Training as if China isn’t a Country

By Hannah Ryder, Deputy Country Director, United Nations Development Program China


One continent, many countries: Credit: 玖巧仔, 2009

Africa isn’t a country.

It’s an obvious statement but a while back, even American Vice President Joe Bidden forgot it when he said: “There's no reason the nation of Africa cannot and should not join the ranks of the world's most prosperous nations”.

Having worked in development for over ten years now, I think recognizing the wealth of diversity across the African continent - different languages, cultures, economics – is key. There is no way you can understand the different problems facing the continent – and required solutions – unless you recognize its wealth of diversity.

But working in China I now have the complete opposite problem: I now have to remind myself that while China is indeed a country, its scale and experience is not like that of any other country.

China is almost a continent.



For example, by 2015, China is projected to have 3000 kilometers of urban rail networks, and by 2020, 5000. That’s half the size of East Africa’s entire rail network – urban and rural, let alone just in cities. Over the next 10-12 years, the population of rural to urban migrants within China is forecast to be almost the size of the USA’s entire population.

There is also scale in China’s policy. For instance, according to a report UNDP China recently commissioned, China’s basic pension scheme covers 820 million people, and 20 million more people per year are expected to become eligible for it, meaning by 2030 it could cover the equivalent of the entire African population.

This scale makes China an excellent – and unique – partner for learning from on development. Since 1990, China has brought 600 million people out of poverty. But to do this, given its own scale and diversity, China needed a huge and varied number of policies and approaches.

This is where the facts that Africa is not a country and China is almost a continent come in. Here’s why.

One of UNDP China’s key stakeholders is an organization called the International Poverty Reduction Center in China (IPRCC), which started up in 2005, to help share China’s experience of poverty reduction and development with other countries. Since then, IPRCC has organized 60 training workshops for 1450 trainees from 97 countries. And IPRCC is not the only organization that delivers this kind of training. For instance, with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), I recently helped to open a three-week long low-carbon development workshop. There were around 80 officials at the workshop – from Zimbabwe to Ethiopia – all from various ministries in their home countries. These workshops are held twice a year, and many other Chinese ministries hold similar thematic workshops. In fact, China’s recent 2014 White Paper on Foreign Aid provided statistics that suggest that between 2010-2012 around 1.5-2 seminars per day of around 25 officials were held! I'm sure very few other countries in the world could manage this!

Yet the challenge of running such workshops, for such a diverse audience, is huge. It makes attracting the right participants who will be in charge of deciding or implementing policies difficult – because that takes time to investigate and go back-and-forth on with stretched Chinese offices in recipient countries. It makes tailoring the workshops to varied participants to make each part useful very difficult – as this might require re-design of the agenda or changing partners for various field-trips. And critically, it makes follow-up of the workshops with individual queries or ideas for on-the-ground projects very complex. On return to their recipient countries, participants can find it hard to create active partnerships with China.

Yet scale is good. Scale is needed, if poverty is to be reduced around the world. So how can China balance its scale with tailoring to a diverse audience? Can China shift to meet the targets for numbers of people trained but also deliver more long-term results?

The fact is, although China is one country, being almost a continent, it has a great deal of diversity within it. It has potential to vary and adapt its training programmes. So UNDP is supporting China – and the IPRCC in particular – to try this. One example is a workshop we hosted a week or so ago, with a few mayors from Bangladesh. The mayors had visited China previously, and expressed interest in learning more about a particular service that local governments in China often use, called “one stop shop” centers. We helped IPRCC follow through this request, and tailor the workshop to help the Bangladeshi delegates work out how to adapt the “one stop shop” model to their situation, there and then.

We can’t be sure whether the mayors will actually set up the centers, but we think there is a much higher likelihood of this happening now, and our office in Bangladesh will remain in touch with them to support them if they decide to go ahead.

These new adaptive approaches are often suggested as useful for OECD aid donors. But China, being one country but almost like a continent, really has potential to excel at it, as China has experience as varied as the African countries it partners with. Experimenting with (or piloting) a shift to a more tailored approach, plus following-up through our global reach – is something UNDP can offer to China, but more importantly to those countries – including in the diverse African continent – that want to learn from China’s experience to reduce poverty at home, and deliver long-term results.

This post first appeared on UNDP China's Our Perspective, in which Director Ryder and her colleagues chronicle their lives in China promoting sustainable human development.