Global Policy Forum

By Meena Menon

A meeting of U.N. experts, government and NGO members from many nations opened in this western Indian city Tuesday asking peoples' groups and bureaucrats to be friends and not rivals in tackling rural poverty.

While NGOs have helped strengthen democracy, their role is more than just criticising governments, said Klemens Van De Sand of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) which has organised the four-day conference. ''We are convinced that alleviating mass poverty is the biggest challenge in the 21st century,'' Sand, Assistant President, IFAD Programme Management Department told the opening session of the 'tenth IFAD-NGO consultation'.

He added that some of the major causes of rural poverty were policies and institutions that do not serve the poor. Senior Indian NGO representative Mohan Dharia, of the group VANARAI, pleaded for freeing poverty alleviation programes from the ''clutches of the bureaucracy

According to Dharia, poverty reduction programmes should not be seen as altruistic but as adding to the purchasing power of the poor. Therefore rich nations should be more generous in funding such programmes, he argued.

The Pune meeting is part of a series of tripartite consultations IFAD has held since 1990 to consider how the U.N., NGOs and governments can work together to tackle rural poverty. It follows IFAD's December 1998 tripartite consultation in the Egyptian capital Cairo.

More than 50 NGOs from 28 countries and representatives of the governments of India, Armenia, Benin, Chile and Zambia have assembled in Pune to discuss how NGOs, governments and IFAD can work together to reduce poverty and ensure food security.

Government officials at the conference agreed that NGOs had a major role to play in official poverty alleviation efforts. Chandra Ayyangar, a top government official of western Maharashtra state where the confernce is being held, said it was difficult for the government to implement rural development programmes without NGO involvement.

The government of India too has now realised the crucial role of NGOs, a senior Indian government official told the conference. According to J.S. Sharma, Joint Secretary, Rural Development Ministry, there has been a policy change in official rural poverty alleviation programmes to give greater role to NGOs.

India's over two-decade-old ambitious Integrated Rural Development Programme that targets an estimated 244 million rural poor, now makes it a point to involve NGOs from the village level upwards, he said.

According to Van De Sand, partnerships have to be based on common concerns and IFAD's main concern was eradication of rural poverty. IFAD aims to impart greater control to the poor over their lives, he added. For this, it was vital to increase their access to social and economic resources, he said.

Aloysius Fernandez of MYRADA, one of India's well known NGOs working with the rural poor, agreed. ''It is not enough to teach the poor to fish when they cannot reach the river,'' he said.

The Pune meeting is expected to provide inputs for designing effective rural poverty alleviation projects, said Shyam Khadka of IFAD's Asia-Pacific division.

Rural credit experts at the conference said the most effective way to raise living standards of the poor was to boost farm productivity. According to Y.C. Nanda, chief of India's premier rural credit institution, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, his bank is reaching out to people bypassed by the formal banking system.

Since 1992, the bank, better known by its acronym NABARD, has disbursed more than 300 million U.S. dollars to some 100,000 self-help groups in India's over half a million vilages. It aims to create one million self-help groups in the country by the year 2008, he said.

According to MYRADA's Fernandez, NGOs may have to diversify their roles depending on community needs. IFAD was set up in 1977 as the 13th specialised agency of the United Nations. It is not a relief agency and its resources are made available on a cost recovery basis to finance projects and programmes to raise food security among the rural poor.

IFAD has disbursed 6.5 billion dollars so far to 115 nations reaching out to more than 250 million people. Some 800 NGOs are working in IFAD backed projects today, up from just 173 seven years ago.

According to world poverty statistics, some three billion people live on less than two dollars a day. This includes 40 percent South Asians and 46 percent people in Sub Saharan Africa who survive on less than a dollar a day.

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