The findings reveal that only 11 of the 58 countries assessed have satisfactory standards of transparency and accountability in oil, gas and mining. In the other 47 countries, citizens lack fundamental information about where the revenues from natural resources are going.

The RGI, which measures four key components (Institutional and Legal Setting, Reporting Practices, Safeguards and Quality Controls, and Enabling Environment), is an important step in giving citizens and civil society a voice in the decisions that are made about their country’s natural resources. After all, poor governance in oil, gas and mining affects nearly 450 million people living in resource-dependent countries.

Here are some of the highlights:

A big part of GDP

Revenues from oil, gas and mining are a substantial proportion of a large number of economies. For resource-rich developing countries, the proper governance of these resources is essential to ensuring that revenues from natural resources are being used toward eliminating extreme poverty in those countries instead of lining the pockets of corrupt rulers.

The revenues from oil, gas and mining in these countries are no small part of their economies. In 41 countries, oil, gas and mining contributed to one-third of gross domestic product and an average of 50% of total exports.

Low scores, high poverty rate

The RGI finds that the deficit in governance around natural resources is most severe in countries that are the most dependent on their natural resources, and that the worse a country scores on the RGI, the larger the proportion of its population that lives in poverty.

In countries whose score was “satisfactory”, 7% of the population lives on less than $2 per day. In countries that scored in the moderate range, 32% of the population lives on less than $2 per day, and in the 26 resource-rich countries with weak or failing performance in the index, half of the population – more than 300 million people – live on less than $2 per day.

The silver lining

However, it’s not all bad news. Chile, Columbia and Peru were among the top 11 performers in the “satisfactory” category. Though no African country’s composite score puts them in the “satisfactory” category, five African countries score in that category in Institutional and Legal Setting – Guinea, Liberia, South Sudan, Ghana and Zambia. Ghana, Liberia, Zambia and South Africa all score in the “satisfactory” category in the Safeguards and Quality Controls component of the index.

Revenue Watch is not, of course, the only organization focused on the effective use of Africa’s natural resources. The index follows last week’s release of the Africa Progress Panel’s 2013 Report, “Equity in Extractives”, which urges African leaders to invest natural resource revenues to create jobs and opportunities for current and future generations. The Africa Progress Panel report also urges G8 countries to help by tackling international tax avoidance and evasion, corruption and weak governance in order to help African economies recoup the $51 billion in illicit financial flows estimated to have been lost in 2010. Former Secretary General of the United Nations and current Chairman of the Africa Progress Panel Kofi Annan said in an op-ed last week that seizing the opportunity provided by Africa’s natural resources will require “strengthened governance backed by international cooperation to stem the hemorrhage of revenues associated with tax evasion, secret deals and illicit financial transfers.”

We hope that the G8 takes the opportunity in June to require gas and mining companies to publicly disclose the payments they make to developing country governments so that citizens can make sure they’re getting a fair deal for their resources. In addition, the G8 should seize the opportunity to take the “anonymous” out of “anonymous shell companies” (Phantom Firms used to rob Africa of its resources) by requiring public disclosure of information about the beneficial ownership of public and private companies.

There’s much more to explore – have some fun with Revenue Watch’s Resource Governance Index data here.

A few weeks ago, a few House Republicans introduced H.R. 1613, the innocuous sounding “Outer Continental Shelf Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement Act”. A little over four pages long, H.R. 1613 is primarily designed to provide Congressional approval to a US-Mexico Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement (TBA) signed by both governments over a year ago.

Oxfam has no problem with the approval of the US-Mexico TBA which simply lays out the rules for how hydrocarbons reserves in the Gulf of Mexico that straddle our maritime borders would be developed.

We do have a big problem with an irrelevant provision inserted into the bill designed to weaken the payment disclosure requirements in Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act, also known as the Cardin-Lugar provision. That law provides for the annual disclosure of payments made by oil, gas and mining companies to host governments around the world – final rules were issued by the SEC in August last year. H.R. 1613 would exempt any covered company from reporting payments from in accordance with any transboundary hydrocarbons agreement anywhere in the world.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) – backed by companies such as Exxon, Shell, Chevron and BP – is suing the SEC in federal court and is now hoping that its Congressional allies can help weaken this landmark law. Oxfam is intervening to defend the rule. Meanwhile, the European Union has reached agreement to put in place similar reporting requirements.

I spoke this week with Neil Brown who was, until very recently, a top Senate Republican aide working on energy issues for Senator Lugar, who was the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His response: “this exemption is unnecessary and inclusion would only forestall quick approval of this important agreement.”

He should know. As both the co-author of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority staff report for Senator Lugar on “Oil, Mexico and the Transboundary Agreement” as well as someone intimately familiar with the “Cardin-Lugar” provision in  Dodd-Frank, Mr. Brown would know if the reporting requirements in Dodd-Frank Section 1504 present any issue in approving the US-Mexico TBA. The short answer – they don’t. The minority staff report envisions reporting under Section 1504 and says that under Section 1504 covered companies “would already have to disclose payments” to the SEC if “they invest in Mexico”.

The US-Mexico TBA requires that certain information be kept confidential unless disclosure is required by law. The TBA text demonstrates that the US and Mexico have already made the correct policy judgment that the specific confidentiality provisions of the TBA should be subordinated to each country’s commitment to openness and subject to each country’s disclosure requirements. Nothing in the TBA would require the exemption provided by H.R. 1613.

Tellingly, the Senate Energy Committee has introduced a bi-partisan bill, S. 812, sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to approve the US-Mexico TBA, and it contains no Section 1504 exemption provision. If Congress is truly interested in approving this agreement and providing the “rules of the road” for joint development of oil and gas reserves straddling the US-Mexico maritime boundary, then it should adopt the clean Senate bill without the reporting exemption.

Former Senator Jeff Bingaman, past Senate Energy Committee chairman, told Reuters that the exemption proposed by the House “complicates things significantly” for passage of the bill. Referring to the Section 1504 exemption language, he said, “They’ve added in some things that are going to make it difficult to pass in that form.”

The Mexican Congress ratified the TBA a year ago, and the Obama administration – and the oil industry – would like to see it approved. The Obama administration, though, has made clear that implementation of Section 1504 is a priority.

In a letter to Oxfam, Sec. of State Kerry said, “The Department of State and Administration strongly support transparency in the extractives sectors, as outlined in Section 1504 of Dodd-Frank, and the new rule issued by the SEC. The new SEC standard directly advances our foreign policy interest in increasing transparency and reducing corruption, particularly in the oil, gas and mineral sectors.”

My guess is that the oil industry lobby wants this TBA approved far more than it wants this unnecessary Section 1504 exemption. Surya Gunasekara, a tax and trade counsel with the American Petroleum Institute told me that there is “no doubt” that API cares more about Gulf of Mexico access than the proposed Section 1504 exemption.

Yesterday, the President signed an Executive Order committing all federal government data to be open and accessible by default. This isn’t the first time that President Obama has signed an executive order about the importance of transparency and open government. So, what makes yesterday different?

This time, we’re talking about an open data policy with teeth. An executive order has the full force of law, and this one compels agencies to compile lists of their databases, which of those can be made public, and then make them public in accessible, machine-readable formats. It also ensures that any new systems are created with an eye on making it easier to make new data public. A term that’s usually reserved for techies, machine-readable means simply that instead of being trapped in a format that a computer program couldn’t immediately analyze in large quantities (example: PDF), you can download it in a format friendly to analysis.

In support of the Executive Order, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memo outlining the new Open Data Policy. The policy will institutionalize those open data principles. It will also help agencies meet the new requirements. Soon, a huge amount of government data will be made public. In order to help communities of developers use the data, the government is also releasing free tools on Github as part of Project Open Data. The idea is that anyone will be able to use these tools, allowing developers and entrepreneurs to make use of it in new and exciting ways.

This isn’t the first time that data has been made available to the public, but it is the first time that government data is open by default. I would bet open data is already more a part of your life than you realize. The Obama Administration considers these vast oceans of data a national asset whose value increases as citizens make use of it. Whole industries have come out of datasets that were opened to the public. Weather data has generated a whole sector of business which includes private weather forecasting, commercial agriculture advisory services and new weather insurance industries.

One of the benefits of the new open data policy is the innovation it’s expected to spur. When President Reagan opened up the data from Global Positioning Systems (GPS), he was hoping it would give us more accurate mapping, but I doubt he could have predicted the location-based applications that help us find the direction of the nearest pizza place, or how far we’ve run. Now, these applications are a part of our daily lives, and many people make their living creating, using and participating in the organizations and companies they’ve helped create.

The open data and open government movements have been gaining momentum. The Open Government Partnership has resulted in a huge wave of government commitments to openness, which are intended to give citizens around the world more information about how their governments work and how they can work for them. We hope that these recent steps by the US turn into an example for how governments can overcome the inertia of closed systems and put online open databases people can use.

So we don’t know exactly what will come out of this new Open Data Policy. What we do know is that we’ll have more information about our government, how it operates, and the people it serves, and when you combine information with creativity, that’s cause for excitement.

Got a question or idea? Let me know in a comment below and I’ll try to respond. 

Erik Charas. Photo World Economic Forum / Matthew Jordaan matthew.jordaan@inl.co.za

Whether “Africa keeps its promise” to its people, the theme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Cape Town, depends in large part on how Mozambican and other African leaders respond to the probing questions asked by people like Erik.

The stakes could not be higher. Mozambique, like many other African nations across the continent, is discovering and developing vast natural resource reserves and untapping enormous amounts of resource wealth. Resource development offers a golden key to a much desired and heralded  “economic transformation”. But the turning of this key depends on ensuring efficient and transparent management of resource revenues and the investment of these revenues into the continent’s physical and human infrastructure.

If Mozambique – like Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and others – gets this right, it could develop more rapidly and, above all, more inclusively, securing a prosperous future for all its citizens. These choices must be made now.

That is why ONE, along with its partners in the Publish What You Pay coalition, have been campaigning hard for transparency in the extractives sector in Europe and North America. We recently celebrated serious progress in this campaign as Europe agreed to mandatory reporting of payments by companies to governments in the extractives sector. It would be wonderful if African leaders now took this further and implemented legislation covering Johannesburg, Nairobi, Accra and other stock exchanges.

We are also supporting our partners in pushing for disclosure of “beneficial ownership” of dodgy shell companies – as lack of clarity around ownership facilitates hiding stolen assets and tax evasion – as well as technical assistance for African revenue authorities, and exchange of tax information conventions.

All these efforts can help authorities and citizens follow the money, and ensure funds hidden from revenue authorities in the murkier parts of the offshore system can be exposed, relocated and taxed accordingly. But it would be nonsense stopping at transparency only offshore.

Transparency of government budgets is equally important, from national to local level, so citizens can track resources and follow the money all the way to results where people live – kids immunised, educated, nourished, wells dug and working, electricity accessed even in remote rural areas, and small farmers properly supported and connected through farm-to-market roads.

With partners we are campaigning across these fronts so that African nations will have more domestic resources at their disposal, through increased revenue collection and economic growth, to invest in the continent’s infrastructure and meet all the promises African leaders have made to their citizens to end hunger, malnutrition, disease and extreme poverty, and to instead spread prosperity.

A new report from Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel on African natural resource governance, being launched this week at the World Economic Forum, lays out much of what must be done to help secure the revenues needed for development on the continent.

Its policy recommendations make clear that African nations should be legislating for transparency in the natural resources sector, and how governments can make better use of those revenues – by channelling them into infrastructure, job creation, health, nutrition and education. If this happens, then the 2 billion African citizens of 2050, and all global citizens around the world, who will by then be relying on Africa for economic and political dynamism and leadership, will look back upon this time – the 50th anniversary of the African Union, and maybe even this very 2013 meeting in Cape Town – as pivotal turning points in the continent’s history.

This way lies the future that leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu envisioned – that the twenty first century will be “the African century”. This way lies the realisation of the African Union’s own charter; of a resilient, vibrant Africa driven and determined by its own citizens.

This way also lies the realisation of Nelson Mandela’s dream – that this could be the generation to end extreme poverty and hunger. But the path towards such visionary progress wont be lit up if the Erik Charas’ of Africa are silenced and intimidated into not asking those probing, revealing, enlightening, questions.

Get the latest news and views from ONE at the World Economic Forum from tomorrow by following @ONECampaign on Twitter.

Former Brazilian President and Mo Ibrahim shared the stage. Photo credit: http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/

This weekend, Africare hosted its annual gala, the 2013 Bishop John T. Walker Memorial Dinner in Washington, DC. The annual dinner is a very hot ticket for DC’s development community, and the attendee list is chock-full of friends who have for years worked tirelessly for the world’s poorest.

The dinner honored President Obama, who donated $100,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize award to support an Africare water and sanitation project in Ghana. A video message from the President – and the subsequent speech by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough – praised Africare’s work and reiterated the US’s ambition for an AIDS-free generation.

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gave an impassioned speech, stressing the importance of cooperation between governments and the private sector to build the infrastructure needed to help tackle poverty in Africa. President Lula’s speech directly preceded the awarding of the 2013 Africare Leadership Award to Dr. Mo Ibrahim, ONE board member and friend. Dr. Ibrahim made his fortune in telecommunications, as founder of Celtel International, one of Africa’s most successful businesses. In 2006, he founded the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, committed to promoting good governance and great leadership on the African continent. The Ibrahim Foundation’s annual Ibrahim Index of African Governance ranks African countries based on critical governance criteria. See how countries fared in last year’s index.

Dr. Ibrahim’s acceptance speech touched on the importance of accountable governments, the transformational power of technology, and the two things that will change Africa, “youth and women is really what is going to change Africa,” he said. One of the most memorable moments was Mo’s assertion that despite African agreement that regional integration is important for their collective economies, progress is elusive. Using the American catchphrase, he asked, “Where’s the beef?”

Africare gala celebrating the progress thus far and challenging attendees to look to the future. Photo credit: Lauren Pfeifer

But what Dr. Ibrahim knows best is the importance of good governance for the creation of inclusive and successful societies and economies. “We need to demand also good corporate governance,” he said, stressing the importance of clean governments and corporate governance, and the inextricable link between them. You cannot battle corruption with only one or the other. He cited the millions upon millions that are lost to illegal activities such as corruption, tax evasion and trade mispricing.

Mo’s final message: we need to fight for a more transparent world.

Listen to the rest of Mo’s speech here.

Sign here to keep up to speed on future transparency campaigns!

The fight against corruption is messy, unpredictable and often dangerous. In developing countries it has historically been most acute in countries with large deposits of oil, gas and minerals, and involves the diversion of huge sums of money that could otherwise be spent on poverty eradication.

That’s why this week’s agreement in Brussels for all 27 European Union member states to require extractive companies to publish the payments they make to governments is potentially such a game-changer. Transparency of this kind releases information that will make it harder for natural resource wealth to be lost to corruption or captured solely by elites. 

The European decision follows a similar US law which passed in 2010 and came into force last year. It is to the credit of policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic that the laws match each other in many respects, including requiring reporting to be on a project-by-project basis and for publication of all payments over EURO 100,000/$100,000 respectively. Both sets of lawmakers also rejected industry pressure for an exemption for reporting in the most autocratic countries where secrecy laws might be passed in the future, deciding these were precisely the places where greater transparency is needed most. This is the new global standard for legally binding transparency in the extractive industries.

Now attention should turn to two key issues: globalising the standard even further; and putting in place a plan for ensuring all the forthcoming data is used for accountability purposes.

The G8 focus on natural resource governance presents an opportunity to make progress on both. First, the G8 countries not covered by Dodd-Frank 1504 or the EU Accounting Directive should commit to passing their own equivalent measures by the end of the year. Canada, home to over 2000 extractive industry companies and the largest non-African investor in mining in Africa, is a natural priority. Mining groups and civil society are currently working together to make a recommendation to government in the coming months for how this might work in practice. As co-chairs of the G20 anti-corruption working group Canada is also well placed to win support from other major players in the sector, including Australia, South Africa, Brazil and China.

The G8 can also help mobilise financial support to help the end-users of extractives data hold governments to account. These include parliamentary committees, supreme audit institutions, media, international organisations and local civil society. A new multi-donor ‘Follow the Money’ fund could be set up to support this. There must also be international vigilance to support the activists on the frontline of campaigns against corruption, such as the Publish What You Pay coalition member recently arrested in Gabon.

The momentum in favour of transparency and openness in the extractive industries is remarkable. It is testament to the organisation and commitment of the activists involved, and to the bravery of political leaders who persevered and stuck to their principles in the face of fierce lobbying. This is deservedly a moment for celebration but it would be a mistake to become complacent. The battles to make this transparency standard truly global, and ensure the data delivers the improvement in people’s lives that all sides want to see, will be just as tough. Europe struck an important blow in the fight against corruption last night. Now we must make sure it is not the last.

ONE has set its cleverest people to work, analyzing the progress made by both developing counties and donors who pledged to support them.  Our 1000 Days briefing captures all the important facts and figures, but here are seven headlines  you need to know.

If you want to know what we think needs to happen in the next 1000 days to keep the Millennium Development goals on track, have a look at the full briefing.

ONE’s Global Policy Director Ben Leo answered ONE members’ questions on this briefing earlier this month. Read the full transcript here. 

Join us this Friday at 11 AM EDT/3 PM GMT by following @ONECampaign and #MDGMomentum on Twitter for our chat, “How to Speed Up the Fight Against Extreme Poverty Before 2015 – And Set The Stage for the 2030″. ONE’s own Global Policy Director Ben Leo will discuss ideas to meet existing MDG goals in the next 1000 days and what it will mean to reach “near zero” in the fight against extreme poverty by 2030. Ben has been leading ONE’s latest campaign to bring the world’s poorest voices to the discussion for post-2015 MDGs. Last week, ONE delivered our post-MDG petition to the UN High Level Panel in Bali. Ben also co-wrote our report on improving post-2015 development goals through more open processes.

We want you to help take part in the conversation and ask your questions/leave your comments  in three easy ways:

1. Leave a question or comment below.

2. Ask a question @ONECampaign on Twitter anytime this week.

3. Follow us at the the hashtag #MDGMomentum on Friday, April 5 at 11AM EDT/3PM GMT to ask questions and watch the conversation.

So, need to know more about the MDGs and what it means to end poverty by 2030? Glad you asked! Here are some primers:

-Check out the UN’s MDG website for quick facts and success stories around the eight specific groups of goals.

-Watch Bono’s fantastic TED presentation on reaching the near-end of poverty by 2030.

 

On President Obama’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that called for open, transparent government.

Photo credit: The White House

The order is based on the principles that openness should be the default position of the US Government, citizens should be given more opportunities to participate in and collaborate with the US Government, and the data the US government collects is a national asset that should be accessible to its citizens.

That the order was signed on Day 1 was a symbolic gesture, of course, but its impetus was, I believe, the President’s belief that openness and access can generate a level of trust through accountability that no amount of rhetoric and reassurance can replicate. It is a testament to his desire to change the view that our government is a secretive bureaucratic system, one difficult to hold to account.

The President’s commitment to open and accountable government isn’t limited to our own borders. The Obama administration has also taken concrete action to increase the transparency of our foreign assistance, a potentially game-changing step. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton gave a keynote speech at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, late 2011, in which she announced that the US would sign the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), the global standard of aid transparency. As the largest donor of development assistance, transparent US programs have the potential to be transformative, giving developing nations a more complete picture of their revenue streams.

But plans released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that outline how the US will implement IATI’s aid transparency requirements – which include reporting project data to an open machine-readable database – show the government may be standing in its own way. The plans show a “whole of government” approach which – while beneficial at the political level – doesn’t take into account the factors that affect the ease of implementation. Certain agencies are ready (and more relevant) to begin reporting to IATI, and each of the 10 plus US agencies that currently disburse development assistance have their own systems, and as such, different capacity for converting the data into IATI’s format. Agencies, such as USAID and the MCC, should each have their own plans for how best to report to IATI. This would allow them to be tailored to their various systems and ensure that information is as specific as possible. Useful aid transparency information illuminates projects and transactions at the local level. This project-level information’s specificity is critical. OMB’s plans are lacking in other areas. Geo-coding of data and reporting results are called “supplemental” and left optional. Lastly, the most obvious information is perhaps the least likely to be available. US agencies are only required to publish 1-year forward-looking budget information, rather than the suggested 3 to 5-year forward-looking information that would enable recipient governments to plan ahead.

In order to maintain the momentum that was so inspiring at the start of the President’s first term, his administration should encourage agencies to accelerate the timeline outlined by OMB’s implementation schedule – empowering those who lead our development agencies to publish their agency’s data in IATI format on their websites as soon as they can. This would encourage agencies to be ambitious and speed up implementation, while providing useful data to developing countries.

The principles the President championed the first day of his Presidency are reflected in the reform and evaluation processes undertaken by key US development agencies – new and better data enables citizens to hold their governments to account, and transparency helps to make programs more efficient. But the commitments the US has made to aid transparency are stifled by the approach it has chosen to meet them. US development agencies need to be encouraged to publish what they can, as soon as they can. Perhaps they can take the President’s advice, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” This IATI data is transformative, and will provide a fuller picture to countries who receive sometimes unpredictable assistance from many different countries. The administration should provide clear and strong encouragement to make transparent, as soon we can, the data that has the potential to accelerate progress in the fight against poverty.

Want to know more? Read the US Aid Transparency Report Card.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia. Photo Credit: DFID

The day of reckoning has come round yet again. On behalf of the world, the United Nations has set up a process for thinking about the next big thing to succeed the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) due to end two years.

When at the turn of the new Millennium, MDGs were adopted by more than 189 countries. They were a powerful statement of a world leadership intent on banishing poverty and hunger, putting every child through school, giving women parity with their male counterparts, and stopping unnecessary deaths of our infants and children.

It was a leadership determined to improve the health of mothers so that when giving birth to the next generation they do not have to die in the process.

HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other killer diseases, which were on rampage, were to be stopped in their tracks while the sustainability of our environment was to be assured.

Indeed progress has been made in some of these goals. For example, results in poverty reduction have accelerated over the past decade. Fewer children are dying than was the case at the turn of the Millennium.

However, little change has been registered in many of the other goals, especially those to do with the preventable death of child-bearing women.

My wife, a communications practitioner and a fellow development activist, is convinced that, until women take charge of developing and implementing such goals and make them effective and relevant to the problems that afflict them and the families they take care of, full success will continue to elude us.

I agree with her completely (which by the way is the safest way to keep peace in the home). Women do the heaviest lifting in sustaining humanity, especially in our African societies. They are the mothers, farmers, producers and reproducers. They are at the heart of keeping us well-fed and well-nurtured. In sub-Saharan Africa, they account for the production of 90 percent of staple food and contribute 20 to 30 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). So how on earth did anyone expect to meet all those MDGs to do with eliminating poverty, hunger and malnutrition when the very women farmers are restricted to only eight percent of land ownership and access to only 10 percent of available credit?

Now that another opportunity to rectify the mistake is here, our male leaders must not repeat the same mistake of trying to think for the women.

To reflect Africa’s priorities and concerns, we must put our best foot forward first by giving full respect to our women and letting them have their say first. I have a feeling that, if in a safe space women were to draw what they think of men, they would most likely draw men with no ears, small eyes, small heart, even smaller brains but big mouths.

Men accuse women of talking a lot. But actually it is men who like to talk and do so expensively. When they draw budgets, they prioritize seminars, workshops and conferences. If need be, men will even talk to themselves. They seem to think that to feed the people all they need to do is talk, make resolutions and return to their offices and homes exactly to do nothing.

The fact is, to feed our people, what needs to be done, first and foremost, is to give women land rights and allocate requisite resources to them to get the job done. But can you find a country in Africa that has addressed this issue head on? No. Can’t men see that continuing to ignore land rights for women is an expensive mistake?

By the way, 2010-2020 is the African Women’s decade while 2014 has been designated the Year of Agriculture. If anything concrete is to happen, this is the time for women to swing into action so as to set the agenda.

Fortunately, the UN High Panel on the next MDGs is co-chaired by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the President of the Republic of Liberia. Women must work through her to ensure that the next global development agenda is one that goes to the heart of the world’s malaise as understood and experienced by the heavy-lifting women in their lived realities.

Already, women know what did not work because the design of the current MDGs was defective and the implementation incompetent. They see how men under-fund vital sectors such as agriculture, health and education and then in broad day-light, steal the little money meant to feed and educate the children and attend to the sick and dying.

They see how men pledged to allocate 10 percent of the national budget to agriculture and 15 percent to health and ended up allocating less than half the amount.

Time for positive energy and corrective action is now. Let women guide us to determine the future direction of our world’s development.

About the Author: Warren Nyamugasira is an economist and development activist based in Uganda