G8
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Following the tradition started last year at the G8 in Canada, this year’s French presidency prepared an accountability report together with the other G8 countries, which outlines the state of delivery and results of the G8’s commitments on fighting extreme poverty.
Let’s start with the positives: it is commendable that the G8 continues with preparing such reports. Great promises are one thing, but keeping them and proving to have kept them is equally important. This is exactly what ONE has been saying for years (and showing the example for) with the DATA report.
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More details have emerged in the past couple weeks on the G8’s commitment to improve maternal, newborn and child health through the “Muskoka Initiative,” but not enough to deliver on the G8’s other critical commitment at the 2010 summit – to enhance their own accountability.
The initiative (which includes a $5 billion in funding from G8 countries, $2.3 billion from non-G8 donors and a handful of qualitative principles and targets) was unveiled by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the first day of the summit and outlined in an annex of the final G8 communiqué. Harper specified that the $5 billion commitment from the G8 would be “additional” funding and that Canada would be contributing $1.1 billion in new resources over the next five years. Advocates and experts alike were disappointed by the G8’s lack of ambition (with $5 billion representing just a fraction of the estimated $30 billion needed from donors to meet maternal and child health targets), and without details on individual country commitments, it was also impossible to applaud the clarity of the announcement.
Last week, an official “methodology document” shed some light on the numbers behind the initiative, with details on how the G8 had calculated their current spending on maternal, newborn and child health (i.e. their collective baseline). To anyone familiar with the tedious business of tracking DAC purpose codes and calculating imputed percentages of multilateral organizations like the Global Fund and the World Bank, this analysis is both incredibly thorough and extremely valuable for advocates and recipient countries.
Yet some of the most critical details on the $5 billion G8 commitment are missing. It’s still unclear what each country is contributing towards the initiative and whether their commitments are truly additional to current spending. The United States, Germany and France have announced their contributions (though not necessarily their baselines) and some additional details have been unofficially reported.
For those of us accustomed to following international summit processes, this story is all too familiar: a vague commitment is made, advocates respond with tepid applause (and a reminder that more is needed), and the following year is spent haranguing governments to clarify what they promised to ensure that it is eventually delivered (if you haven’t seen my colleague Erin Thornton’s recent post on tracking G8 commitments, check it out here).
This year felt different though. Prime Minister Harper put accountability squarely on the summit agenda back in January, and one week before the summit the G8 released a self-evaluation of their progress towards meeting development commitments with the Muskoka Accountability Report. Although the G8 promised to “ensure follow-up” on the conclusions and recommendations of the report, they shunned the first opportunity to actually implement them through the development of a robust, transparent and accountable Muskoka Initiative.
The G8 would argue that advocates can now calculate each individual donor’s baseline using the agreed methodology- a somewhat painful exercise, but certainly not impossible. But by failing to offer up these details themselves, the G8 are not only allowing some countries to hide flimsy, potentially dishonest commitments behind a collective promise, they are missing the bigger picture on accountability.
And everyone loses in this scenario. Advocates are still ill-equipped to hold their governments accountable, recipient countries face another hurdle to planning their budgets for next year, and, in a critical year when the changing global architecture and emergence of the G20 is grabbing the lion’s share of media headlines, the G8 has missed another opportunity to flex their muscle and demonstrate their relevance.
Somewhat buried in the flow of announcements and press releases surrounding the G8/G20 meetings last weekend, the White House issued a statement Friday that President Obama had outlined his vision for a new US policy on global development. This is especially welcome news as it suggests that we’ll soon see the results of a delayed Presidential Study Directive (PSD) on Global Development, an effort the President launched last September. Not surprisingly, the White House release looks strikingly similar to a leaked draft of the PSD posted in April, although omissions in the June 25 statement point to continuing inter-agency disagreements over some portions of the PSD.
While the press release is important for a number of reasons, it puts President Obama squarely on the record of embracing a series of sound global development principles that will significantly advance his campaign promise to bring coherence to US development programs and to “elevate development as a central pillar of our national security strategy”. The President pledged to issue a new policy directive — presumably referring to the PSD — “in the near future”.
The new development policy will strengthen US efforts to reduce global poverty, promote economic growth, and enhance the impact and results-based approach of American foreign aid, all fundamental principles that ONE has championed for some time. Of particular note, the plan promises to:
- Support sustainable economic development and good governance;
- Meet basic human needs by building public sector capacity to deliver services;
- Hold recipients accountable;
- Be selective in where and on what the US will focus;
- Strengthen multilateral approaches; and
- Install rigorous standards for monitoring and evaluation
While all solid elements, I found one part of the plan a little too vague that hopefully will be explained more fully in the final PSD. The President’s approach stresses country ownership and mutual accountability, critical elements of successful development outcomes. But I would like to see further elaboration of this concept that instead of just focusing on well governed countries, as the White House statement suggests, it broadly includes a direct response to country priorities, whether they flow from national development strategies of the government or those articulated by citizens at the local level.
Much of what we see in the President’s policy statement is not new – many of these ideas have been discussed, and some applied, for a number of years and proven to be successful approaches to more effective development policy. And some are clearly evident in President Obama’s initiatives on food security and global health. But what is different is the effort to codify and consolidate these principles – for the first time ever – into a coherent and comprehensive strategy with clear goals and priorities against which the United States can shape its global development programs, policies, and funding allocations.
As we approach the MDG summit in September, the President has a unique opportunity to lead by example and demonstrate to the rest of the world that the United States is making it a priority to help raise people around the globe out of poverty, giving them opportunity, dignity, and a voice in holding their elected officials accountable to high standards of good governance. Nearly a year ago, President Obama told the United Nations that he would return in September 2010 with a plan to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. With the articulation of a new global development policy, as reflected in a signed and issued PSD, the President will strengthen his call to action in New York with a clear vision of how the United States itself plans to tackle poverty and foster global growth.
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.
