COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Only a few are benefiting

Yohannes Damtew raises an important issue. The development model that has been used by the World Bank / IMF, by the UN system, by bilateral donors and multilateral institutions .... and has been welcomed by governments of developing countries is one that sustains only a tiny proportion of the economy of the countries concerned ...... most of the population knows nothing of what has happened in the ODA (official development assistance) arena ..... most of the population is not participating in the development dialog and development progress.

I am a corporate accountant / financial manager before I became involved with development consultancy. The allocation of resources to development priorities has rarely been done with a view to getting the most in terms of development performance, but has always been a result of some more tangible agenda. The phrase 'We don't want the project .... we just want the cars' sums up the rather inappropriate decision making characteristic of resource allocation in development.

The good news is that transparency is coming. Our own organization is not interested in what big ideas people have for the future, we want to understand what simple small success is already going on ..... and we want to use that as the basis for allocating resources and getting bigger success. Our position is that there are thousands and thousands of people who are doing good work with minimum resources ..... and will do better and bigger with just a modest amount of financial and technical support.

The cost of conferences is substantial. People attending the conferences get a lot of personal satisfaction from them ..... but in terms of development resource allocation .... they ought not to be a priority. A conference that leads to development action may have great value ..... but if the conference merely results in a set of filed position papers .... the value is minimal. Where the conference reiterates positions that are already well known .... there is cost .... but not value. Corporate style of financial analysis applied in development would very quickly change the priorities of what is done in development. All of this is very sad ...... since the failure of development has ended up causing incredible suffering ....... in development the bottom line is expressed in mortality figures.

Modern communications technology is very powerful, but sadly only available to very very few. Yohannes talked about 99% of health workers have no access to this modern communications capability ..... but it is now 1% ..... and with a good allocation of development resources it can be increased to maybe 5% and later something better.

And then there is the question of content. The luxury of discussion is not something people faced with crisis have time for ..... so the content has to be of real value. Our view is that getting more SOUTH view into the development discussion is something of importance .... and we are encouraging that. We also aim to use knowledge from the SOUTH as a part of our program for fund raising .... and part of our program to make what we are doing very transparent.

As some of the participants will know one element in our agenda for HIV-AIDS relates to safe injections ..... clean needles .... the auto-disable technology. Nobody should ever be infected by a dirty needle. But we see other priorities as well ..... in the care of PLWHA (people living with HIV-AIDS) ..... in support for groups providing help to AIDS orphans ..... in helping communities where AIDS has ravaged the production age population ..... in helping young people handle sexuality in this dangerous new era.

There is work to be done. Resources must be used to the best possible effect. Everything in development that costs money should be subject to financial scrutiny and the money allocated in the very best possible way to yield development results.

Thank you