UN Says AIDS Will Kill 80 Million Africans by 2025 (2)
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Dear Colleagues
I am getting pretty tired of the official relief and development
assistance (ORDA) community writing flashy expensive reports
about what is going to happen in 20 years, when they a totally
incapable of telling or unwilling to tell what has happened to
the money they have used this past year.
The Transparency and Accountability Network has been unable up
to this point to find any area of the ORDA community that has a
serious interest in excellence in transparency and accountabil-
ity. They are not willing to commit to the idea of excellence in
transparency and accountability, it appears that they do not
have the systems and management capability to deliver on trans-
parency and accountability, they certainly have not demonstrated
the actual practice of transparency and accountability, and when
it comes to measures of "efficiency" and "effectiveness" in
socio-economic practices the cost related to the results is ex-
orbitant.
In the meantime, a lot of informal CBOs around the world are do-
ing amazing things with little or no external resource. If we
want to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, maybe the best
idea would be to get the ORDA community out of the way. They
consume the resources without doing an awful lot of good.
They have some serious accounting and accountability to do.
Where are the Tsunami funds? Where did they go? What did they
do? Don't worry they said some weeks ago, PriceWaterhouseCoopers
(my old firm - I trained with Coopers and Lybrand in London) is
offering pro-bono services... so everything will be OK. So now,
please, show me it's OK. Give us an accounting. We are talking
about big money... maybe $ BILLIONS
The GFATM also is in a transparency and accountability crisis.
They know what checks they have written to Primary Recipients...
BIG DEAL. What have the primary recipients done with the money
and what has been achieved. There are prominent local fund
agents (LFAs) including again my old firm PriceWaterHouseCoop-
ers, but actually what has happened to the money? Please. Let
our organization see some real accounting so that we can feel
comfortable that the funds are being well used and some reason-
able results achieved. Again we are talking about big money...
$ BILLIONS
There is almost nothing RIGHT about the current performance of
the official relief and development assistance (ORDA) community.
This was confirmed to my surprise a few days back when Oxfam and
ActionAID in the UK pointed out in a short report that only some
25 cents out of every dollar gets used usefully in relief and
development. That is pretty pathetic.
I can predict that this message will be ignored totally by "man-
agement" in the ORDA community. Ignoring problems of the magni-
tude of their performance failure is a disgraceful state of af-
fairs.
Sincerely
Peter Burgess
Transparency and Accountability - a global not-for-profit net-
work
PS A the last two meetings in New York involving the relief and
development community I have asked how many accountants were in
the room. You know the answer.
--
Peter Burgess Kris Dev
Tr-Ac-Net in New York Tr-Ac-Net in Chennai
peterbnyc@gmail.com krisdev@gmail.com
tracnet@gmail.com
Tel: +1-212 772 6918
http://www.afrifund.com
http://Tr-Ac-Net.blogspot.com