions accompanying modernisation of what amounted to a feudal state.

Q: How well equipped did you feel as an academic for pursuing this sort of impact work – at the high levels of government, with a great deal at stake?

When I started, not at all. I have now being doing this for twenty years, and so I am more used to it and am probably regarded as someone who has opinions that are reasonably well founded on academic grounds, but also on practical experience. I find that I have a credibility with many people I work with because I have worked in many of the places I talk about, and that cannot be said for all of my colleagues. I also don’t tend to criticise things and then stop there – that’s easy. What is more difficult is developing ways forward, and I have always regarded my role as doing both rather than just carping from the sidelines.

Having said that, I am and have been critical of some approaches to state building, for example. The same can be said for the role of democracy and the way in which the international community operates democracy – goes in, intervenes, holds an election and then goes home. My criticism is not that democracy or the liberal state is wrong, but that you can’t just create a democracy in five years or less. Liberal states rely on underlying assumptions that do not hold in most of the world, but there are also real risks in alternatives to liberal approaches, [that is], there are lots of critics of liberal democracy, but just think about the alternatives. It is also worth pointing out that many of those critics benefit by living in liberal democracies.

I also have lots of moments where I sit back and think ‘what am I doing here?’ I have never been trained as a diplomat, but then again, whilst I draw on some similar skills and I work with diplomats, my role is to be an academic, and therefore to try to be as objective as possible.

Q: What lessons might you want to share with other academics who would be open to or interested in pursuing similar impact and outreach efforts?

I think I would always tell people to go for it if they are interested, but there are some things that academics might need to know:

  • Policy makers do not all read academic papers. Find a way to translate complex ideas in accessible ways. This is not as easy as it sounds.
  • It is immediate – you don’t have months to produce papers or reports. Learn to write quickly and concisely. I actually find this is a great discipline for clarity of ideas.
  • I have never been told what to put in a report or had the experience of someone changing the wording, but this is partly because I avoid some things, not least compromising individuals whose jobs may be at risk. Depersonalise when you criticise and if you do criticise be willing to engage in discussion and defend your position. Policy makers might not all agree with you, but they are usually able and willing to engage in processes of improving approaches.
  • Theory is not what policymakers want, but never forget that it is important. More than once I have stood up and explained aspects of Foucault to army officers. If you can explain why it is relevant (and do it in accessible English) then ideas remain really powerful. I have learned to do things like explain an idea and then only tell people afterwards that the idea is from a theorist.

One invaluable aspect of doing his work is that I have access to more immediate and frequently more accurate information than most researchers. If I was a researcher then the chances of some of these people talking to me are remote. However, as someone who is an insider – as long as I use the information reasonably – then I get access to confidential information that is up to date, as well as the people actually engaged in this. What I mean by being reasonable is, for example, my promise to the Maoists that as long as the process was ongoing, then I wouldn’t write about them — but now they have said that they would like me to. This is about to allow me to write about them having spent a significant amount of time with the Maoist hierarchy and also the rank and file, which otherwise I would not have been able to do.

I think it might be difficult for someone to have the same career trajectory as me, particularly with the REF (Research Excellence Framework) system in the UK, but there are opportunities to engage. [The UK government allocates funding to universities in part based on the results of an assessment and ranking of their research produced, conducted about every six years.]

Q: Do you intend to pursue further your research into the effects of Glenfiddich on peace brokering?

There is always room for studying Glenfiddich! [Noted in a blog Prof. Jackson posted on his experiences in Nepal]

This came about because Nepalis drink whisky (usually bad whisky) in tumblers and they dilute it, i.e. they put in one finger of whisky and then fill the glass to the top with water. I used to take a different single malt for every meeting, and we would share it out. I banned them from using water and it made a great icebreaker!

Details on ASAP’s Impact: Global Poverty project are available here. If you would like to nominate an impact-oriented academic for an Impact Stories profile, please contact Luis Cabrera at a.l.cabrera@bham.ac.uk.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: Chapter: UK, II, Nepal, Paul Jackson

Impact Interview: Alex Cobham

2013-06-14 By ASAP Global

In this profile interview by Robaiya Nusrat, Alex Cobham explains his choice to leave academia to try to better leverage his expertise on illicit financial flows, or ways in which forms of tax avoidance can hinder poverty alleviation and development efforts. Cobham left a research post at Oxford University to join UK-based Christian Aid, and he now serves as a research fellow at the London office of the US-based Center for Global Development. Details on CGD’s overall impact efforts are available at here

Photo Credit: Xavier Granet/Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development

Q: Why did you decide to leave academia? What was it that you felt you couldn’t do as an academic researcher that you can do now?

Cobham: Well, I had been doing various research posts at the Queen Elizabeth House, the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, since the beginning of 1999. During that time I was lucky enough to work with a professor who was especially then one of very few people who were seriously thinking of the role of tax havens and to some extent on the scale of the illicit financial flows and their impact on development. At the end of the 90s there was an OECD process looking at tax havens and it felt for a period that real policy change might be quite close. So one of the things we did in that period was to write a series of background papers for the UK Government’s white paper on globalization, which is one of the first major policy documents on that. It was quite explicit about the potential damage that tax havens can do. It felt like it was the right place in terms of being able to influence policy and persuade to that research agenda. Over the following few years, the OECD process more or less completely stalled, as a previous one 10 or so years earlier had done. It started to feel there was less and less policy attraction with research, so I suppose I got to the stage of thinking that I could sit in my office and write the perfect paper on tax havens and illicit financial flows in developing countries and nothing would happen. It simply wouldn’t matter.

Around about 2005, by that time I was working as junior teaching fellow at Oxford and doing more of my own research independently, mainly focusing on the importance of tax for development. Around about that time I met a very interesting economist called Charles Burgay who became the head of policy at Christian Aid — one of the big 5 development NGOs in UK. I think it was him more than anyone who saw the potential for the whole area of work to become the next big economic justice campaigning issue. I must say, the UK development NGOs, in terms of their scale but also on their commitment to campaigning on the policy issues, are probably the world leaders. So when eventually he and I talked about the possibility of my coming to work for Christian Aid and starting that campaign, it just felt like too good a chance to pass up. Christian Aid began the first really big development campaign on tax issues and illicit financial flows, closely followed by ActionAid, which meant you had 2 organizations among the big five. Over the course of 5 years or so, in combination of a lot of people, we were able to drive the issue up the agenda. The financial crisis was also turning up. As they say, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” The silver lining of the financial [crisis was that these] issues became impossible to escape even within the domestic context in a country like the UK, and making the development argument became that much easier, as people were more and more aware about the problems of tax evasion and tax avoidance for the UK and could very well understand how a country at the lower income level might face more extreme versions of those problems.

Q: Were there specific contributions you made in your work for Christian Aid, and now for the Center for Global Development (CGD), that wouldn’t have been possible at Oxford?

Cobham: I think it was more of the fact that the work that I started doing at Christian Aid was tied directly into the campaigning. To be fair, it is also possible for academics to achieve a lot of the same opportunities without leaving academia in the same way I did. But, I think, having those links and being involved in to some extent in those campaigning and understanding the policy potential was important. So, the first serious piece of work we did at Christian Aid was to drawn some existing estimates of illicit financial flows and calculate both the potential tax revenue impact across a range of developing countries, but then also use estimates of the elasticity with respect to tax revenues. To calculate the potential impacts in terms of child mortality – so that first report gained enormous amount of attention and media coverage, because in a sense it was more media focused than anything that I might have done at Oxford. Potentially 1000 children under 5 years of age die in a day needlessly because of this problem. I think that was the first time that it really brought home to people the human impact rather than just saying this is a technical problem in the financial sector. It crossed a line in awareness of people’s human development issue. I guess that’s the kind of thing you could certainly do from within academia, but then having that outlet to reach the kind of media and policy makers directly — I think you need to be thinking about the relationship with NGOs and with campaigning organizations.

Q: There is increasing emphasis on financial secrecy and international tax laws. Why is it of such importance now? Is this growing importance good news for the developing countries? How is the situation different for all those developing economies suffering from severe domestic corruption?

Cobham: First of all, you are absolutely right, this has taken a place on the international policy agenda, which reflects the importance of the issue, but which for a long time simply hasn’t been true. The fact that the UN High Level Panel on the post Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)- 2015 framework has explicitly recommended a target of reducing illicit financial flows and tax evasion is extremely good news for developing countries, but [also] actually more widely. Because this is one of those areas were people living in a country like the UK suffer in exactly the same way as people in countries of lower income levels. Not all the impacts are not to the same degree. Overall, however, nothing has actually changed yet. Really very little has been delivered. Now, the G8 held in the UK this year has finally got down to some of the real specifics. Again, they haven’t really delivered much, but it was really important and I think the line that has been crossed here is that you now have the international policy agendas focusing on the right specifics, the things that would really make a difference rather than just the ‘color of the flier’ rhetoric. Unfortunately in this area we tend to hear this after every 10 years or so, and then it goes away. This time it feels different simply because the areas where progress is needed are very well identified, and that’s things like having public registers of who owns companies and trusts and foundations. That’s not only important for fighting tax evasion but also money laundering and a whole set of or types of corruption. Again, we are also looking at the specifics around transparency in corporate reporting, which is crucial for reducing the scale of corporate tax avoidance, and also automatic information exchange between the type of financial centers sometimes called tax havens and developing countries.

Now coming to your final answer, on corruption within developing countries. There remains no question that this remain a problem in very many countries, but I think it’s wrong, and it’s increasingly being realized that it’s wrong to see that as a developing country problem. One of the things you see over the last 20 years is a growing recognition in international media of the problem of corruption. But unfortunately that’s being associated with a sense that corruption is a problem over there somewhere in developing countries, not a problem for major high income economies, and that’s actually very misleading. If you look at the corruption perception index, it very strongly reinforces that view, but these are the perceptions of a very narrow international elite, and I think it’s a growing concern about whether that index is playing a useful role. An alternative that gives you quite a different picture is the financial secrecy index, which actually ranks countries according to, in effect, how important they are in terms of tax havens. So, you often see countries which do extremely well on the corruption perception index, coming near the [top] of the financial secrecy index — and that’s countries like Switzerland and Singapore, who in some sense very well regulate it but actually are encouraging corruption of various sorts, including tax abuse in countries of lower income levels. We need to thinking about corruption in that way as it appears as having a train of events. This is not about one person in one place perhaps working for a government, asking for a bribe. This is a pattern of asking for a corporate behavior, a pattern of consistent international bribery. But it’s also about jurisdictions and the professionals, accounts and banks and others who facilitate and create structures to facilitate tax evasion, money laundering and whole range of types of corruption. I think, finally what we are seeing is the discussion around the post-2015 framework is a recognition of that, when we talk about corruption we will be talking about these global problems to which the solutions will be global rather than [this] very unhelpful and distorted view that corruption is a problem in developing countries and that they need to address by themselves somehow. I think again we have crossed a line on that.

Q: To what extent do illicit financial flows have impact on global poverty?

Cobham: Certainly income poverty in particular is overwhelmingly focused in developing countries, or concentrated. [It is] increasing in middle income rather than low income countries, and that tells you somewhat on the geography of poverty, that it is really about inequality within countries, not only about poor people living in poor countries. That in fact goes back to this global problem. One of the effects of the pervasive nature of illicit financial flows, not least tax evasion and tax avoidance, is that it becomes very difficult for countries at any income level, and particularly at lower income levels, to effectively tax income, profits and capital gains. If direct taxation is very heavily constrained in the developing countries by this problem of illicit flows, then almost inevitably you will end up with higher inequality than you would do otherwise. For example, if you look across Latin America, you see great many countries where the original market distribution of income is more or less as unequal as it is in the UK or in the US. The difference is that [especially] in the UK, fairly powerfully, you have a system of taxation and transfers that reduces that inequality quite significantly. Across Latin America, very often you simply don’t see that. Increasingly there are some efforts on the transfers but it’s still very little very effective direct taxation and that means people living in these countries are left with higher levels of inequality and of course with all the social, political and human development problems that come alongside that. We know that economic growth is more unsustainable in developing countries. We know that conflict is more likely. We know that child development outcomes are much worse, gender and inequality is higher and so are the health outcomes. Henceforth, there is global attention and global policy change to address things which individual development countries can’t address on their own.

Q: Can you cite some examples of poverty effects from illicit financial flows, and which parts of the world are most affected?

Cobham: That’s a major part of research agenda here at CGD, but we are not taking it forward in the sense of global development. In think the bulk of the research being done on the problems of illicit financial flows has not in fact been done by academics, and there is a clear gap and need for greater scholarly attention to these questions. The work that has been done has largely focused on generating the kind of big numbers, estimates of the total scale, which have been extremely valuable in driving these issues up the policy agenda. The shortcoming they have is this: they don’t easily allow a break down into detail of the type of development impact of the different type of illicit flows in different countries, or if you want to look at countries by income level or by region. So, that’s the kind of agenda we’ve got at CGD, to start trying to push forward not just the estimates of the dollar scale of illicit flows but specifics types of impacts, whether that’s on tax revenues, on governance and effective political representation, on inequality. It’s about being a bit more precise on what the priorities should really be, whether that’s individual developing country or for policy making at the global level.

It is important to stress that illicit financial flows are a global problem. There is not a single country that does not suffer, and to some extent the difference is the question of the type of illicit flows that a particular country has a problem with, and the scale. Let me give an example of the kind of problem that is perhaps most common in Sub-Saharan Africa, and this is the problem of illicit flows around the natural resource wealth of large number of countries. We had a bit of work few years ago looking at Zambia. Now, Zambia relies for its export-GDP largely on copper which it is mining. There are two major problems in the way Zambia benefits or fails to benefit from its copper resources. One is the ownership, and although this has improved somewhat in recent years, the ownership has historically been fairly well hidden. A great many of the copper mines have been owned by the British Virgin Islands, which is one of the most secretive jurisdictions. It’s long been thought that various numbers of different governments have in fact been behind them, and the treatment of these companies, or the extent that those nations have benefited rather than the owners have benefited, has been questioned. The other aspect is that the majority of Zambia’s trade, at least on paper has been with Switzerland. Now, Switzerland combines being a global hub of commodity trading. A Swiss company sells the copper it mines to a Swiss-registered company at prices greatly below the market value, which Switzerland subsequently declared on re-exporting copper itself. What comes out of it, when the Swiss company resells the same copper at a price far above the world price, taking the difference as profit in low-tax Switzerland, depriving Zambia of both export earnings and tax revenue. Zambia’s GDP would have nearly doubled from something like $14 billion to more than $25 billion, and that’s a country where about 80% of people were living on less than $2 a day. So, the potential of addressing the illicit financial flows in Zambia’s copper trade in terms of the impact they could have had enlisting the majority of the population to come out of their income poverty would have been enormous. This is why you have a Zambian government which is being much more focused [on this issue] and trying to ensure better national benefits.

[Consider also] a country at a higher income level, a country that is heavily dependent on natural resources, a bigger economy, like Brazil or Argentina. What you tend to see there, is that there is a lot of problem is around the corporate tax behavior, and you find two different things. One is that OECD guidelines on transfer pricing, which are supposed to guide effectively how a MNC behaves in order to ensure that its profit is declared in the place where the actual economic activity took place. But these guidelines simply don’t work very well, and they work especially badly for developing countries. One of the reasons can be that they are designed by the OECD member countries, and it’s not surprising, but unfortunately they continue to be the global standard, despite Brazil, India or China and a number of other countries actually trying to use quite different rules. They are pushing to change those rules internationally. So, Brazil takes a whole set of efforts and measures which OECD doesn’t condemn in order to try and restrict the extent to which it was losing tax to different MNCs. In Argentina, in the last few years you see quite a number of cases being taken against the MNCs, which is very rare in the UK, I don’t think anything like that have happened in the 4-5 years. But it’s a signal of the frustration that these relatively powerful developing countries government have in trying to get what they feel is fair amount of tax from the MNCs, with benefit from operating within their markets.

You can also talk about more extreme cases [like] extent of Nigerian wealth in the billions of dollars, taken by various, more or less dictatorial leaders and subsequently [sent to] those range of jurisdictions. In the case of Nigeria it has been particularly concentrated in the island of Jersey, one of the UK’s grand dependencies, and in Switzerland of course. A lot of countries or jurisdictions offer either bank accounts or company or sometimes both which people can control completely and anonymously. That anonymity has been shown systematically to encourage and to facilitate the type of abuses I had been talking about, from the theft of public assets, to tax evasion and tax avoidance and related forms of corruption and bribery.

Q: If the Southern part of the developing world is heavily affected from illicit flows be it a larger or smaller economy, are things much worse for smaller economies in the South of Asia?

Cobham: Well I couldn’t count it as small but we could think about Bangladesh, as having and facing a number of problems. Bangladesh is thought to have higher illicit financial outflows but also potentially a large number of inflows which are likely to be associated with undermining governance and the rule of law. So we shouldn’t think these are largely benevolent. So, in Bangladesh we see different types of flow. But, what is particularly worrying is around trade mis-pricing. It’s estimated that a great deal, and perhaps the majority, of exports from Bangladesh, often in the textiles, are mis-priced in such a way as to do one of two things: either to increase artificially subsidies that may arise for exporting, or to reduce the profit which is being declared within Bangladesh by artificially depressing the price declared, and having an additional fee for the exports being paid outside the country. A kind of classic example would be, textiles worth a $1000 have been depressed in terms of price or declared for exports as for $100 and that’s what comes to the company. But perhaps the company doesn’t declare any profit, so it doesn’t pay any corporate tax. The other $900 is paid into the bank account of the textile company owner, let’s say in Switzerland, which will never exchange and never provide that information to the tax authority in Bangladesh or other parts of the government.

It will be absolutely outside government’s ability to tax or explore whether there may be corruption, of course, since that $900 tends to be split with people who try to blind eye the customs, or the tax authority, or people in the government who otherwise wouldn’t help to turn the process around. That’s secrecy around who owns assets and income streams, the fact that information is not readily available to developing countries like Bangladesh, and it leads to all sorts of abuses which not only reduce the tax revenues that Bangladesh receives but also just domestically undermine the benefit of any economic activity taking place there and also of course undermine the rule of law. A sad additional fact on this is that when people in a country are aware that they are elites, whether there are individuals in power or large companies are not paying the tax as thought to, then people intending to pay tax are reduced — it’s like why should I pay tax when people with higher incomes are evading? Since we know choosing to pay tax is voluntary, it is really necessary to raise the citizen-state relationship to the social public right, and the way that develops over time to support effective political representation is very fundamental to the process of development.

Q: There is a growing importance of approaching economic sustainability on the other hand continuing emphasis on market liberalization. How do you think the UN’s High Level Panel (HLP) addressed these issues in their recommendations for Millennium Development Goal replacement efforts after 2015?

Cobham: I think the High Level Panel had a very difficult job to do in the way they were given the task. This has to be remembered that it is their first draft, where they are taking into account of the whole horizon of political, economic, environmental and social sustainability issues. In saying that, we should remember that their reports and their recommendations are only in the first draft. There’s a long way to go, and it needs a great deal of improvement. So I think what they tried to do is whatever they can, but it’s pretty clear from the report that it was difficult for them to interpret in a few places and that is also because they were under a lot of time pressure. One of the areas in which the integration is largely lacking or the area that the report lacks is, I would say, this area of illicit of financial flows and that of tax evasion and tax avoidance. So, I think yes you are right, from the view point of how companies can be set within rules of taxation in a market liberalized environment is something to be looked at. I mean the HLP have points that are committed to transparency and accountability, as well as to sustainability but the joint document probably lacks complete coherence on an economic approach to sustainability with emphases both on the multinationals’ roles and market liberalization.

In my opinion, ASAP will have to work more in the issue of illicit financial flows. In a sense that it is quite new in its working arena on illicit finance, but they can make an elaboration of their tasks and make a contribution in the post-MDG framework.

Q: There are many institutions working towards transparency and anti-corruption. What do you see that is different in the High Level Panel’s recommendations?

Cobham: Well I think it is — the recommendation of the panel is very much of a challenge. Their proposed target is to reduce the volume of illicit flows, which is an admirable aspiration, but that’s the problem of the target. To begin with, you don’t have proper estimates of the flows, but probably a wider challenge is the qualitative measure than the quantitative one. What are the right set of indicators and targets? Are those targets set achievable? And, whether those measures would give us the right set of policy decisions. The panel’s recommendation for a ‘data revolution’ is valuable to promote accountability, and the proposal for a target of reducing illicit financial flows is of course very important. The challenge is to populate what is currently just a placeholder for such a target with a meaningful target and a set of indicators that both reflect the range of the problem and will trigger the necessary, specific policy actions in countries at all income levels.

Q: There have been very public criticisms recently of big corporations such as Google and Starbucks, alleging tax avoidance. What sorts of specific solutions have been proposed, and would they be effective?

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strong>Cobham: The OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative, supported by the G8 and G20 groups of countries, is intended to address the issue of large-scale multinational company tax avoidance. Ultimately, however, the proposals so far resemble a piecemeal approach to what is a systemic problem. Fundamentally, the OECD approach to taxing multinationals relies on treating each company within the group as a separate (profit-maximizing) entity – when of course any such maximization occurs at the level of the group as a whole, and profit-shifting between group companies can be driven by a desire to reduce overall tax payment. Until there is a broader shift to recognize the unit of taxation as the group of companies as a whole, and then to allocate the tax base between countries of operation on the basis of the real economic activity taking place in each tax authority – not least in lower-income countries – we will face an uphill struggle to obtain an appropriate amount of tax.

Q: ‘Global partnership’ is given a lot of emphasis by the High Level Panel. To what extent do you think it is a progressive measure and do you think global partnerships can be effective on illicit financial flows?

Cobham: The global partnership goal of the MDGs, MDG8, is widely seen as a failure – the only one with direct requirements for donor countries, and the only one with no effective accountability measures in place. The optimism about the HLP’s proposed goal 12 is that it does provide the space for verifiable contribution and accountability for all countries. And of course, illicit flows are a global problem, that no one country can deal with alone, so setting this issue in the context of global partnership is crucial. However, the current proposal is a long way short of the specific, verifiable target and indicators that will be needed to ensure serious progress.

Q: How do you see gender inequality, as highlighted by the High Level Panel, intersecting with issues around illicit financial flows?

Cobham: Arguably, the greatest contribution of the MDGs was to crystallize through MDG 3 the then growing but still fragile consensus that gender equality is a fundamental part of progress. The HLP proposal retains, and makes broader and more ambitious, the targets in this regard. Especially important also is the HLP recommendation that each marginalized group – not only in terms of gender but also by income, region, ethno-linguistic group, age and disability – must separately meet any target before that target can be considered to be met overall.

My main concern with the HLP recommendation is the decision to reject the findings of the global consultation in respect of a goal, or even a target, on economic inequality. While economic inequality can be more politically challenging to address than absolute poverty, there is very clear research that progress will be much weaker if economic inequality is not challenged; but also a growing consensus that the human effects of inequality are such that challenging it should be seen as important to development inherently, not only instrumentally.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: Alex Cobham, Center for Global Development, Christian Aid, Theme: Institutional Reform

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