Transparency and the APRM

Steven Gruzd, Africa's pre-eminent APRM watcher, has filled in some of the details of the APRM meeting held in Benin last weekend (see my earlier post). In so doing, he also pointed to the difficulties of getting meaty details on the process: "Tracking progress and highlighting achievements is currently almost entirely left to the national level. Transparency would be enhanced if these reports were routinely lodged on APRM websites and distributed in hard copy as well, including to national and regional parliaments, and to the media." Read his comments!

Google.org and information as accountability

Google.org is embarking on a project in East Africa which deserves to be closely watched...not least because of the various sorts of resources that it can bring to play in taking the project to scale. Aleem Walji, head of Global Development Initiatives at Google.org, penned an outline of the project in his contribution to Blog Action Day. The project would " support, catalyze, and widely disseminate...information to public, private, and civil society stakeholders that can use it to see more clearly what’s working, what’s broken and what are potential solutions. Leveraging platforms like Google Earth and Google Maps can help organizations disseminate their content widely and let people see and understand what was once invisible. Once information is visible, widely known, and easy to understand, we are betting that governments and citizens will pay more attention to leakages in the service delivery pipeline and feel empowered to propose solutions."

Is information the answer?

Shanta Deverajan, the WB's new chief economist for Africa, recently launched a blog which promises to be worth following. One of his first entries was titled "Is information the answer?". Inter Press Service, for obvious reasons perhaps, appropriated the title for an article they requested from me on "any experience of research and development in Africa". My own working title had been "Africa needs more knowledge intermediaries". My contribution ends with a call for an Addis Briefings series, modelled on the Brussels Briefings. The IPS article draws on material from the IDS-initiated process on KI issues: the 2007 conference report is the first stop. The background paper to the 2008 conference and commentary from participants will bring you up to speed.

* A small correction to the IPS article: the last sentence should read: "Imagine how influential an "Addis Briefings" series could be, modelled on the lessons of the "Brussels Development Briefings", put together by a group of agencies - CTA, the European Commission, Euforic, CONCORD, and IPS Europe."

Towards an inventory of African government speeches

Knowledge intermediary work in Africa would be made so much more effective if we had an inventory of (re)sources for government speeches across the continent. This point was rammed home again yesterday when the daily listing of new speeches here in South Africa popped into my inbox: it contained the lead-in commentary (by the new RSA president) on land and associated issues in those countries that had been part of the African Peer Review Mechanism process. Reading the speech it is clear that the APRM meeting in Benin was discussing comparative processes and issues in APRM reviewed states - potentially a very interesting topic. What other issues were reviewed I wonder? The Botswana government issues a weekly listserve of key speeches; it pops into the inbox on a Sunday night or Monday morning. I mine it for material for both the FANRPAN and Ansa-Africa websites. It would be interesting to know of other such government-sponsored dissemination processes - can any one help with some pointers?

Of newspapers and websites

My years as a policy researcher taught me at least one lesson: the day begins with a read of the newspapers! This rule is even stronger when one is building a website, looking for material that will give a website a clear niche and be of use to consistent users. Newspaper stories provide leads to new projects and processes, research reports and, in this case, conference outcomes which must be followed up. Readers will hear more about my experiences with iGoogle in future blogs: over the weekend one of the feeds highlighted a news report about a conference declaration from a Pan African Parliament (PAP) convened process with African women. The ANSA-Africa website contains a section on communiques, started to capture the outcomes of relevant international, African and regional conferences. Unfortunately the PAP www does not yet contain the full declaration (I await it from their media crowd so it can be posted in that section): in the meantime we will have to make do with the news report, which I have just posted on the FANRPAN and ANSA-Africa wwws. It would seem that only Afrique en Ligne has picked up the conference outcome in any depth; many of my newsflashes come from that news agency. It is worth taking a look at and subscribing to via their RSS feed.

Dar seeks elusive cure for donor dependency

Africa will, unfortunately, be one of the fall guys for the financial crisis, increasing cynicism across the continent about the predictability of donor aid. The African press is already full of articles on how the continent will be affected; it is a matter of when and by how much. Judging from a great article last week in THISDAY's Tanzanian edition, the fallout has started. Tanzania's donor dependence is much greater than Kenya's, for example.

" National ownership and leadership of the development process is seen as significantly compromised since a huge chunk of the money funding the construction of roads, schools, hospitals and water projects comes from foreign donors. According to widely-quoted official records, valuable civil service work time is spent penning an average of 2,400 donor reports everyquarter, hosting around 1,000 meetings a year, and preparing some 8,000 audit reports for multilateral development financiers. According to an official with the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Brian Hammond, the donor deluge has been keeping Tanzanian health workers so busy during office hours that their proper jobs ''vaccinating babies or checking their mothers' well-being'' have to be done during evenings and weekends.
''It's unfair and unsustainable,'' Hammond was quoted as saying in a recent interview with the 'Irish Times' newspaper."

Food for thought...