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Global Washington joins Global Campaign for Aid Transparency

One of the four principles that Global Washington identified in its 2009 white paper on global aid effectiveness and highlighted in its 2010 policy paper is “Transparency and Accountability” — information on strategy, goals, and spending [should be] clear and readily available to U.S. taxpayers and international beneficiaries.

It turns out that Global Washington is in line with much of the rest of the world in its call for transparency. Publish What You Fund, a London-based group, is sponsoring a global campaign for aid transparency, in preparation for the upcoming High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Korea in early December.

The upcoming High Level Forum will be the fourth such forum sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). At the third forum, held in Accra, Ghana, in 2008, OECD issued the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which included the following action:

“We will make aid more transparent. Developing countries will facilitate parliamentary oversight by implementing greater transparency in public financial management, including public disclosure of revenues, budgets, expenditures, procurement and audits. Donors will publicly disclose regular, detailed and timely information on volume, allocation and, when available, results of development expenditure to enable more accurate budget, accounting and audit by developing countries.”

Publish What You Fund is working with a global coalition of partners, including U.S.-based Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), to collect organizations willing to sign onto a petition urging governments and other donors to make their aid more transparent. Global Washington has recently signed onto the petition, and urges individual members to sign on as well.

Guest Blog: Why are all these white folks deciding what Africa needs?

This guest post from Kunle Oguneye, president of the Seattle chapter of The African Network was originally posted in Humanosphere and is reposted here with permission.

One glaring omission which prevails in the global health and development community in the Greater Seattle region is the absence of Africans or Indians or Chinese or Vietnamese.  Those of us who live in the poverty-stricken regions of the world have no input in the so-called solutions to eradicate malaria or to fight global-poverty.

I find it quite disturbing that the so-called beneficiaries are not consulted when seeking solutions to the challenges that we face on a daily basis.  I would not be so concerned about this, but for the fact that some of the policies and activities of well-intentioned advocates may actually be detrimental to the poor communities of this world.  Why does the global development community assume that we Africans don’t know what works in addressing poverty?  Why do they assume that we do not have the answers?  Why does a white man or woman visit Africa and immediately prescribe a solution based on their three-week visit?

Many of us in the African immigrant community have seen poverty first-hand.  Many of us have watched our relatives and friends pull themselves out of poverty or further fall into poverty.  We understand what solutions can and do work.  We understand that technology can help, but only to a point.  We understand that you cannot address a society’s problems without boots on the ground.  We understand that no program will be successful without the buy-in of the community.

Another glaring omission in the debate around global development is the absence of the business community.  Communities thrive around business.  All the efforts to provide a village with bed nets and anti-malaria drugs will ultimately fail, if those villagers do not have the means to purchase those items once the initial donations run out.  We must be encouraging businesses to engage with the developing world.

We need to stop presenting the image of Africans and indeed the developing world as helpless lost souls who need help from the benevolent white man or woman in order to survive.

If the community is really sincere about development, then they should ask the people of that community what works.  Help them acquire the necessary infrastructure, provide relevant educational opportunities and then get out of the way.

Kunle Oguneye

Member Guest Blog: Two Steps Backward for Innovation to End Poverty

By Sam Daley-Harris

The deed is done.  On May 5^th the appellate division of the Bangladesh Supreme Court agreed that the Bangladesh Bank, the nation’s central bank, was justified in firing Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus from his post as Managing Director of Grameen Bank, the institution he founded more than three decades ago.  Prof. Yunus’ lead lawyer, Dr. Kamal Hossain, one of Bangladesh’s most distinguished attorneys and a drafter of the nation’s constitution, was scarcely able to hide his disgust at the Appellate Division order, when he said: “I [apparently] have to take admission to university again to newly learn the constitutional laws of the 21st century.”

The dismissal is not the lone action of one government institution but is part of a premeditated campaign that starts at the highest level with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.  Their reason for sacking Prof. Yunus?  He’s “too old.”  Never mind that the 70-year-old Yunus maintains a rigorous schedule or that the Finance Minister, another key player in the sacking, at 77 is somehow not “too old” for that post.  Their excuse would be laughable if it were not for the calamitous impact it portends.  What makes the decision to remove Prof. Yunus so disgraceful is not that he would be out of a job – any university in the world would welcome him with open arms as a visiting professor.  No, the atrocity here is the fact that the independence and integrity of one of the world’s premier poverty fighting institutions is now at grave risk.  Grameen Bank, an extraordinary institution with more than 8 million microcredit borrowers that took 35 years to build, could be destroyed in a matter of months by incompetent government action.

The government’s action cannot honestly be in response to accusations by a Danish documentary maker about an improper transfer of Norwegian aid funds more than a dozen years ago, because both the Norwegian government and Bangladesh’s own review committee have found that Grameen did nothing wrong.  It cannot be due to the documentary maker’s charge of excessive interest rates, because Microfinance Transparency and the government’s own review committee found Grameen has the lowest interest rates in the country.  Instead, most observers see this as an inexcusable political vendetta by the Prime Minister against Prof. Yunus, stemming from his short-lived attempt to start a political party in 2007.

Consider these groundbreaking innovations that Prof. Yunus’ poverty-fighting laboratory has brought to the world and what could be lost in the future from his unwarranted ouster:

• In 1976 he made loans of less than US$1 each to 42 desperately poor Bangladeshis to start or build tiny businesses – and the microcredit revolution was born.  It has made its way all around the world.  While others have seen microfinance as a way to make big money for investors, Prof. Yunus has never once diverted from his original intent to empower the poor.
• In 1997 Grameen Phone Ladies started bringing cell phone technology to remote villagers throughout Bangladesh—providing the dual benefit of creating jobs and increasing communications, which enhanced others’ work.
• Grameen Shakti, an energy firm, has installed more than a half-million solar home systems and sold more than a quarter-million improved cooking stoves.
• In a joint venture with Danone, the yogurt maker headquartered in France, Grameen Danone is bringing low-cost fortified yogurt to malnourished children throughout the country – and creating a business opportunity for the poor women who sell it.
• College scholarships and loans have gone to 180,000 students. Most remarkably, in almost all of the cases, these are the children of illiterate parents who have had the help of Grameen Bank in breaking the bonds of intergenerational illiteracy.

A government that so rashly and ruthlessly ousts this innovative and transformational leader cannot likely be trusted to continue his revolutionary work.

But the deed is done.  Here is a sample of the visionary voice that Bangladesh has likely lost in this despicable government act.  Reflecting on the 1997 Microcredit Summit Prof. Yunus wrote: “In teaching economics I learned about money, and now as head of a bank I lend money.  The success of our venture lies in how many crumpled bank bills our once starving members now have in their hands. But the microcredit movement, which is built around, and for, and with money, ironically, is at its heart, at its deepest root not about money at all.  It is about helping each person to achieve his or her fullest potential.  It is not about cash capital, it is about human capital.  Money is merely a tool that unlocks human dreams and helps even the poorest and most unfortunate people on this planet achieve dignity, respect, and meaning in their lives.”

Sam Daley-Harris is Founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign which seeks to reach 175 million poorest families with microloans www.microcreditsummit.org and of RESULTS which seeks to create the political will to end poverty www.results.org.