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As Kenya prepares for the first general elections in 2012 under the new Constitution, the media’s focus has been on politics. While this is important, the media should not forget other critical and pressing issues that need urgent attention. As agenda setters and opinion shapers, the media should not be swayed by politicians and their aggressive campaigns to get votes and gain favor among the electorate.

Climate change is one key issue that the media should focus on. The Horn of Africa experienced the worst famine in four decades this year and people are still reeling under its effects. It is laudable that the East African Community (EAC), the Common Market for Eastern Africa (COMESA) and Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) launched a joint five-year programme on climate change adaptation and mitigation in early December, 2011. Aimed at addressing the impacts of climate change in the EAC, COMESA and SADC region through successful adaptation and mitigation actions to enhance economic and social resilience, member states need to urgently create policies to implement the programme. It is worth noting that the EAC has taken the lead and established the Climate Change Fund and the Climate Change Coordination Unit.

The media should come in to set the agenda and shape public opinion on climate change. For starters, the media need to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change among the citizenry, development partners, the private sector and the government. Secondly, the media should provide a platform upon which the citizenry can engage the government on climate change, demanding and claiming their rights to cushion them from climate change impacts such as famine and floods. Last but not least, the media should find a way of generating debate among key stakeholders on climate change including the government, development partners, the private sector, the civil society and the citizenry.

The impacts of climate change and the need for urgent attention cannot be overemphasized. According to a report by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) (Climate Change: Impacts, Vulnerabilities and Adaptation in Developing Countries) the impacts of climate change in Africa are many. In regard to water, many countries will face water stress with 75-220 million people facing severe water shortages by 2020. In as far as agriculture and food security are concerned, agricultural production will be severely compromised due to uncertainty about what and when to plant as weather patterns will be unpredictable. Worse still, the report predicts that yields from rain-fed crops could be halved by 2020 in some countries with net revenues from crops falling by 90% by 2100. Last but not least, an increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events, including droughts and floods are likely to occur.

Given that Africa and East Africa in particular have low adaptive capacity to both climate variability and climate change, it is important that the mass media use their power to help address these issues. This is urgent and important because the situation is exacerbated by the existing challenges including endemic widespread poverty, limited access to capital, including markets, infrastructure and technology, complex disasters and conflicts.

Editor's note: From Jawahir Habib of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Pakistan, the blog entry below shares perspectives on efforts to deliver the oral polio vaccine (OPV) within the remaining polio-endemic countries in the context of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (PEI).

"Polio has been 99% eradicated, this line often encourages me when i travel this last mile to eradicate the One percent.  Pakistan, India, Nigeria and Afghanistan are the only four countries where polio virus circulation has never been interrupted.  India has shown a remarkable progress as the clock strikes 12 this New Year even hopefully India will be standing with one polio case in 2011; it’s the same country where back in 2009 more than 400 cases of polio were confirmed in the two endemic areas UP and Bihar.

Situation in Pakistan has been the opposite, specially the part of Pakistan where I work for Polio eradication, Balochistan. Cases in Balochistan in 2011 have increased more than five times than that in 2010. 69 cases of polio have been confirmed in Balochistan a province where population is not more than 6 million. The concentrations of cases have been more in the Quetta Block a region of three districts which borders to Afghanistan. The Quetta Block has some peculiar features which places it at a greater risk of virus transmission and a threat to global polio eradication initiative.

Travelling the last mile hasn’t been easy, it has its toll on the workers, and a recent research conducted by UNICEF on motivation of the healthcare workers and volunteers shows a grim picture. Community fatigue is evident with the increased number of cases. Lack of accountability and ownership of the polio eradication initiative has resulted not only in diminishing quality of campaigns but also has affected the overall health system at the district level.

Rumors and misconceptions regarding OPV have filled the operational gaps, community sees the initiative as something that is forced on them and does not see polio as their problem. The threat susceptibility and severity as compared to other diseases as dengue, malaria and tuberculosis is perceived by community as very low which is another area where communications for PEI campaigns are struggling.

The last mile demands not only new and innovative approaches, out of the box strategies and strong micro-plans. But it also demands commitment from everyone…"

Disclaimer :(Views and opinions with this Blog represent my own and not those of people, institutions or organizations I am affiliated with unless stated explicitly. My Blog is not affiliated with; neither does it represent the views, position or attitudes of my empolyer)

In order to improve the effectiveness of our very small contribution to the development struggle I have just reviewed a document called "Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-Operation". It is the outcome from the work of the 3,500 people who participated in the 4th High Level Forum on AID Effectiveness in late November. The document prescribes their way forward for us all to be much more effective. I sought guidance. There is lots of good advice. (See James Deane blog for his detailed analysis).


The problem is that at the same time as this meeting of 3,500 of the best and brightest in international development was taking place I had managed to sneak some time at home on my daughter's Ipad and checked out the very cool National Geographic Global Maps App. One map in particular popped my eyes right open.


There are two reasons for that rare reaction: first, that the data I saw so brilliantly presented by the National Geographic is something we all intuitively know; and, second, that it is data so many in Development so blindly ignore. 


From 1960 to 2009 the average global GDP (Growth Domestic Product) was 113%. The average level of economic growth for all countries in that period was just over double.


The National Geographic map with this data is relative. The greater a country's economic growth level the larger it appears on the map. My own very small country physically, New Zealand, is a heck of a lot bigger in this map. The USA, Western Europe and Japan are massive.


And Africa looks really small.


The legend on the left of the map tells the story. With helpful colour coding for each country it is very clear that almost every Africa country was below the global GDP growth average. Many of them are way below - in the less than 50% GDP growth category.


I have reproduced the Africa map below.


From the perspective of AID effectiveness we have just seen the elephant in the room - and we are going to have to push it uphill. The countries whose populations experience the most pressing health, education, gender, poverty, AIDS, environmental, and myriad other development issues have economically grown at the slowest rates. Their collective wealth is slipping behind - badly.


And of course there is no news there! We all know that. It is patently clear that the biggest AID Challenges are in the economically poorest countries. But it is equally clear that the greater the level of internal financial resources available in a country then the more likely that they will experience development success! But we have the opposite condition: the countries with the biggest development challenges are gettng economically poorer, minute by minute, month by month, year by year, compared to the economically wealthier countries.


There is not one jot of reference or attention to this, or anything even remotely similar, in the "Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-Operation" outline of how AID can be more effective. It is as though AID has been corralled into its own pen. Only within that pen can effectiveness be described and prescribed. The bigger picture - the context for AID related to effectivness - is of no apparent matter.


Why in the Busan deliberations and pronouncements was there such an exclusively inward looking focus on the mechanisms of AID itself? Why was there no contextual, data driven, overview of the setting for AID effectiveness? Not AID funding levels and flows as such (that is internal stuff). But the changing (deteriorating) nature of the development challenge within which AID funds are one part of the dynamic. GDP growth is a vital part of that.   

By not asking such questions - and providing some strategic guidance related to them (eg what are key factors behind the growing GDP inequity between countries and what can be done) - we reduce questions of AID effectiveness to manouvering in a room with shrinking space as the elephant(s) take up more and more room. And the floor tilts upward to make the task even more difficult.

Three and a half thousand people have been meeting in Busan, South Korea to discuss the future of development assistance. The 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness is a tedious name for an important process - how best to organise the billions of dollars of development assistance designed to improve the lives of the poorest people on the planet.

Organising aid

Aid has traditionally been a disorganised process. Multiple donor organisations, often with their own pet priorities and projects, meeting multiple Ministers in recipient countries, and funding projects with little or no reference to the strategic priorities of the countries themselves has been standard practice for many years. A decade ago there was increasing recognition that this chaos did not work.

In 2004 and 2007 at earlier High Level Fora in Paris and Accra, donors and developing countries reached a deal. Donors would work with each other so that developing country Ministers could deal with a coordinated group, and this more coordinated group of donors would try to allocate their money to 'on budget' issues which the country itself had determined as its development priorities. Increasingly aid money took the form of budget support – direct funding of developing country government priorities. In return, developing countries would become more accountable for expenditure to their own citizens. Both developing and developed countries committed themselves to opening up their systems and publishing far more information about what money was being spent on what and with what purpose. Aid and budget transparency has increased as a result, and the Busan meeting has seen both Canada and the United States join the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

Aid has many critics but the choice of hosting this meeting in South Korea was designed as a riposte to some of them. In opening the conference, Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean President passionately paid tribute to the role aid had played in enabling his country’s transformation from a war-ravaged wreck to one of the most vibrant industrial and democratic success stories in the world – all in little more than a generation. Once dependent on foreign aid it is now an increasingly influential and confident aid donor, with an annual aid budget of $1 billion and a determination to substantially increase this in the future.

Mixing donor soup

  In Busan, this whole agenda has been tested as never before. It is facing two main challenges.

The first is that agreeing on a deal is a good deal easier than implementing it. The OECD DAC, to its credit, has been good at monitoring the implementation of earlier agreements and transparent when things have and haven't worked. There have been important successes; the number of developing countries with 'sound' national development strategies has tripled since 2005, and organised donor support to such strategies has improved.

Successes are, however, greatly outweighed by failures. Very limited progress has been made in enhancing the capacity of developing country citizens to subject aid spending or national development policies to real scrutiny. A progress report published by the DAC in advance of Busan argued that 'perhaps the most important overall finding on the implementation of the principles has been the clear and almost universal failure...to advance on making direct mutual accountability more transparent, balanced and effective.'

In total, only one out of nine key benchmarks set in Accra had been met. The background to Busan was one of failed implementation.

The second challenge is more serious still.

Despite the chill winds of the global economic crisis - felt keenly in the West and even more so by those dealing with high food and energy prices - the aid donors club is growing fast. South Korea is not the only new entrant on the scene; Brazil, India, China and other emerging economies are becoming powerful new donors themselves. Add to this mix the big private donors such as the Gates Foundation and the multiple global funding mechanisms, such as the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria and you get a rich soup of donors with very different agendas, cultures and ways of working.

A central tenet of the Busan meeting is that this expansion is badly needed. The Millennium Development Goals are off-track, the financial crisis is putting pressure on western development budgets, the problems of famine, food insecurity, energy and climate change make the need for development money ever greater. The main objective of Busan was to form a new 'Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation' which could accommodate new donor actors.

The potentially thankless task of getting common ground among this group has been one of the main challenges facing the OECD DAC in putting together an agreement. The process has struggled. A major aim of the organisers of this meeting was to get China to join this club. The hopes appeared to have been dashed when the Chinese delegation turned up and promptly announced that they would not be signing up to the declaration. In the event, China, Brazil and India and other emerging economies did agree that the declaration from the meeting would be a 'reference' for their development cooperation, but only on a voluntary basis.

There are many reasons why countries like China would not want to commit themselves more fully. It could ostensibly commit them to being far more transparent about where their money goes and for what purpose and intensify pressure to untie their aid. Besides, China like other emerging economies also see aid as south-south cooperation which historically has been politically rooted in efforts to counter Western hegemony. New models of 'triangular cooperation' are emerging, and a session at the conference on south-south cooperation focused on practical technical sharing of knowledge and experience between countries that had experienced similar development challenges. Nevertheless, joining what many developing countries see as a Western club of donors is a big step, particularly when so many of the rules of the club have been established before they have joined. Underpinning much of the debate at one fascinating conference session on the subject of Asian development cooperation was a deep-seated historical sense of national humiliation and a determination not to be in thrall to a weakened West regarded by many new actors as still bent on lecturing others on how to govern themselves.

All this raises a question. Is there a point when the search for consensus among an ever growing set of actors comes at the price of effectiveness? Many of the emerging economies are pursuing their own national interests in their aid policies, just as Western countries have done. The carefully calibrated language of the Busan outcome document is that of the lowest common denominator. It is short on clear, time-bound indicators and hard targets. It is focused on setting out rules that can be agreed by the widest range of actors.

The drafts and final text of the declaration coming out of Busan have been tailored to make it more palatable to new emerging economy entrants. The danger is that the broader the consensus, the shallower it becomes and that some important things get left out. Are we moving now towards a development consensus that everyone can live with, but few really buy into?

The cost of consensus

  I must declare an interest in this debate. The BBC World Service Trust - a charity founded by the BBC that is legally, financially and operationally independent - is not an advocacy organisation but it does strongly believe that a free and plural media, strong investigative, financial and other forms of journalism, and open and connected societies are key to making accountability work in society. The media is also key to making the issues discussed at Busan relevant to and resonant with those who have most to win or lose from the outcome of these debates.

Our work has focused significantly on working with developing country media to enable citizens in developing countries to question their political leaders in front of millions on radio and television. In the run up to Busan over the last couple of years, we have also helped organise meetings with and worked alongside the OECD DAC to document the evidence base supporting the role of media as an accountability mechanism and to highlight its relevance of media to aid effectiveness.

The word 'media' does not appear in the Busan declaration despite recommendations coming from the preparatory processes and synthesis of findings on ownership and accountability recognising its role.

There are defensible reasons for this, and too many negotiations of this kind insist on listing every group in society anyone feels are important (faith groups, youth groups, political parties and many other actors who have engaged actively in the Busan process are also not mentioned and are assumed, like media, to fall into an overall category of 'non-state actors'). However, important emphasis is placed on parliaments and civil society organisations as key sources of accountability. The omission of any language on a free media as a source of political accountability looks odd.

The Busan process is a response to how the world is changing, particularly given the growing influence and development role of emerging economies. It has as one of its central objectives to make 'domestic' accountability work better and to address the problem that development strategies are too disconnected from the people they are designed to benefit. Few disagree that media is important to this, so it seems strange and puzzling that it appears to be so overtly ignored.

It is more puzzling still given this meeting takes place in the winter following the Arab Spring. It is not just the reconfiguration of power moving from West to East and North to South that is happening. Growing access to new communication technologies and independent media is enabling more power to shift from governments to citizens, from institutions to networks, from elites to masses, from old to young. The Arab Spring was just the most powerful manifestation of this shift.

The Busan process places a strong and welcome emphasis on issues of aid transparency and opening up access to information on budgets and government processes and on the importance of civil society. It seems oblivious however to these wider changes in how citizens are holding their governments to account.

A central hypothesis remains behind the Busan process that it is governments that shape development and that the South Korean example of the past provides a blueprint for the future. Perhaps, but the world is changing in broader ways than the simple shifting of international economic and power balances. Information empowered people, companies and civil societies are increasingly driving change. A central focus on the role of the state makes sense, particularly when this process is so focused on fragile and conflict affected states - a strong case for this was certainly made by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda in his keynote address to the conference. However, present that case to the citizens of many of the Arab Spring countries and you may get a very different perspective.

The Busan process is an attempt to reach a consensus, a consensus where commitments to support the more tricky and political elements of development assistance - such as free media and a right to information - might appear problematic. The consequence is a declaration that seems consensual and reasonable, one bent on accommodating as many actors as possible. Look here for a technical consensus on development effectiveness and you will find it. Look for a vision of development effectiveness, particularly a vision rooted in the creativity and innovation with which citizens are taking control over their own futures and lives around the world and you will look in vain.

This criticism is not aimed at those organising this meeting and those facilitating the process in the OECD DAC I know are not the dry technocrats implied here. The technicality and limitations of the declaration are the inevitable cost of achieving an ever broader consensus.

The West has often messed up its development assistance. It has used aid to advance its own economic and political interests, lectured and hectored aid recipients and sometimes got things badly wrong. I would argue that it has also tried to learn from its mistakes and that, for all its problems, the aid effectiveness agreements of Paris and Accra were essentially progressive ones aimed at rectifying the mistakes of the past. They were designed to put developing countries in the driving seat, and to ensure that the accountability relationship was downwards to citizens, not upwards to donors.

That seems a precious achievement but it is built on a consensus that can only be stretched so far. The aid effectiveness agenda has achieved much that is important and all of that has been achieved through consensus. The absence of any language about the importance of a free media from the document may be telling us something about the cost of such a consensus. At some point this may become a price that stops being worth paying.

There were real achievements at this meeting. The benefits of consensus were clear - a fresh energy around aid transparency, a new and important agreement on aid to fragile states and the creation of a more global aid framework capable of accommodating very diverse aid actors.

The costs are less clear, but to this observer very real. We should get better at counting them.

James Deane is the Director of Policy at the BBC World Service Trust. The BBC World Service Trust is an international development charity which is supported by but operationally independent of the BBC. His views should not be taken to represent those of the BBC.

Responding to George Monbiot’s recent article in the UK’s Guardian on the exorbitant costs some academic publishers charge for access to research, Globethics.net raise an important point about how such practices “accentuate a “knowledge divide” between the global north and south.  But the story doesn’t just start there.

Like many of the well-worn discussions circulating around development, the problem of northern voices dominating research itself keeps raising its head and those of us who work to resolve the issue scratch our heads and think about what else we can do to solve it. How can most southern research organisations even begin to compete with their Northern counterparts who can enjoy advantages such as good funding, greater communications capacity and technical infrastructure? And what else can be done to create a more level playing field?

While it is true that there are many southern-based research institutes doing very well for themselves (BRAC’s Research and Evaluation Division immediately springs to mind), there are plenty of smaller organisations and individuals for whom raising their profile and sharing their work beyond their circle of influence is impossible without the help of others. Happily, knowledge brokers such as Globethics.net and GDNet are helping address these inequalities and bringing southern research to the centre stage.

By creating platforms to showcase their research and providing opportunities for engagement, GDNet are supporting more than almost 11,000 researchers from the South to contribute and debate ideas in development thinking policy and practice. Working with members and partners across eight regions, GDNet not only advocates for local knowledge solving local problems but for southern research to make the same impact as that from northern institutes at the global level. Yet this ambitious remit to promote southern research knowledge is not without its difficulties.

A recent review highlighted a number of challenges facing GDNet in pursuing this objective including the practical implications of a southern focus, increasing member participation and drawing on untapped potential for members and partners to act as advocates. So how is GDNet responding to these issues? Part of the answer has been a radical rethink of its online services to ensure that southern research is easily accessible by all users. 

Demonstrating relevance: Building on the success of the GDNet Knowledgebase (an internet portal to development research produced in developing countries), GDNet have now launched a new section on their website to demonstrate the relevance of southern research beyond local and regional contexts. GDNet Thematic Windows organise research papers from the GDNet Knowledgebase to reflect a range of major policy and development-related topics, from agriculture to urbanization. The first 13 themes are now available for visitors to preview and test before the full set of 23 Thematic Windows is launched later this year.

Building confidence: Reaching out to other researchers can be valuable to everyone yet many southern researchers feel isolated within their own small ponds. The new GDNet Community Group is an online space for sharing and learning between people who have participated in GDNet training events. As well as providing a way for researchers to stay in touch, the group also provides participants with access to useful information and acts as a discussion forum to explore ideas.

By building platforms that showcase southern research and encouraging sharing and learning, GDNet is part of a global drive to address the issues of access, delivery and adoption of academic research from the South. And as a member of the I-K-Mediary network it learns from and shares its experiences with others so that work in this area becomes a team effort.

While the debates concerning the impact of northern versus southern research look far from being over, initiatives such as these are starting to readdress the balance. The proof, as those of us that like our puddings say, will be in the eating.

GDNet

@connect2gdnet 

GESCI, founded by the United Nations, (UN) ICT Task Force, has just released five reports, available in PDF format,  that assess the environmental, institutional and individual leadership capacity needs for the Knowledge Society in Africa.The rationale for the reports stems from the programme document on Africa Leadership in ICT (ALICT): Building Leadership Capacities for ICT and Knowledge Societies in Africa (2010). The main area of focus of the ALICT programme is to build the absorptive capacity of current and potential future African leaders to acquire, assimilate, transform and exploit the benefits of knowledge through knowledge sharing and exposure to technology. The aim is to build leadership capacity for producing dynamic organisational capability and creating conducive policy environments for development towards Knowledge Societies.

The four country reports (Zambia, Tanzania, Mauritius and South Africa - all available in PDF format) and the synthesis report [PDF forrmat] describe knowledge societies as those based on the creation, dissemination and utilization of information and knowledge, and those in which knowledge assets are deliberately accorded more importance than capital and labour assets in the economy. In a knowledge economy knowledge and innovation are regarded as the key engines of economic growth.

The reports tell us that for knowledge societies to be realised education must be viewed as a vehicle for socio-economic development. ICT the report goes on to say should act as an enabler for both innovation and education and that awareness must be raised regarding the significance of science and technology for building innovation systems. Central to the cultivation of knowledge societies in Africa is also the role of leadership the reports confirm. Better leadership will lead to better policy making and thus sustainable and appropriate implementation of education, and science and technology policies across systems. Leadership in the Knowledge Society requires new mindsets (i.e. shifts in thinking), new skills and capacities to provide leadership politically, economically and socially in environments that are rapidly changing. In this regard leaders need to adopt more creative and strategic thinking, new approaches to problemsolving and acquire the skills for team building, collaboration and effective communication and the technical and technological capabilities for higher levels of efficiency, productivity and impact in planning, implementation and evaluation processes including foresighting and forecasting.

In all of the four countries surveyed there are clear policy frameworks emerging for moving from a resource-based economy into a knowledge-based economy. Education, ICT, Science Technology and Innovation (STI) are recognised as vital components of this change. Infrastructure presents challenges for access on a physical level and opportunities for exponential growth and change on a virtual level. However, in all countries surveyed education and training infrastructure is proving inadequate to meet the demands of expanding school populations resulting from the successes of Education For All (EFA) and Universal Primary Completion (UPC) policies. Many schools particularly in rural zones lack basic facilities and access to reliable electricity is a problem. Yet the exponential growth of mobile telecommunications in each country presents a scenario of a virtual future that may not be so dependent on a physical one. Education systems are slowly being transformed, while there are continuing concerns regarding school infrastructure, teacher availability, skills training and employability. Many of the countries appear to be caught in a low skills equilibrium characterized by self-reinforcing networks of national and local institutions which interact to stifle the demand for improvement in competency and skills.

The factors enabling and constraining development towards Knowledge-based Societies and Economies are similar across the four countries surveyed and are essentially similar to other regions in the world. While there are differences in relation to the KS vision and objectives, there are several common factors which have underpinned KS development in each of the four countries. What differentiates the rate of transition towards knowledge?based economic development in each country is the degree to which the KS agenda is articulated from national to local levels in the various faces of national policy, strategy and implementation in the KS Education, ICT, Science and Technology and Innovation pillars.

The country reports have demonstrated the progress that has been made in the development of Knowledge Society agendas related to the pillars of Education, ICT, Science and Technology and Innovation in the four African countries surveyed. The progress that has been achieved in each country particularly over the first decade of the 21st century has been remarkable. However, in terms of broad development towards Knowledge Society status, the process is still at an early stage. The country reports present a picture of diverging understandings of key Knowledge Society concepts at all system levels. The need is for a comprehensive approach to address the human capital development challenges as well as the structural transformation that development towards a knowledge?led future will entail.

The country reports point to a need for drivers and managers with expertise in the KS pillars of ICT, Education and Science and Technology, especially at senior and middle management levels. National level strategy and coordination mechanisms, interrelationships among sector and ministry based policies and strategies, capacity to translate the vision, mission and value frameworks into strategies and activities and to develop messages about the significance of the KS pillars for organisational and national development are generally lacking.

Visit this link to download the reports.

For more information on the ALICT program and the reports please contact:

niamh.brannigan@gesci.org and helena.tapper@gesci.org

Please visit the GESCI website to find out more.