In preparation of People's Health Assembly II - part 17 (2)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Dear Colleagues
In Claudio's recent message, there is a very long list of "is-
sues" that might ought to be on the agenda at the "People's
Health Assembly" next year.
But there was only one that dealt with the issue of management
information... or the lack of it and the whole area of transpar-
ency, accounting and accountability, and effective monitoring
and evaluation (TAAME). This was the item "Corruption, bureauc-
racy, accountability and transparency and the role of the activ-
ist".
Frankly, this is only a subset of what is needed to make the in-
formation dimension of development effective. Management is a
process, and to some extent the "project" form of organization
understands this... the project cycle goes from identification
to preparation to appraisal to loan negotiation to disbursement
and implementation to evaluation. The management process is
similar, but applied more rapidly and to all the separate sub-
sets of elements and components, etc inside the project. The aim
of the management process is to make the use of (scarce) re-
sources as effective as possible... and this starts with plan-
ning and allocation of resources, but continues essentially
every day until the job is done, and then some after that so
that lessons learned are used in the next cycle of planning.
All of this is missing from the development world... or to the
extent that it exists, is hidden from public view and public
scrutiny. To some extent it is apparent that the management di-
mension of development is less effective now than it was perhaps
twenty years ago. The massive amount of "economic date" tends to
confuse rather than clarify and is not in any way structured
best for decision making. And worse, organizations like UNDP
have discontinued the Development Cooperation Report (DCR) which
used to be one of the best sources of information about what the
official development assistance community was doing in any coun-
try project by project. For good reason, the donors did not like
the report, and at some time in the last few years the UNDP has
chosen to discontinue its preparation. (Note: It is my under-
standing that the UNDP was mandated to produce the DCR annually
by the UN General Assembly in 1978, and as far as I know this
mandate has not been officially revoked up to now.)
But back to the People's Health Assembly... if we have manage-
ment information in the health sector, then we will be in a much
better position to prioritize so that resources are best used
for People's benefit. I think we are in a position to start get-
ting management information together and in the public domain...
but it needs some repositioning and rethinking of how informa-
tion is circulated and put on the record. The Afrifund Database
could be a tool to help... maybe not in its present form but in
the next iteration of its development which is now being
planned.
I look forward to feedback... including critical comment.
Sincerely,
Peter Burgess
in New York
Tel: +1-212-772-6918
mailto:peterb@afrifund.com
Database
http://www.afrifund.com/wiki/index.pcgi?page=AfrifundDatabase
Coffee: http://afrifund.coffeefair.com