[afro-nets] Monitoring and Evaluation of ART Procurement and Supply (2)

[Peter Burgess <Profitinafrica@aol.com>]

Monitoring and Evaluation of ART Procurement and Supply (2)
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Dear Colleagues

The tremendous lack of accounting and accountability in almost
all areas of the official relief and development assistance
(ORDA) sector is disgraceful... but, in my view, it is not going
to be helped very much by strengthening monitoring and evalua-
tion (M&E) which is usually an exercise that is expensive, and
too little and too late. Because it does not work and does not
do much good, the donors have felt the need to "strengthen" M&E
over and over again for years... when it would have been much
more useful to have insisted on decent accounting and decent
timely reporting all the way during the implementation process.

I have worked in both the corporate world and the official re-
lief and development assistance (ORDA) sector. In the corporate
world I got excellent accounts from operations all over the
world in less than three days after the end of any month... in
the ORDA world such information took months and even then was
incomplete. The role of accountancy in the ORDA world has been
dramatically diminished... and it is then no surprise that there
is little accountability.

This has not happened by accident... senior people and experts
have made this happen... and the accountancy advocates and In-
stitutes have totally failed to take a professional stand.

I like the fact that IDA Solutions is interested in the problem
of ART Procurement and Supply... but I believe that their ap-
proach fails to get to the core of the problem and really adds
more to the complexity of the situation than anything else.

Maybe I am wrong... I would be interested to get feedback.

Peter Burgess
Tr-Ac-Net in New York
Tel.: +1-212-772-6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com
The Transparency and Accountability Network
http://tr-ac-net.blogspot.com
http://www.tr-ac-net.org