[afro-nets] World Bank's malaria matrix (2)

["Peter Burgess" <profitinafrica@gmail.com>]

World Bank's malaria matrix (2)
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Dear Colleagues

Thank you Philip for drawing attention to Richard Tren's recent paper.

The "management dimension" of the relief and development sector is missing, and poor decisions are replicated for years. The World Bank, for all its academic expertise is not very good in the management area, and even worse in the basics of accounting and measuring performance.

Governments are also weak in accounting and management information ...at any rate at the "top" of the institutions and in terms of their reporting to the public. That said, there are pockets of excellence in management information in all sorts of places ... mostly out of sight because it is being compiled by junior staff, sometimes with excellent accounting capabilities.

But who at the World Bank would want to talk to the junior staff in a "south" organization ... and indeed the same can be said for most of the "north" experts. But people from the "north" should take note ... there is a huge amount of valuable information in the hands of working people in the "south" ... and if only we could get to use it, we might start to make some decisions about allocation or resources that would start to solve problems rather than merely going in circles playing politics and talking about them.

I have been trying to find out about cost effectiveness of the various malaria interventions that have been going on ... not much of this material is easily accessible, but what is accessible suggests that a lot of scarce money has been used "expensively" ... I wish there was some strong management information about this that is credible ... and peer review of management information is not, in my view, a good way to give credibililty to management information since it is an expensive process. Corporate management information is made credible by good systems, internal control, internal check, internal audit, external audit and now the moral suasion of Sarbanes Oxley ... and not by peer review which is about academia and science and not at all efficient for management information.

>From a management perspective ... the World Bank and the other major relief and development sector institutions seem to have a preference for a "working blind" approach to policy formulation. No wonder it does not work.

Sincerely

Peter Burgess

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Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network
Tr-Ac-Net in New York
+1-212 772 6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com
Tr-Ac-Net book "Revolutionary Change for Relief and Development"
350 pages http://www.lulu.com/content/477773