Help for HIV/AIDS Orphans in Africa (5)
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Dear Colleagues
I appreciate very much Janet's response to my criticism of the
FAO model. Janet's initiatives are quite modest, but her work is
being done with a tiny amount of money, and there are some
pretty valuable outcomes. This is my idea of development per-
formance. I do not know any of the numbers, but I would not be
at all surprised if Janet's efforts cost 1/10th or even 1/100th
of the FAO costs. The FAO has a huge overhead. The FAO section
of Rome maybe not quite as big and rich as the Vatican, but it
is a huge establishment.
As far as I am able to determine it is quite seriously deficient
in terms of transparency and accountability and in spite its
huge establishment its projects are really very modest... as we
saw with the planned assistance to 1,000 African children! But
worse, there is often an expectation that FAO is going to do
something substantial after a good pilot project. This rarely
happens, and good people wait and wait and wait... Some of the
work that FAO has done in the past has been very good. The amaz-
ing work of the FAO fisheries population dynamics team in the
1970s and 1980s was absolutely superb, but the ongoing follow up
to maintain this work during the past fifteen years has been too
little by far.
Thanks Janet,
Peter Burgess
Tr-Ac-Net in New York,
The Transparency and Accountability Network
Kris Dev in Chennai India
Others in South Asia, Africa and Latin America
mailto:Profitinafrica@aol.com