G8
Wondering what the NGO community thought of the G8 and G20 Summits in Canada? Here’s a great round-up of responses from a host of our partners and friends from the online news source The Sherpa.
The G8:
http://www.sherpatimes.com/g8/179-g8-summit-ngo-responses.html
The G20:
http://www.sherpatimes.com/g8/185-ngo-responses-to-the-g20-summit.html
As ONE’s Kimberley Hunter reported from Toronto this weekend, on Friday, Canadian Prime Minister and G8 host Stephen Harper announced that the G8 would be contributing an additional $5 billion towards maternal, newborn and child health in developing countries over the next five years. Other donors – like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Norway, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Spain and Switzerland – pledged $2.3 billion, bringing the total up to $7.3 billion. While this is a welcome increase, it still falls far short of the $30 billion in additional funding that experts estimate is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals on maternal and child health by 2015.
More details on the so-called “Muskoka Initiative” were revealed with the release of the official G8 communiqué on Saturday, which included an annex outlining the initiative. Here at ONE, we were pleased to see that the initiative embraces some critical principles for long-term sustainability and effectiveness, like support for country-led national health plans and increased coherence through coordination and harmonization. Although there is a strong focus on outcomes (with an estimate from the World Health Organization and the World Bank that pledged funds will prevent the deaths of 1.3 million children and 64,000 mothers over the next five years), it stops short of setting out clear targets to meet these goals, such as supporting the training of an additional 3.5 million health care workers by 2015, a critical input to strengthening the health care that mothers and children need, especially during pregnancy, labor and the first five years of life, and an issue that 61,000 ONE members urged the G8 to support.
Moreover, in a year when G8 accountability was high on the summit agenda, the lack of clarity around individual country pledges is extremely disappointing. Although the communiqué states that the G8 will release the methodology used to define each country’s commitment and baselines, without this info it’s not clear which countries are truly delivering additional funding and which are using creative counting and hiding behind the G8’s collective commitment. It is critical that these details be made available, not only so advocates can chart the delivery of them, but also so governments and citizens in developing countries can start planning for them and make sure that the funds promised lead to lasting results for mother and children.
Every year, approximately 350,000 mothers die from complications during child birth and 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday. We are desperately off track to achieving the Millennium Development Goals on child and maternal health and expectations were high for the G8 summit to deliver results.
Yesterday, the G8 announced the Muskoka Initiative on maternal, newborn, and child health. Although Canada deserves some credit for putting maternal and child health in the developing world on the G8 agenda this weekend, world leaders have not done enough to truly turn the tide on this vital issue.
At ONE, we campaigned for a robust maternal and child health initiative at this year’s G8 summit and for it to be accompanied by a concrete accountability framework. We also delivered a petition signed by more than 60,000 of you to world leaders to push them to deliver for the world’s more vulnerable – mothers and children.
While we were disappointed in the total G8 pledge of $5 billion to the Maternal and Child Health Initiative, our efforts elevated this issue, raised awareness, and will raise the bar for world leaders to address this and the other Millennium Development Goals at the UN Summit in September.
Sheila Nix, our U.S. Executive Director, was featured on CBC’s The National, the Canadian equivalent of NBC Nightly News, as part of segment on maternal and child health. Sheila talked about her trip to Ghana and Sierra Leone, and how simple interventions can prevent the mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDs giving children a whole new lease on life.
You can watch the clip here.
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post:
A promise is a promise.
Or is it? Is it really a promise if it’s not legally binding? Or if not everyone really meant it?
It’s hard to know, and advocates would argue that when it comes to promises made to the world’s poorest people, it doesn’t matter — there are no acceptable escape clauses and the letter of the commitment should be delivered. But the art of promise-making has evolved, and there are now some crafty ways to sound supportive without actually being committed. International summits like those held annually by the G8 have been littered with some in the past several years.
Ultimately, crafty language may earn some golf-applause, but if no real results are delivered for the world’s poor, then what’s the point?
Advocates and donors alike have come to the same conclusion that going forward, there needs to be much greater accountability for commitments made to development. Too much time is spent crafting language or twisting words, and too little time monitoring the actual delivery on the ground.
The G8 published their own accountability report this year — the Muskoka Accountability Report — which was released on Sunday in advance of the annual G8 Summit this weekend. It’s a welcome change of pace to have the donors themselves collecting information about their efforts to fulfill their commitments and proactively publishing an assessment that clearly reveals where the shortcomings remain.
ONE started its own accountability exercise in 2006. At the Gleneagles Summit in 2005, we celebrated when donors announced their intent to double foreign assistance, cancel debts and make trade work for Africa. But, as we noted at the time, the celebration would only truly be warranted if the rhetoric translated into results.
Every year since, we’ve issued an annual report card on the anniversary of the Gleneagles Summit to examine how well donors have done in delivering on those commitments. We worked with individual donors to translate — to the best of our ability — the true intent of their promises, with the hope that so that in the following years, we could spend time debating what they had actually delivered as opposed to what they had promised in the first place.
The results have been mixed. In this year’s report, ONE estimates that the G7 are on track to deliver roughly 61 percent of the development assistance they committed to sub-Saharan Africa. They have delivered on debt cancellation (even though there are some worrying signs of new loans accumulating) but they have been slow on improving the quality of assistance and have virtually nothing to show for their lofty language about making trade work for Africa. On more targeted sectoral commitments such as those for health, education, water and sanitation and agriculture, there are varying results: the more targeted, quantifiable goals such as those to distribute bednets or enroll children in school are more on track than systemic investments in building health systems or ensuring that children complete their schooling.
And therein lies a simple truth — that the quality of the commitment itself impacts the delivery. Both the Muskoka Accountability Report and the ONE Report reveal that much more has been done against those commitments that were made in a transparent manner with clarity as to the way success would be measured and the date by which results are to be achieved. Other commitments — like those to “make trade work” and to prioritize investments in water and sanitation — leave little to be held accountable to and that ultimately makes a difference.
It’s fantastic that the G8 has put accountability front and center on their agenda. To the optimist, it could mean that the days of empty promises are nearing an end. If this report ushers in a new era of annual reviews, and if the criteria suggested in the report mean that promise-making will now be done in a way that removes the wiggle room for future dodging, then developing countries can look forward and plan for a real partnership with donor countries going forward.
Cross-posted from the Gates Foundation website:
The G8 summit gets underway tomorrow in Muskoka, Canada. It’s exciting that a focus of the summit is a new G8 initiative – conceived and led by Canada – to improve maternal, newborn, and child health in poor countries.
G8 countries are expected to commit major resources toward the initiative. Other public and private donors are also lending support, including the Gates Foundation — we recently announced the foundation will make new grants totaling $1.5 billion over the next five years to support family planning, maternal and child health, and nutrition programs in developing countries.
The G8 commitments are an important landmark, but it’s more critical than ever to step up advocacy on global health. Right now there’s tremendous pressure in most donor countries to cut budgets, so we need to continue highlighting the fact that global health investments are working and are incredibly cost-effective. Maternal and child health is a great example – there’s very clear proof that low-cost solutions are saving lives, and can save many more if we expand effective programs.
This is a pivotal moment for women’s and children’s health. The task ahead is to be ready to make the most of the opportunity we created – to do the hard work of saving women’s and children’s lives. We must move forward together, as one, with the courage to overcome the obstacles that have stopped us in the past.
Our unity and our courage will be tested. Canada’s new initiative is the most ambitious effort on behalf of women’s and children’s health in history. And in a few weeks, the United Nations will publish its Joint Action Plan, leading up to the special session on the Millennium Development Goals in September. The whole world will be looking to us for leadership.
It will not be easy, but we must not fail. We are making a new world for poor women and children: a world in which every birth is a promise – a promise of a better future.
Check out groups like ONE and CARE for info about ways to make your voice heard.
ONE’s Mark Entwistle with our 58,000 signature strong petition
Yesterday, ONE’s Mark Entwistle delivered our petition with over 58,000 names calling for 3.5 million new health workers to help mothers and children to the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa, Canada.
Unfortunately, photographs aren’t allowed within the Langevin building itself, but we have it on good assurance that shortly after the above photo was taken Mark proceeded into the building to hand off the wishes of ONE members to the Canadian government.
This delivery presented some unique scheduling difficulties – on the eve of the G8, most senior members of the Canadian government are en route to Hunstville, Ontario, far away from the media centre for civil society organisations in Toronto where ONE will be based during the summit. So if we wanted to make sure the G8 heard our message before meeting, we needed to do it now, in Ottawa. But scheduling wasn’t easy given that the Prime Minister’s Office had quite a bit on their plates.
Luckily it all worked out for the best. In fact, it almost appeared that the fates conspired to make sure we could deliver our petition as a mere 20 minutes later, Ottawa was hit by an earthquake that caused all parliamentary and government offices to be evacuated!
During the summit ONE will be on the ground, fighting to make sure this G8 has the strongest outcome possible for people living in poverty. We’ll be keeping you updated through our blog and twitter – so watch this space!
