[afro-nets] On accounting and accountability

[Peter Burgess <Profitinafrica@aol.com>]

On accounting and accountability... not a lot of progress... YET
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Dear Colleagues

I wrote the following message in April 2002 just after Dr.
Feacham's appointment had been announced. The issues are still
with us. The only change from the original message is replacing
ATCnet with Afrifund!

While there is still a lot that has not been done, some progress
is now being made by Afrifund and others on getting some infor-
mation mobilized that will help to address the issue of measur-
ing performance. This new information dimension is taking time
to come together, but it is coming!

Peter Burgess
mailto:Profitinafrica@aol.com


--
To:     "BTS" <break-the-silence@lists.hdnet.org>
Subject: GF: One of Feachem's challenges
From:   "BTS" <break-the-silence@hdnet.org>
Date:    Mon, 29 Apr 2002 19:10:21 +0200
Reply-To: break-the-silence@hdnet.org

Dear Colleagues

I would like to congratulate Dr. Richard Feachem on his appoint-
ment as the Executive Director of the GFATM. I wish him well as
I am sure everyone else with concern over the Health and HIV-
AIDS crisis must do.

The challenge facing Dr. Feachem is enormous. And it may be that
the challenge is actually such that success is impossible.

Observers of the international official development assistance
(ODA) community, of which GFATM is now a part, have a great con-
cern that the resources available will be managed effectively.
We know that the processes used in the ODA world to plan inter-
ventions and allocate funds and control expenditure and to moni-
tor and control have been ineffective more often than they have
worked well. And this has been going on for two or three or more
decades. The changes have been frequent, but generally superfi-
cial.

The main systems and business processes used by the official de-
velopment assistance (ODA) community have a focus on procedure
and not too much on performance. Even though there has been mas-
sive resource mobilization for emergency and development over
the past decades, the results are now measured more in the
amount of accumulated debt rather than major improvement in the
quality of life.

The resources that have already been made available to the medi-
cal and the international community to address health and HIV-
AIDS issues have not yet produced anything like the results that
should have been expected. Already many billions of dollars have
flowed into work associated with the health and HIV-AIDS crisis,
but not very much has been delivered to the people who are suf-
fering and the affected communities.

It is absolutely apparent that performance in the use of scarce
resources can be improved enormously, but requires much more fo-
cus on performance and much less on procedure. The Executive Di-
rector of the GFATM has the possibility to make a substantive
change in the performance realized by the use of GFATM funds.

The Afrifund view is that funds need to go much more to programs
that deliver benefits to those that are affected, and less to
the overhead and oversight of programs, and to studies that con-
firm what is already known.

Some work, however, needs to be done on what we do not know, and
from our perspective, we know very little about what is happen-
ing in remote rural communities in Africa (and other developing
areas). Conversely, these rural remote communities are also ter-
ribly unaware of the health and HIV-AIDS crisis that has en-
gulfed the developing world, especially in Africa.

We have been disappointed that the initial procedures for use of
fund resources are predicated on a GFATM-to-Government arrange-
ment. This is understandable, but the use of funds effectively
under this procedure needs to be studied with care. There needs
to be a strong system of performance assessment and total ac-
countability. Under the GFATM-Government arrangement it is dif-
ficult to ensure that funds are allocated to programs that are
working, not to programs with great objectives that are failing.

The flows of funds into the pipeline for health and HIV-AIDS,
and the other killer diseases ...... should actually come out
doing excellent work in the area. This is something that cer-
tainly cannot be said to have happened with a lot of the HIV-
AIDS funding that was mobilized in the US for these purposes.
The GFATM should get engaged in the issues surrounding the mas-
sive publicly funded investment in research and the immensely
costly therapies that were the corporate response to available
funding.

I know from my corporate experience over a period of almost 20
years that major performance improvement is possible based on
systems and process changes and a concentration on strengthening
what is essential and what works. The results are immediate and
also serve to satisfy strategic goals. I hope this will be on
the agenda of the GFATM.

My development and emergency consultancy experience also for
about 20 years has shown that amazing results are possible when
people are motivated to perform, and the priorities are based on
the needs of families and communities that are the intended
beneficiaries. Many years of exposure to development and emer-
gency shows how often we (the NORTH and the ODA community) im-
plement value destroying activities, and then we are concerned
about debt repayment having a higher priority than funding
health and education and human services. I hope this concept
will be understood by the GFATM.

But few are as disappointed as I am at the terrible performance
of development and emergency interventions over the past twenty
or thirty years. This is not about bad lazy people ...... the
problem is great people working very hard in institutions and
organizations that have become slaves to ineffective systems and
processes and procedures. It is time we broke out of this vi-
cious situation, and created a virtuous loop of positive feed-
back based on accountability and performance criteria.

Afrifund is working in the information dimension for development
.... and the effective use of ICT and database technology to en-
able much more informed decision making in development. This is
especially critical at any time when resources are limited and
the work to be done is huge.

Thank you. Good luck

Peter Burgess