AIDS funding not reaching community efforts (2)
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Dear Colleagues
Many people who have spent time working with the global relief
and development sector recognise that funds far too often do not
reach the intended beneficiaries... it is a huge problem and one
that nobody seems much able to address successfully.
My own take on the problem is that the basic process has been
deeply corrupted, and that leadership is too much implicated to
be able to make needed changes. In some cases the organizations
are not staffed with enough accountants, and in some cases the
accountants have been shoved into a position where they cannot
do any good. We seem to have had the problem of corruption and
missing money for more than a generation, and it has not gotten
any better over time. A situation like this is a disgrace.
I had hoped that the new Global Fund (GFATM) would be able to
operate with the process that made fund disbursement conditional
on good use of previous funds... a reasonable conditionality.
But even though GFATM started with no baggage of out-dated pro-
cedures, it promptly adopted a process that looked very much
like the failed processes already in use by the existing offi-
cial relief and development assistance (ORDA) organizations. The
focus on analysis of proposals... and then rather little ac-
counting for use of funds... followed by ex-post M&E and then
"Oh dear, where has all the money gone!" is not a process that
works for needy beneficiaries, though it is God's gift to cor-
rupt intermediaries.
And it puts honest good intermediaries in a terrible bind. Some
of the fund flows are big... and dishonesty pays much better
than honesty. This is what old fashioned good accounting was de-
signed to combat... when everything is accounted for... then re-
sources can be used for what they were designated for... leakage
does not happen. But accounting has to be done... and the man-
agement and leadership has got to support the accounting people
so that they do a good job and do not themselves become part of
a corrupt process.
Good accounting also helps to improve decision making... why is
it that so much money is spent to do things that have little of
no value? Good accountants in a good system report on this type
of abuse... but it does not happen in the ORDA world. Again, a
failure, in my view, of leadership and experts who seem to like
to be able to do what they want with little or no fear of ever
being held to account.
I am involved with an initiative that one day will measure
socio-economic progress at the community level... and ask where
all the money that disburses from donors actually gets used.
There is leakage that relates to corruption, but there is also a
huge amount of just plain waste and massive diversion of re-
sources to activities that do absolutely nothing of value for
community level socio-economic progress.
Interesting subject... but leadership and experts are not much
interested in getting ALL the answers.
Sincerely
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