Worker on a farm in Felicity, Chaguanas, Trinidad, harvesting sweet potatoes. Climate change has brought drastic changes in the weather of this twin-island Caribbean nation. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Bjorn Lomborg
COPENHAGEN, Feb 13 2015 (IPS)

Right now, the United Nations is negotiating one of the world’s potentially most powerful policy documents. It can influence trillions of dollars, pull hundreds of millions out of poverty and hunger, reduce violence and improve education — essentially make the world a better place. But much depends on this being done well.

In the year 2000, the U.N. laid the foundation for the Millennium Development Goals, which comprised 21 mostly sharp and achievable targets in eight areas, including poverty and hunger, gender equality, education, and child and maternal health.Imagine sitting in a high-end restaurant with a menu lacking prices or sizes. You do not know whether the pizza costs two dollars or 2,000 dollars, or whether it will feed just you or your entire party.

These goals have been hugely successful, not only in driving more development funding but also in making the world better. For instance, the world promised to halve the proportion of people hungry counting from 1990. And the progress has been remarkable.

In 1990, almost 24 percent of all people in the developing world were starving. In 2012, ‘only’ 14.5 percent were starving, and if current trends continue, the world will reach 12.2 percent in 2015, just shy of the halving at 11.9 percent.

Likewise, we promised to cut by half the proportion of poor. In 1990, 43 percent of the developing world lived below a dollar a day. In 2010, the proportion had already been more than halved at 20.6 percent – on current trends the proportion will drop below 15 percent by 2015, showing spectacular progress.

With the MDGs ending this year, we have to ask what’s next. The U.N. has started an inclusive process from the 2012 Rio Earth summit to define so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2016-2030.

So, over the coming months, countries, missions, U.N. organisations and NGOs will perform a complex dance to determine – and hopefully whittle down – the next set of targets. But that’s easier said than done. Last summer, 70 U.N. ambassadors in the open working group proposed a vertiginous 169 targets. Clearly we need priorities.

The SDGs will determine a large part of the 2.5 trillion dollars in development aid the world will spend until 2030. In order to spend the money most effectively and help as many people as possible, negotiators now need to zero in on the targets that promise the biggest benefit for the investment.

My think-tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, has asked 60 teams of top economists, including several Nobel laureates, to identify which targets will do the most good for each dollar spent. Imagine sitting in a high-end restaurant with a menu lacking prices or sizes. You do not know whether the pizza costs two dollars or 2,000 dollars, or whether it will feed just you or your entire party.

This is where the U.N. is today – lots of well-intentioned targets with no prices or sizes. Our economists have taken the 169 targets and evaluated the social costs and benefits of each.

The best ones – the targets that have economic, social and environmental benefits 15 times or higher their costs – are painted bright green. Less good ones are light green, mediocre ones yellow and the poor targets – the ones that cost more than the good they do – red. Backed by thousands of pages of peer reviewed economic research, such a simple colour scheme will hopefully help the world’s busy decision makers focus on picking the most effective targets.

Reducing malaria and tuberculosis, for example, is a phenomenal target. Its costs are small because solutions are simple, cheap and well-documented. Its benefits are large, not only because it avoids death and prolonged, agonizing sickness, but also improves societal productivity and initiates a virtuous circle.

Similarly, we should focus on at least halving malnutrition, because there is robust evidence that proper nutrition for young children leads to a lifetime of large benefits – better brain development, improved academic performance, and ultimately higher productivity as adults. For every dollar spent, future generations will receive at least 45 dollars in benefits.

But at what point do goals simply become aspirations? While many ambitious goals are commendable, they may be unrealistic in practice – and could hinder instead of help progress.

For example, setting an absolute goal of ending global malnutrition, warn the economists, may sound alluring, but is implausibly optimistic and inefficient. We cannot achieve it, and even if we could, the resources to help the last hungry person would be better spent elsewhere.

At the other end of the scale, some proposed targets are ineffective. The doubling of the renewable energy share by 2030, for example, sounds great in theory but practically is an expensive way to cut just a little CO₂. Instead, the focus should be on providing more energy to poor people, a proven way of inclusive growth and poverty alleviation.

And in order to reduce carbon emissions, removing fossil fuel subsidies in third world countries promises much higher benefits. Reducing these subsidies in countries where gasoline is sometimes sold for a few cents per liter would stop wasting resources, send the right price signals, and reduce the strain on government budgets, while also cutting emissions.

Of course, the ultimate decision for the Sustainable Development Goals is a political one. No doubt, economics is not the only measure of what the global society should ultimately choose as its development priorities, but costs and benefits do play an important role.

But if well-documented economic arguments can help even just to swap a few poor targets for a few phenomenal ones, leveraging trillions of dollars in development aid and government budgets in the right direction, even small adjustments can make a world of difference.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Given the likely persistence of political pressure to reduce the yawning federal deficit, the United States – whether under President Barack Obama or his presumed Republican challenger, Mitt Romney – must be more selective in its foreign aid programme, according to a new report released here Tuesday by two influential think tanks.

The report, a joint production of the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Center for American Progress (CAP), calls for re- allocating bilateral economic aid to increase support for 32 high- priority and generally well-governed countries, while curtailing assistance to 51 others.

It urges a similar weeding out process among the 134 current recipients of U.S. security assistance, of which only 45 should be considered high-priority and thus eligible for increased support.

“The United States must make hard choices about where to invest its resources,” according to CGD’s Connie Veillette, who co-authored the report with John Norris at CAP, a think tank from which the Obama administration recruited a significant number of its top foreign policy and aid officials.

“Foreign assistance works best in countries that embrace policy reforms and are committed to working with the United States as partners,” she added.

The nearly 300-page report, “Engagement Amid Austerity,” also calls for Washington to focus its aid efforts on three areas in which the U.S. has a “comparative advantage”: health, food security, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance, particularly given the Pentagon’s quick-reaction capabilities.

The report urges upper-middle-income recipients of Washington’s nearly eight-billion-dollar-a-year President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) programme, including several southern African and Caribbean countries, to assume more responsibility for its cost and operations.

And it calls for a major overhaul of Washington’s food aid programme to allow for more local and regional food purchases instead of insisting that almost all food aid be exported from the U.S. itself aboard U.S. ships.

The report also recommends the establishment of a bipartisan International Affairs Realignment Commission that would present a comprehensive package of reforms to be accepted or rejected in toto by the new administration and Congress. Such a mechanism was used successfully several years ago to decide on the politically hypersensitive issue of which military bases to close.

While the report, the product of consultations of a 15-member bipartisan working group over the past six months, does not recommend any reduction in the U.S. international affairs and aid budgets, it assumes that political and fiscal realities will force cuts, regardless of who wins the November presidential race.

“It is far easier to demonise foreign aid than to explain how relatively modest programmes to improve living standards in the developing world have consistently proven to be in the national interest over the long term,” according to Veillette.

The current Republican-backed budget plan in the House of Representatives, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan and endorsed by Romney, calls for cutting the foreign affairs budget by more than 30 billion dollars from 2012 levels over the next four years – or by some 10 percent a year – in contrast to the steady increases it mandates for the Pentagon.

In determining how to more effectively allocate U.S. diplomacy and aid in times of austerity, the task force considered multiple variables for each country recipient, including GDP per capita, net development assistance per capita, military expenditures, and country scores on half a dozen multinational indices designed to measure different aspects of governance, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, and the Human Development Index.

In addition, it considered more subjective factors, such as short- and long-term strategic interests, political support, and the traditional strength of the bilateral relationship. It also considered the degree to the role of multilateral assistance programmes to which the U.S. contributes.

All recipient countries were then divided into three categories for both economic and security assistance.

The first two include those considered “priority investment countries”, for which continued or increased aid was warranted; and those considered to have “limited expectations”, for which aid would continue based largely on short-term imperatives, such as geo- political concerns.

The last category is those to which aid should be curtailed for any of three reasons – because they could be “graduated” from assistance within one to five years based on declining need and growing capacity; or because aid programmes there were too small or expensive to operate effectively; or because their performance, especially in the area of governance, was too poor to justify continued aid except for humanitarian reasons or to support local civil society.

Of the 103 countries currently receiving economic assistance, the report found 32 qualified as “priority investment countries”; among them, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mozambique, Senegal, South Sudan, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, Tunisia, the Palestinian Territories, Bangladesh, Nepal, El Salvador, and Peru.

It also cited Mali but noted that the recent military coup d’etat probably disqualified it.

Limited expectation countries included, among others, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Kazakhstan, Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, Cuba, and Mexico.

Among countries where aid could be curtailed, the report cited Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Nigeria in Africa; Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka in Asia; Brazil, Colombia and the islands states of the Eastern Caribbean in the Americas as those which could be graduated from U.S. aid programmes.

Laos, Timor-Leste, Morocco, Guyana, and Jamaica were among those which were considered either too small or too expensive to operate, but the report noted that aid could continue in these countries with a minimal U.S. presence.

Among the “poor performers” were Angola, Cameroon, Sudan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Several Central Asian states, Afghanistan, and Pakistan also fell into this category, but the report stressed that the U.S. could continue providing economic aid – albeit reduced from current levels – to the latter two through a proposed “strategic fund” that would be administered separately by the State Department.

Among the 45 “priority investments” for U.S. security assistance, the report cited most of the same countries deemed priorities for economic aid, including Nigeria, South Africa, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and Colombia.

“Limited expectation” countries included Ethiopia, Mozambique, Vietnam, Alteria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Yemen, among others, while countries which can “graduate” from U.S. security aid include India, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Malaysia, Singapore, among others.

“Poor-performing” countries where aid should be curtailed for reasons of poor governance of human rights abuses include Angola, Bahrain, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, and Nicaragua, although the report stressed that security-related assistance may continue through the proposed “strategic fund”.

The report stresses the importance of increasing cooperation with other donors, particularly multilateral institutions, in enhancing aid effectiveness and reducing costs and also suggests that Washington develop trilateral cooperations with emerging aid donors, notably India, South Africa, and Brazil, all of whom receive U.S. aid but have also launched their own aid programmes.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Canada is ending bilateral aid programmes in eight countries and refocusing efforts in five others due to “high operating costs”, a move which the umbrella group representing Canadian international development organisations say is difficult to immediately measure but will affect some of the poorest countries in the world.

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) will end bilateral programming where aid efforts are hindered by high operating expenditures: Nepal, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Niger, Cambodia and China, Scott Cantin, the agency’s media relations and public affairs manager, told IPS in an e-mail.

The agency will also reduce and concentrate its bilateral programming in Mozambique, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Pakistan, Cantin wrote.

The changes are part of the federal government’s plans to curtail 319.2 million dollars from CIDA’s funding over the next few fiscal years. More details about how the 2012 budget is to be implemented will be released in the coming weeks.

Chantal Havard, the government relations and communications officer at the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC) in Ottawa, argued that it is “hard to assess” the direct impact of the cost-cutting exercise because the exact reductions in each country are still unclear. Yet, she added, significant staff cuts will undermine CIDA’s capacity to play a strong leadership role among other donor countries.

Moreover, many of the countries that have experienced a total funding loss or decrease – eight are located in Africa – “rank at the bottom” of the United Nations’ 2011 Human Development Index, Havard said.

“We’re turning our back on those who need Canadian assistance the most,” she said.

Peru, Colombia, Ukraine, Bangladesh and Vietnam, with which Canada has either ongoing trade agreements or is carrying out significant business activity, will see no change in their relationships with Ottawa, Havard said, pointing out that many are middle-income nations.

Although Canadian development NGOs are unaware of the exact criteria determining which countries merit slashed funding, “there’s definitely a tendency towards bringing together more and more of Canada’s trade interests and business interests with international development interests,” she said.

Overall, the Conservative government is not “ideologically” attracted to development assistance as a principle because of problems accounting for funding and showing results, said Dane Rowlands, a professor and the associate director of Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Ottawa.

Still, Canada’s development arm emphasised that it will continue to provide aid assistance to Benin and Afghanistan, and meet publicly stated commitments to Caribbean countries, despite previous media reports.

The agency will deliver “value for aid dollars” and respond to humanitarian crises in a “timely and meaningful manner”, CIDA’s Cantin said. The government will maintain sufficient funding to meet development objectives like improving the health of mothers and children through the Muskoka Initiative and curbing poverty through multilateral programmes, he added.

Over time, the countries that the Canadian government has targeted for funding reductions will not to a great degree notice Canada’s withdrawal, though this might depend somewhat on whether CIDA also slashes financing to these states via its “Partnership with Canadians” branch, said Rowlands.

The branch supports Canadian organisations improving the quality of life in poor, developing countries.

Smaller communities, however, will experience “noticeable effects” when specific projects are terminated, Rowlands said. A further danger is that Canada’s rationale for selecting these countries for cuts – high operating costs – may also influence a possible “piling- on effect” whereby donors prefer concentrating in a few countries with an easier operational environment, he noted.

As a result, some of the countries CIDA has earmarked for the “chopping block” may become “aid orphans that few donors want to deal with”, he added.

In this era of global austerity, Canada faces a low immediate risk to its international standing among established donors which also register below the 0.7 percent of GDP target for aid, Rowlands conceded, although “behind closed doors I suspect some disappointment will be expressed to Canada”.

Funding recipient states will view Canada’s slashed bilateral assistance as its further withdrawal from the development scene, but individual nations are unlikely to voice complaints due to fears of deeper cuts or a wish to “make it back on the list”, he told IPS.

Within the wider development and NGO community, Ottawa is vulnerable to a further decline in its “once reasonably positive” reputation in this regard, noted the academic, adding that Canada will be perceived as “quick to cut assistance when times are tough” and will probably continue to “drift down the donor ranks”.

Today, Canada holds the 10th spot of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee ranking of donor nations, he said.

Yet, as the global economy slowly recovers and the government nears the next election, aid will probably increase, predicted Rowlands. By then, it will be harder to blame cost-cutting on economic weakness, he said.

And governments often turn their attention to foreign affairs as they grow “bored and frustrated with domestic issues” deeper into their terms.

Although coming off a rocky year in 2011, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is “not in crisis”, according to the organisation’s deputy general manager, Debrework Zewdie.

At a roundtable organised on Wednesday by the Council on Foreign Relations here, Zewdie stated that after being forced to weather a scandal last year and the ongoing international economic downturn, the Global Fund is once again receiving substantial commitments from bilateral donors.

A day after the news was officially disclosed to the Global Fund’s governing board, Zewdie announced new or renewed multi-year funding promises from Germany, Japan, Spain and the UK. The Global Fund’s most significant donor, the United States, has maintained its backing throughout the difficulties of the past year.

“Dr. Zewdie delivered a clear message that the Global Fund’s transformation is well underway, with a strong new focus on impeccable grant management,” Mark Isaac, interim president of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told IPS.

“She also underscored how critical ongoing U.S. leadership is to ensuring support from other nations and to reaching those most in need around the world with lifesaving services.”

The Global Fund began operating in 2002 with the expressed aim of operating differently from other such multilateral funders. It was to be a simple, straightforward organisation with a simple, straightforward mandate: to disburse funding with the aim of treating and preventing HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

Quickly attracting some of the biggest names in international philanthropy and celebrity, the impact and example of the Global Fund on global health over the past decade would be difficult to overstate. As of last year, the organisation had approved funding of some 23 billion dollars. Today, it is operating in 150 countries, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

Further, the Global Fund’s activities have been on the increase. Around 80 percent of its funding dispersal has taken place within the last five years.

Today, it is the world’s largest grant-making body working on the three diseases under its remit.

Alongside this massive ramping up, however, the Global Fund has inevitably become a complex behemoth. “When the Global Fund was created, it was supposed to be simple,” Zewdie said in Washington. “It’s nothing like that now.”

The Global Fund’s complexity appears to have led to an inability to adequately oversee its massive operations.

In January 2011, the Associated Press news agency, utilising data from the Global Fund’s own inspector general, published allegations that the Global Fund was losing tens of millions of dollars due to mismanagement and corruption. According to that data, up to two- thirds of grant monies for certain projects was being lost to various types of fraud.

Additional allegations of poor oversight and shoddy management came to light following the initial publication.

The news led the European Commission and several European countries to announce that they would be withholding nearly 450 million dollars, pending investigation.

The results quickly amassed, with the most dramatic ramification coming in November 2011. At that time, because some 2.2 billion dollars in pledged donor contributions had not materialised, the Global Fund’s governing board announced that it would be cancelling the next scheduled round of grant dispersal.

Since then, many have begun warning that the significant strides that have been made in recent years against each of these diseases were in danger of being rolled back. Zewdie’s comments on Wednesday coincided with the marking of World Malaria Day, the theme of which this year is “Sustain Gains, Save Lives”, clearly underlining the building anxiety.

The Global Fund has been adamant that, although the mid-term future of its efforts has been in danger during the contribution slowdown, the multi-year structuring of its programmes means that on-the-ground services have not experienced negative impacts.

According to a new report funded in part by the Clinton Health Access Initiative, however, 91 percent of cases of malaria resurgence over the past eight decades have been due to weakened control programmes, typically due to funding cuts.

The recent turnaround in donor sentiment is undoubtedly motivated at least in part by significant restructuring plans being implemented within the Global Fund.

The agency is currently halfway through a twofold plan aimed at dealing with issues of complexity and mismanagement. Zewdie reported that while the Global Fund’s grant-making monies used to be evenly split between administrative and programmatic costs, an expedited 60- day overhaul resulted in administrative costs being cut down to a quarter of the total.

In addition, the agency has moved to shift its focus to what those areas deemed “high impact”, following a realisation that resources were not going only to those countries most in need. The total number of staff – previously around 600 – will also be reduced.

By Beverly Bell
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 24 2012 (IPS)

In honour of Earth Day, we run an interview with Yves-André Wainright, who discusses ways that poor governance and the role of foreign donors have contributed to the country’s environmental catastrophe.

He also lays out a blueprint for what could turn the situation around, effectively mobilising both government and the population to begin restoring the environment.

Yves-André Wainright served twice as Haiti’s minister of environment. Trained as an agronomist, Yves-André’s work has focused on environmental management, especially management of natural resources and waste.

His comments follow:

My approach towards management of the environment is to have Haitians who face (the same environmental) challenges come together. We might not all share the same economic interests, but if we work together, we can reach a compromise where one’s interest won’t trump another’s.

A second issue is that (central) government ministries act as competitors rather than allies. As a result, information is not shared and institutions are not organised to provide assistance and directives to local government or NGOs (non-governmental organisations, and international agencies).

Since management of the physical environment is a crosscutting and long-term challenge, it’s very difficult to maintain continuity from one government to the next, which hinders the implementation of required programmes.

For example, in the 1990s, I led the preparation of an innovative programme to fund peasant-managed micro-enterprises for families who depended on cutting down trees in national parks. All state institutions including local governments, the judicial system, the national police, and key ministries would be able to give input and would receive training in the sustainable management of biodiversity.

The project facilitated coordination among the various stakeholders, public and private, through various management committees. The first disbursements were made two weeks before I left the government.

(When I returned,) the project was considered overall as having failed. The governance structure of the project was considered too complex, and (since) normally in the government, people from different ministers don’t talk to each other, the project’s implementation lacked leadership.

There were even 70 or so agronomists trained, and about 10 who went abroad for professional specialisation, but none of them were never put to use. And, the peasants never benefited from the comprehensive technical and financial assistance I had dreamed of.

The third issue I wish to highlight is the role of donors from the international community. They put too much emphasis on ‘transparency’ toward their foreign constituency and lack sensitivity to the process of building democracy within communities receiving aid.

I admire the abundance of documentation donors have accumulated on Haiti but feel that not enough effort is put into making this information available to local stakeholders. This has facilitated the creation of an oligarchy of consultants and specialists who monopolize the field of international assistance. Donors don’t seem to trust the initiatives from people outside of this circle.

For instance, during my first term as minister of environment, USAID and the World Bank were the main donors providing assistance to the process of clarifying the role of the newly created ministry and prioritising actions for environmental management and rehabilitation.

I started to organise multi-stakeholder platforms towards preparation of a National Action Plan for the Environment, but the donors decided to replicate the preparation process from various African countries – a plan written by specialists and validated afterwards by the civil society. They succeeded in having beautiful documents prepared, which are currently embellishing shelves of libraries in foreign universities.

What is needed is to help Haitians develop partnerships around common environmental concerns.

(In 2010), the office of the prime minister organised a forum on lessons learned from watershed management over the past 30 to 40 years. That forum had a large participation of funders, with data- rich presentations by the experts.

These presentations confirmed that, during the period considered, more and more short-term NGO-led projects promoted market-linked incentives for environmental protection instead of building of decentralised state capacity so that the government ensures respect of environmental norms.

(Participants of the forum) acted as though the state were outsiders of the process and that the government should be replaced by the market as the driving force for livelihood improvement.

But the problem is that the market promotes individualism and a spirit of competition. It can’t instill the feeling of community and citizenship needed to stimulate Haitians to take part in the rehabilitation of the environment.

We must have regulations that guarantee the socioeconomic and environmental rights of all citizens: the right to be informed of initiatives affecting their environment; the right to have input into (environmental) mitigation measures to be implemented; the right to an unbiased judicial system to (ensure) the application of norms.

We must also have an appropriate democratic governance structure able to implement this at the regional and local level. Otherwise, even if the billions of dollars pledged would be effectively disbursed, we won’t resolve anything.

One of the principles in the Rio Declaration on Sustainable Development (endorsed by 165 countries in June 1992) states, “Peace, economic development and protection of the environment are interdependent and indivisible.” There is no peace without social justice. I’m not preaching anything new.

Fortunately, there is progress being made. In October 2005, the government adopted an important environmental decree. It integrates most of the international principles for managing the environment promoted by the Rio Declaration. It identifies nine priorities (to be implemented by government authorities and) the private sector. By the private sector, I don’t just mean the bourgeoisie in town, but also peasants and small merchants.

There are ways to improve governance of the environment around these themes, provided they are integrated into a comprehensive and progressive land-use zoning process.

For example, alleviation of the pressure of agriculture production on mountainous lands should be a common objective for all groups working on any of these nine issues. With more than 500,000 families depending on subsistence agriculture on eroded lands, there’s no potential for improving living conditions.

Policies must be proactive in providing alternative means to make a living, and we have to invest more in building governance capacity at the municipal level.

We have to start working collaboratively. We can be successful in the nine priorities listed, but only if we admit that whatever our capabilities and our excuses, we’re condemned to fail without cooperation. By we, I mean the government, the ministries, the parliament, the NGOs and their networks, grassroots organisations and social movements, enterprises and trade unions, donors and others.

*Read the full, unedited interview with Yves-André Wainright here.

Interview translated by Larousse Charlot and David Schmidt.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance and is working on the forthcoming book, Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s New Divide. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Alexis Erkert is the Another Haiti is Possible Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has worked in advocacy and with Haitian social movements since 2008. You can access all of Other Worlds’ past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti here.

Excerpt:

Worldwide, women are largely responsible for managing family budgets, controlling 65 percent of global spending. But, women’s needs are often ignored when it comes to government budgeting, delegates at an international meet in Turkey’s largest city observed.

Over the last 10 years, there has been a growing movement to monitor national, regional, and local budgets and demand changes to allocation priorities to give women their due.

More than 100 countries from Norway to Tanzania engage in some kind of gender-responsive budgeting. Yet, the concept is facing new challenges due to the global economic crisis.

“Investing in gender equality is often just seen as a matter of providing money for the gender ministry,” Lakshmi Puri, executive director of United Nations Women, told IPS at the 12th International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development.

The Apr. 19-22 forum, organised by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, has been described as a process with a multiplier effect for local and national initiatives as well as strategies at the global level.

Impacts on women of seemingly “gender-neutral” budget investments in transportation, agriculture, education or infrastructure need to get attention, said Puri.

Budget decisions can determine whether a woman in a village has to spend hours each day gathering fuel; if her children can attend a free after-school programme; if she has to pay for private care or whether the neighbourhood bus stop is well-lit enough for her to feel safe.

“You can work hard, you can get laws passed to protect women’s rights, laws passed to improve women’s lives, but if no budget has been allocated for them, they’re not going to be implemented,” Diane Elson, the chair of the U.K. Women’s Budget Group, told IPS.

“Government budgets connect very directly with the everyday lives of women – the taxes they pay and the services they do or do not receive,” Elson said.

Those services are diminishing in both developed and developing countries as financial crises prompt “austerity” cuts, whether initiated by a national government or imposed by an outside institution such as the World Bank or IMF.

“When countries cut expenditures, it’s usually bad for women,” Elson told IPS.

“The powerful are able to protect themselves. The military budget doesn’t get cut. Services that help big business don’t get cut.

“What do get cut are the public-sector jobs women often hold, the services they rely on while caring for children and the elderly, even the hospital-provided bedclothes and bandages – that women then have to procure for ailing family members,” Elson said.

So-called “stimulus” or “economic recovery” measures often focus on reducing corporate taxes or decimating the tax base that provides social services, said Kathleen Lahey, a law professor at Queen’s University, Canada.

Declining tax revenues and individual governments’ shrinking roles in the modern globalised economy led some critics to ask if gender budgeting is still a meaningful tool.

“When you have limited funds is when you really need to look at equality,” observed Mary Rusimbi, executive director of Women Fund Tanzania.

In some cases, the world’s fiscal woes seem to have opened up more space for positive reform. “In Iceland, the government that presided over the financial collapse has been thrown out,” Elson said, noting that women now hold powerful posts as prime minister and finance minister in the new administration.

“Iceland had a referendum on whether the government should take on the liabilities of the banks and the people said no,” Elson added. “More democracy and transparency are being demanded.”

The need to “go deep down into the data” to create gender-responsive budgets “increases transparency and accountability because you have to know where the money goes,” Rusimbi told IPS. “It also raises issues of corruption that haven’t been talked about before.”

Equitable governance is good governance, said Zohra Khan of U.N. Women, which supports gender- budgeting initiatives in 55 countries, including in Mozambique where the group started its work by holding meetings and asking women what they needed.

“At first the men were furious, but we showed them how this kind of budgeting can help them get water closer to their homes and maternity wards built in their neighbourhoods – things that benefit the whole community – and the men got behind it,” Khan told IPS. “This is not about taking something away from men, this is about how local governments can be made more effective.”

The success of such initiatives has pitfalls. Unscrupulous or simply out-of-touch governments may seek a share of international funding for gender equality or attempt to use the concept to burnish their own credentials.

In the Philippines, officials have tried to count any activity in which women participated, including ballroom dancing classes, as “gender development activities,” while in Hungary, equality funds from the European Union were spent to promote anti-abortion campaigns, according to forum participants.

Well-meaning donor organisations can also create problems by just “offering to give a government money to train officials and produce some handouts,” Elson told IPS.

“It’s very different for a government to have the political will to really change how it allocates resources, than it is for it to have the will to take UNDP money for a three-year project,” as happened with an unsuccessful effort in Pakistan.

A better approach is the one taken in Mexico City, where women’s rights activists trained municipal officials and parliamentarians in gender-responsive budgeting; the government has now been carrying out the work on its own for six years.

“If it’s not rooted in what people want, in what women’s groups are advocating for, it can be very short-lived,” Elson said.

Engagement with grassroots women’s groups not only helps improve the success rate of gender- budgeting initiatives, it also provides a way for activists to engage more deeply with economic policies that may previously have seemed distant from their work on poverty, healthcare, education, or other issues.

“It’s very important for us to demystify the budget,” said Maria Victoria Raquiza from Social Watch Philippines. “At the end of the day, that’s our money.”

Water privatisation has been proven not to help the poor, yet a quarter of all World Bank funding goes directly to corporations and the private sector, bypassing both governments and its own standards and transparency requirements in order to do so, says a new report released Monday.

People in many developing countries often lack access to clean water, but the approach to remedy this problem has shifted in recent years to rely more on the private sector. Yet, as this new report and several other watchdog groups have shown, the change has been more harmful than helpful.

Corporate Accountability International, the U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that published the report, has called on the World Bank to stop funding the private water sector and start redirecting its money to public and democratically accountable institutions.

The release of the report, entitled “Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: Case for the World Bank to Divest”, coincides with the start of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund‘s 2012 Spring Meetings.

The World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has spent 1.4 billion dollars on private water corporations since 1993, according to the report.

As of January 2013, that investment will increase to 1 billion dollars per year. The report also says that the IFC is attracting 14 to 18 dollars of follow-up private investment for every 1 dollar it directly invests.

This money helps explain why the World Bank and the IFC continue to fund private water corporations, even though roughly one third of all private water contracts signed between 2000 and 2010 have failed or are in distress – four times the failure rate of comparable infrastructure projects in the electric and transportation sectors, according to CAI.

“A tremendous failure”

“Rather than focusing on guaranteeing access to clean and affordable water, the World Bank has promoted measures that will cost consumers more money for water,” says a 2010 report from the NGO Food and Water Watch.

The high cost can also be defined in human terms. That same report pointed out how poor water quality and sanitation bring about gastrointestinal diseases and parasites that are “the leading cause of illness and death throughout the developing world”.

CAI also criticises several different conflicts of interest, such as the World Bank’s ownership of water corporations while simultaneously presenting itself as an impartial advisor. Ultimately, “the World Bank has been the engine behind this corporate takeover of water systems and services,” its website states.

The World Bank encourages countries to either privatise their water systems or modify pre-existing public ones with a focus on profit, says CAI. As a result, the World Bank paves the way to further privatisation. It also pushes for infrastructures that offer advantages to “large corporate users over individuals and communities”.

“In the midst of a world water crisis, the World Bank is squandering resources needed to save millions of lives,” said Kelle Louaillier, executive director of CAI. “Its charter is to aid those in the greatest need, but its financial stake in private water corporations is creating perverse incentives which undermine the bank’s own mission.”

According to CAI, funding the privatisation of water hurts the world’s poorest and can also have negative effects on water access and human rights, such as in Manila, Philippines.

Here, the World Bank not only advised the government, but it also helped design the privatisation of water there.

“Years later, many residents still don’t have water, and affordability problems have gone through the roof,” Shayda Naficy, CAI’s water expert, said.

“The IFC is calling it a success, which it has been for its investors. But it’s been a tremendous failure from the perspective of everyday residents and the right to water.”

A World Bank spokesperson told IPS that the report misrepresented the World Bank’s role and did not elaborate. “IFC’s financing and advisory services have provided clean water and sanitation to over 20 million people as of 2011,” the spokesperson said.

World Bank reform?

Given that the bank is expected to vote on a new president this year – current president Robert Zoellick will step down in June – Louaillier suggested, “With a change at the top comes an opportunity for the bank to change course as it has before.”

One year ago, Zoellick declared that the world needs a “new geopolitics for a multi-polar economy, where all are fairly represented in associations for the many, not clubs for the few”.

In his view, the 2009 global financial crisis marked the definitive end of longstanding paradigms of the global economy and development. As a result, categorisations such as first or third world, donor or recipient, leader or led, “no longer fit”. Yet the reforms considered by the bank itself do not represent the same ideas.

Three candidates are on the list of Zoellick’s possible successors, with two of them non-U.S. candidates.

One is Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the other former Colombian finance minister Jose Antonio Ocampo.

Whilst both have been raking in high-profile endorsements, the United States is claiming its right to nominate the new World Bank president, who has always been a U.S. citizen.

The candidate of the United States is the South Korean-born Jim Yong Kim, who is currently president of Dartmouth University and former head of the HIV/AIDS department at the World Health Organisation.

The Canadian development community is concerned that the government’s international assistance commitment to poor nations is waning in the interest of fiscal responsibility and that Ottawa instead prefers to forge ties with middle-income nations for commercial purposes.

Ahead of the United Nations’ 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the federal government’s 2012 budget cuts represent a “big slap in the face” to the world’s poor and to Canadians who view themselves as playing a strong role in international development, said Fraser Reilly-King, the policy analyst for aid and international cooperation at the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC) in Ottawa.

In its defence, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) argued that the 2012 federal budget will continue the government’s commitment to make international assistance “focused, effective, accountable and transparent”, according to Scott Cantin, CIDA’s manager of media relations and public affairs.

Canadian tax dollars will still deliver “value for money” and be directed into the agency’s three thematic sectors – sustainable economic growth, food security, children and youth, and humanitarian assistance, Cantin wrote in an e-mail, adding that more details on the plan’s implementation will be released in the coming weeks.

Ottawa’s International Assistance Envelope (IAE) will decline between fiscal years 2011-12 to 2014-15 by 7.6 percent and reach 4.9 billion dollars in 2015-16, according to an analysis by the CCIC. During the next few years, Canada will have reduced its Official Development Assistance (ODA) or aid by nearly 1.2 billion dollars.

The IAE is comprised of about 90 percent ODA, but debt relief and refugee costs outside this envelope also constitute aid, the CCIC noted.

In a continuing era of national austerity, many government departments are incurring spending decreases of between five and 10 percent, Reilly-King told IPS.

Yet, his organisation’s examination of CIDA’s share of the international assistance envelope shows that the agency “seems to be taking a much higher hit” than other departments delivering aid money such as Finance Canada or the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, he said.

Over the next few fiscal years, CIDA will lose a total of 319.2 million dollars compared to Foreign Affairs’ reductions of 29.1 million, according to the budget.

“With these cuts, Canada to some extent, is taking itself out of the equation,” Reilly-King argued.

Although quality aid delivery is critical, the volume of money is also important, he added. Without such obligations, Canada risks being regarded as not “much of a player at international meetings” compared with the United Kingdom, South Korea and Australia, which will exercise greater influence over development issues in line with their pledge to increase aid budgets, he warned.

Given CIDA’s declining resources, he doubts the development agency will still invest in small programs beyond its 20 countries of focus and may even narrow its commitment to 15 nations.

The bulk of assistance is now channeled to Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Peru, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean Regional Program, Indonesia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Ukraine, West Bank and Gaza, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, Sudan and South Sudan, and Tanzania.

As it is, the government changed its international development focus countries in 2009, replacing “several poor African countries” with “middle-income Latin American countries” with which Canada was negotiating free trade agreements, Stephen Brown, an associate professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, told IPS.

Should Ottawa slash the number of focus countries, it will be quite indicative of the government’s priorities regarding foreign affairs and trade, Reilly-King added. International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda has indicated that “she doesn’t see much difference between Canada’s foreign affairs and trade policy and its development policy,” he said.

Curbing government expenditure, particularly international assistance, is “an ideological project” to be viewed as an alignment with Canadian extractive industries, Brown said.

There is a school of thought that Canadian mining companies operating overseas pay taxes which the local government can then direct toward fighting poverty, noted Brown, who specialises in the intersection of the policies and practices of rich countries and international actors with the politics of poor nations.

Yet, he contended, there is no “clear, direct link” between trade and development in this case, as mining can introduce other problems like environmental damage and human rights abuses.

Ottawa’s gravitation toward trade was apparent in the budget speech. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the “most ambitious trade expansion plan in Canadian history”. Flaherty said the government has signed new trade agreements with nine countries since 2006 and is negotiating many more, including those with Thailand and Japan.

In some quarters, the government’s 2012 budgetary moves are not too unsettling.

“If people are telling you that cutting back on foreign aid is going to harm international development, they’re just wrong,” said Fred McMahon, who focuses on economic freedom, globalisation and mining in his Toronto-based position of vice president of international research at the Fraser Institute think tank.

However, McMahon conceded, he is not referring to aid for humanitarian disasters but funding for development projects overseas.

For anyone who cares about poverty reduction, the media debate on foreign aid is often frustrating, he told IPS, adding that the arguments are based on how much is spent, with almost no discussion of whether these actions truly help.

Research indicates that foreign aid sent to developing countries, particularly in African nations with bad governance structures, is harmful because it may be used by local governments to reward elites or build police forces, he noted.

Trade, on the other hand, is “marvelously effective” in bolstering incomes, freedoms and democracy, McMahon said. Trade openness, sound money (low inflation) and sensible fiscal policy are most effective in increasing economic growth, with aid a positive force only for nations with these attributes, he said.

For the most part, he argued, the act of doling out money to the Global South mainly serves to make Westerners “feel better” about themselves.

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 3 2012 (IPS)

After Latin America and the Caribbean’s “lost decade” of the 1980s, the region has experienced a period of “light and shadow”, says Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Alicia Bárcena. Credit: Rousbeh Legatis/IPS

“The real progress in the social arena was in the first decade of this century because we went from 44 percent people living in poverty to 31 percent last year,” she says.

But that percentage still represents 177 million people of region’s 600 million inhabitants.

In the lead-up to the major international summit in June known as Rio+20, 19 U.N. agencies collaborated to take stock of progress and challenges in the region over the last two decades.

Bárcena spoke with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about ways forward on the path of sustainable development in the region, the historic chance of the upcoming world summit to revisit global governance structures, and the role of the South in tackling problems of a common future.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are some of the main threats facing the Latin America and Caribbean region? A: One of the important alerts for our people in the region is that the fertility rates are going down in general. However, the place where more children are being born are with youth pregnancies. Poor young women are the ones who are having children.

This is very crucial, because if our region does not invest in the first ages from zero to five years, the future of this region is going to be in the hands of poverty.

Furthermore, we have also analysed where in Latin America and the Caribbean are the areas most vulnerable to climate change according to its expected impact by 2050.

Take extreme events or natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, etc. as an example. Most affected are going to be Central America on the Atlantic side, Mexico on the Caribbean basin, some areas of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia on the side of the Pacific Ocean, and Montevideo (Uruguay) and the port there (on the Atlantic).

It is true that socially we have improved poverty rates, but unemployment is a very important issue in Latin America and the Caribbean. [The rate is] relatively low compared with Europe or the U.S. – 6.6 percent. The problem is the quality of employment: often it is informal and does not provide social security. As important as reducing poverty is reducing inequality.

Q: If we look at the main foundations of the regional economies, we see exploitation and exportation of commodities and natural resources: mining, oil and gas, coal, agribusiness products. Those are the items moving the Latin American economies forward, due to Asian demand. How could the green economy make any impact in this scenario? A: Abundance of natural resources has to be seen as a blessing; the curse is not to have policies to handle it. What we need to do is invest the rents of the extraction of those natural resources in other areas, to build other forms of capital and to replace it with other forms of productivity for the future generations.

It has to be done with the lowest impact possible on the environment. And the rents have to be adequately distributed, we need a better mechanism to guarantee that.

So we are discussing the governance of natural resources. What did countries like Norway, Finland, Australia, New Zealand do, since all those countries have an abundance of natural resources and made the transition to a more technology-oriented society and they did it thanks to the rents of their natural resources.

Q: Green economy experiences until now are just case studies, nice examples. In the dominant economic scenario, how can governments find space to take measures like fiscal reforms or subsidies reforms? A: First of all, in our region the term “green economy” is very polemic, because it is seen as a trend imposed by Northern developed countries without proposing also the mechanisms and the costs of this transition and answering the question of who is going to pay for this transition towards this type of economy. And it is seen with fear in terms of protectionism.

What can the governments do? I believe very much in fiscal reform, which is a very powerful sign. Governments with fiscal reforms give signs to the productive agents but also redistribute resources. To make it successful it has to be a consensus-based fiscal reform.

This is what we need, it cannot be imposed. There has to be internal discussions to see where and what is the society ready to pay for this transition, this is essential.

Q: What can be done in terms of solutions? A: So what we are trying to tell the governments is “you do not have to invest in everything but in certain things that are essential for people” – electricity being one, potable water being the other, broadband internet access, public transportation and intelligent construction.

Why not build houses which have solar energy, air conditioning facilities or light already included, to have some engineering or design behind (them) that is already available? In Latin America and the Caribbean, we have space to do things better as to urban planning.

The cash transfer programmes were (also) very successful, like “Bolsa Familia”. This is a programme that took 20 million Brazilians out of poverty in the last 10 years.

If one expands these programmes and conditional cash transfers so that they are not only for education and health, taking the children to school and to the doctor, but also incorporate sustainability measures there, by saying to the community “we are going to give you money but you have to protect the soil”, “you are going to use the water this way”, etc. then you also include some of those sustainability measures.

Q: In the report you say that “developed countries have not honored their commitments to provide finance and leadership”. Please explain that a bit more. A: The developed countries commit themselves to provide 0.75 percent of their GDP for the Official Development Assistance (ODA) to transfer money from north to south in terms of financing for development. We are now at 0.33 percent, which is half of the commitment that developed countries made.

Okay: in the moment of financial crisis, it is very difficult to achieve this goal now or soon. However, historically developed countries developed themselves with high consumption of energy and resources of the planet. Now it is very unfair to impose this on developing countries, which is more costly.

The other way of achieving this transfer from north to south is through knowledge sharing and technology transfer. That is why we believe patents, training and free exchange of knowledge could be useful mechanisms.

Investment in science, technology and innovation is essential; that is going to be the key for the transition to sustainable development.

Q: What would be a useful outcome from Rio+20? A: To have the sustainable development goals agreed upon, because that puts a lot of pressure on everybody and all the institutions to achieve those goals.

Another thing that we are suggesting is a “Tobin Tax” that should go to sustainable development that is on financial transactions. With a tax of 0.0005 percent, we could get a good amount of money for the world to go for this transition.

Secondly, to have clear financing tools. Third, to have clear technology transfer mechanisms and fourth to have institutions that work.

From our perspective, multilaterally, the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) should be strengthened. To bring the economic actors to ECOSOC to discuss economics, because what is wrong is economics, the environment is on the receiving end, but we need to change the economics.

Excerpt:

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Mar 26 2012 (IPS)

Like its Caribbean neighbours, Jamaica is looking for outcomes that will address its food security challenges when world leaders meet in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Jun. 20 to 22.

World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules have opened up Jamaica’s small economy to cheap imports of everything from vegetables to fish, meats and juice concentrates, virtually crippling the island’s agricultural sector.

Jamaica’s position is outlined in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat’s seven-page submission, conveying the challenges facing the 15 island nations it represents.

The document articulates the regional body’s call for decisions that will address a slate of problems, including the erosion of markets caused by the application of WTO regulations and the difficulties of establishing green economies.

Due to their size, member states have had “severe structural handicaps in integrating into the global economy”, the document stated.

The loss of preferential European Union markets for bananas, sugar and citrus has left Jamaica and other small regional producers struggling to prevent devastation of their local agriculture.

Severe weather, disease and pest infestation are also making it harder for this northern Caribbean island to cope.

In addition to severe dislocation in some agricultural sub-sectors, there are concerns that the Huanglongbing, also known as citrus greening disease, could wipe out local citrus.

And according to industry reports, infestation by the coffee berry borer slashed the 2010/2011 Blue Mountain Coffee crop by as much as 50 percent. Meanwhile, the black sigatokavirus is hampering the recovery of the banana industry.

A debt burden that runs at roughly 131 percent of its gross domestic product means Jamaica has no cash to provide the kind of bailout farmers need to solve their many problems.

CARICOM is looking for decisions in Rio that will prioritise the needs of small states in matters of trade, as well as provide assistance to adapt to climate change and achieve green economies.

There is need, the regional body noted, for a recommitment to the promises made to small island states to level the playing field of international trade.

Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke is aware of the challenges. But even as he engages the nation’s farmers in a bid to increase production and reduce the food import bill estimated at 800 million dollars in 2011, Clarke is mindful of his government’s limitations.

“We will do whatever we can, but whatever we do must be within the limits of the budget,” he cautioned farmers at a recent meeting.

Despite increasing demand, production in traditional crops continues a downward trend. In 2008, Jamaica ceased banana exports. This follows a 32-percent drop in banana production due mainly to the impact of adverse weather. In December, limited exports to the Caribbean began again.

Between 2002 and 2010, a combination of bad weather and diseases reduced citrus production by 14 percent. Over the same period, imports of subsidised milk solids from the European Union forced a 37-percent decline in milk production; and there were 45 percent fewer fishponds, causing a virtual collapse of the inland fish- farming sector.

Neglect means production of the coveted Blue Mountain coffee crop is at the “lowest since Hurricane Gilbert in 1998” despite an injection of 336 million dollars by government and rising prices, Director General of the Coffee Industry Board (CIB) Christopher Gentles told IPS.

“Farmers are neglecting the trees because of low prices and they are afraid there is no market for the crop,” he said.

Gentles told IPS that the lack of enthusiasm is directly related to the global economic meltdown, which slashed farm gate coffee prices by half, and the intensive labour required to control the coffee berry borer.

Elsewhere, disease is creating shortages and pushing up prices.

According to Citrus Growers’ Associations’ (CGA) technical director Dr. Percy Miller, the price for orange juice concentrate has increased almost three-fold, and the price of solid fruits has gone up by more than 40 percent.

“Farmers are not able to take advantage of the higher costs because citrus greening is reducing the amount of concentrate and number of fruits on the international market. The closure of local citrus nurseries also means there are no replacements for dying trees,” he told IPS.

Only 30 months ago, more than 220,000 gallons of juice concentrate remained in local warehouses awaiting buyers, while more than 150,000 gallons were imported, leading farmers to condemn import policies.

Food security means that a nation is able to provide sufficient food and related services in a way that is economically efficient , profitable and socially responsible. But even with increases in vegetable crop production, current trends indicate that Jamaica’s reliance on the soil could compromise its food supply.

Agriculture is Jamaica’s single largest employer, providing more than 180,000 jobs. Traditional crops like sugar, coffee, bananas and citrus are not only major employers but also some of the largest foreign exchange earners.

Even with low costs loans and limited help from government and donor agencies, sector leaders concur that getting farmers to make significant reinvestments will depend on how effectively authorities are able to stimulate farmers’ interests.

Assistance to small farmers to acquire new technologies, as well as access to affordable pest and disease controls are also crucial.

There are efforts to reintroduce crops like corn, and grow under- performing sectors. Former dairy turned fish farmer Donny Bunting is among a growing number of farmers who have invested in sheep because, he says, “There is a market and I don’t know anything else but farming.”

And president of the Goat Farmers Association Kenrick King told IPS, “Eighty percent of goat meat is imported.”

The group is working with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Caribbean Agricultural Research Development Institute (CARDI) to improve goat herds and grow the sector to provide 50 percent of local demand within five years, King said.

The FAO is also training technicians to provide pathogen-free planning material in a bid to save the 42-million-dollar industry. Two years ago the Jamaica Citrus Protection Agency closed citrus nurseries to prevent the distribution of contaminated planting material.

The European Union also joined forces with the FAO to support activities that resulted in recent increases in non-traditional food and vegetable crop production. Under the FAO’s Initiative on Soaring Food Prices and the two-year European Union funded Food Security project, small farmers were given new technologies and provided with seeds, fertilisers and tools.

Many of the interventions only provide short-term fixes to ongoing problems. Goat farmers have been down this road before. Now, according to King, they are seeking cheaper, sustainable sources of feed.

Agriculturalists agree that salvaging Jamaica’s agriculture will depend on how effectively authorities are able to stimulate the farmers’ interests in reinvesting. In the absence of agricultural insurance, there must also be effective and sustainable programmes to assist farmers who have been affected by bad weather.

Farmers suggest that the introduction of new technologies, sustained and funded vector and pest control methods and a robust system to curtail poaching may help to turn their fortunes around.

*This article won the New Media Category in the 2012 CARDI-CTA Regional Media Awards on Climate Change.

Excerpt:

By Peter Richards
ROSEAU, Dominica, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

Dominica presented its “2012-2020 Low Carbon Climate Resilient Development Strategy” to donors including the World Bank on Wednesday in a bid to gain wider access to funding and position itself as a regional leader in renewable energy.

“Dominica, the Nature Island of the Caribbean with an excess of 60 percent forest cover, has the potential to continue to be one of the few-carbon neutral countries in the world as we today explore the possibilities of harnessing our tremendous geothermal potential,” said Environment Minister Dr. Kenneth Darroux.

By the end of the donors’ conference on Friday, Dominica hopes to obtain pledges totalling 60 million dollars to undertake projects ranging from sea defence walls to food security, renewable energy and water resources in the short to medium-term, along with as much as 200 million dollars for long-term projects.

Consultant George Romelli, who helped draft the document, said it is focused on low-carbon growth, sustainable development, poverty alleviation, and a range of other issues.

“It’s not just the technocrats saying, ‘yes we must look at the climate change risks’, it’s also the people who say ‘how do we address the needs of the everyday people, how do we address the concerns of food security, livelihoods, how do we address poverty, education, health issues’,” he told a news conference ahead of the conference.

The strategy, which is being supported by the nine-million-dollar loan envelope available to Dominica under the World Bank’s Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience (PPCR), outlines the island’s determination to have a “green economy” by 2020.

Romelli warned that while Dominica is fortunate to be in a position of being carbon-neutral, it is losing forested areas because of natural and human events.

In 2011, flooding and landslides due to unseasonable intense rainfall caused in excess of 100 million dollars in damage. The previous year, the island suffered its most severe drought, followed by a hurricane.

Local authorities say that these combined events inflicted a severe shock on the agriculture sector, which employs 25 percent of Dominica’s labour force, and generates some 15 percent of gross domestic product.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said that the island’s vulnerability to climate change is exacerbated by its present economic situation, socioeconomic structure, and high concentration of infrastructure along the coastline.

“To date, narrowly-defined mitigation and adaptation projects have dominated climate change action policies taken by Dominica. This has resulted in the accumulation of many efforts, isolated in nature, to respond to a crosscutting issue,” he said.

Skerrit said that new and innovative programmatic approaches are necessary to meet the challenges and uncertainties of climate change, and that development processes must be rendered more climate- resilient and lower in carbon emissions.

“The Low-Carbon Climate-Resilient Development Strategy will not only serve as the programmatic nexus for capturing conventional and innovative sources of sustainable development and climate financing, but should also assist facilitate Dominica’s transformation to a climate-resilient economy while implementing, monitoring and building upon existing low-emission climate-resilient development projects and programmes,” he added.

The 69-page document notes that Dominica is amongst few countries that can be termed “carbon neutral” in light of its limited use of fossil fuels – 28 percent of the island’s energy comes from renewable sources – and system of protected areas that serve as carbon sinks.

Dominica is not likely to go the route that Guyana has taken in terms of trying to get climate change funds in exchange for not cutting down its forests.

Darroux said Dominica does not have the kind of vast expanses of forest that Guyana does, and such a project in Dominica would not be as lucrative, but that the island would most likely adopt its own “Redd-Plus” programme.

The general pattern of land use has been dictated by topographic limitations. The highest, most rugged elevations in the interior have remained inaccessible and therefore forest cover predominates, although there has been gradual loss of forest cover in the lower elevations.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Country Profiles on Forests, Grasslands and Dry Lands cites a percentage reduction in forest cover relative to land mass area of 65 to 61 percent over the period 1990 to 2000.

Much of the recorded forest loss is due to the sale of state lands and subsequent conversion of forest cover. Most of these lands were given over to agricultural production and ultimately to housing.

“By extension, the transition from larger-scale agriculture to small farms has also had implications for implementation of land conservation measures and efforts to enhance the resilience of natural ecosystems to address climate change concerns. As holdings become smaller, farmers tend to cultivate the full acreage within the holding in short-term crops to maximise financial returns,” the report says.

“Trees that would otherwise maintain the soil and serve as carbon sinks are often removed resulting in accelerated land degradation in fragile environments.”

It states also that climate change, including increasing ocean acidification and changes in sea temperatures, are affecting fishery resources and migration patterns with consequent impacts on the sustainability of Dominica’s fishery sector, livelihoods, human health and prospects for food security.

In addition, due to the island’s vulnerability to hurricanes, the fisheries sector is continuously trying to recover from the damage caused by these storms.

Dominica has no petroleum resources and all the energy required to sustain development is imported. Electricity constitutes the primary source of commercial energy for industrial and other uses, while approximately 8,000 cubic metres of wood fuel are used domestically.

Darroux said the goal is to move away from the importation of petroleum products.

“By developing and utilising renewable energy, we intend to reduce and eliminate the importation of petroleum products which are becoming more and more expensive while at the same time emitting greenhouse gases that causes climate change,” he said.

Darroux said the tests being carried out to determine the extent of the island’s geothermal reserves are part of the new strategy of being less dependent on petroleum.

“The vision is that the funds saved by exploiting this clean and cheaper form of energy can be used to build sea defence walls and other critical infrastructure that are required to withstand the damaging and destructive effects of climate change.”

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

By Bari Bates and - -
BRUSSELS, Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

Decades ago, 15 of Europe’s wealthiest nations made a promise to allocate .7 percent of their respective gross national products (GNP) to official development assistance. Yet despite a commitment that comprises such a small fraction of a nation’s wealth, only a handful of countries are on track to reach this goal by the 2015 deadline.

Among the few leaders who have prioritised this target is Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning- Schmidt, who was recently celebrated by the confederation of European non-governmental organisations known as CONCORD, together with the ONE Campaign, for Denmark’s aid commitment to help the world’s poorest.

Volunteers and activists donned masks of the Danish Prime Minister’s face on Mar. 16, under the slogan, “Everyone needs a Helle.” The action was designed to spread the message that, if the European Union was comprised of 27 leaders like the Danish Prime Minister, the world would be well on its way to keeping its aid promise to the world’s poor, according to the ONE campaign.

Denmark is one of four EU member states to go beyond the target of .7 percent of GNP, a commitment made in a 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution. The commitment has been reaffirmed several times throughout the decades, most notably at the March 2002 International Conference on Financing for Development, as well as in 2005, when EU development ministers met in Brussels and announced the 2015 deadline for the .7 percent target.

It was determined then that the original “EU-15” member states – Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Finland and Sweden – would adhere to the goal of .7 percent by 2015, while countries that joined the EU after 2002 would create timelines for a .33 percent goal by 2015.

According to AidWatch, a subgroup of CONCORD, only seven EU countries are “on target” to meet the 2015 goals, including Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK.

A recent report compiled by the ONE Campaign analysed international development efforts from the UK, showing exactly what .7 percent of a county’s GNP can do.

The report, “Small Change/ Big Difference”, is an independent study that examined current UK aid commitments, and projected an analysis for the next four years. The UK is expected to meet the .7 percent goal by 2013, contributing 11.7 billion pounds in aid. Broken down, the report explains that, at the targeted percentage, aid will account for 1.6 pence of every pound of government spending.

These abstract numbers tell a much more compelling story when translated into the direct impact pledges make on the ground, such as providing 80 million children with vaccines; allowing access to safe drinking water for more than 17 million people worldwide; providing preventative measures or treatment for malaria to more than 40 million people; providing 633,000 affected people with treatment for HIV; and enabling 15.9 million children to go to school.

And these figures account for the UK’s contribution to global aid efforts alone—if other member states follow through on their promise to contribute .7 percent of their GNP as well, millions more could benefit.

While official statistics for 2011 have yet to be published by AidWatch, a survey taken at the end of last year found that only a few countries from the EU will drastically cut aid, according to Wiske Jult of 11.11.11, a coalition of NGOs based in Northern Belgium, which contributed to the AidWatch report.

Jult explained to IPS that it is difficult to estimate how many countries will meet their targets for the coming year. Part of the problem is incomplete data. Jult said that, despite requests, Greece failed to release data from last year, making it impossible to know whether or not the country is on track to delivering on pledges.

A more comprehensive AidWatch report is expected in June 2012.

In a world thrown into economic chaos since the 2008 financial crash, the pressure is on governments to make tough decisions. With several EU countries leading the way toward fulfilling their .7 percent promises, civil society is calling on remaining countries to continue to work toward the 2015 goals.

“Aid in some countries is under assault from the financial crisis, but cutting back on promises to developing countries isn’t the way out of austerity or unemployment in Europe,” said Olivier Consolo, director of CONCORD.

“EU governments should realise that their aid is precious help for millions of people in desperate need and be proud of the support Europe gives against poverty.”

Excerpt:

Woman works in family garden next to forest in village of Pillumallai in eastern Sri Lanka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

When the United Nations concluded a two-week session highlighting the plight of rural women last week, the meetings singled out both the achievements and shortcomings of the ongoing relentless battle for gender equality in a world still dominated – and overwhelmingly ruled – by men.

The 45-member Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the global policy-making body fighting for women’s rights, focused its priorities on the empowerment of rural women, including ownership rights, gender disparities in land holdings and the unequal access to productive resources in agriculture.

According to U.N. estimates, the international community contributed 7.5 billion dollars in official development assistance (ODA) to rural development during 2008-2009, but only a paltry three percent of that amount was earmarked for programmes where gender equality was the primary object.

Judging by the inherent shortcomings, the corresponding figures for 2010 and 2011 are not expected to be any better.

As Ann Tutwiler, deputy director-general of the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), points out, the gap in agricultural production and productivity exists not because rural women were incapable of farming, but because of social constraints.

“Female famers produced less than their male counterparts because they lacked access to seeds and credits,” she said.

Simple investments in water pumps alone could save women billions of hours a year, she added.

In short, she argued, 100 to 150 million people are still hungry and a significant share of agricultural production is missing primarily because rural women’s economic potential is being squandered.

Tutwiler said African women spend a staggering 40 billion hours a year just collecting water.

But apparently all is not lost.

Cheryl Morden, director of North America’s Liaison Office of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), points out that the number of the world’s poorest women with micro-loans increased from 10.3 million in 1999 to 113.1 million in 2010.

However, while microcredit had lead to women’s empowerment, it has its limitations.

“To enable rural women to get a stronger foothold on the pathway out of poverty, they need a broad range of financial services, along with other kinds of support,” she added.

Asked what the United Nations has achieved so far in terms of gender empowerment over the last two decades, Anwarul K. Chowdhury, a former U.N. under-secretary-general and currently a senior special advisor to the president of the General Assembly, pointed to U.N. Security Council resolution 1325 adopted in October 2000.

“It has been the most significant decision of the U.N. in terms of asserting that peace is inextricably linked to equality between women and men, and also calling for equal participation of women at all decision-making levels along with equal access to policy processes,” Chowdhury told IPS.

“The political and conceptual breakthrough for 1325 was achieved eight months before in March of that year for the first time in the Security Council when as its president, I could lead the Council’s 15 members to reach consensus on the statement that outlined the elements of 1325.”

The main thrust of that statement was participation of women on equal footing. “However, we have to be more determined to achieve that objective both nationally and internationally,” he added.

A strong advocate of women’s rights, Chowdhury said the “agreed conclusions” of the just-concluded CSW’s 56th session could have brought out more forcefully the debilitating negative impact of war, conflict and violence on rural women.

“It failed to recognise that rural women still face enduring challenges to their human security which continues to exacerbate where there is proliferation of weapons, particularly small arms and light weapons,” he said.

Rural women’s natural ability to mobilise the community in times of conflict and disaster was not recognised and supported. Experience has shown that 1325 is very relevant in this context for rural women, Chowdhury noted.

He said a strong focus should have been on the improvement of the human security of women in conflict zones.

As the statement by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) released last month has underscored, building on the potential of rural women to improve their human security through active involvement within policy processes and political decision-making is a precondition for achieving lasting peace and security.

It also called for implementation of gender-sensitive security measures developed together with rural women.

Asked what needs to be done to advance the cause of gender empowerment over the next decade, Chowdhury told IPS, “I strongly believe that the adoption of 1325 National Action Plan (NAP) by each of the U.N.’s 193 member-states is potentially the single-most significant step that could be taken for women’s empowerment and participation in general and in the area of peace and security in particular.”

As of now, he pointed out, only 35 countries have their respective NAP’s ready.

“But there should be concerted time-bound efforts made in that direction, particularly by U.N. Women which has accepted 1325 implementation as one of its priority mandates,” he said.

Meanwhile, the most comprehensive and potent opportunity to advance the equality, empowerment and participation of women would come from the Fifth Global Conference on Women in 2015 as proposed by the president of the U.N. General Assembly and the secretary-general in a joint announcement made last week on International Women’s Day.

“This is a remarkable initiative, first-ever jointly presented by the two leaders of the U.N. system, and it would be 20 years since the last summit in Beijing,” Chowdhury said.

The 2015 conference would not only review the implementation of the Beijing outcome but, more importantly, look into the new and emerging challenges and opportunities that women are facing and what needs to be done.

Resolution 1325, which was adopted five years after Beijing, would find a major rallying point in the new summit, he predicted.

The intergenerational transition with greater role and involvement of young people would also be a key element of deliberations there.

A significant new dimension of the 2015 gathering would be to take advantage of new technology to connect with and listen to women in various parts of the world who would not be physically present in the conference.

Meanwhile, the CSW approved several draft resolutions Friday, including on women, the girl child and HIV/AIDS; an end to the harmful practice of female genital mutilation; release of women and children taken hostage in war zones; indigenous women as key actors in poverty and hunger eradication; the elimination of maternal mortality and morbidity through empowerment of women; and gender equality and the empowerment of women in natural disasters.

But the only draft resolution put to a vote was on the situation of, and assistance to, Palestinian women, which was adopted by a recorded vote of 29 in favour to two against (Israel, United States), with 10 abstentions (Belgium, Colombia, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden).

Excerpt:

A lack of long-term housing plans in Haiti's post-earthquake tent cities made the refugees even more vulnerable to natural disasters. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

As donors struggle to meet their aid commitments, and the number of people around the world in need of direct humanitarian and development assistance skyrockets, many experts and activists are asking the tough question: are donors being effective? A report published today by the Spanish non-governmental organisation DARA on donor effectiveness highlighted some of the biggest obstacles to aid reaching target populations, including insufficient consideration of women’s needs, politicisation of aid and lack of long-term plans for humanitarian assistance. “If donors want to make sure that money gets to the people, they must analyse the different needs of women and men,” Philip Tamminga, coordinator of DARA’s 2011 Humanitarian Response Index (HRI), told IPS. For example, after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, humanitarian agencies distributed inappropriate hygiene kits to women, and failed to address cultural norms that would have allowed women to be adequately cared for by men. Similarly, Tamminga explained, much of the gender-based violence that shook the post-earthquake tent cities in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince and outlying areas could have been avoided if women’s security at latrines and water and sanitation installations had been taken into consideration when building the refugee camps. Tamminga believes much of aid inefficacy is directly linked to a lack of preparedness for dealing with natural disasters and armed conflicts.

“In previous years four hurricanes hit Haiti,” he said. “Had donors focused on prevention at that time, Haitian authorities would have responded better to the 2010 earthquake and donors could have applied lessons learned there to (subsequent) earthquakes in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. Donors have to make sure that the recovery stage takes long term solutions into consideration.” In most major disasters, donors and humanitarians work together to provide emergency shelter in transition to longer-term housing. In Haiti, however, there was no long-term housing strategy in place after the earthquake; as a result, when the hurricane hit, scores of people still languishing in temporary shelters were extremely vulnerable to the catastrophic impact of the winds. Another example of the dire consequences of insufficient preparation is the on-going food crisis in the Horn of Africa. Though the whole international community knew that a severe famine was brewing in the region, donor governments failed to scale up their funding, which resulted in the tragedy of over 100,000 preventable deaths. “There is no evidence that donor governments are changing attitudes in their transition from emergency to recovery and to the preparation of risk reduction. Emergency and long-term development are still considered as separate programmes,” Tamminga lamented. The situation is compounded by the increasingly politicised nature of aid. “When donors or host governments start to apply political considerations about to whom, how and when aid is distributed, the situation becomes very (precarious),” Tamminga stressed. “We have witnessed this in cases like Palestine, Somalia, Sudan or Colombia.” The most recent example is Syria, where the regime has failed to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis on its soil and refuses to act in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, which clearly state that besieged populations on all sides of a conflict have the right to humanitarian assistance. “We are very concerned when donor governments start to impose their agenda and tell humanitarian organisations where they can work,” Tamminga said. “In Somalia there are serious restrictions; Al Shabaab bear a grave responsibility for that.” He added, though, that countries like the United States, Canada and some European countries, bound by anti- terrorism legislations, also have a part to play. “They forbid humanitarian organisations from working with or having contact with those labelled “terrorists.” Yet humanitarian organisations are neutral, impartial and independent and they must be allowed to work with all parties,” he added. In 2011, only 62 percent of the U.N.’s appeal for 8.9 billion dollars to assist some 50 million people facing crises was met, resulting in huge gaps in the humanitarian response.

The HRI looked at 19 of the world’s biggest donors and ranked Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands as the ‘best’ donors, with the U.S. coming in 17th and Italy receiving the lowest rank on the index. While traditional donor governments still provide 85 percent of global aid, 40 percent of the funds channelled into relief work in Haiti came from private sources and new government donors like Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba. In fact, DARA has tracked a sustained shift from traditional donors to new, emerging funders. “We want to encourage good practices with these new donors,” Tamminga told IPS. “If not for new donors like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, Yemen, for example, would receive little aid. And many of these Gulf donors are becoming much more aware of international standards – Qatar and the UAE are good examples.” He stressed the importance of new and old players working together and teaching each other about cultural norms and the needs of specific populations. The private sector also has a lot to offer in terms of innovation, quick responses and utilising existing networks and infrastructure. In Haiti, cell phones proved to be a useful tool for disseminating messages on cholera prevention, when an outbreak erupted after the earthquake. “If the private sector understands humanitarian principles and good practices – like standards on the donation of drugs, that forbid sending medicines that are close to expiration – then it can contribute to using aid appropriately and effectively,” Tamminga concluded.

Excerpt:

By Mathilde Bagneres
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

In 2008, delegates meeting for the annual U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) agreed that much greater investments in women and gender equality were a critical – and overlooked – aspect of sustainable development.

For example, according to UN Women, while the international community gave 7.5 billion dollars in official development assistance to rural development and the agricultural sector in 2008–2009, a mere three percent was spent on programmes in which gender equality was a principal objective, and only 32 percent to those in which gender equality was a secondary objective.

Four years later, there has been some forward movement in a number of countries, but in many others, progress remains slow and uneven, a situation that is exacerbated by the ongoing global financial crisis.

Rural women continue to face limited access to productive resources, such as agricultural inputs and technology; only five percent of agricultural extension services are provided for women farmers.

As the CSW meets again here from Feb 27 to Mar. 9, panellists from around the world sat down Thursday to evaluate the evolution of financing for gender equality and women’s empowerment in their home countries, and chart a way forward.

“It’s time to promote gender equality and for that purpose we need a change of paradigm, we definitely need to change our way of thinking,” said Maria Almeida, vice finance minister of Ecuador.

Cambodia

Dr. Ing Phavi, minister of women’s affairs in Cambodia, cited a series of measures taken by the Cambodian government that have proved successful in enhancing gender equality across different areas.

“In Cambodia, in the context of a public administration reform, the prime minister has launched a major drive in 2008 to address the gender imbalance in the public administration,” she said.

As a result of extensive promotion across ministries and affirmative action policies, the number of female civil servants increased by 34 percent. At the sub-national level, more women were appointed as deputy governors or heads of government departments.

“In education, gender disparity has been eliminated in the primary and lower secondary education,” she noted. “Remarkably, with the focus on training and deploying female teachers, the female ratio at the primary level reached 46 percent in 2009/2010.”

However, fewer girls than boys continue on to get a higher education.

Asked what more needs to be done, Phavi told IPS, “The most important thing to understand is that gender equality is a government policy and it has to mainstream the poverty reduction strategy.

“Poverty reduction means taking care of growth, trade, agriculture development, well-being in terms of health, education and so on,” she said. “Gender is already inside all sectors so it should be part of the poverty reduction strategy.”

Morocco

Mohammed Chafiki, director of studies and financial forecasts for the ministry of economy and finance in Morocco, spoke about Morocco’s transition to equal rights and liberties for men and women.

In April 2011, the country ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a key instrument often described as an international bill of rights for women.

Morocco also adopted a new constitution in July that included many articles which expressly enshrined gender equality. For example, Article 19 affirms that men and women have equal civil, political, economic, cultural and environmental rights and liberties.

“In Morocco, we now need to continue the institutional reform. We are reforming our financial laws so it integrates gender considerations irreversibly,” Chafiki told IPS.

“But in order to move forward with gender equality, it is not all about the government. Local communities will also have to take concrete actions,” he said.

“To finance gender equality and women empowerment, we also need partnerships. We need partnerships with the private sector, with NGOs, with governments, of course, and we need international cooperation.”

Chafiki cited significant progress in reducing educational disparities as one of the country’s primary achievements.

“In 2010/2011, 96.3 percent of the girls from six to 11 years old are sent to school,” he said.

Austria

Gerhard Steger, director general of budget for the ministry of finance in Austria, explained how the government now integrates gender considerations into budgets.

The concept of gender responsive budgeting (GRB) was included in a comprehensive budget reform package that was unanimously adopted by parliament. It features a medium-term expenditure framework, accrual budgeting and accounting and performance budgeting.

“First of all, we transformed our budget from a traditional steering instrument of resources, asking the question ‘who gets what?’, into a comprehensive instrument for resources and results,” Steger told IPS.

“So we ask two questions: who gets what, and who has to deliver what for public management,” he added.

“We ask each and every ministry to define no more than five top objectives for the ministry, which are part of the budget decision in parliament, and at least one of those objectives has to be a gender objective.

“Gender is directly interpreted into the performance budgeting process in Austria. Therefore every ministry has to contribute – with no exceptions.”

Steger stressed crucial lessons that can be drawn from the Austrian experience.

“To make GRB a success, the design needs to be simple and focused on the most important aspects. If the design is too complex, GRB will very likely be a failure,” he said.

“We also have to make gender relevant and thus integrate it into the budget and to create awareness for gender issues to convince decision makers to support GRB.”

While national governments must take the lead, key agencies like UN Women are also working hard to steer funds into gender-oriented development.

On Thursday, UN Women announced it will give out 10.5 million dollars in grants to organisations working to advance economic and political empowerment of women in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia.

The grants will start at 200,000 dollars for initiatives that “make tangible improvements in the lives of women and girls, from enabling women candidates to run for office, to managing resources to support themselves and their families.”

“At this moment of historic change, we cannot afford to leave women out. These grants will advance women’s efforts to achieve greater economic and political equality during this time of transition,” said Michelle Bachelet, executive director for UN Women.

Since its creation in 2009, the Fund has invested a total of 43 million dollars in 40 countries around the world for projects working for gender equality.

Excerpt:

In 2008, delegates meeting for the annual U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) agreed that much greater investments in women and gender equality were a critical – and overlooked – aspect of sustainable development.

For example, according to UN Women, while the international community gave 7.5 billion dollars in official development assistance to rural development and the agricultural sector in 2008–2009, a mere three percent was spent on programmes in which gender equality was a principal objective, and only 32 percent to those in which gender equality was a secondary objective.

Four years later, there has been some forward movement in a number of countries, but in many others, progress remains slow and uneven, a situation that is exacerbated by the ongoing global financial crisis.

Rural women continue to face limited access to productive resources, such as agricultural inputs and technology; only five percent of agricultural extension services are provided for women farmers.

As the CSW meets again here from Feb 27 to Mar. 9, panellists from around the world sat down Thursday to evaluate the evolution of financing for gender equality and women’s empowerment in their home countries, and chart a way forward.

“It’s time to promote gender equality and for that purpose we need a change of paradigm, we definitely need to change our way of thinking,” said Maria Almeida, vice finance minister of Ecuador.

Cambodia

Dr. Ing Phavi, minister of women’s affairs in Cambodia, cited a series of measures taken by the Cambodian government that have proved successful in enhancing gender equality across different areas.

“In Cambodia, in the context of a public administration reform, the prime minister has launched a major drive in 2008 to address the gender imbalance in the public administration,” she said.

As a result of extensive promotion across ministries and affirmative action policies, the number of female civil servants increased by 34 percent. At the sub-national level, more women were appointed as deputy governors or heads of government departments.

“In education, gender disparity has been eliminated in the primary and lower secondary education,” she noted. “Remarkably, with the focus on training and deploying female teachers, the female ratio at the primary level reached 46 percent in 2009/2010.”

However, fewer girls than boys continue on to get a higher education.

Asked what more needs to be done, Phavi told IPS, “The most important thing to understand is that gender equality is a government policy and it has to mainstream the poverty reduction strategy.

“Poverty reduction means taking care of growth, trade, agriculture development, well-being in terms of health, education and so on,” she said. “Gender is already inside all sectors so it should be part of the poverty reduction strategy.”

Morocco

Mohammed Chafiki, director of studies and financial forecasts for the ministry of economy and finance in Morocco, spoke about Morocco’s transition to equal rights and liberties for men and women.

In April 2011, the country ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a key instrument often described as an international bill of rights for women.

Morocco also adopted a new constitution in July that included many articles which expressly enshrined gender equality. For example, Article 19 affirms that men and women have equal civil, political, economic, cultural and environmental rights and liberties.

“In Morocco, we now need to continue the institutional reform. We are reforming our financial laws so it integrates gender considerations irreversibly,” Chafiki told IPS.

“But in order to move forward with gender equality, it is not all about the government. Local communities will also have to take concrete actions,” he said.

“To finance gender equality and women empowerment, we also need partnerships. We need partnerships with the private sector, with NGOs, with governments, of course, and we need international cooperation.”

Chafiki cited significant progress in reducing educational disparities as one of the country’s primary achievements.

“In 2010/2011, 96.3 percent of the girls from six to 11 years old are sent to school,” he said.

Austria

Gerhard Steger, director general of budget for the ministry of finance in Austria, explained how the government now integrates gender considerations into budgets.

The concept of gender responsive budgeting (GRB) was included in a comprehensive budget reform package that was unanimously adopted by parliament. It features a medium-term expenditure framework, accrual budgeting and accounting and performance budgeting.

“First of all, we transformed our budget from a traditional steering instrument of resources, asking the question ‘who gets what?’, into a comprehensive instrument for resources and results,” Steger told IPS.

“So we ask two questions: who gets what, and who has to deliver what for public management,” he added.

“We ask each and every ministry to define no more than five top objectives for the ministry, which are part of the budget decision in parliament, and at least one of those objectives has to be a gender objective.

“Gender is directly interpreted into the performance budgeting process in Austria. Therefore every ministry has to contribute – with no exceptions.”

Steger stressed crucial lessons that can be drawn from the Austrian experience.

“To make GRB a success, the design needs to be simple and focused on the most important aspects. If the design is too complex, GRB will very likely be a failure,” he said.

“We also have to make gender relevant and thus integrate it into the budget and to create awareness for gender issues to convince decision makers to support GRB.”

While national governments must take the lead, key agencies like UN Women are also working hard to steer funds into gender-oriented development.

On Thursday, UN Women announced it will give out 10.5 million dollars in grants to organisations working to advance economic and political empowerment of women in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia.

The grants will start at 200,000 dollars for initiatives that “make tangible improvements in the lives of women and girls, from enabling women candidates to run for office, to managing resources to support themselves and their families.”

“At this moment of historic change, we cannot afford to leave women out. These grants will advance women’s efforts to achieve greater economic and political equality during this time of transition,” said Michelle Bachelet, executive director for UN Women.

Since its creation in 2009, the Fund has invested a total of 43 million dollars in 40 countries around the world for projects working for gender equality.

(END)

A global coalition of development activists and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) is calling on the World Bank’s governors to ensure that Bank President Robert Zoellick’s successor is chosen in an “open and merit-based process” that will give borrowing countries a major say in the selection.

Robert Zoellick with Bill Gates (left) at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2008. Credit: World Economic Forum/CC By 2.0

“As the Bank only operates in developing countries, and has most impact in low-income countries, any candidate that was not supported by these countries would seriously lack legitimacy,” the coalition, which includes Oxfam International, Civicus, and the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (Afrodad), said.

The selection process, it went on, should include “…a public application procedure open to anyone to apply; sufficient time to allow proper deliberation; interviews held in public; and open voting procedures.”

Several groups, including Oxfam, Afrodad, and the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), also asked that the United States announce in advance that it will not seek to maintain its monopoly over the World Bank presidency.

Under an informal “gentlemen’s agreement” between the U.S. and Europe, a U.S. national has held the top Bank position and a European the managing directorship of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), since the two agencies were created at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944.

Despite NGO and some developing-country opposition, that agreement was maintained last year when French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde was elected to succeed IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

“It’s a World Bank, not a U.S. Bank,” said Collins Magalasi, Afrodad’s executive director. “It needs the best candidate to get the job with support of wide Bank membership, not just the U.S.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, however, issued a statement shortly after the Bank’s announcement indicating that Washington would put forward its own candidate.

“We encourage the board to move forward with an open and expeditious process,” Geithner said in a statement. “It is very important that we continue to have strong, effective leadership of this important institution, and in the coming weeks, we plan to put forward a candidate with the experience and requisite qualities to take this institution forward.”

While the Bank’s relative importance as a source of finance for developing countries faded somewhat beginning in the 1990s as private foreign direct investment (FDI) poured into fast-growing middle- income nations, it has enjoyed a major revival under Zoellick, particularly since the outbreak of the September 2008 financial crisis.

Indeed, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), as the Bank is formally known, and its soft-loan affiliate, the International Development Association (IDA), virtually doubled its total lending from 24.7 billion dollars in 2008 to nearly 47 billion dollars in 2009. In 2010, lending reached an all-time high of 58.7 billion dollars before falling back to 43 billion dollars last year.

In addition to IDA and the IBRD, which lends primarily to middle- income countries, Zoellick has also presided over other parts of the Bank’s vast empire, including its private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which made 12 billion dollars in new commitments last year, and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), which provides insurance and other guarantees to spur FDI in developing economies.

Zoellick, who was nominated by then-President George W. Bush in 2007 after his predecessor, former Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, was forced to resign as a result of conflict-of-interest allegations, had served previously as U.S. Trade Representative and Deputy Secretary of State.

A moderate Republican, Zoellick has been given high marks for his managerial competence and work ethic. In terms of concrete achievements, Zoellick helped negotiate the Bank’s first general capital increase since 1988 as part of a package that also increased developing-country representation on governing board.

He also helped raised a record 90 billion dollars for IDA, which provides credits to the world’s poorest countries; expanded the Bank’s anti-corruption efforts; promoted more women and developing- country staff to senior positions; and significantly increased the transparency of its operations through the revision of the Bank’s Access to Information Policy.

“NGOs regard the new policy as a significant achievement in that it is the most progressive international financial institution access- to-information policy to date,” the independent Bank Information Center (BIC), which works closely with civil society groups in many borrowing countries, said Wednesday.

He also launched new initiatives to channel more funding into climate-change-related projects, agricultural research, and food security. Just last month, he launched a new lending instrument, the Program for Results, which supports government operations and disburses money as results are achieved.

NGOs have criticised some of his work, arguing that he has been more responsive to the interests of political and economic elites in developing countries than to the most-vulnerable sectors of the societies. Some point to the Program of Results as an example, noting that operations supported by it will not be subject to the environmental and social safeguards that apply to other Bank operations.

“In the absence of the type of safeguards that have applied over the years, citizens and the natural environment will be vulnerable, potentially without recourse,” said Nancy Alexander, director of Economic Governance at the Heinrich Boell Foundation here.

“Those safeguards were what enabled people who were adversely affected by Bank-funded projects and other activities to appeal to the Bank’s own Inspection Panel for remedies,” she said.

As to Zoellick’s successor, the NGOs argue that the selection process must not only be completely open and transparent, but it should also satisfy the proposed double-majority requirement. Under the Bank’s charter, the president is elected only by a majority of voting shares, which are disproportionately weighted in favour of North America and Europe.

In addition, the NGO letter, which was coordinated by the Britain- based Bretton Woods Project, called for candidates to satisfy one other requirement.

“Given that the World Bank has a mandate to focus on eradicating poverty and only works in developing countries, the new president should have strong understanding and experience of the particular problems facing those countries,” it said.

Anticipating Zoellick’s departure, a number of U.S. nationals, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, Geithner himself, as well as his top international aide, Lael Brainard, have been mentioned as possible candidates.

When asked about Hillary Clinton’s interest Wednesday, her spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said it “isn’t happening”. Summers, who served as the Bank’s chief economist in the early 1990s, is also considered unlikely, in part because of his reputation for arrogance and abrasiveness.

What remains uncertain is how hard President Barack Obama will fight for a U.S. candidate. As a signer of the 2010 G20 Summit communiqué in Toronto which called for “an open, transparent and merit-based” process who also endorsed an open process last year at the IMF, Obama should be willing to consider an alternative.

But the timing of the selection – in the heat of what is expected to be a difficult political campaign in which Republicans will charge that Obama has sacrificed Washington’s global leadership – reduces that possibility.

As Nancy Birdsall, the respected head of the Center for Global Development here, noted earlier this week before Zoellick’s announcement, “There is a risk that the World Bank could become a highly partisan, U.S. hot-button issue, as the U.N. has too often been.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Despite strong pressure to reduce the yawning federal deficit, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is asking Congress for a slight increase in funding for the State Department and foreign aid next year.

The administration is requesting a total of some 56 billion dollars in “international affairs” spending for fiscal year (FY) 2013, which begins Oct. 1, according to the budget proposal presented by the administration Monday.

That total is two percent more – or about 1.3 billion dollars – than Congress approved in a 2012 omnibus appropriations bill, but still four percent less than the FY 2010 international affairs budget, the last year in which Democrats held a majority in both houses of Congress.

More than half the increase from last year will be provided by a 770- million-dollar “Middle East Funding Initiative”, which is designed to give the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) flexibility in responding to new developments in the so-called “Arab Awakening”.

“The notion is we’re in a new world,” Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides told reporters Monday. “…(T)he idea is to have some flexibility to support everything from Tunisia, to support areas like potentially in Egypt and in areas where things are changing every day, in Syria… the world is evolving as we see it, and we felt it was important to have a pool of money.”

On the other hand, U.S. aid to Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union will decline under Obama’s proposal. Military and police assistance to Latin American countries – particularly its two biggest beneficiaries, Colombia and Mexico – will also be reduced by roughly 10 percent.

The budget also calls for modest cuts in global health, food aid, and disaster and humanitarian programmes, proposals which drew concern from a number of aid groups.

“We understand this is a difficult fiscal climate, but any further trimming of these core accounts is counterproductive and impedes our efforts to build more self-sufficient populations,” said Samuel Worthington, president of InterAction, a coalition of more than 190 independent U.S. humanitarian and development organisations.

The proposed international affairs budget, which will now be taken up by Congress, represents less than one percent of Obama’s total federal budget request of 3.8 trillion dollars and less than 10 percent of the proposed 614-billion-dollar Pentagon budget – of which nearly 90 billion dollars are earmarked for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Under the plan, the defence budget would be reduced by about 32 billion dollars from this year’s level.

Given a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, election-year politics and the lack of a politically potent grassroots constituency willing to lobby for more foreign aid, the administration’s proposed request is unlikely to make it through the Congress intact.

In addition, some specific proposals contained in the budget are likely to provoke considerable controversy.

Under pressure from Congress, the administration is currently holding up delivery of some 1.6 billion dollars in military and economic aid to Egypt, for example, as a result of the military regime’s crackdown against U.S. democracy-promotion activists and indigenous groups that accepted U.S. and other foreign funding. The new budget proposal calls for another 1.3 billion dollars in military aid next year.

Some 2.4 billion dollars in aid to Pakistan – most of it for military and counterinsurgency assistance – could also be vulnerable to cuts or new conditions if accumulating tensions that reached their zenith when U.S. warplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers close to the Afghan border last November persist over the coming months.

Similarly, the administration has included 79 million dollars for U.S. dues to UNESCO next year despite the fact that all payments to the Paris-based agency have been frozen since its governing board voted to admit Palestine as a member state.

Nides said Monday that the administration will ask Congress to waive the provisions of two laws enacted some 20 years ago that ban the government from contributing to any U.N. agency that recognises Palestine. Most analysts believe this will be a difficult, if not impossible task, during an election year.

The administration’s earmark for UNESCO nonetheless reflected a strong commitment to the United Nations, multilateral diplomacy, and peacekeeping throughout the budget document.

The administration’s proposal calls for maintaining or increasing U.S. contributions to most multilateral accounts, notably the Global Environment Facility (GEF) for which it is asking nearly 130 million dollars, or a 44 percent increase over this year, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria to which the administration hopes to provide 1.65 billion dollars in 2013, a 57-percent increase over current levels.

It also urges the approval of 250 million dollars for debt relief for the world’s poorest countries, a huge increase over the 12 million dollars approved by Congress this year.

Despite the proposed increase in contributions to the Global Fund, AIDS activists expressed deep disappointment over a proposed 10 percent cut – or more than 500 million dollars – in the nine-year-old bilateral President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah told reporters that dramatic reductions over the last several years in the cost of providing treatment for HIV/AIDS had made it possible for Washington to meet its target of putting six million HIV/AIDS victims on life-sustaining anti-retroviral treatment by 2013. Nearly four million are covered by PEPFAR today, he said.

But AIDS activists said they were sceptical that the six-million target could be reached with a 10-percent cut in funding and that the savings realised by the cuts in cost should be reinvested in what is widely considered one of Washington’s most effective aid programmes.

“It’s simply not credible to cut a half billion from the U.S.’s bilateral global AIDS programme and say you’re doing all you can to end AIDS,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of U.S. Advocacy for Health GAP, an anti-AIDS group.

“There’s no need to take money out of AIDS and into Afghanistan,” he added.

Indeed, nearly a quarter of the entire international affairs budget request is earmarked for the so-called “front-line states” – Afghanistan (4.6 billion dollars); Iraq (4.8 billion dollars), where the State Department has taken over from the Pentagon as the chief U.S. presence and is now staffing what is supposed to be the world’s largest U.S. embassy; and Pakistan (2.4 billion dollars).

Most of that money will come from a special account, the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) Fund, which some on Capitol Hill have criticised as a State Department “slush fund” that, because of its close relationship to the so-called “Global War on Terror”, has escaped close scrutiny by Congress.

Aside from the three front-line countries, the biggest bilateral recipients of U.S. aid under the proposed budget include Israel at 3.1 billion dollars in military aid and Egypt at 1.6 billion dollars.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

As U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro once put it, “Women hold the keys to unlocking the barriers to sustainable development.”

Women in Muslim-dominated Metiabruz district in eastern India look forward to better opportunities after their IT education. Credit: Ranjita Biswas/IPS

Women play essential roles in the global economy, agriculture and development. But while the rhetoric regarding the importance of women’s inclusion in development projects has peaked in recent years, actual gender-inclusion in investment projects often fails to walk the talk.

The main challenges facing sustainable development in the future are gender inequality, climate change, natural resource degradation and the global recession, said Melanne Verveer, U.S. Department of State ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, at a recent conference on gender equity and sustainable development.

“No effort to advance sustainable development will succeed that does not take into account half of the world’s population,” she said. “Women have long been promoting solutions to sustainable development challenges. They’ve been promoting climate change adaptation and mitigation, protecting biodiversity and vital ecosystems, securing water access, and combating indoor air pollution.”

According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), women are responsible for half of the world’s food production. And they continue to bear most of the responsibilities at home, from caring for children to providing meals. Therefore, women’s participation is vital to the success of sustainable development projects.

However, while acknowledging the importance of gender equality for development, the World Bank and other international financial institutions (IFIs) continue to make gender-insensitive decisions, Elaine Zuckerman, the head of Gender Action, told IPS.

“A lot of people propose gender equality, women’s rights, women’s empowerment, but then when you look at what is budgetised, where the funds go, there is a huge disconnect. I think it’s critical to translate the rhetoric into investments… A lot of IFI staff don’t still, but those who do often speak in a vacuum,” Zuckerman told IPS.

IFIs still view gender as a “soft issue”, Elizabeth Arend, programmes coordinator for Gender Action, told IPS.

In 2011, while the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) highlighted gender issues, the Bank’s budget for “social development, gender and inclusion” investments decreased to 908 million dollars from 952 million in 2010. The Bank’s spending in this thematic category represents less than two percent of its 2011 budget, Arend noted.

“It is not enough to have a handful of ‘gender experts’ in an institution like the World Bank… nor is it permissible to address gender in a single paragraph within a 160-page project appraisal document. IFIs must understand that every component of every project in every sector has gender implications, and that marginalising gender issues fundamentally undermines the effectiveness and sustainability of IFI investments,” Arend told IPS.

Many IFI projects fail to address gender inequalities that prevent women and girls from participating and benefiting from project activities, experts say. And women tend to disproportionately suffer when gender inequalities are not included in development project designs, as exemplified by the World Bank-financed West African and Chad-Cameroon pipelines project.

Research by Gender Action in partnership with Friends of the Earth found that because gender dimensions were not taken into account in the project, “IFIs reinforced (existing) second-class status by sidelining women in consultation processes, discriminating against women in compensation schemes and employment opportunities, and undermining women’s critical livelihoods.”

Arend believes there are several reasons for the World Bank’s persistent gap between gender equality rhetoric and actual funding. First is the historic discrepancy between what the Bank’s research team prioritises and what actually gets funded. Secondly, if the leadership doesn’t see gender as a priority, then gender simply will not be integrated in the Bank’s investments. Finally, the Bank is ultimately a business.

“The World Development Report provides an example. Gender Action’s founder, Elaine Zuckerman, has followed WDRs since their inception and has (hardly) seen a correlation between the WDR and actual funding. This holds true for the Gender Equality and Development WDR as well. While the Bank is busy promoting this report and its findings, in addition to its ‘Think Equal’ social media campaign, it is not investing more in gender at all,” Arend said.

However, this situation might be slowly changing. Arend noted that the Bank has committed 40 million dollars to re-launch a “strengthening agriculture public services project” in Haiti following the original project in 2009.

The new project has “developed a financial literacy programme for women agriculture producers and traders, strengthened the agriculture ministry team’s capacity on gender issues and supported the integration of a Gender Focal Point into the ministry” as requested by female beneficiaries.

“The (Haiti) project is far from perfect, but this shows that the World Bank is capable of making investments in a gender-sensitive manner. All that seems to be lacking is the will,” Arend said.

As China sees its influence continue to grow in this part of the world, a delegation from the United Kingdom arrived in Grenada last weekend with a proverbial carrot for its former colonies, vowing to create new opportunities for trade, investment and innovation “in our respective economies”.

Foreign Secretary William Hague (right) with Chairman of CARICOM Foreign Minister Sam Condor (center). Credit: Courtesy of the British High Commission

With plans to invest 116.5 million dollars over a four-year period, a considerable increase from previous aid budgets, London is sending a strong signal of its intention to be part of the future socioeconomic development of the region.

“We are one of the biggest trade investment partners in your region,” said Foreign Secretary William Hague. “South of the U.S., only Brazil is a more important market for our exports. We are a leading voice in the European Union in favour of free trade and against protectionism, putting us in a position to champion things that matter to the Caribbean.

“Our membership of the G8 and G20 gives us a leading role in discussions about global economic governance – and we know how important it is that the voices of smaller nations are heard in these debates and across international multilateral organisations,” he said.

Asked about London’s role in a new Caribbean environment where countries, including China, were seeking to gain some form of influence, Hague noted said “this is a network world, it is not a world of blocs anymore where you are in one camp or another camp. You can actually have strong and effective trading relationships with many countries in the world.”

In September, China signed cooperation and loan agreements for projects worth millions of dollars with Barbados, The Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana.

Wang Qishan, China’s vice premier, also announced one billion dollars in loans and preferential treatment to Caribbean countries in support of local economic development.

At the UK-Caribbean Forum, St. Kitts and Nevis Foreign Minister Sam Condor, who chairs the Caribbean Community Council for Foreign and Community Relations, said he was heartened by the stated determination of Hague “to bring about a new beginning, as it were”.

“The ongoing economic crisis, the epidemic of interpersonal violence, the prolonged tightening of credit markets, the less predictable relations between and among nations, the degradation of the environment (and) climate change” are some of the critical issues involved, he said, adding that “the Caribbean region has taken a beating in all areas resulting in a formidable toll on our very survival”.

One bone of contention that was not resolved in the talks is the Air Passenger Duty (APD) that Caribbean officials complain hampers the tourism sector.

Late last year, London announced that the APD rates to Caribbean destinations will continue to be considerably higher than those to some competitor destinations. The tax on economy long-haul flights of more than 6,000 miles will rise from 132 dollars to 143 dollars per person. The new measure goes into effect in April this year.

Condor, speaking at a news conference at the end of the talks, said that “we always have to be hopeful” as the region continues to look for “some adjustments” since “we do not believe it (APD) is cast in stone.

“We are aware that the British government has their own fiscal responsibility to their own country (but) we believe that this is a new partnership, a new beginning which we hope to see a different attitude in how they relate to the Caribbean.”

But British Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister for the Caribbean Jeremy Browne made it clear that London would not be pressured into re-examining the matter now.

“We have a very difficult budget situation in Britain…and countries across Europe, many have even harder budget situations than us, we are running a very big deficit and there are a number of unpopular taxes in Britain…and we are not in a position where we have the flexibilities to remove sources of revenue,” he said.

The “Final Action Plan” made reference to the new strategic partnership between the Caribbean and the United Kingdom “to promote prosperity and build economic resilience”. There was also an agreement to explore other avenues, such as the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) that was signed between Europe and the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) countries in 2008 to improve access for Caribbean exports of goods and services to Britain.

Britain also agreed to assist the Caribbean improve food security and the “resilience of their food and agricultural sectors, through measures aimed at enhancing the efficiency of production and distribution systems and the economic security of producers”. The meeting agreed to the develop this year an “effective coordination mechanism to help take forward our partnership in the fight against drugs and international crime, including through the establishment of a UK-Caribbean Expertise Exchange Mechanism to promote best practices on security issues across the region”.

There was also agreement to establish with the “full collaboration of the United States, a regional network of land-based law enforcement units trained and equipped to a common standard.

“These units would provide a fully interoperable regional resource to conduct land based surveillance and interdiction operations.”

The ministers also agreed to remain “engaged in negotiations to conclude an Arms Trade Treaty in 2012 and for the successful outcome of the Review Conference of the UN Plan of Action to prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons.”

On the issue of climate change, there was agreement to collaborate closely on many issues, including working together “with urgency and vigour” to close the “ambition gap between current mitigation commitments and those necessary to keep long term temperature increases well below two degrees centigrade or 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels”.

A was made commitment to secure agreement by 2015 based on the Durban Platform for enhanced action on a comprehensive legally binding global framework, incorporating commitments commensurate with a two or 1.5 degree threshold.

The meeting also agreed to identify sources and ensure adequate mobilisation of long term climate finance and to meet the agreed goal of 100 billion dollars of additional financing annually by 2020.

Figuring out how to change the world for the better is a daunting challenge, but throngs of passionate people are willing to take on the task.

A display at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held in Busan, South Korea in November. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

How hard can it be? Find a problem and solve it.

Problem: Women in Afghanistan are oppressed.

Solution: Help empower them by creating a women-only shopping mall, thereby helping them earn income and gain business experience.

Problem: Millions of Africans lack access to clean drinking water.

Solution: Install merry-go-round water pumps across the continent that allow children to produce fresh drinking water by merely playing.

Problem: Countless children in Thailand are orphaned by a tsunami.

Solution: Build orphanages.

Can aid work really be this simple?

The women’s shopping mall in Afghanistan never caught on, and was later filled with men buying and selling construction materials.

The water pumps were criticised by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the aid organisation installing them eventually suspended its project.

As for the orphanages in Thailand, two that were built ended up seeking out children to fill their empty facilities since most of the children were taken care of by relatives or the government. Many children who did come were brought by poor family members who couldn’t feed them and used the orphanage like a daycare.

What went wrong? Weren’t the intentions in the right place?

Not according to Sandra Schimmelpfennig, who created the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough. An experienced aid worker and donor consultant, she served as an aid organisation coordinator in Thailand after the massive tsunami struck in 2004 and witnessed the failed orphanage project, and called such bungled ideas extraordinarily common.

“A massive percentage (of the organisations in Thailand) followed a haphazard model,” she said. “A majority of those were run by people with zero experience. Maybe 10 percent really tried to learn from their mistakes.”

Poor models take a variety of forms, but many lack such basic prudence as carrying out needs assessments, consulting experts in local communities, and conducting candid post-project evaluations, according to Schimmelpfennig.

But sometimes ambition and novelty best practicality.

Take Playpump International’s project in Africa. According to the agency’s press releases, it planned to install 4,000 merry-go-round water pumps by 2010. The idea’s novelty attracted millions of dollars from the U.S. government and other donors including several celebrities.

However, it belly-flopped due to the high cost of the pumps, their propensity to break down, difficulty of use and lack of consultation with communities they were meant to help, according to a 2007 UNICEF report. In March of 2010, Playpump International closed and donated its inventory.

As for the women’s market built in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2007, it was inhibited by high product costs and an awkward location which attracted little foot traffic. Funded by the German aid agency G.T.Z. and USAID, it was largely abandoned in 2009.

Other ideas like 1millionshirts.org which sought to collect a million shirts and send them to needy Africans, lacked the most basic of needs assessments. Its founder had never visited Africa or worked on a foreign aid project. The idea was lambasted by critics and was eventually suspended last year.

These types of projects fall under the phenomenon dubbed by Schimmelpfennig as “Whites in Shining Armor,” a misplaced ambition where outsiders feel they are in a special position to help the less fortunate, and rush off to solve problems in other communities.

She cautions that before setting out, a person should think about an outsider coming to their own community and trying to implement a similar project. What seems an obvious fix is usually much more complicated in reality.

Robert Bortner, the director and founder of the Community Empowerment Network (CEN) takes a markedly different approach to aid than simply dropping a solution into the laps of the needy.

“You have to establish what the core root need is,” he said. “People on the ground understand their immediate problems a lot better than we do, they just may not understand the cause.”

CEN, based in Washington State, works to create sustainable development in the Brazilian Amazon by first allowing target communities to decide their own priorities and objectives, then helping them achieve their goals by providing mentoring and training, and assisting them to develop their local economy.

But Bortner understands the propensity to help communities by giving them “things”.

“It’s so much easier to fund things than something social or psychological. It’s easier to talk about and show. But you have to be candid and look at what worked and what didn’t work.”

However, the issue of conducting post-project evaluations is highly contentious. It’s common for organisations to understate failures and spin reports to the point of telling only good things.

“All aid organisations are afraid of bad publicity,” said Schimmelpfennig. “Because donors can’t actually see the results of the work most (groups) do, they get donations almost solely based on their reputation and how well they can sell their own work. If you admit mistakes, then it could get out to the public and then they’d begin to question whether you deserved their money.”

Some donors even look down on evaluations, considering them an unnecessary waste of money, she said.

However, a movement to address failures is gaining momentum. The website admittingfailures.org, created by Engineers Without Borders Canada, allows for people to browse and submit accounts of failed aid projects.

“By hiding our failures, we are condemning ourselves to repeat them and we are stifling innovation” the group writes. “In doing so, we are condemning ourselves to continue under-performance in the development sector.”

“Conversely, by admitting our failures – publicly sharing them not as shameful acts, but as important lessons – we contribute to a culture in development where failure is recognised as essential to success.”

Before conceiving an aid idea, you should know the people that you’re serving and their needs and create a partnership with local stakeholders, said Bortner.

Shimmelpfennig recommends getting a reality check first by reading aid blogs and seeing what has and hasn’t worked. She also suggests checking her website for ideas on getting started.

Excerpt:

The Ganta Concerned Women's Group runs a pilot project to teach women in Liberia's Tonglewin village how to read and do basic mathematics. Credit: UN Photo/Christopher Herwig

By Thalif Deen and - -
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 28 2011 (IPS)

If the international community can successfully raise billions of dollars to fight deadly diseases, why not a similar fund to promote education, asks Gordon Brown, former British prime minister.

The Ganta Concerned Women's Group runs a pilot project to teach women in Liberia's Tonglewin village how to read and do basic mathematics. Credit: UN Photo/Christopher Herwig

The proposal by Brown, a former British chancellor of the exchequer, has been gathering momentum at a time when the United Nations complains of a growing crisis in the educational sector – a shortage of over 6.1 million teachers in a world inhabited by nearly 800 million illiterate people, nearly two-thirds of them women.

Allan E. Goodman, president and chief executive officer of the New York-based Institute of International Education (IIE), who strongly supports the proposal for a global fund, told IPS: “It is a new idea and one that promises to leverage private as well as public funds.”

Without it, he warned, the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals – including a call for universal primary education by 2015 – are unlikely to be reached by the deadline.

“Improving education needs to be a priority for governments and such a fund would signal that indeed it is,” said Goodman, whose Institute was one of the co-sponsors of the Qatar summit, along with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Dr Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, chairman of WISE, told IPS the former UK prime minister’s proposal for the creation of a global fund for education is evidence that leaders are hearing the WISE call to raise the status of education on the political agenda.

He pointed out that WISE was established in 2009 as a platform for debate on how education can be equipped to better serve future needs and as a launch pad for practical actions.

“I hope other leaders will contribute to the discussion so that we might find and implement practical solutions to one of the most pressing issues of our time,” he added.

Meanwhile, the statistics coming out of the educational sector are bleak: widening gender disparities in classrooms; woeful lack of schools in urban and rural areas in Asia and Africa; and a shortage of funding to meet the growing needs of education worldwide.

Brown argued there is an urgent need for a massive infusion of funds into the educational sector.

“We must hold national governments to their promises to provide the funding both in development aid, and of course, the funding that individual developing countries’ governments have promised for education in their own areas,” he said.

And where countries fall behind, he said, “We should be telling them this is not acceptable because it is not simply about them and their generation; it is about future generations. But we should do more.”

“In my view, we should now create a global fund for education,” he said, which would allow people in the private sector and the public sector, philanthropists and people in charities, private companies to affiliate and make possible a focus for momentum to meet the U.N.’s MDGs by 2015, including universal primary education.

Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund to fight diseases has become the main financier of programmes to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, with approved funding of 22.4 billion dollars for more than 1,000 programmes in 150 countries as of June 2011.

The proposal for a similar fund for education also comes at a time when the United States is threatening to cut all funding to the Paris- based UNESCO, one of whose primary mandates is the achievement of “education for all.”

The funding cut has been prompted by the admission of Palestine as a member of UNESCO much against the wishes of the United States.

UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education Qian Tang told IPS there are less than four years to go until 2015, the target date set by the international community for achieving “education for all”.

Between 2008 and 2009, aid to basic education increased by one-fifth, to reach 5.6 billion dollars.

“UNESCO is very encouraged by this tendency. But it is not enough: ensuring that all children participate in basic education alone will require the injection of an additional 16 billion dollars,” Tang said.

“And we must not forget the many other levels and types of education that are critical to sustainable and equitable development: early childhood care and education, secondary schooling, higher education and training for the world of work, among others.”

He also pointed out that literacy programmes in particular remain under-funded, as 793 million women and men lack basic reading and writing skills.

Yet literacy has the power to transform lives far more than almost any other development action.

With this in mind, UNESCO works with governments to raise awareness of the importance of education and supports them to make good on their commitments, he added.

In early November, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova addressed the opening of the first pledging conference of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), an initiative and fund devoted to making quality education a reality for all children.

The conference, which was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, resulted in 57 significant pledges from donor and developing countries, civil society organisations and the private sector, demonstrating a political commitment to opening up opportunities for quality education.

UNESCO says it will continue to help beneficiary countries to prepare the necessary education plans to qualify for funding under the GPE.

At the same time, the U.N. agency will work with its partners to explore the viability of establishing other means of increasing resources for education, including innovative mechanisms such as debt swaps and micro-donations from bank transactions.

Excerpt:

By - - and Kristin Palitza
CAPE TOWN , Nov 16 2011 (IPS)

South African health experts are calling on governments to use legally available mechanisms to promote the production or import of generic drugs in their countries.

Patented drugs limit patients access to public health care. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

Pharmaceutical patents continue to drive up drug prices, making it expensive to treat patients. This often leads to limited access to health care, especially in developing countries where the disease burden is high, but public health budgets remain low, experts said.

Governments can revert to the Doha Declaration – a declaration on the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Public Health, which was signed 10 years ago by member countries of the World Trade Organisation in Doha, Qatar – which exits to ensure that patents do not undermine the ability of countries to achieve the right to health.

“Countries, like South Africa, may interpret TRIPS as they see fit. They can enact national legislation to allow fewer patents and promote generic production of drugs to promote access to medicine for all,” explained Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) South Africa access and innovation officer Mara Kardas-Nelson.

The availability of generic medications can have drastic consequences for public health. “When generics were produced for antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for HIV-patients, costs rapidly decreased from over 10,000 dollars per patient per year to about 600 dollars,” said Kardas-Nelson. “It allowed increased access to medicines for millions of people.”

But when the TRIPS agreement was signed in 1995, pharmaceuticals were allowed to apply for 20-year patents for their drugs, which meant that during that period, no generic versions of those medicines could be produced. This drastically reduced the global availability of generics. Only six years later, when the Doha Declaration was signed, were governments allowed to circumvent the strict patenting regulations in the interest of protecting their citizens access to health care.

Surprisingly, very few developing countries, including South Africa, have amended their Patent Acts to make use of the possibilities the Doha Declaration provided – mainly due to international pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, the United States and European Union, where many of the world’s patented drugs are manufactured, health experts argue.

“Countries must not bow to this pressure,” warned Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) senior researcher Catherine Tomlinson. South Africa currently provided patent protection beyond what is required by the TRIPS agreement, she said.

“Unlike South Africa, India, Brazil and Thailand have used flexibilities allowed under TRIPS to curb excessive patenting of pharmaceuticals and promote public health. While South Africa granted 2,442 pharmaceutical patents in 2008 alone, Brazil only granted 278 pharmaceutical patents between 2003 and 2008,” Tomlinson explained.

Publicly, the South Africa government repeatedly confirmed the need for generics. In a joint declaration with India and Brazil, South African President Jacob Zuma officially acknowledged earlier this year that the impact of intellectual property on health, access to drugs and prices can best be tackled by scaling up production of generic medicines. But up until now, such declarations have remained lip service.

“We demand Zuma lives up to his commitment. We have not yet seen any concrete indications that government will take steps to change the Patent Act law,” said Tomlinson. “There is lack of political will.”

TAC and MSF also demand stricter and independent review of patent applications, as well as for third parties to be able to oppose patents pending approval and the first year after they have been granted.

Moreover, South Africa should make use of its right to issue compulsory licenses under the Doha Declaration that would allow it to access generic versions of otherwise patented medicines in cases where prices are prohibitively expensive, the organisations say. In contrast to other developing nations, such as Thailand, South Africa has not once made use of this option.

The consequences of South Africa’s strict patent protection are high medicine costs and the delayed availability of affordable generic medicines. South African pharmaceutical benefit management company Mediscor reported in its 2010 medicines review that drug expenditure increased by 25.2 percent between 2008 and 2010, while medicine use only increased 5.8 percent.

For patients receiving chronic, life-saving medication, such as ARVs, availability of generic medication can mean the difference between life and death.

Nokwanda Pani, an HIV-positive woman who lives in South Africa’s third-largest township, Khayelitsha, near Cape Town, has been receiving ARV treatment since 2005. Four years later, when she developed resistance to the drugs, she was put onto a second line of medication.

She now worries about what will happen to her if her body stops responding to the medication again. Because, in South Africa, third-line treatment is only available in the private health care sector, at a high cost of 4,200 dollars per patient per year – an amount that Pani cannot afford.

Without generic competition, the cost of second- and third-line ARVs can be up to 20 times more expensive than first-line ARVs, confirmed MSF. Such price differences do not only apply to HIV treatment but to all drugs, including those needed to treat cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes or high-blood pressure.

“Because I rely on the public health sector, third-line treatment is not available to me. If I build up resistance again, it’s the end of the road for me,” Pani says. For her, it all comes down to one central question: “Why is our government putting the profits of pharmaceutical companies before our lives?”

Excerpt:

By - - and Kanya D'Almeida
WASHINGTON, Nov 12 2011 (IPS)

While experts are hopeful that blocs of emerging market economies like BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – will play a major role in the upcoming aid effectiveness conference in Busan, South Korea, others fear that the new players do not yet have the fiscal power to make a serious intervention in fora generally dominated by rich donor states.

For instance, while the BRICS pledged just 26 billion dollars in loans to low-income countries over the last decade, traditional donors from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation And Development (OECD) committed 269 billion dollars in the same timeframe.

Moreover, many observers fear that rising South-South partnerships are merely a slightly distorted mirror image of the old exploitative relationships between the developed and developing worlds.

According to Jayati Ghosh, a leading international development economist, “Groupings (like BRICS) do not so much change patterns of trade and investment as reflect them. We have seen the emergence of multinational corporations from the South, which have affirmed the universal tendencies of capital rather than (produce) any massive difference based on location.”

“On the other hand, it is also true that, while capital is increasingly footloose and transnational in its orientation, it is also still relies heavily upon state support and therefore nation- states (including in the South) continue to make efforts on behalf of capital originating in their own countries,” she told IPS.

“Ironically, despite this interdependence, states are increasingly subservient to capital (especially finance capital) than the other way around. This is as true of capital from Northern countries as from Southern ones.”

This prognosis raises serious questions about both the capacities and desires of BRICS countries to significantly alter development assistance, or trade, in ways that benefit the global South.

A recent working paper put forward by Nkunde Mwase, an economist at the strategy, policy and review department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), examined the BRICS’ increased development financing flows to low income countries (LICs) and found that “BRICs lend more to LICs with weaker institutions. Land-locked, resource- scarce LICs receive significantly less financing than other resource- rich LICs.”

Most of this development lending over the past few years has been driven by China, Mwase told IPS.

“We do not find any evidence suggesting that LICs with good governance are rewarded with more financing. While these findings are not unique to BRIC financing, the rapidly growing BRIC-LIC ties have ‘raised the stakes’ and underscore the need to ensure that the financing does not undermine efforts to improve governance in LICs,” she stressed.

“Such loans could lead countries into debt traps if the risks are not fully taken into account,” Mwase added. “LICs need to ensure that the financing is allocated to projects with high returns and does not lead them (down) unsustainable debt paths.”

This trend is compounded by a pronounced lack of transparency in transactions – be they aid, development assistance, loans or even corporate contracts – between BRICS and poorer countries.

“Countries like China and India do not yet publish any country- specific data on their concessional and non-concessional loans,” according to a paper from the Centre for Chinese Studies at the Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

“This makes it difficult for partner countries’ parliaments and civil-society actors to assess the impact that money has on their development. Greater transparency is needed if we are to make a general assessment of the effect of (BRICS’) development ‘packages’.”

Susan Thomson, a postdoctoral fellow in contemporary politics at Hampshire College, is one of many observers concerned about the negative impacts of development aid in the hands of BRICS countries.

“BRICS as a donor begs the question of what conditionalities, if any, will be placed on recipient countries,” she told IPS. “The U.S., Canada and the EU traditionally make human rights requirements and human security requirements part of their aid package, but it is unlikely that the BRICS will do the same.”

“China provides a particularly pernicious example of direct aid, particularly to Africa, with no strings attached and through this we see systemic human rights abuses by governments across the continent,” she added.

She pointed to the example of Zambia, where Chinese development projects force local workers to labour seven days a week, with scant regard for international or domestic labour, human and social rights.

“The fact that African governments are actively seeking additional channels of aid is going to lead to an increasing economic gap, where the winners are the BRICS and the losers are the subsistence farmers, women, people living with HIV/AIDS and all the traditional ‘losers’ of this system,” Thomson said.

A 2011 study by GRAIN and the Economic Research Foundation unearthed a recent trend of Indian corporations buying up vast tracts of land in Africa, essentially “outsourcing” its food production into low- income countries across the continent.

In the year 2010, “more than 80 Indian companies have invested about 2.4 billion dollars in buying or leasing huge plantations in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal and Mozambique that will be used to grow foodgrains and other cash crops for the Indian market.”

This practice, which many in the agricultural and food justice movement refer to as “land grabbing”, has hitherto been decried as a neocolonial tool of the West to exert corporate control over the global South.

India’s new venture thus highlights the limits of South-South cooperation as a way out of systemic inequality and exploitation for many countries.

According to Ghosh, “South-South partnerships do have the potential to change the current exploitative and inefficient global economic order, but only if they are based on very different premises of co- operation – currently, they (like North-South economic relations) are also driven by corporate needs and operate very much within a broadly market-driven system that privileges the interests of large companies over citizens.”

“What is surprising is that in this moment of global crisis there is still no serious attempt in any of the global economic groupings (including BRICS) to consider alternatives that would lead to sustainable resolutions – for example, the need to move from credit bubble-led growth or export-led growth to more sustainable forms of growth based on expansion of domestic wages and employment are simply not considered seriously,” she stressed.

“Most significant of all, the need to identify alternative forms of production and consumption that will involve a more sustainable and less damaging approach to nature is still not at the top of national or international policy agendas,” Ghosh added.

*This is the second of a two-part series on the BRICS countries and how their development and political agendas will influence the future of aid.

Excerpt:

As shock waves from Greece’s economic crisis emanate across the Eurozone and the Occupy protests in the U.S. grow bolder in their critique of the dominant neoliberal system, it seems clear to many observers that the old hegemonic economic order is fading fast.

Still, promises made years ago by these afflicted developed and industrialised nations – such as aid pledged to the global South – remain intact and the question of who will honour these commitments has become the veritable elephant in the global economic arena.

As over 2,000 government delegates and experts gear up for the fourth high-level conference on aid effectiveness slated to run from Nov. 29-Dec. 1 in Busan, South Korea, calls for emerging market economies – particularly South-South cooperative groupings like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – to take the reins of global development are reverberating across continents.

According to the World Bank, the BRICS countries pledged 26 billion dollars in loan commitments to the developing world between 2000- 2008, the bulk of which came from China.

Between them, the BRICS hold roughly 4.3 trillion dollars in hard cash reserves, three-quarters of which sit in Chinese banks. By 2014, these countries will account for 60 percent of world economic growth.

Yet they have hitherto been slighted by the traditionally wealthy Northern economies, particularly in the realm of development aid and assistance.

According to the Centre for Chinese Studies (CCS) at the Stellenbosch University in South Africa, “The 2005 Paris Declaration was issued against the background of the North-South divide; the Accra agenda in 2008 was extended only slightly to include some weak statements on South-South cooperation.”

This year, while the U.S. and the European Union are busy slashing their official development assistance (ODA) to low income countries, the BRICS will likely be called upon to fill the commitment gaps.

For example, aid to Africa will be a priority item on the menu in Busan, since the continent is home to 33 of the planet’s 48 least developed countries (LDCs). According to the U.N.’s most recent estimates, 50 percent of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

This situation has been exacerbated by developed nations’ failure to comply with the 1970 U.N. General Assembly Resolution mandating rich countries to allocate 0.7 percent of their gross national income to developing countries. In the midst of severe domestic crises, the developed world is unlikely to pick up the tab now, adding more pressure on the BRICS to foot the bill.

“The significantly increased importance of China in global trade and investment is widely recognised. Russia matters not only because of its size but also because of its role as oil exporter and therefore ability to build up sizeable reserves,” Jayati Ghosh, a leading international development economist based at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told IPS.

“India’s potential role is much greater than its current one, (and) South Africa and Brazil are not only the largest economies in their respective regions but also closely involved in major regional networks like Mercosur and Nepad,” Ghosh said.

“Their coming together at present indicates their greater recognition of the need to connect independent of the nodal points earlier provided by the USA, Europe and Japan.”

In a rare example of collective action between BRICS’ two biggest rival, India and China issued a bilateral statement Wednesday urging Western countries to “adopt responsible macroeconomic policies to handle the issues of debt and financial stability properly”.

Published by Beijing’s finance ministry, the document (scroll down for English) encapsulated the outcome of the Fifth India-China Financial Dialogue, which closed Tuesday in New Delhi.

The statement recognised that, “The global economy is in a critical phase.” Criticising Eurozone for mismanaging its sovereign debt crisis and allowing ripple effects to touch the developing world, the statement added, “In emerging markets, where growth is relatively stronger, there are clear signs of a slowing as developments in advanced economies begin to weigh on (our) countries.”

However, this unity between the BRICS superpowers disintegrated quickly, as India’s finance ministry hastened to distance itself from the joint-statement’s sharp admonition of the West.

The document has since been conspicuously absent from any Indian media outlet, prompting many observers to reiterate lingering scepticism that the BRICS will be able to flex a collective muscle in the international arena, particularly since the countries’ geopolitical and socioeconomic strategies and priorities diverge so greatly.

“I see no basis for lumping these countries together,” Rajan Menon, chair of the department of international relations at Lehigh University told IPS. “Calling the BRICS a ‘grouping’ is an interesting sleight of hand – it gives the illusion of an entity capable of acting together. But I see no history of these countries being a cohesive collective.”

“If you take China out of the mix, what would be the residual capacity of the remaining countries to shape global outcomes? It would be hardly be comparable to other centres of power,” he added.

Indeed, trade patterns between the BRICS over the last decade bolster Menon’s analysis.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that Brazilian exports to China soared from 1.1 to 21 billion dollars between 2000 and 2010, while imports from China rose from 1.2 billion to 15.9 billion dollars in just nine years.

But while China is now Brazil’s primary trading partner, Brazil does not even rank in the top 10 of China’s partners.

“The BRICS have not yet demonstrated a collective agenda,” Menon said, “and until they do, positing them as a pressure group seems to be a little overdone.”

*This is the first of a two-part series on the BRICS countries and how their development and political agendas will influence the future of aid.

When the G20 leaders meet for their fifth summit in Cannes, France, on Thursday, they will be confronted with several worsening global economic and trade issues. Among them is how to strengthen the international trading system and how to overcome the developmental deficit that continues to create an uneven playing field for poor countries.

A police car burns at last year's G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. Credit: Marty Olauson/IPS

So far there is no consensus among the members of the WTO on what the blueprint to addressing the endemic ills plaguing the organisation is, particularly on how to deliver on the developmental promises made in the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), say trade diplomats.

The DDA was launched over 10 years ago to correct the historical imbalances and asymmetries in the global trading system and was designed to enable poorer countries to integrate into the system.

The EU and its allies, including Switzerland, want the G20 leaders to instruct their trade ministers to agree to an “ambitious” agenda that would make the WTO an active and lively body.

“The EU’s stand is also subtly supported by the WTO’s Director General Pascal Lamy, who wants an expanded agenda,” says a trade diplomat familiar with the discussions.

“A number of delegations want new approaches to be consistent with the Doha mandate, suggesting that the WTO could play its role in responding to global challenges, including its role in keeping protectionism at bay,” Lamy told members at the WTO’s General Council meeting last week.

Though Lamy did not mention the exact number of delegations or their composition, he was primarily alluding to a small group of countries led by the EU, says a trade diplomat from the IBSA countries.

Lamy, who will attend the G20 meeting, is expected to lobby leaders for his expanded agenda to revitalise the WTO.

But China and IBSA members do not share the need for an expanded agenda. At a time when the WTO is yet to deliver on the promised developmental goals set out in the Doha agenda, they are asking why members should abandon the single undertaking of the DDA negotiations and embark on a new programme. The single undertaking principle stipulates that nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed upon in the entire Doha package.

Clearly, there are differing perspectives at play, particularly between the EU, IBSA and China. “We are not telling the public the truth about where we are and how members must make a collective effort to recover the credibility of the organisation,” says Ambassador Roberto Azevedo, Brazil’s trade envoy to the WTO.

He disagreed with the EU’s specific demands, which include an early realisation of select issues, including trade facilitation and improvements in the Dispute Settlement Understanding (the WTO’s procedure for resolving trade quarrels).

“Characterising extremely difficult issues as areas of potential outcome for early harvest would not reflect the truth and would set us up for additional failures to deliver on a realistic promise,” Azevedo told IPS.

IBSA and China have adopted common positions on the DDA and other issues at the WTO. China supports the recent IBSA declaration that reiterated the trading bloc’s commitment to the DDA in addressing the core inequities and uneven playing field that poses problems for the poorest countries trying to integrate into the global trading system. China wants to ensure that there is a strong outcome on the development package.

The emergence of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries on the global stage brought tectonic shifts, even at the WTO. While Russia is yet to join the WTO, China and IBSA present common strategies on developmental issues in the Doha mandate.

In their statement issued on Oct. 19, the IBSA leaders said “the demands of the current negotiations in the Doha Development Round reflect an imbalance in the sense that there is too much accommodation of the sensitivities of developed countries in agriculture, alongside unjust demands on developing countries to open their markets in the services and industrial sectors.”

Over the last three years, the industrialised countries have changed the terms of the Doha negotiations without addressing the central issues. They seem determined to extract a high price involving steep cuts on industrial goods and sweeping market access for services from the four developing countries – China, India, Brazil, and South Africa – for meagre concessions to reduce their subsidies and market access for agriculture products.

In sharp contrast, the EU issued a “non-paper” for the G20 Summit in Cannes, on the same day when the IBSA declaration was made public. Brussels’ “non-paper”, obtained by IPS, is totally silent on the issue of addressing “the high levels of protection and subsidies in agriculture in the developed countries” as demanded by the IBSA leaders.

Incidentally, high levels of protection and tens of billions of dollars in farm subsidies are still prevalent in the EU and several farm defensive countries – Japan, Switzerland, and Norway among others – have more to do.

The EU, however, defended its proposal saying it is “our initiative” and others can discuss their proposals. “We are open to the proposals from other members,” said the EU’s trade envoy Ambassador Angelos Pangratis. “We certainly look forward to other initiatives,” he told IPS, suggesting that Brussels would like members to discuss the elements it had proposed.

Zambia has recently been categorised as a middle-income country, yet two-thirds of the country's population live on less than two dollars per day. Credit: Ephraim Nsingo/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Oct 31 2011 (IPS)

Last week the European Commission unveiled its ‘Agenda for Change’, a new policy framework outlining priorities for the European Union’s development aid and detailing the Commission’s renewed focus on economic growth as a means of poverty reduction, particularly in the world’s poorest countries.

However, while many have applauded this new agenda, international NGOs fear that several developing nations, especially middle-income countries, now risk loosing the Commission’s much-needed financial support. NGOs also raised questions about the role of the private sector in the new agenda.

The EU is the world’s biggest donor of official development aid: With an annual budget of 53.8 billion euros, the European Commission (EC) and member states delivered more than half of total global development aid in 2010. The EC singlehandedly manages and distributes 11 billion euros worth of EU development funds.

To increase the effectiveness of existing aid, the EC organised several rounds of consultations with global partners, governments, private sector actors and NGOs this year, resulting in the publication of the ‘Agenda for Change’ on Oct. 13.

This document was subsequently discussed at an open stakeholder meeting on Oct. 19 during which Development Commissioner Andris Pielbags stressed the EC’s commitment to focus on “sustainable and inclusive growth”, a policy that includes supporting good governance, respect for human rights and democracy, gender equality, the role of civil society and the fight against corruption.

The agenda also prioritises social protection, health, education, supporting a favourable business environment, sustainable agriculture and clean energy.

Most major international NGOs welcomed the Commission’s focus areas, particularly commitments to crack down on corruption and invest in agriculture, but continue to voice serious concerns about the Commission’s focus on economic growth.

“Basically, the Commission is telling us that greater economic growth is a means of tackling poverty,” Laura Sullivan, an expert in EU development policy for the international NGO ActionAid, told IPS.

“We agree growth is a necessary condition (for poverty reduction) but it’s not the only one,” she said.

“Nigeria, for instance, has had growth rates Europe can only dream of. At the same time, Nigeria has one of the highest poverty rates in the world because of the high levels of inequality in the country.”

“Here we clearly see growth is not trickling down to the poorest,” she added.

The Commission is also considering cutting aid to middle-income countries: nations that fall into a middle-income range set by the World Bank’s world development indicators. Between them, these countries account for almost half of the world’s population.

“The list of middle-income countries contains emerging economies like India and China, but also includes Senegal, Congo, Zambia, Ghana and Namibia,” Sullivan told IPS. “It’s important to bear in mind that 75 percent of the world’s poorest people live in middle-income countries. There’s a risk that development aid will be cut to countries that still need it.”

“For instance, Zambia is a country where two-thirds of the population live on less than two dollars a day,” Sullivan stressed. “The gap between rich and poor is immense. At the same time, Zambia has recently been categorised as a middle-income country. What would the EU’s new strategy mean for Zambia? We are concerned that if you turn off the taps overnight, ultimately people will suffer.”

Natalia Alonso, head of Oxfam International’s EU office, told IPS, “Aid is intended to reduce poverty and should therefore be direced where it’s most needed. Middle-income countries are equipped with robust governmental structures, so these are the places where aid is most effective, where it can fully trigger change. It is very hard to do this in fragile states,” she added.

According to the Commission, no solid decision has yet been taken on the question of middle-income countries.

“We will indeed cut official development assistance to countries that don’t need it anymore,” Catherine Ray, spokesperson for Commissioner Pielbags told IPS. “This concerns emerging economies like Brazil, India and China. But that does not mean we will fully stop all support. We will continue to donate to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, as well as support other initiatives that are active in Brazil, India and China.”

“Regarding the other middle-income countries, we are now studying which of them should continue to receive official development assistance and which countries would benefit from other, more specific types of funding,” Ray added. “Of course, we’ll take the level of inequality and the degree of fragility (in each country) into account.”

In spite of these assurances, NGOs are still troubled, particularly by the creeping influence of the private sector as a development actor.

“The Commission wants to put public money into the private sector as a means of generating more funding,” Sullivan told IPS. “We agree with that, as long as this money is (funneled) into domestic, small- and medium-sized enterprises. That’s where you can really make a change in people’s lives. Too many times in the past we’ve seen public money flowing to foreign multinationals via the World Bank.”

“If we engage the private sector, would it have the same goal as all of us, namely poverty reduction? That is not clear,” Alonso said, adding that the Commissions remains very vague about defining the specific role of the private sector.

But Ray believes that, “If you want growth, you need the private sector. You cannot do without it.”

“So the first objective of the commissioner is to develop a local private sector,” she added.

“Economies in Africa, Latin America and Asia are growing. There are a number of countries on track towards eliminating poverty. They are starting to create jobs and attract foreign investment. So our job doesn’t entail simply delivering aid anymore. We want to help these countries build the conditions for sustainable growth that is long-term, respectful of the environment and fairly distributed,” she concluded.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
GENEVA, Oct 14 2011 (IPS)

Developing countries, particularly from Africa, are concerned about attempts by industrialised nations to change the negotiating dynamic of the World Trade Organization.

Will the World Trade Organization remain multilateral? Credit:

The Doha Development Agenda (DDA) trade negotiations, launched in 2001, were meant to correct the historical imbalances and asymmetries in the global trading system and were designed to enable poorer countries to integrate into the system.

Industrialised countries are insisting on negotiating new controversial issues like investment, competition policy, energy security and climate change, often referred to as 21st century issues, without concluding the old issues of duty-free and quota-free market access. The WTO eighth ministerial meeting will take place from Dec. 15 to 17 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Over the last few weeks, developed countries from North America and Europe launched a campaign to alter the WTO’s negotiating framework from a multilateral format, where all members have a say in an agreement, to a plurilateral one, which would restrict participation to select countries.

The developed countries argue that “the business as usual approach” involving every member at the WTO will not work.

“The African friends seem to have a problem with regards to new issues and the plurilateral approach,” said Ambassador Luzius Wasescha, Switzerland’s trade envoy to the WTO.

“If these new issues are not discussed at the WTO, members will discuss them outside and they (the African countries) will regret (such a move),” he told IPS.

The discontent comes at a time when WTO Director General Pascal Lamy wants the theme of the upcoming ministerial meeting to be “WTO: the institution that delivers.” However, trade officials from developing countries question whether the organisation and its powerful drivers have actually delivered on the promises made in the DDA.

“It’s a joke to consider such a theme when the credibility of the global trade body is at its nadir when it comes to addressing the concerns of poor countries,” said an African trade diplomat who preferred anonymity.

Developed countries want their issues on the Doha agenda to be addressed first and let the remaining issues, which concern poor countries, die a slow death, said the diplomat.

Effectively, industrialised countries want to close the window on addressing the “developmental” dimension of the DDA in which African countries invested considerable political capital.

“Instead of addressing the duty-free and quota-free market access, removing trade-distorting farm subsidies on cotton and other products, and enabling the poorest countries to enjoy the benefits from global trade, some countries are now insisting on 21st century issues,” said Ambassador Faizel Ismail, South African’s trade envoy to the WTO.

“What is the point in embarking on 21st century issues without first concluding the negotiations of the 20th century issues that are relevant to the poorest countries in Africa and elsewhere?” the Mauritian trade envoy to the WTO, Ambassador Shree Baboo Chekitan Servansing, is understood to have asked the chair for the WTO’s General Council, Ambassador Yonov Frederick Agah of Nigeria, during an informal consultation. Agah is overseeing the preparations for the eighth ministerial meeting.

Servansing, who is the coordinator for the Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific countries at the WTO, wants implementation, trade and development issues concerning enhanced flexibilities for developing and poor countries, which arose from the previous Uruguay Round, resolved.

Developed countries, however, are not convinced. In a confidential letter written to many trade ministers, and obtained by IPS, Australia’s Minister of Trade Craig Emerson fired the first salvo by calling for a “new pathway to global trade liberalisation” prior to next month’s G20 meeting in Cannes, France. The G20 is a group of the world’s most powerful countries.

Emerson’s approach insists on an early realisation of select issues in the DDA negotiations based on a plurilateral framework and parallel negotiations on new issues.

While the letter speaks of some concessions for the poorest countries, the thrust of the document is on bringing new issues and new approaches that are “antithetical” to the multilateral negotiating principles underlying the 153-member WTO.

Emerson said in his letter “the Doha agenda is large and complex, with many entanglements between issues, making it impractical to achieve progress.” But “some parts of the Doha (agreement) may be more easily resolved and we should be permitted to advance those issues.”

“The Geneva meeting could therefore agree to continuing negotiations with the idea of early implementation where achievable,” Emerson continued. “This approach would also need to consider finding alternative negotiating approaches to those issues which have become the most intractable, and in particular market access.”

Referring to new issues such as competition policy, investment, climate change and energy security, the Australian trade minister urged his colleagues “to contemplate agreement on the negotiation of identified issues, but beyond the existing Doha mandate.”

“This would offer a mechanism to modernise the WTO’s work and to ensure it keeps pace with the demands of the modern global economy,” Emerson suggested.

Though African and other countries oppose the Australian approach, developed countries have solidly supported the move.

“Why should African countries agree to new approaches?” asked Martin Khor, the executive director of the Geneva-based South Centre, which represents the interests of the poor countries.

“The WTO is a multilateral organisation and it should not have plurilateral agreements within it, as this damages the multilateral nature of the organisation,” he told IPS.

“Under the pretext of bringing new issues as well as selectively picking up issues of interest to them from the Doha agenda, industrialised countries want to say good bye to the DDA once and for all,” said the African trade diplomat.

He said the theme for the ministerial meeting should be “WTO: the more it changes, the more it remains the same,” implying that industrialised countries continue to have their way at the trade body.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
Geneva, Oct 7 2011 (IPS)

The poorest countries in Africa are not merely the victims of natural calamities. They are also ravaged by the continued denial of market access as promised in the Doha trade negotiations, say African trade diplomats.

Almost six years ago at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Hong Kong ministerial meeting, the least-developed countries (LDCs) in the global trading regime, drawn largely from Africa, were assured that their industrial products will be given duty-free and quota-free market access in rich countries.

Further, the four poorest cotton producers in West Africa – Benin, Mali, Chad and Burkina Faso – were promised that all trade-distorting cotton subsidies provided largely by the United States would be expeditiously slashed. The LDCs were also told they will be provided with a “wavier” on trade in services, implying that they would not have to undertake any fresh commitments.

All these promises are clearly spelt out in great detail in the Doha mandate, particularly the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration of 2005. The Doha trade negotiations began in 2001 with the objective to lower trade barriers around the world and thereby enable the increase in global trade.

The “daridra narayans” – a term coined by Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, the father of an independent India, to describe the conditions of the wretched of the earth – of the global trading regime were assured time and time again that their demands would be treated as part of the “early harvest” at every ministerial meeting.

Sadly, there are grave doubts now that these promises will be addressed at the WTO’s eighth ministerial meeting in December.

“African countries will be left high and dry at the ministerial meeting in December as their core LDC issues – duty-free and quota-free market access, cotton, services waiver – will not be addressed,” says an African trade diplomat, preferring anonymity.

Bangladesh, the coordinator for the LDCs at the WTO, remains confident that things can be turned around at the ministerial meeting.

“We are still hoping that our priorities will be adequately reflected at the outcome from the eighth ministerial meeting,” says Ambassador Abdul Hannan of Bangladesh.

Leading developing countries – South Africa, India, Brazil and China – among others have repeatedly underscored the need for addressing the duty-free and quota-free market access to enhance the “credibility” of the WTO.

“Any attempt to deliver on any issue will not be credible in the WTO if it doesn’t begin with the poorest members of the global trading system,” says Ambassador Faizel Ismail, South Africa’s trade envoy to the WTO.

“The developing country members of the WTO agree that the MC8 (eighth ministerial conference) should at the least send out a strong signal that the weakest members (LDCs) should have something to gain from the trade system, even if the Doha talks are deadlocked,” says Martin Khor, the executive director of the Geneva-based South Centre, an intergovernmental organisation of developing countries, which was established by former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere.

The Doha trade negotiations are grid-locked because of the differences between the U.S. and other industrialised countries on the one side, and emerging powers such as China, India, Brazil, and South Africa on the other.

The U.S. wants the leading developing countries to make onerous commitments given their current economic performance and status in the global trading system.

The developing countries refused to accept unilateral demands saying they will provide market access and make other commitments as per the Doha Development Agenda.

In the run-up to the ministerial meeting, the U.S. and some industrialised countries made it clear that they are not going to address the issues of duty-free and quota-free market access for the LDCs. They also will not address the reduction of cotton subsidies, which brought misery to African countries, unless China and other emerging nations like India, Brazil and South Africa also agree to the same commitments.

“The LDC package, particularly the duty-free and quota-free market access and cotton, are stalled,” says Ambassador Luis Manuel Piantini Munnigh of the Dominican Republic, the chair for the informal group of developing countries.

“It is unfortunate that some developed countries are insisting that unless their market access issues are addressed first, they will not address the LDC package,” he told IPS.

Under the Doha mandate, which was further clarified by the July 2004 framework agreement and the 2005 Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration, market-opening and subsidy- reduction commitments are clearly spelt out for developed and developing countries.

The Hong Kong ministerial declaration of 2005 says “developed-country members, and developing- country members declaring themselves in a position to do so, agree to implement duty-free and quota- free market access for products originating from LDCs” by 2008.

It further says that the “members (industrialised countries) facing difficulties at this time to provide market access as set out above shall provide duty-free and quota-free market access for at least 97 percent of products originating from LDCs, defined at the tariff line level, by 2008.”

Except for the U.S., all other industrialised countries more or less adhered to this commitment. Even developing countries like China, India, and Brazil continue to provide market access to LDCs for over 90 percent of their industrial products.

Effectively, the eighth ministerial meeting, which begins on Dec. 15, is going to cause a “trade drought” for the LDCs in Africa and elsewhere without addressing their bread-and-butter demands in the global trading regime.

“However, it is becoming more and more clear that even such a minimal outcome is becoming difficult, due to the position of a very few, or even one (the United States) developed country,” says Khor.

Excerpt:

The streets around the headquarters of the world’s leading financial institutions – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – have been transformed into a canvas over the last three days.

Emblazoned with this year’s signature slogan of the Bretton Woods Institutions, “Think Equal”, the sidewalks in DC are now home to the campaign of the world’s biggest bank that has, for the first time this year, placed the issue of gender at the centre of the development debate.

“We’ve just released a World Development Report on gender that proves that ‘getting to equal’ for women is not just the right thing to do. It’s also smart economics,” World Bank Group president Robert Zoellick told a press conference here Thursday.

“Women are the next big emerging market – how can the world reach its full growth potential if it fails to advance the prospects, energies, and contributions of half the world’s population – women and girls?” he asked.

“Nearly four million girls and women in developing countries ‘go missing’ each year,” Zoellick stressed. “That’s like losing a Los Angeles, a Johannesburg, a Yokohama.”

For instance, “Why does the Bank only encourage us to ‘think equal’? Why not call for us to ‘act equal’ as well?” Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College, asked the Bank’s gender and development director Jeni Klugmen at a round-table discussion on Wednesday.

The WDR and reproductive rights

As organisations like the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) have consistently pointed out, full reproductive agency is a prerequisite to women’s equality in the 21st century.

“The WDR 2012 highlights women’s health during their reproductive years as a key priority,” Merrell Tuck-Primdahl, senior communications officer for development economics at the Bank, told IPS.

“This vital issue is covered as part of the main causes for excess female mortality in regions such as Sub Saharan Africa and as related to women’s voices within the household and ability to control and decide the number and spacing of children they will have in their lifetime,” she added.

“Institutionally, the World Bank is a global leader in reproductive health, and we launched a new Reproductive Health Action Plan (RHAP) in 2010,” Tuck-Primdahl said. “We are currently implementing the five-year plan to help countries improve their reproductive health outcomes,” she concluded.

But some experts believe that the Bank’s failure to take a “rights- based” approach to reproductive health limits its scope.

“The Bank does not see sexual and reproductive health as a human right, but instead as a necessity to maximise women’s economic activity,” Elizabeth Arend, programmes coordinator for the Washington-based Gender Action, told IPS.

“As long as women are healthy, they are better able to be economically productive – this is the motivation behind the Bank’s ‘women’s health’ focus,” she said.

According to Arend, this means focusing on only three issues: women’s fertility through contraception promotion, maternal morbidity from malaria and HIV, and maternal mortality.

“Women around the world also suffer the psychological consequences of sexual violence, which is given outrageously little attention or funding. In fact, the Bank has only four active projects in the entire world to address gender-based violence, totaling only 12.5 million dollars. This is 0.02 percent of the Bank’s FY2010 58.8- billion-dollar budget,” she added.

“This track record suggests that the WDR is highly unlikely to have any impact on the Bank’s gender policies or investments since its investments in ‘gender and social inclusion’ have actually decreased in recent years, from six percent of the budget in FY2006 to two percent in 2010,” Arend told IPS.

Development rhetoric vs. Bank investments

Other civil society representatives are using the opportunity to identify the increasingly bitter conflict of interest between the Bank’s research and its investments.

Speaking at a panel on the destructive impacts of the World Bank- financed Chad-Cameroon pipeline on women in the region, Betty Abah from Friends of the Earth Nigeria said, “The World Bank and its investors often pander to the patriarchal tendencies of certain communities where their projects – especially resource-extraction projects – are implemented.”

“Too often the Bank fails to consult local women, thus robbing women of their voice and allowing for terrible imbalances in the community,” she added.

Jointly owned by Exxon/Mobil, Petronas Malaysia and Chevron, the 6.7- billion-dollar, 650-mile pipeline, which carries crude from the oilfields of land-locked Chad to a shipping facility off Cameroon’s coast, was made possible by World Bank loans amounting to 337.6 million dollars – justified by the promise that the project would boost the local economy and “lift thousands of Chadians out of poverty”.

But according to a comprehensive report slated to be released early next week, authored by Gender Action together with Friends of the Earth International, the pipeline has not only failed to develop a job market, it has actually wreaked havoc on women in both countries.

Extensive research found that women were systematically alienated from consultation and compensation processes and were forced into the informal sector as their lands and traditional livelihoods were swallowed up by the construction project.

Transport corridors for the crude became breeding grounds for HIV/AIDS. A huge demand for prostitution, coupled with job loss in the community, pushed scores of women into vulnerable and disempowered social positions, the report says.

Oil-poisoned waters forced fisherwomen out of work and led to rapid increases in still-births, infertility and respiratory disease. Oil spills and noise pollution devastated the local ecology, creating a dangerous and precarious dynamic in the community, it says.

In short, the report said the project exacerbated scores of the most deadly problems facing women, the very problems outlined in the WDR “blueprint for equality”.

The Bank itself issued a report stating that less developed countries’ reliance on primary commodity exports was one of the “leading causes of violent, armed conflict” – but that report was embargoed until after the approval of the pipeline.

Tuck-Primdahl told IPS that the “phenomenon” of women’s exclusion from the project was “most unfortunate and the Bank Group is strongly in favour of consulting with women and communities to ensure better design of extractive industry projects and programmes.”

But these assurances have done little for advocates who have fought a long battle against the Bank’s policies.

“I have very little faith in this year’s WDR to change policy,” Elaine Zuckerman, president of Gender Action, told IPS. “After all, the Bank’s investments speak louder than its rhetoric.”

*With additional reporting by Rosemary D’Amour

Civil society organisations weighed in Friday on the risks and necessities associated with results-driven aid, asking the key question when it comes to a development project: Results for whom? Donors, or the people on the ground?

In an event sponsored by Oxfam International on Friday during the World Bank’s annual fall meetings, civil society organisations from around the world contributed their experience to the debate, calling for aid organisations to rethink their approach.

“Shorter-term outcomes are easiest to measure, and politically, more saleable,” said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and former administrator for USAID.

McPherson said that solving short-term goals is often a matter of fire-fighting, or solving immediate, serious, problems, often putting projects that could have long-term effects on the back burner.

The results for a development project can be deceptive, panelists said – an increase in enrollment in schools does not necessarily mean an improvement in literacy levels, for example, which ultimately means that the project will be ineffective in changing the society in which it is operating.

“But if you’re not careful, everything gets skewed, [like] longer term creation -technology, human resources, institutional building – all of the things which you can’t measure as easily or often,” McPherson said. “The donor community tends to push the short term.”

Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, echoed these sentiments on the panel on Friday, arguing that in Afghanistan, the lack of progress was due to immediate expectations for projects.

“Sometimes, it’s very ambitious, people may want to see change overnight,” Nadery said.

This focus on greater context for development projects has been a theme of the international finance institution’s meetings this year, with increased attention paid toward civic engagement and responsibility in creating accountable governments and development projects.

Friday’s panel ramps up attention for results of the Busan Agenda meetings in South Korea this November, to convene the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4), which will offer both quantitative results of projects in recent years and suggestions for new focal points in development projects, such as focusing on long- term impacts, and using those who will be impacted by projects to name the results they want achieved.

“This notion of country ownership should not be equated with government ownership,” said Richard Ssewakirvanga, executive director of the Uganda National NGO Forum. “It should be about how a citizen is actually owning the development process.”

The civil society panel occurred just one day after the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report monitoring the 2005 Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness, which painted a bleak picture for the goals set six years ago.

According to the report by the OECD which tracked more than 100 aid donors and developing countries, only one out of 13 targets set has been achieved as of 2010 – the goal of increasing “coordinated technical cooperation”.

“Developing countries have come through with their part of the programme, they’re improving, but how are we doing on the donor side? Not so well,” said Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and campaigns at Oxfam America, who moderated the panel discussion. “Basically, we talk to each other better.”

Despite this seeming setback, O’Brien said that he and others were still optimistic about the progress made towards the next 12 goals, especially amongst developing countries who have been working to create enabling environments for aid.

Ssewakirvanga said that development projects, in tandem with civil society organisations and governments themselves, should have this enabling theme in mind.

“Let’s think of it not as a place where we ask governments to do things for us, but a place where the government creates conditions that allow me to actually do what I’m supposed to do,” said Ssewakirvanga.

Civil society organisations have weighed in on the debate of effective aid, with some arguing that “real aid”, or the money that can be and is used by governments for development, should be a major measure to determine the effectiveness of projects.

Lucia Fry, a policy advisor for ActionAid, an international non- governmental organisation focused on alleviating poverty, said that “real aid” was a benchmark in determining how aid dependency amongst developing nations can be reduced.

“This is a story that gets missed, because there’s the idea that aid is a bottomless pit,” Fry told IPS. “But if we see where the money is going, if we put it to use in catalysing domestic revenues, increasing domestic accountability, we’ll see results.”

Numbers show that on average, dependency on aid in low income countries has actually gone down by about one third since 2000, or down by 12 percent of the average country’s expenditure, according to an ActionAid report.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 22 2011 (IPS)

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates appears poised to endorse the adoption of a controversial financial transactions tax (FTT) to be used as a new source of development aid for poor countries.

Such an endorsement, to be included in a report to the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Cannes in November, will likely boost efforts by summit’s host, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to persuade other countries, particularly in the European Union (EU), to impose such a tax, said activists who have long advocated what some of them call a “Robin Hood tax”.

It was Sarkozy who last February asked Gates to prepare a report for the upcoming summit on new ways that money could be raised to promote development and alleviate poverty in poor countries, particularly in light of the sharp cuts in official development assistance (ODA) from many donor countries that followed the 2008-9 financial crisis.

“The report will acknowledge the controversy around the proposal, … but will make the case for a substantial allocation to development,” according to a “Technical Note” on the report that will be presented Friday to officials gathered here for the annual World Bank- International Monetary Fund meetings.

“If G20 members or some other set of countries (e.g., within the EU), can agree on the outlines of an FTT, Bill’s report is likely to argue, it could generate substantial resources,” according to the Note which was attributed to Geoffrey Lamb, the senior advisor on international policy development at the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“For example, some modelling suggests that even a small tax of 10 bp (basis points) on equities and 2 bp on bonds would yield about 48 billion (dollars) on a G20-wide basis, or 9 billion (dollars) if confined to larger European economies. Some FTT proposals offer substantially larger estimates, in the 100-250 billion (dollar) range, especially if derivatives are included.”

“If a substantial part of the revenues could be allocated to development, this would be a useful addition to resources – and would be additional help to some donor countries to meet their aid commitments in the current environment,” according to the Note.

Activists who favour the FTT said Gates’s position as described in the Note should help their efforts.

“The FTT ship has sailed, and the world’s richest man is on board,” said Richard Gower of Oxfam International. “We’re on course for an agreement which delivers billions to help poor countries fight poverty and climate change.”

“Even though the language is not exactly rah-rah, having him confirm the feasibility (of the tax) and that it would raise substantial resources is huge,” said Sarah Anderson, the Global Economy project director at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, who participated in Foundation-sponsored consultations that have taken place over the past six months.

“Buffett now has Obama’s ‘Buffett rule’ named after him, and we’re very happy to re-name the FTT the ‘Gates tax,'” she said in a reference to the appeal last month by Gates’s fellow- billionaire/philanthropist, Warren Buffett, to raise taxes on the “mega-rich” to help reduce the yawning government deficit.

While taxes on financial transactions date back several hundred years, the idea gained new traction after the Asian and Russian financial meltdowns of the late 1990s. Nobel Economics Laureate James Tobin proposed the implementation of an FTT in 2001 as a way to discourage short-term speculation – or “hot money” – of the kind that precipitated those crises.

The financial crisis that erupted three years ago with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its immediate aftermath added momentum to the idea, which was put on the G20’s agenda by its two strongest champions, France and Germany, at its Pittsburgh summit two years ago.

According to a new book, “Confidence Men”, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, U.S. President Barack Obama, who hosted that summit, initially supported an FTT but was dissuaded by the then- director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers.

Britain, which had been a major booster of the FTT under its Labour Party government, has since become the EU’s strongest internal critic, in part because of fears that such a tax would affect the city of London’s standing as one of the world’s premier financial centres.

Nonetheless, France and Germany have continued to promote the tax within the EU. Last week German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble called for its adoption as soon as possible.

While most of the revenue from such a tax would be used by governments for national purposes, many advocates have insisted that some portion be devoted to fulfilling previous commitments by the Group of 7 (G7) wealthiest developed countries for development aid and help in adapting to climate change in poor countries. A number of key donor countries were failing to meet those commitments even before the latest series of financial crises.

Lamb’s Note stresses the report will argue that the G7 countries should not “retreat from aid commitments vital to poor people’s lives” despite the current “economic difficulties and fiscal consolidation”.

It will also “welcome the expansion of aid programs by G20 countries such as Korea, China, India, Turkey, South Africa, and Brazil,” which if maintained, “would provide over time a sizable ‘aid dividend’ from their rapid economic growth”.

In addition to the FTT, Gates’s report will likely suggest raising taxes on tobacco to the World Health Organisation (WHO) target of at least 70 percent. If fully implemented by the G20 and the rest of the EU, according to the note, revenues could reach 170 billion dollars a year, “a small part” of which could be earmarked to a “Solidarity Tobacco Contribution” for global health agencies, such as the WHO, the Global Fund, and Unicef, among others.

A third revenue proposal will be designed to help poor countries adapt to climate change, according to the Note, which suggested the adoption of World Bank/IMF proposals to introduce consistent taxes on shipping and aviation fuels. An efficient carbon-based bunker, according to their analysis, could yield up to 30 billion dollars annually by 2020.

Among proposals for engaging the private sector more directly in poverty reduction, the report will focus on lowering the cost and improving the effectiveness of remittances to developing countries, which are currently running at about 350 billion dollars a year.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 21 2011 (IPS)

Political, private sector and civil society leaders from around the world gathered here on Tuesday to recommit to a year-old initiative, Every Woman Every Child, which aims to prevent 16 million maternal and child deaths by 2015.

Though much progress has been made, they said, much more remains to be done.

Each day, over 21,000 children under the age of five around the world die, while 350,000 women die annually from complications in pregnancy and childbirth.

Launched one year ago by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Every Woman Every Child is an effort to advance components of the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, to which 200 organisations have pledged their commitment, by coordinating international and national actions across various sectors.

Those who spoke at Tuesday’s event not only shared stories of success related to their respective countries or organisations, but they also reiterated the call for greater resources and financial contributions.

“We have the knowledge, we have the expertise” to reduce mortality rates and improve women’s health, General Secretary of World YWCA Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda said at the event. “We know what works. We just need the resources.”

She called for countries to reallocate their spending to support health-related causes rather than, for instance, military pursuits, in a slight echo of Ban’s earlier warning that “political roadblocks litter the path ahead”.

Countries, many of them in the developing world, have already pledged to the cause an estimated 40 billion dollars for the next five years.

The Global Strategy, launched in April 2010, targets children and women’s health in order to bring countries closer to achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5 by their target year of 2015.

MDG 4 calls for a two-thirds reduction, based on 1990 data, in mortality for children under the age of five, while the fifth MDG is universal access to reproductive health and a 75-percent reduction in maternal mortality.

Ban said that the private sector would play a “central role” in helping countries reach these MDGs. Indeed, under Every Woman Every Child, public-private partnerships have thrived, with several new initiatives between the private sector and U.N. agencies such as the World Health Organisation, and between governments and private foundations.

Several developing countries have been hailed for their efforts to reduce infant, child, and maternal mortality rates. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh told those who attended the event that since 1990, Bangladesh had reduced infant mortality by 45 percent and maternal mortality by 66 percent.

Every Woman Every Child also seeks to avoid 33 million unwanted pregnancies and protect 120 children from pneumonia.

Maternal and child mortality rates have declined at an accelerated pace since the signing of the Millennium Declaration aimed at improving child and maternal health, said a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

The report by the IHME, “Progress toward Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 on maternal and child mortality: an updated systematic analysis”, published in the leading British medical journal The Lancet, showed that since 2000, maternal mortality rates in 125 countries have declined at a faster pace.

In 1990, approximately 409,100 women died from pregnancy and childbirth-related complications, whereas in 2011 the number is estimated at 273,500.

Similarly, mortality rates of children young than five have declined faster since 2000 than in the past 11 years than they did the decade prior, from 11.6 million deaths in 1990 to 7.2 this year. The data indicates that efforts to decrease maternal and child deaths through education and health initiatives are succeeding.

Nevertheless, the initiatives have not ensured that countries will be on track to meet MDGs 4 and 5 by 2015, the report said. Though 31 developing countries will achieve MDG 4 and 13 developing countries MDG 5, only nine will achieve both. They are China, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Mongolia, Peru, Syria and Tunisia.

Haidong Wang, assistant professor of global health at IHME and co- author of the report, commended the work of U.N. agencies, telling IPS that they “have played an important leadership role in improving child mortality and maternal mortality”.

Efforts in particular to fulfill the MDGs “have been a huge boon for public health” in developing countries, he said, and have had a significant impact child and female health there.

“Governments within those lower income countries have also, for the most part, increased their own spending on health,” Wang said. Those changes contributed to major improvements.

Still, education was “one of the biggest factors”, said Wang. “Half the reduction in child mortality can be tied to the education of young women. With more schooling, they make better choices about their own health and about the health of their families,” he explained.

Nevertheless, despite efforts on the part of the U.N. and individual countries, said Wang, “We need to acknowledge the fact that most countries are not on track to achieve either MDG goal.”

“In order to continue reducing child and maternal mortality to the targeted levels,” he concluded, “We must build on what has been working the past two decades.”

Excerpt:

By Kanya D'Almeida
WASHINGTON, Sep 20 2011 (IPS)

Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force.

According to the World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report (WDR) “Gender Equality and Development”, ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16 percent in Malawi and 17 percent in Ghana; eliminating barriers that block women’s access from certain occupations or sectors could reduce the gender productivity gap by one-third to one-half and boost output per worker by as much as 25 percent in a range of developing countries; and granting women farmers equal to land and resources could increase agricultural output in developing countries by as much as four percent.

As the annual fall convergence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) kicks off Tuesday in Washington DC, with participants from international financial institutions (IFIs), civil society, grassroots movements and private sector enterprises flooding the city, all eyes are on the Gender WDR, the blueprint for the course of 2012 development.

“Over the past five years, the World Bank Group has provided 65 billion dollars to support girls’ education, women’s health, and women’s access to credit, land, agricultural services, jobs, and infrastructure,” the Bank’s president Robert Zoellick said Monday.

“This has been important work, but it has not been enough or central enough to what we do,” he added. “Going forward, the World Bank Group will mainstream our gender work and find other ways to move the agenda forward to capture the full potential of half the world’s population.”

Though the report presents some positive trends, much of the data paints a bleak picture. Excess female mortality after birth and “missing” girls at birth account for an estimated 3.9 million deaths of women annually.

Two-fifths of the world’s women are never born because of sex- selective abortions. A sixth of the world’s women die in early childhood, and over a third perish in their early reproductive years, losses that hit particularly hard in Sub-Saharan Africa where the prevalence of HIV/AIDS is stunningly high.

While the 2012 WDR calls for more work in the areas of human capital, closing earning and productivity gaps between women and men, improving women’s voices in their households and society and limiting the perpetuation of gender inequality across generations, hundreds of voices from civil society are arguing that unless the Bank undertakes major structural changes in its approach to women, very little will change.

“The real issue here is that the World Bank has never had a human rights policy, and this year’s WDR follows that trend of ignoring women’s rights as human rights,” Elaine Zuckerman, president of the Washington-based Gender Action, told IPS.

“Rather, the report makes the business case for women’s development – positing institutional support for women’s struggles as ‘smart business’,” she said.

The report has also been criticised for zeroing in on shallow solutions to complex issues, looking at symptoms rather than structural causes of the greatest problems plaguing women’s lives.

“The massive integration of women in the labour market over the last 30 years is not only characterised by significant gender pay gaps but also by the type of jobs occupied by women, (which tend to be) insecure, informal, temporary, home-based, precarious jobs with limited rights and access to social protection,” said Claire Courteille, director of the Equality Department at the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

“Unless policies directly address the quality of the jobs held by women, nothing will change,” she added.

“The WDR may well recognise that economic growth alone will not change patterns of gender segregation in economic activity, but again they missed the train, as now the international consensus goes further, and calls for a coherent approach that takes account of the invisible care economy in the formulation of macroeconomic policies,” she concluded.

In fact, civil society activists say this year’s WDR exposes the glaring contradictions between the rhetoric of international development policy, and its impact on women’s lives.

“The [worst contradiction] is that the IFIs have begun to use the individual development of women as a substitute for economic development of a country as a whole,” Hester Eisenstein, professor of sociology at Queens College and author of the recent book “Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labour and Ideas to Exploit the World”, told IPS.

“It’s an extremely uncritical approach that does not address the Bank’s own development policies that have totally impoverished much of the third world – affecting primarily, and often exclusively, women and children,” she said.

“Though the goals of ending violence against women, or achieving universal primary education for girls, are admirable, they are mired in a refusal to step back from the macroeconomic policies that make those goals impossible to achieve,” Eisenstein told IPS.

“Above all I find this approach to be extremely cynical,” she said.

“When the IFIs use feminist rhetoric and language, it is misleading and superficial because they are essentially saying, “we see women as key to development, we want them to have equal education opportunities, experience economic advancement and generally be empowered but we won’t change our macro policies that led to this unequal distribution of wealth, power and resources in the first place” – so this kind of endorsement of women is doomed to failure,” she concluded.

According to Zuckerman, “Though the WDR is beautifully written by a team of experts at the top of their respective fields who are recruited to research, write and edit what the Bank calls its ‘flagship development report’, there is very little evidence to show that the WDR has an impact on lending policy.”

“In fact, in the WDRs 33-year circulation life, not a single one has changed policy,” she told IPS.

“What we need to keep in mind is that the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) introduced and implemented by the IFIs actually hinder women’s rights,” Zuckerman added.

“Because of this, the IFIs need to start taking a rights-based approach to development, they need to genuinely, not just rhetorically, consult with local men and women before they launch pipelines or build dams or invest in transnational sponsored projects.”

“They should also, eventually, stop and ask themselves whether they should be investing in these projects at all. The IFIs and especially the Bank should be promoting rights and holding genuine consultations with so-called beneficiaries. After all, it is not the Bank’s research that eventually affects women’s lives – it is their investments,” she said.

Excerpt:

Amid a global financial crisis that has shown little signs of reversing, next week’s fall meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are crucial in setting the tone for rebounding world markets, to which leaders of the Bretton Woods institutions offered optimistic, yet ultimately vague, solutions in speeches this week.

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said that political leaders needed to become “responsible stakeholders” in the world’s development in an appearance Wednesday at George Washington University.

“We need to leverage aid more effectively through new instruments, and we need to expand the contributors by involving more stakeholders through more innovative approaches,” Zoellick said, stressing private investment and entrepreneurship as avenues which needed to be more involved in global growth strategies.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde echoed Zoellick’s comments on Thursday, in her first speech in Washington since her appointment in July. Lagarde emphasised a need to restore confidence in the global economy, but said that the world would take its cue from the action and cooperation of political leaders.

“[Solutions] have to be demonstrated, implemented by political leaders who may have to put aside for a little while their ego and their partisan interests, and extend the agenda to beyond the next election,” Lagarde said.

Lagarde, formerly France’s finance minister, was herself the subject of partisan debate upon her appointment as head of the IMF in July, with many in the developing world balking at the idea of continued European control of the organisation.

During her speech on Thursday, she hinted at the work that the IMF had undertaken to increase its internal management, and also at the results of a report that will be published next week during the shareholder meetings.

“Growth is continuing to slow down,” Lagarde said, citing high levels of unemployment in the advanced economies of the world, combined with an increase in credit balances and high inflation in emerging markets. For the lower income countries, the degree of dependency on other countries for capital and assistance is still very high, placing them in a vulnerable position in the global marketplace.

“There are major conduits of connections generally in the financial system,” Lagarde said. “In this interconnected world, economic tremors in one country can reverberate swiftly and powerfully across the globe.”

Civil society organisations have weighed in on the need for a change in the modus operandi of development programmes, especially when it comes to how the money is handled.

“There’s growing consensus about the need for innovative new methods to raise financing for development,” Caroline Pearce, spokesperson for Oxfam International, told IPS Friday.

Among the options to be discussed at the upcoming meetings are taxes and new investment strategies, which Pearce said could be useful to help face the myriad of structural problems the world is facing, particularly relating to climate change.

“A tax on global financial transactions could raise at least 650 billion dollars annually, and a tax on shipping fuel could raise billions more,” she said. “We hope that the World Bank and IMF will be calling for proceeds to go to development and climate change adaptation.”

Zoellick’s remarks revealed much of the same perspective on the new reality for development in the 21st century.

“Today, we are seeing economic, trade, and financial interdependence that was incomprehensible in 1944,” he said, the year that the Bretton Woods system was created.

But despite the myriad of economic challenges that the world’s economies are facing, Zoellick, whose term ends next year, seemed optimistic about the patterns of investment in emerging economies.

“In the 1990s, developing countries accounted for about a fifth of global growth,” he said. “Today, developing countries are the engine driving the global economy.”

These countries are attracting 45 percent of global investment, a number that has more than doubled in 20 years.

And more and more, Zoellick said, developing countries are interacting with and taking a cue from not just aid donors, but from each other, as the share of foreign direct investment between the global south has increased to about 40 percent, up from just over 30 percent in 2008.

“Relationships among developing countries are changing the development world as we knew it,” Zoellick said.

Zoellick, who was appointed president of the World Bank in 2007, has proposed various development strategies in his tenure, including the “One Percent Solution” for development in Africa, with countries investing one percent of their Sovereign Wealth Funds in the region’s growth.

On Wednesday, he highlighted a new development focus, perhaps a major point in the meetings next week, on women in development, called the “Fifty Percent Solution”.

“Women make up 50 percent of the global population and 40 percent of the global workforce,” he said. “Yet women own only one percent of the world’s wealth.”

An important point in the discussions next week will include working to mainstream women’s rights as part of the development conversation as well as increasing the knowledge base on gender-related data, such as numbers on women’s access to credit and justice systems, Zoellick said.

“We will build on the 65 billion dollars we have provided over the last five years to support girls’ education, and women’s access to credit, land, agricultural services, jobs and infrastructure, ” he said. “This is important work, but it has not been central enough to what we do.”

Addressing global gender inequities would have an enormous impact on other elements of development, analysts said, and should be a focal point for discussion next week.

“Narrowing the gap between women and men – in terms of resources, opportunities, and decision-making at every level – is at the core of development,” Pearce said.