Food for a bottom-up thought
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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 ser-
vices 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 govern-
ments 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 inter-
ests that are effectively blocking the poor's access to better
services will resist reforms leading to greater power for bene-
ficiaries.
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, Vietnam
mailto:claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn
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Mostly taken from F+D (the journal of the IMF) 40:3, Sept 2003.