Source: Arab NGO Network on development
Three main factors directly affect the impact achieved by aid flows for the purposes of financing for development in the Arab region. These are:
1. The double standards of the US and the EU with Israel, whereby the UN resolutions addressing the rights of the Palestinian people are being neglected, and Israeli nuclear weapons remain a taboo, while the insecurity in the region and the tendencies towards militarization and enhancing defense policies persist
2. Linking aid to terrorism is weakening the ability to sustain an efficient and effective flow of aid based on the national needs and not on foreign policy demands of rich countries. This is also finding new explanations for the prioritization of defense and security policies at the expense of development and social security, which has been for long the main dilemma in the Arab region.
3. Undemocratic regimes in the Arab region, which continue to repress freedoms, violate rights, and limit the space of civil society organizations are continuously being supported by various donor countries for reasons related to energy and oil sources or military bases located in several of the Arab countries.
The report argues that the role of civil society would be a crucial factor in the process of reforming aid mechanisms, guaranteeing their outreach, and making them more adequate to local and national needs, and, accordingly, more sustainable within the development policies of developing countries.
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Source: EURODAD
During 2007 the World Bank will be reporting on their use of conditionality in partner countries, in particular the implementation of the ‘Good Practice Principles’ agreed as a follow up to the Conditionality Review in 2005. However, indications to date suggest that the report prepared by the World Bank will be rushed, based on inadequate consultation, and heavily biased towards the World Bank perspective.
CSOs are therefore proposing to compile alternative evidence on the impacts of World Bank conditionality on the ground. This will be based on short (3-5 pages) submissions prepared by NGOs in country. The combined evidence will be compiled into a short briefing for presentation to key donor countries and World Bank staff.
Would you like to contribute a submission from your country? If so, please get in touch with Nuria Mulina at Eurodad - she can be contacted at nmolina@eurodad.org or +32 (2) 543 90 68. You can find a list of the countries where the Bank plans to have consultation here. As you will see, there’s still quite a bit of information missing but the Bank says they’ll be posting more dates and further information during next week.
Kindly click on the attachment below for the guidelines to prepare the submissions.
Source: Ghana Civil Society
Participants at a forum on the "Grand Debate" on the formation of a United States of Africa in Tamale on Thursday advocated for the formation of a United States of Africa now. They contented that since the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in the early 60s, the African continent had continued to face a lot of challenges, politically, economically and militarily and were therefore of the opinion that only a continental government would be able to salvage Africa from its misery.
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Source: Ghana Civil Society
This is the first edition of the Civil Society News, a publication of the Civil Society Resource Centre, of UNDP Ghana. The newsletter is intended to be a source of information about civil society activities in Ghana, particularly, those activities that enhance the growth of the sector and assist the nation achieve its development targets as contained in the MDGs and the GPRS. It will capture challenges faced by CSOs and good practices in the delivery of service by CSOs in the country. We would like to make Civil Society News a great resource for every practitioner, donor, researcher and student in the civil society sector in Ghana. This issue includes:
Civil Society Resource Centre (CSRC)
UNCT Ghana CSO Advisory Committee
CSO Profile: Advocates and Trainers for Women’s Welfare
Advancement and Rights (ARWWAR)
Identified Weaknesses of Ghanaian CSOs
Civil Society in a free Ghana
Regional Consultative Meeting
Click on the attachment below to view the newsletter
Source: Ghana Civil Society
The second edition of Civil Society News presents to readers interesting articles on the current climatic changes globally and an article on the preferred alternative to conflict resolution among others. Inside this issue:
Aid is only effective when it fosters development
Mediation: The Preferred Alternative for Conflict Resolution
Economics of tackling Climate Change
Q & A: NEPAD
Ghana Civil Society proposes elected African Parliament
CSO Centre represented at the CIVICUS 2007 World Assembly
Click on the attachment below to view the newsletter
Source: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)
For decades, the debt issue has remained a front-runner—or perhaps even the front-runner—on the agendas of civil society organizations and movements throughout the world. The debt problem is a fascinating mosaic of world politics and power relations spiced with greed and mistrust. It also shows the devastating consequences of systemic imbalances in the global economy. From the civil society standpoint, these consequences have resulted in human suffering and diminished opportunities for those affected by debt.
An impressively wide range of civil society organizations have been working on the debt issue: from single-issue HIV/AIDS organizations to churches, from radical groups to academics. Within these movements, perhaps the most prominent issue of contention is the approach of development aid as a form of charity versus a call for global justice.
Civil society in the South argues for immediate and complete cancellation of debts, appealing to human rights, moral justice and the historic debt of the North toward the South. The debt problem is, at times, referred to as a mechanism of re-colonization. In the North, impressive mass mobilizations have attracted the attention of creditor governments, and led to media calls for solving the problem of illegitimate debt. Even though civil society movements have denounced the debt burden on developing countries, effective measures have not yet been taken to solve the debt problem. And despite the common goal of finding a solution to the debt problem of the South, debt campaigners do not agree on how this goal should be attained.
These differing approaches loosely distinguish the North-South divide, which sharpened following the split of the Jubilee campaign in 2000. Having said this, the debt work of civil society organizations constitutes a textbook case of necessity for North-South cooperation in terms of fact finding, knowledge building and political pressuring. If getting an issue onto the political agenda is an indicator of successful civil society work, the debt movements have been very successful. In addition, the work done by civil society organizations has created public awareness of the debt problem. But the actual reduction of the debt burden has been modest, standing today at about three times what it was in the 1980s. Figures show that indebted countries have paid, in pure interest, the amount owed to the international financial institutions. This is used as an argument for the debt problem being a political problem rather than an economic one. Still, the potential usefulness of the historical and moral arguments—among others—put forward by civil society should be revisited.
Potential research gaps raised in this paper include practical consequences of debt cancellation, the mechanisms that maintain the debt problem, and how these can be addressed. These issues should be thought of within a framework of developing alternative structures for the world economy.
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Source: Centre of Concern
The report argues that the UN has been weakened by the actions by donor countries, who feel that their interests are safer with the Bretton Woods Institutions - where they exercise greater control. This has led to a gap between the decisions taken in the main UN summits and their implementation due in part to the change in thinking -policy orientation-, and the resultant ¨cuts¨ in funds for progressive global programmes.
In the development, social and economic fields, donor countries have sought to weaken the UN by turning it into an implementing agency. The BWIs and the WTO operate as the providers of the policies and thinking, while marginalizing the UN’s role and function to speak or to provide alternative development thinking and technical assistance to developing countries in fields touching upon trade, finance or monetary policy.
The civil society response goes on to say that the panel’s analysis excludes the acute responsibility of BWI and WTO when looking in the past and current lack of system-wide coherence, while ascribing all past, current and future responsibility solely to the UN as it is currently constituted.
Also, by demanding that agencies act “coherently†may simply represent the endorsement of one view at the expense of others, with that view being oftentimes that of the strongest or more resourced agency. At the same time, a look at the track record of the provision of development by the Bretton Woods Institutions leaves no reason to be complacent. A certain amount of choice among providers of what we would call “development services†should not only be preserved, but fostered, in the interest of the health of the whole system.
A better balance between a certain diversity needed on the one hand, and the importance of the global coherence of the UN system on the other hand, must be found. “Coherence†is not only achievable in centralized systems, but can also be present in a well-coordinated, decentralized one.
The report essentially argues that the balance being struck by the Panel will lead to a smaller, less effective UN, less able to offer a meaningful and effective alternative voice to other organizations - in particular the Bretton Woods Institutions — in areas of development policy.
Click on the attachment below to read the full report
Source: Centre for Policy Studies
This paper presents the most significant findings of the third phase of the South African contribution to a study that has sought to research the impact of foreign political aid on CSOs and on democratisation in three African countries: South Africa, Ghana, and Uganda. It was conducted in partnership with the Institute for Development Studies of Sussex University in the United Kingdom; the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda; and the department of political science of the University of Ghana. This third phase consisted of detailed studies of a range of CSOs, more specifically their organisational capacity, their internal democratic processes and structures, and their political efficacy, understood as their ability to influence government policy and legislation for the benefit of their members and other social actors.
In each case, the study also attempted to assess the effect on the CSO of donor funding where it has been available, and where it has not, to analyse the effect thereof and the likely implications of it receiving donor funding. In order to derive conclusions about the effects of donor actions, the analysis was conducted at two levels. The first concerned the ‘outputs’ of donor interventions: are donors supporting, in appropriate ways, the types of CSOs and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are likely to contribute to democratic consolidation? The second relates to outcomes; what evidence is there that CSOs and NGOs supported by donors are making an active contribution through activities designed to influence government policy and law?
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Source: Actionaid International
Based on a 4 years of field research in Uganda, this report evaluates the relationship between NGOs and donor agencies. The study illustrates the complexity of the relationships between donors and recipients, and how far these shape behaviour and outcomes.
Main findings of the study include:
-there are tensions inherent in many grants and contracts between meeting set targets and the focus on impact while working to develop local organisations and processes are widely evident
-the policies, tools and procedures of aid management have an in-built bias towards tools and ways of thinking imported into Uganda from the donor countries
-donor agencies are in the driving seat most of the time - imposing donor or managerial ways of thinking and defining issues that may not be shared – or even understood- by local organisations or communities
-the tools and approaches also tend to simplify the complexity of doing development work with poor people in Africa: issues of inequality and poverty are over simplified, and more challenging issues such as ethnicity, the legacy of colonialism, the cultural norms around issues of age and gender are often overlooked altogether
-in realty development is much more ‘messy’ than in practice
-tensions exist where two or more very different organisational cultures work together, creating a lack of understanding, listening, and often suspicion at different levels
-there are, however, a few exceptions: a few NGOs work to a different paradigm, in spite of the difficulties in getting funding from the dominant donors in Uganda.
The paper points out, however, that there is also the potential of working differently within the current aid system. To realise this potential there needs to be a change in attitude:
-donor agencies need to be willing to listen and need to invest time for discussions and face to face meetings
donors and local NGOs need to work together on shared and negotiated planning, thereby developing mutual trust and confidence with regards to the implementation of the project
-advice and support should be given in an overall context of support rather than control
-more joint evaluations should be established allowing for learning, flexibility and openness
-while most development actors subscribe to the principles and values of participation in theory, they need to be properly implemented in practice.
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Source: Malawi Economic Justice Network
This report assesses participation of Malawian Civil Society in the development of the Malawian Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS)
The report finds that the MGDS is a product of relatively lower levels of consultative and participatory processes, when compared with the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy (MPRS). While the MPRS and the Vision 2020 incorporated views and inputs from communities, the MGDS incorporated views of a smaller set of stakeholders. Civil society participation took place in the processes after key documents were already developed. One such key document was the Malawi Economic Growth Strategy (MEGS).
The MGDS has built on the MEGS. The MEGS emphasized the need to create a conducive environment for private sector investment to stimulate economic growth. Government conducted consultations with private sector only in the development of the MEGS. The MGDS also incorporates lessons learnt from the implementation of the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy (MPRS).
However, while the civil society actively participated in the MPRS annual reviews, the development of the MGDS was on average far ahead of the completion of the MPRS comprehensive review report and this raised the concern of time mismatches which was potentially undermining participation of the civil society. The MGDS has also been aligned with existing key sectoral strategies and policies from both private and public stakeholder institutions.
Government will spearhead the implementation of the MGDS. However, all stakeholders have varying responsibilities in the implementation process to ensure the attainment of the set goals. The civil society has established itself as one of the key players in monitoring implementation of national poverty policies and government budgets.
While the role of civil society in the implementation of the MGDS is appreciated, lack of adequate access to public information continues to hinder civil society efforts to meaningfully generate credible evidence for influencing policy dialogue. In addition, civil societies’ own inherent capacity weaknesses continue to slow down efforts for promoting pro-poor policy processes and content. These are also gaps and broken bridges that need urgent mending for civil society to become an effective vehicle for transforming public policy for poverty reduction.
Click here to read the full report
