Five Chinese NGOs have been awarded government funds to facilitate village-level poverty alleviation and development projects in Jiangxi Province as part of an Asia Development Bank-supported programme whose progress was discussed at a forum in Beijing on January 19.

This was the second round of funding in a two-year programme that has the backing of the State Council’s Leading Group of Poverty Alleviation and Development Office and its local counterpart in Jiangxi. They are together providing around USD 1.7 million to match a USD 1 million ADB technical assistance grant.

In 2006, six NGOs were selected to begin poverty reduction projects in 19 project villages of Le’An (乐安), Ningdu (宁都) and Xingguo (兴国) counties, Jiangxi. Each NGO received CNY 500,000 project funds per village, allocated from the government poverty alleviation budget, with an additional 10% contribution from the ADB grant to cover staff and administrative costs.

The NGO grants are coordinated and managed by the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, whose leader, He Daofeng (何道峰), has long championed NGO involvement in poverty reduction, advocating competitive tendering for government funds.

ADB and government officials told the January 19 forum that this is the first time that Chinese NGOs have managed government funds to implement government programmes on a significant scale. Speakers also stressed the systematic and competitive selection process, which was overseen by a review panel of Chinese researchers, Jiangxi poverty alleviation officials and NGO representatives.

Liu Dongren (刘冬文), of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, said that after 20 years of experience in poverty reduction work he believes that “innovative institutional arrangements” can do most to reduce poverty, and that NGO-government cooperation is exemplary of such innovation. The Jiangxi programme, he said, “has changed the long standing perception in people’s minds that it is always government that does these things.” NGOs, he suggested, are better placed than government agencies to understand the situation of rural households, more effective in stimulating participatory planning processes, and better than government at involving women and “motivating the masses” in general. The programme has also improved transparency in the use of funds, he said.

Another address came from Professor Li Xiaoyun, (李小云), Dean of the College of Humanities and Development (人文与发展学院) at China Agriculture University and head of an “expert group” that is advising and monitoring the Jiangxi programme. A consultant to many internationally funded technical assistance programmes, Li was one of the architects of the “village participatory planning” approach that now forms an important plank of Chinese government poverty alleviation policy.

He told the meeting that “market based mechanisms” were preferable to “monopoly allocation” of public resources for poverty alleviation work, but acknowledged that “there are potential areas of conflict in strengthening NGOs’ role in social management.” For example, he said, “If NGOs are closer to the people than the government, if they’re taking government money and doing a good job, this creates a kind of psychological pressure on government.”

Li noted that there can be quite high “external transaction costs” for NGOs delivering poverty alleviation projects; but he argued, in a veiled reference to misallocation or misappropriation of government funds, that the “internal transaction costs” of government schemes are higher.

Nevertheless he pointed to the need for further NGO capacity building both within and beyond the parameters of the Jiangxi programme. He described China’s civil society as “still in its infancy,” saying that “We can hardly find enough qualified candidates to participate in bidding” for programme funds. He urged that more steps be taken during the second phase of the programme to develop local NGOs in Ningxia.

Li also noted several practical implementation problems, such as the fact that NGOs headquartered outside the province are not able to open a local bank account in Jiangxi.

In addition, he questioned whether contracting NGOs to roll out specific programmes gives full reign to their comparative advantages. “If they are just doing service delivery they may not be well-motivated and they are not necessarily being innovative,” he said.

The novel nature of the NGOs in the first phase had, however, evidently impressed two farmer representatives from the project sites, who spoke of how moved they were to see staff coming voluntarily to their fields in the heat of the day.

In response to a question from the floor about how they understood the idea of “NGO,” a woman villager named Yang said: “An NGO has no officials, no Party Secretary, no Director. It’s a kind of spontaneous civil structure with no power, no people on the payroll.”

NGO winners

Grant awards were announced for new work in Jiangxi by three NGOs from outside the province: the Beijing Liangsuming Rural Development Centre (京梁簌溟乡村发展中心), Kunming Earthwatch Institute for Sustainable Development of Natural Resources (昆明思德瑞自然资源可持续发展研究院) and the Ningxia Centre for Environment and Poverty Alleviation (宁夏扶贫与环境改造中心). The Ningxia group had already received funds for project work in the first phase of the programme.

Jiangxi’s home-grown Mountain-River-Lake Sustainable Development Promotion Association (江西省山江湖可持续发展促进会), which also participated in the first phase, won a second award to expand their own work and, in addition, a third grant to work on project sites in Ningdu in collaboration together with a recently established Ningdu County Community Poverty Alleviation Research Association (宁都县社区扶贫研究会).

Other NGOs involved in the first phase of the programme were the China Association for NGO Cooperation (CANGOs, 中国民间组织合作促进会), Heifer Project International, the Jiangxi Youth Development Foundation and the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family (陕西省妇女理论婚姻家庭研究会).

The ADB’s contribution to the Jiangxi programme comes from the UK Department for International Development, via the Bank’s Poverty Reduction Cooperation Fund.

RGM International, a Singapore-based pulp, paperboard and energy company that is building two power stations in China and that produces viscose fibre in Jiangxi, donated an additional USD 80,000 to the China Foundation Poverty Alleviation to support capacity building under the aegis of the programme.
Report by Nick Young, January 22 2007