PHA-Exchange> Food for a bottom-up thought

[Claudio]

Human Rights Reader 86

 
DOES IMPROVING THE PROVISION OF SERVICES EMPOWER POOR PEOPLE, OR IS IT THE EMPOWERING OF POOR PEOPLE THAT IMPROVES THE PROVISION OF SERVICES?

 

1. It has never been proven that improving the provision of services through privatization is the best approach to the problems of public sector inefficiency. Give the public sector the hidden or overt subsidies the government quite invariably gives the private sector (already) and the public sector may well perform better than it has done so far working on shoe-string budgets.   OK, but is this enough? 

 

2. No. Actually, to make services work for the poor, the poor need more control over those services --not privatization. This, because services are failing poor people; because governments are spending too little on poor people. (World Bank's World Development Report 2004)

 

3. In the provision of services, empowerment of the poor strives to enhance-beneficiaries'-power-over-providers (also called 'the short or direct route to accountability'). But the vested interests that are effectively blocking the poor's access to better services will resist reforms leading to greater power for beneficiaries.

 

4. The side on which we ought to be in this struggle is clear. Putting our energies on improving the provision of services for the poor from the top down is not an intervention that promotes human (people's) rights per-se.

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn

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Mostly taken from F+D (the journal of the IMF) 40:3, Sept 2003.
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