DEVELOPMENT: Experts Plead For Partnership with ‘Southern’ NGOs

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Dec 1 2003 (IPS) - Independent development experts have urged global financial institutions, governments and developed country NGOs to establish partnerships for sustainable development with civil society organisations in the Third World.

Participants in the so-called First International Forum on Sustainable Development, which took place in Paris on Nov. 27-29, said such partnerships should aim at ensuring people’s access to health, energy, and water services.

The Forum was organised by a French monthly magazine, with the support of France’s authorities and several important private corporations. It was joined by numerous government representatives, mainly from Africa, and development researchers and scholars.

The Forum’s organisers focused the debates on a “public-private partnership” (PPP) among governments and multinational corporations, as suggested since the early 1990s by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

However, the participants underlined that PPP has meanwhile proved to be counterproductive as a strategy in managing public services, such as water and electricity utilities.

In contrast, the experts said, partnership between consumers’ and citizens’ associations in the countries of the South has been successful in supporting people’s access to basic services.

Marc Vezina, director of the French NGO Water Solidarity, said: “In Mali, citizens have successfully created consumers’ associations to manage water services in villages and small cities.”

“At the beginning, we thought that these associations would fail. However, we realised soon that they were working remarkably well. After two years, they were even producing profits,” Vezina added.

Similar cooperatives have emerged in Burkina Faso and other West African countries.

Vezina argued that such small NGOs need technical and organisational counselling, to resolve problems directly associated with the managing of public services.

“They even need financial counselling to put the money they are saving from their normal operations to good use. Otherwise, their profits will be eroded by inflation or by bad financial operations.”

Ricardo Petrella, professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium and counsellor to the European Commission, also rejected the partnership between governments and private multinationals as sole strategy to achieve high-quality public services.

“This PPP is dominated by an ideological bias, which pretends that the private sector is naturally more efficient than public management,” Petrella said.

“It is curious that almost nobody claims that the Swiss or the Scandinavian policies for water services should serve as world-wide models. However, water utilities in Switzerland, in Sweden, and in Norway, although managed by the state, count among the most efficient of the world,” Petrella claimed.

He recalled that public-private partnership in managing public services has been used in such controversial accounts on management of water services as the Camdessus report, so called after the former IMF president Michel Camdessus, who headed the commission responsible for the paper.

In this report, the Camdessus commission even suggested that the private management of water services in the Third World must be accompanied by state subsidies, as guarantee to the return of investment of private multinationals.

“This is a reaction to the management failures of private multinationals controlling water facilities in Argentina, Bolivia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other countries in the South,” Petrella said.

“Instead of continuing to fund this failure, we should be talking of supporting local cooperatives.”

During the debates on health services, Bernadette Mungur, from the French Institute for Research on Development, urged the industrialised countries to promote partnerships with universities and local pharmaceutical industries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

This would “facilitate the transfer of technology and know how, to create adequate local conditions to fight back diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS.”

“So far, the discussions focus on the cooperation between governments and big pharmaceutical industries in Europe and North America,” Mungur said.

“But it is improving local know how in the South which should be the focus of our efforts, because it is the local health authorities and personnel there who are facing the challenge of combating diseases,” she added.

Jean-Hervé Bradol, president of Doctors without Borders, also underlined that “health policy represents a choice of society that should not be influenced by the interests of powerful private corporations.”

In an interview with IPS, Bradol called the partnership between public sector and private multinationals “a polluting concept that has been corrupting the necessary debate on a successful health policy in the countries of the South against AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.”

As example of the failures of this partnership, Bradol recalled that during the 20 years since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, “the interests of the big pharmaceutical industry have prevailed over the health of millions of people in Africa.”

Governments in Europe and North America as well as international health authorities should be supporting the South’s efforts to guarantee inexpensive access to medicines, instead of demanding more and more rigid rules and patents to protect the pharmaceutical interests, Bradol said.