A Bucket of Water

Reflections on Sustainable Rural Development

Practical Action Publishing

Contents

Dignity for all

In the beginning, Jane Njaguara – a farmer in Kenya – had a single goat. By the time I met her, she had poultry, cows, and a thriving milling business. Not only could she send her children to school, she was also employing others in the community. In other words, to echo the theme of this book, Jane had fetched her bucket of water.

Undoubtedly, many factors contributed to Jane's achievements, including her membership of a dairy group supported by an IFAD-supported project. But a development project can only provide opportunity; it is only a drop in the bucket. I suspect the reason for Jane's success had as much to do with an inner drive to provide a better life for her family.

In my career as both a scientist and an administrator, I have learned to track success through objective indicators. But I have also found that to understand results we must go beyond what can be measured in a test tube or plotted on a spreadsheet. In the end, development is about what really matters to people. It's about empowering them to take greater control of their lives, against all the odds that may be stacked against them.

Sometimes a project's success can be measured against tangible factors. For me, however, the most important outcomes are often intangible, such as the pride of a mother who can send her children to school well-fed and well-nourished, perhaps for the first time. When I am privileged to witness such a moment in people's lives I know that real change is possible.

On paper, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a blueprint for ending hunger and undernutrition, as well as tackling poverty, inequality, and the impact of climate change (UN General Assembly, 2015b). There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and 169 targets, indicators, and means of implementation. The Agenda also commits signatories to a 'robust, voluntary, effective, participatory, transparent and integrated follow-up and review framework' to ensure implementation over the next 15 years.

This level of rhetoric is necessary for such a sweeping and ambitious agreement. A detailed list of targets and indicators is also critical to keep us all on track and to help measure outcomes. Yet I do not want to lose sight of what's truly important about the SDGs.

Development is a measurable process aimed at delivering immeasurable goods – improvement in collective and individual well-being and a safer, fairer, and sustainable world. At its heart, then, the 2030 Agenda is about restoring and strengthening hope and dignity for people struggling to make better lives for themselves and their families.

Can such an ambitious agenda be achieved? My answer is: why not?

The international community achieved the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) – to halve the poverty rate – five years ahead of schedule (UN, 2015). There are now more than 100 middle-income countries, as diverse as Brazil, Lesotho, and Vanuatu (World Bank n.d. a). Globally, 1.8 billion people are middle class, a number that could increase to 3.2 billion by 2020 and 4.9 billion by 2030 (Kharas, 2010). And in the last 15 years, the proportion of undernourished people in the developing world has fallen by almost half (FAO et al., 2015).

The 2030 Agenda and the SDGs reflect a growing consensus on development priorities, and signal the international community's desire to solve the world's problems. It is significant that this agenda was developed and agreed in a consultative process among the world's governments and ratified by world leaders. But the time has come to go beyond speeches and declarations, meetings and reports, and expression of commitments.

While we applaud the universal nature of the Agenda and the consultative process behind it, it is also important to recognize continuity with previous development efforts. We must be aware of the issues that have blocked their implementation so we can anticipate and, if possible, avoid similar problems. It is now more than ten years since the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness called for greater country ownership, harmonization, and accountability. Much progress has been made towards these goals, even as the direction of official development assistance (ODA) has become more uncertain. The 2030 Agenda will require even more attention to harmonization, and in addition to being owned by countries, implementation will have to involve the very people we are trying to help. This is what people-centred development means.

At the same time, the growing role of private foundations, more public–private partnerships, South–South and triangular cooperation, and the potential to leverage billions of dollars in remittances for development, are all changing the way we think about development. Everywhere there is an intensifying focus on demonstrating impact and results, and showing value for money in development spending.

Far more than the MDGs, the 2030 Agenda is an ambitious agenda: it aims to eradicate poverty and hunger, to leave no one behind, and to put all economies and societies on a sustainable path. It is also comprehensive, spanning social, environmental, and economic issues, as well as issues related to governance and means of implementation. Finally, it is an integrated agenda, with progress on any goal requiring concurrent and coherent action around others.

We know what to do. We know what works and what doesn't work. What we now need is sustained, evidence-based action. The 2030 Agenda has raised the bar in terms of the ambitions of development; but the expectations have been raised as well. We will be held accountable for delivering tangible and verifiable results.

The importance of rural transformation

The 2030 Agenda is achievable if we recognize the multi-faceted and interconnected nature of the challenges.

Our world is full of paradoxes, some of them grotesque. Amid rising affluence in our world, there is also growing inequality. In 2015, some 836 million people still lived in poverty (UN, 2015), and 795 million people remained chronically undernourished (FAO et al., 2015). While these hundreds of millions go to bed hungry each night, a third of all food is lost or wasted (FAO, 2011a). The three-quarters of the world's poor who live in rural areas are responsible for up to 80 per cent of the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia (IFAD, 2016c), yet many must buy food for their own table (Christiaensen and Demery, 2007).

It is a terrible irony that so many who produce food for others must buy it for themselves. But more than that, it is a travesty because smallholders are penalized at both ends. Lack of access to markets, poor infrastructure, and other causes often prevent smallholder farmers from benefiting from higher food prices. At the same time, they must pay these high prices to feed their own families.

Against this backdrop, we must confront the question of how humanity will feed and sustain itself in the future. The world is becoming increasingly urban, yet cities are still fed by people working the land in rural areas. The health of urban dwellers depends on the quality of the water that flows into cities from rural areas. And without strong rural economies that offer decent jobs and dignified living conditions, the exodus to cities will continue unabated, creating social, economic, and environmental instability.

Given the lack of resources and access to markets faced by many rural people – especially women, who make up nearly half of the developing world's farmers – there is little incentive to improve yields and productivity. If farming is perceived as a back-breaking and unrewarding activity, it is hardly surprising that young people leave rural areas in search of opportunity, swelling already overcrowded cities. Who will feed the more than 9 billion people expected to inhabit our planet by 2050 (UN DESA, 2015).

Rural areas are changing, as higher returns from agriculture attract more investment and create new opportunities. More than incremental change, however, rural areas need transformation. In an ideal world, higher demand for food and higher prices would translate into greater income and prosperity for the people who work the world's 500 million small farms (IFAD, 2013g). It is not enough for investment to flow into local areas. Laws and regulations must be in place to safeguard smallholders' access to land and the rights of local people. Only in this way can we move towards true transformation.

Viewed in a single column, the 17 SDGs appear almost manageable – a kind of global 'to-do' list that we must simply work through, one item at a time. Reality, of course, is much messier. Cross-cutting issues weave below the surface of the SDGs, and we ignore them at our peril. We must make progress on all the SDGs at once, recognizing how our efforts in one area can support work in another.

I am heartened, for example, that SDG 1 aims to 'end poverty in all its forms everywhere' and SDG 2 to 'end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture' (UN General Assembly, 2015b: 14). These goals, so critical to the lives of poor rural people, are at the 'top' of our collective to-do list. Yet I also know these goals are tied to a range of complex issues – from the inequalities faced by women to the causes of migration, or the impact of climate change.

While there is no single path to achieving the 2030 Agenda, I argue in this book that rural lives and rural development matter to the Agenda in a particular way. Any journey towards the SDGs must connect the smallholder farms in the countryside with the urban areas that rely on them for their survival and prosperity. Achieving such a universal agenda depends, paradoxically, on the individual journeys of millions of people out of hunger and poverty – each with a unique bucket of water to be filled.

Dramatic change is possible. Too many of the world's rural areas remain destitute, but over the years, in places as far-flung as Bangladesh and Burkina Faso, I have seen how rural transformation can change lives and communities. And this process must start with small farms.

The small family farm has been the main model of agriculture for thousands of years. In future, its role will only grow in importance. Therefore, we cannot leave the fate of smallholders to chance: they must be integrated coherently into development dialogue and planning.

When three-quarters of the world's poorest and hungriest people live in rural areas, they require a universal agenda to make these areas a priority. Simply put, recognizing the special needs of smallholders will go a long way towards rebalancing inequalities between rural and urban areas, and achieving all the SDGs.

There is also a practical reason to support small farms. In most of the developing world, the terrain and the socio-political structure are simply not conducive to larger farms. Developing the potential of smaller farms, then, is good economics because farming production systems have few economies of scale. In fact, small farms are often more productive, per hectare, than large farms when agro-ecological conditions and access to technology are comparable (Lerman and Sutton, 2006).

In China, 200 million small farms cultivate only 10 per cent of the world's agricultural land, yet they are responsible for 20 per cent of total production (HLPE, 2013). Over 10 million of Vietnam's rice farms are on fewer than 2 hectares of land (Thapa, 2009). These small-scale farmers are contributing to the success of one of the largest rice exporting countries.

Successful small farms lead to more vibrant rural economies. The impact on the local economy of more productive and remunerative small farms is to spur higher demand for locally produced goods and services. And this in turn spurs the growth of non-farm employment in services, agro-processing, and small-scale manufacturing. The net result is a dynamic flow of economic benefits between rural and urban areas so that nations have balanced and sustained growth. These are all keys to rural transformation.

Unlocking the potential

Transformation is not a new idea. More than 40 years ago, the 1974 World Food Conference recognized that food security and famine were the result of structural problems relating to poverty rather than failures in food production. The conference, which gave birth to IFAD, produced the far-reaching Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition. It stated that 'to remove the obstacles to food production and to provide proper incentives to agricultural producers' would require 'effective measures of socio-economic transformation', including policy reform, 'the reorganization of rural structures', 'the encouragement of producer and consumer co-operatives', and 'the mobilization of the full potential of human resources, both male and female', in order to achieve 'integrated rural development and the involvement of small farmers, fishermen and landless workers' (World Food Conference General Assembly, 1974).

Four decades later, we need to take a fresh look at our expectations for transformation. As the cliché suggests, it is better to teach people to fish than to give them fish to eat. But a truly transformative agenda would set the bar much higher, addressing the whole context in which people fish, how they fish, and what they fish for. It helps them fish today in a way that ensures there will be fish to be caught tomorrow and years into the future.

At IFAD, we build the capacity of farmer groups and organizations because, when smallholders join together, they have greater purchasing power, greater bargaining power in the marketplace, and greater power to influence policies that affect their lives. But we also know that local people are a fountain of knowledge. They know the times of flooding, the areas most affected by water scarcity, and the crops and livestock that respond best during droughts. They may lack formal education, but their experience of their context far surpasses that of the development workers who parachute into a village for a few weeks or months. Local people know what they need in order to prosper.

It may not be enough to upgrade value chains through agricultural research and extension services. Smallholders also need access tofinance to adopt new technologies or diversify their production and crop systems.

The development community increasingly realizes that smallholders are agents of change. Now the leaders and decision-makers of developing countries must get the message. Rural transformation requires governments to be responsible, transparent, and reliable. They must invest in their resources and their people more strategically. Ultimately, development starts at home.

In my own continent of Africa, only around 6 per cent of cultivated land is irrigated, compared with 38 per cent in Asia (FAO, 2005). And on average, sub-Saharan Africa applies only 18 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare of cultivated land compared to more than 149 kilograms in South Asia (World Bank, n.d. a).

Africa needs to scale up productivity, not necessarily by exploiting and expanding agricultural land, but by improving the productivity of existing land. Its leaders must invest more of their countries' own resources in agricultural research and development. They must reform their institutions to improve both the adoption and impact of agricultural innovation systems. And they must support the marriage of traditional technology with this culture of innovation.

As a Nigerian by birth, I grieve for the untapped potential of Africa. More than that, it symbolizes the mismanagement and corruption that has kept so many millions mired in hunger and poverty. Corruption is not by any means limited to Africa, but the scale of illicit outflows from the continent – some US$75 bn a year – is nothing short of scandalous (Kar and Spanjers, 2015). This money should be spent building roads, installing electrical lines, and educating and feeding people. Instead, the misappropriation of funds only feeds cynicism and despair.

At a time of global fiscal austerity, the use of foreign aid dollars attracts much scrutiny, and even criticism. Yet perhaps there is lessattention to the fact that ODA accounts for less than US$132 bn of developing country budgets annually across the entire world (OECD, 2016). Cumulative domestic resources, on the other hand, are estimated at US$7 tn annually (World Bank, 2013). How well are these resources being managed? What is their impact on development objectives? A universal agenda also implies the need to take a holistic view on the resource side as well. And the agenda has to be universally owned; ODA may be inadequate to achieve the SDGs, but ODA is not the whole story.

Developing countries need responsible governments accountable to their people and not to their own pockets. They need visionary leaders committed to the rule of law and the rooting out of corruption and fiscal mismanagement. They need people empowered to make lasting, transformative changes in their lives and communities.