IFAD social reporting blog

by Jessica Thomas

Can you think of a business that is  three times more profitable than Apple? A business that involves 35.8 million people and operates in every single country of the world?

You may not be able to come up with the name because it doesn't have a name, it doesn't have a brand, but it's there and regretfully, it's a huge business…..

I am talking about the business of human trafficking or human slavery, one of the most flourishing and profitable criminal industries in the world.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Trust Women Conference in London. At this two-day event I heard 'There are more slaves today than ever before in history’. When I heard this statement I thought, how can that be, it is definitely wrong. But when I saw the facts and statistics, and heard testimonials from the survivors, I was stunned by the atrocities but heartened that so many people, companies and organizations are giving their time, energy and ideas to stop this silent crime.




Human trafficking is the immoral and illegal buying and selling of human beings as commodities to meet global demands for forced labour or commercial sexual slavery. While women and girls are the most vulnerable and make up 66% of the total annual trafficking, this terrible crime does not spare children and men, who respectively constitute 22% and 12% of the total.

The Trust Women Conference aims to put the rule of law behind women’s rights through concrete action. The annual conference brings together global corporations, lawyers, and pioneers in the field of women's rights to take action and forge tangible commitments to empower women.

Over 500 participants from 55 countries attended the conference and engaged in panel discussions and “action groups" addressing specific issues that disenfranchise women and limit their potential.

The panels ranged from 'Women, economic accelerators of society', highlighting the fact that when a woman has a job, 90% of her income goes toward her family and how providing women with  access to education and credit helps to enhance the wellbeing of the household  to  'How to make mega-cities women-friendly’. This panel used the data from the recent Reuters poll which examined transportation safety and caught the headlines of mainstream media. Other panels dealt with topics such as  'Access to land, the biggest challenge for women's empowerment' discussing the challenges of property rights and access to credit as an essential tool to eradicate poverty;  'The Human cost of a bargain: Slavery in the modern supply chain' that highlighted corporate accountability, the need for sound monitoring mechanism and introduced the Memex project which counters human trafficking via domain specific indexing (highly specific internet content search); 'I was a slave: real stories of survival', heart breaking stories from the survivors themselves;  'The long road to freedom: the Psychological issues faced by slavery survivors' where survivors and health workers talked about how to deal with survivor’s long term traumatic disorders.

Muhammad Yunus - Chairman, Yunus Centre and Founder,Grameen Bank (Bangladesh)

The conference benefitted from high-profile speakers such as Emma Bonino, former Italian Foreign Minister; Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Laureate; Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Kailash Satyarthi; world renowned artist, Anish Kapoor; and Cyrus Vance Jr., District Attorney, New York County. They spoke with passion and above all spoke less of what is the harsh reality and more of what they are actually doing and what the world needs to do.

I also heard from Ellie, from Marcela, from Manan and from Evelyn. They did not have honorifics and fancy titles…. they are survivors who only a few years ago were slaves….slaves in the mines, domestic slaves and sex slaves.

The event featured two award ceremonies: The Trust Women Hero award presented to Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC for his innovative and high impact work that helped women to advance and defend their rights; and Chika Oduah, a Al Jazeera freelance journalist and producer  who received the Honorary Journalist Award recognizing her significant contribution to women's rights.

This year’s conference ended with the launch of  the End Child Slavery Week campaign. In the coming days, the organizers will announce the conference actions, wills and pledges.

As Kailash Satyarthi said  "To stop all forms of slavery, including child slavery we need to build a new culture of partnership and alliances, we need to enforce strong laws and we need to build a sense of urgency so that the world is forced into action".

Let me close this blogpost with one of the most touching sound
bites from one of the many survivors who is on the road of discovery and recovery…….. ’

I am not just a survivor,
I can do what you do, if you train me' …

Evelyn Chumbow, Survivor Advocate

P.S. I was able to attend this amazing conference thanks to my organization's reward and recognition programme.

by Valeria Smarrini

Let's say you are concerned with rural poverty alleviation. Maybe you are a government official, or you are doing research, or you just had a brilliant idea and you want to design a project. Maybe your project is already up and running, and you want to be sure it is working properly. Maybe you work in IFAD: in this case, rural poverty is something you are certainly very familiar with.

Options on how to tackle rural development are copious. To make things even more exciting, the whole background of development cooperation is entering a brand new era, as post-2015 is fast approaching and different scenarios are emerging, which focus on different actors, responsibilities, and targets at all levels of ambition.

The thing about rural poverty is that, very often, it just plain complicated. It involves many dimensions, and each and every one of them is very deeply connected to all the others. Look at this from the outside: you pull a thread somewhere and, if you don't really know what you are doing, maybe this will cause some other part of the structure to collapse. Knowing that, you don't really want to experiment when it comes to people's livelihoods.

Let's not be discouraged, though – solutions do exist, and can be found. And this is not a needle-in-a-haystack type of research. What would really be helpful here is a flashlight or, even better, a map.

IFAD happens to have launched a promising tool today, the Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool (MPAT), which has been metaphorically described as a 'roadmap', or a 'dashboard' to better grasp the reality and dynamics of rural poverty, right at its origin: rural villages and households.

MPAT was first custom-designed in 2007, and it received feedback from international experts in various sectors of development through several round of fine-tuning. A beta version of the tool was then developed, tested with some further tweaking and training, evaluated from the European Commission, peer-reviewed by the academic community, and piloted.

The tool is really quite simple to operate. You have your survey templates at the household and village level, a fairly straightforward Excel sheet that does the maths when it's fed with raw data from the survey, and aggregate results for ten different components, spanning from basic needs, such as food security, to equality issues like gender. The idea is to see how these ten dimensions are doing and to also check whether an enabling environment is in place.
 
Innovation lies in the fact that the tool is based on the needs and the assets of smallholder farmers, and the dimensions it takes into account are all, undeniably, at the core of the rural development debate.
Actually, MPAT does more: it collects perceptions right in the households and villages where the effort to raise people out of poverty begins and ends.

Perceptions are subjective statements, one may argue? Yes, they are. But subjective sounds a lot more like objective when it comes out of those who are the object of the whole rural development effort. So, information obtained through this exercise may be subject to some degree of simplification, but the proxies can certainly be useful in defining priorities, which is a very honest thing to do when dealing with a complex situation. I will steal the words of Alasdair Cohen, project manager of the IFAD Management Team for 2012-2013 MPAT finalization, and say that this tool allows us to "look at qualitative data through a quantitative lens."

See how MPAT can be used as a flashlight, or a map?

And, by the way, it seems to be working. Feedback was shared during the event from colleagues from the Kenya-based NGO Nuru International and IFAD's ProPESCA project in Mozambique – and it was encouraging feedback in both cases.

I will admit I joined the event asking myself why another tool to deal with impact, and soon found myself asking "why not?". I can definitely see this at work for the development community at large, to draft roadmaps to inform decision-making and resource allocation, develop meaningful indicators, design compelling projects that go straight to the point and, last but definitely not least, claim evidence exactly where evidence is needed.

Want to find out how to assess and address the various dimensions of rural poverty? Interested in knowing how to map rural poverty and measure the impact of rural development projects?

Tune in on 3 April at 3:00pm CET to find out about IFAD’s Multidimensional Poverty Assessment tool (MPAT) - your "rural poverty dashboard".

Our journey to develop this tool for development practitioners was made possible thanks to the Innovation Mainstreaming Initiative (IMI) - a DFID-funded initiative. And we cannot be grateful enough for this generous contribution, as the IMI has allowed us to launch and mainstream numerous groundbreaking and innovative initiatives.

This morning driving to work, it occurred to me that we may be able to link MPAT, is a tool designed to help development practitioners to take a snapshot of rural poverty by collecting people's ideas, with SenseMaking, a methodology that Dave Snowden shared at the Failfaire - another IMI sponsored initiative.

So what does MPAT do? It collects project beneficiary perceptions on the following 10 components. The first six being fundamental needs and the latter four relating to rural assets, exposure and equality:

• food and nutrition security
• domestic water supply
• heath and health care
• sanitation and hygiene
• housing, clothing and energy
• education
• farm assets
• non-farm assets
• exposure and resilience to shocks
• gender and social equality

If you are into psychology, you can probably find similarities with Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

We at IFAD put PEOPLE at the centre of our work. So if you are an advocate of bottom-up approaches, MPAT is your tool, as it allows you to document people's perspectives both a household and village level and map these out.

You can find out more about this tool on our website. Make sure you follow us live on 3 April at 3pm CET via webcast or on Twitter by following #ifadmpat.

Hope to see many of you virtually and before signing off, check out Thomas Rath's piece on Sustainable rural development needs a roadmap.