The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.— Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister
In the UNDP Turkey newsletter for January 2008 there is the following article:
UNDP TOPS GLOBAL ACCOUNTABILITY RANKING
“UNDP received top ranking on the 2007 Global Accountability Report launched in London on 4 December by One World Trust, a leading expert in the field of global governance and accountability.
UNDP is among 30 of the world's leading organizations from intergovernmental, non-governmental, and corporate sectors assessed by One World Trust according to four widely-accepted dimensions of accountability: transparency, participation, evaluation, and complaint and response mechanisms.
Commenting on the report, UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis said, “UNDP finds the key dimensions of the Global Accountability Framework -- transparency, participation, evaluation and complaint/response management -- to be particularly useful and instructive. The Framework independently validates UNDP’s current work and sheds light on areas of possible improvement. This feedback is critical to UNDP’s continued progress in this area and adherence to the best practices of accountability.”
For UNDP’s profile and results in the 2007 Global Accountability Report, click here. The full report is available on the One World Trust website.”
Kemal Dervis, the present administrator of UNDP, is Turkish.
This report was launched By Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP Administrator 1999-2005, in London.
The Introduction to the report was written by Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP Administrator 1999-2005.
The section in the report on UNDP has as its only contributor Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP Administrator 1999-2005.
The biography, admittedly a selected one, quotes as the only source for UNDP, “UNDP (2000) The Way Forward: The Administrator’s Business Plans 2000-2003, UNDP” written by Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP Administrator 1999-2005. (or at least written on his behalf.)
This glowing endorsement of UNDP is only slightly tempered by the admission that:
“While the UNDP has a high quality policy, the organisation’s practice of handling complaints has come under strong criticism recently. Two high profile cases have emerged of UNDP personnel in West Africa and North Korea who claim to have reported malpractice and consequently lost their jobs. UNDP disputes the claims. The West Africa case is currently before the UN Joint Appeals Board, where UNDP will be bound by any ruling. The North Korea case has been taken up by a broader Independent Investigative Review (IIR) of UNDP operations in North Korea. The IIR is expected to produce a final report in early 2008. UNDP along with the other UN Funds and Programmes are in the process of harmonizing whistleblower protection policies into a common UN ethics system. The UNDP is also consolidating its existing protections under a new UNDP Ethics Office. Therefore, while the UNDP policy is of a high quality, ongoing efforts will likely be required to ensure good practice principles protecting complainants are integrated throughout operations and embedded within the organizational culture to ensure consistent treatment of complainants across the organization.”
What we have here is not a “framework (that) independently validates UNDP’s current work and sheds light on areas of possible improvement” but a piece of propaganda and a very insidious one at that.
06 March 2008
Big Science
The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.— Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister
Econometrics, the application of statistics to social science questions, is without a doubt the biggest and most respected of all the Pseudo-sciences. It is a tool remarkable for its ability to demonstrate whatever a researcher wants it to demonstrate. As a political tool it is unsurpassed for its predictive powers; competing only with astrology in this regard, but having the benefit of sounding far, far more credible (it has lots of numbers and graphs in it).
Econometrics is particularly popular with economists from the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and United Nations development agencies.
The same tool can be used to conclusively demonstrate that foreign aid “works” and will solve all the worlds’ problems as propagated by Jeffrey Sachs. It is just as effective to demonstrate that foreign aid is a waste of time and even counter-productive as William Easterly wants us to believe.
Fortunately David Roodman, a researcher at CGD, provides some excellent papers to help ordinary mortal make sense of all of this:
Through the Looking-Glass, and What OLS Found There: On Growth, Foreign Aid, and Reverse Causality - Working Paper 137, Macro Aid Effectiveness Research: A Guide for the Perplexed - Working Paper 134, Aid Project Proliferation and Absorptive Capacity - Working Paper 75.
The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a very informative and competent organisation “that works to reduce global poverty and inequality through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community.”
In one of the Abstracts from these papers David Roodman explains the nature of the problem:
“Like many public policy debates, that over whether foreign aid works carries on in two worlds. Within the research world, it plays out in the form of papers full of technical language, formulas, and numbers. Outside, the arguments are plainer and the audience broader, but those academic studies remain a touchstone. While avoiding jargon, this paper reviews recent, contending studies of how much foreign aid affects country-level outcomes such as economic growth and school attendance rates. This particular kind of study is ambitious: it is far easier to evaluate a school-building project, say, on whether the school was built and children filled its seats than to determine whether all aid, or large subcomponents of it, made the economy grow faster. Because of its ambition, this literature has attracted attention from those hoping for clear answers on whether aid “works.” On balance, the quantitative approach to exploring grand questions about aid effectiveness, which began 40 years ago, was worth trying and is probably worth pursuing somewhat further. But the literature will probably continue to disappoint as often as it offers hope. Perhaps the biggest challenge is going beyond documenting correlations to demonstrating causation—not just that aid went hand-in-hand with economic growth, but caused it. Aid has eradicated diseases, prevented famines, and done many other good things. But given the limited and noisy data available, its effects on growth in particular probably cannot be detected.”
These are ambitious aims, and although the papers go some way in providing clarity, the author himself contributes, in his own small way, to noisy and limited data, through the all-too-common gymnastics of garnering authority through references to scientific principles. The problem with these principles is that they belong somewhere else and explain other things. The principles of physics and mathematics - as a rule - have no place in justifying social arguments.
By far the most irritating of all is the butterfly story that goes something like this; “the probability that it will rain in London is determined whether a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon forest.” One finds this statement all over the place, to justify and “explain” a surprising number of things, usually completely unrelated to either butterflies or rain. Or London and the Amazon forest.
However much I would like to rant against this stupid habit in more detail, David Roodman does not sink so low as to use it. He does nevertheless make some other statements in a similar vain, and just as insidious:
“in the intellectual revolution triggered by the twentieth century’s encounter with hard limits to human knowledge. Werner Heisenberg discovered that an observer cannot simultaneously measure the position and velocity of a particle with perfect accuracy. Kurt Gödel showed that there are true mathematical statements that are unprovable and false ones that are irrefutable.”
There is absolutely no statement, in science, or in any of the other knowledge generating systems, that unambiguously demonstrate that there are any hard limits to human knowledge (knowledge is the concern of Epistemology, by the way).
Practical considerations aside – lack of information, too much data, too much work, no funding, not particularly important or interesting – the only limit to human knowledge (if there is one) is human intelligence.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which is what is referred to above, belongs in physics, more specifically in Quantum Theory.
It goes something like this: “The probability with which we can know the velocity of a particle is inversely proportional to the probability with which we can know where it is.”
A more accurate, but more obscure, explanation is that the uncertainty in the velocity of a particle x the uncertainty in its position x its mass cannot be less than Planck’s constant.
There is a number of other more accurate but also more obscure explanations of the same phenomenon.
This phenomenon applies to moving particles only and is an inherent feature of reality rather than simply a quirk of Quantum Theory. Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein argued about this for decades. Niels Bohr won the argument.
The ability to know the exact position as well as the exact velocity of a particle would provide us with information at best, not knowledge. It does not affect our ability to know.
Who would want to know such a strange and irrelevant a thing as the exact position and exact velocity of any given particle? Why?
The same sort of argument applies to the theorems of Kurt Gödel. These are, if anything, even more abused than any other mathematical statement, probably because they sound so compelling.
Kurt Gödel made some rather important contributions to the Theory of Relativity but is best remembered, and abused, for his two Theorems in Number Theory. These are the Completeness Theorem and the Consistency Theorem.
Their very names suggest that they must be very compelling.
They are very boring. They consist largely of very long lists of numbers.
They have none of the elegance of the many other mathematical theorems that caused David Deutch, for example, to consider the power of mathematics as miraculous.
Gödel’s Theorems have no application in the real world.
There is no aspect of reality that is a bit fussy because it is incomplete, or places where we are told not to go because it is a bit inconsistent.
Reality likes to live on the edge, it is often the case that our explanations of it must skirt the very edges of completeness and contradiction, but reality itself is always both complete and consistent.
What is more Gödel’s Theorems apply only to axiomatic systems. Axiomatic systems are systems that postulate things that are so simple that they are considered to be self-evident and then build up a number of theorems from those axioms.
The two main axiomatic systems are Number Theory and Geometry.
Number Theory has several hundred axioms, but has no practical application as far as I know. Physics rely on axioms only very weakly, and mostly in that interface where it justifies using mathematics to explain physical phenomena.
Geometry has only five axioms, and a lot of practical applications. It only becomes incomplete and contradictory under very strange circumstances, such as the behaviour of space and time in or near singularities. To fully explain what happens there we can cheat and use algebra. Or something else.
The quirks of mathematics and physics should not be considered to have correlation in all of reality.
Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Gödel cannot be blamed for the weakness of Econometrics.
Econometrics itself is responsible for this. I will cop out at this point in trying to explain it in detail, there is too much of a risk of boring both myself and everybody else.
David Roodman admits to the major weakness when he claims that “Theories are merely nice stories describing reality.”
A nice story about reality is simply that – nice story.
Even the most simpleminded view is that a theory is a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. A theory is only any good if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.
Invoking the limitations of one knowledge generating system to explain weaknesses in another or, worse, invoking a fundamental, inescapable property of unrelated real things (particles for example) to explain systemic limitations, is quite simply making excuses.
One cannot systemically determine what is knowable and unknowable in any particular system if there is no coherent underlying system to do it with and Econometrics is notable, if anything, for its incoherence. It is notable for the way that equations are arbitrarily invented and imposed on haphazardly collected data, its obsession with smoothing out inconvenient little details and its ability to see straight lines and “Ordinary Least Square” graphs when the most logical explanation is the fact that the data is scattered all over the place.
The power of mathematics may be miraculous but it does not and cannot explain everything.
It is impossible to imagine doing Biology without mathematics and without assuming at least the truth of evolution. The results of Biology in fact support evolution and confirm its truth, but the Theory of Evolution itself contains no mathematics. There is no place for it there. There may even be no place for it in Economic growth on large scales and over long periods of time. A purely descriptive explanation may do perfectly well.
Econometrics, the application of statistics to social science questions, is without a doubt the biggest and most respected of all the Pseudo-sciences. It is a tool remarkable for its ability to demonstrate whatever a researcher wants it to demonstrate. As a political tool it is unsurpassed for its predictive powers; competing only with astrology in this regard, but having the benefit of sounding far, far more credible (it has lots of numbers and graphs in it).
Econometrics is particularly popular with economists from the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and United Nations development agencies.
The same tool can be used to conclusively demonstrate that foreign aid “works” and will solve all the worlds’ problems as propagated by Jeffrey Sachs. It is just as effective to demonstrate that foreign aid is a waste of time and even counter-productive as William Easterly wants us to believe.
Fortunately David Roodman, a researcher at CGD, provides some excellent papers to help ordinary mortal make sense of all of this:
Through the Looking-Glass, and What OLS Found There: On Growth, Foreign Aid, and Reverse Causality - Working Paper 137, Macro Aid Effectiveness Research: A Guide for the Perplexed - Working Paper 134, Aid Project Proliferation and Absorptive Capacity - Working Paper 75.
The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a very informative and competent organisation “that works to reduce global poverty and inequality through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community.”
In one of the Abstracts from these papers David Roodman explains the nature of the problem:
“Like many public policy debates, that over whether foreign aid works carries on in two worlds. Within the research world, it plays out in the form of papers full of technical language, formulas, and numbers. Outside, the arguments are plainer and the audience broader, but those academic studies remain a touchstone. While avoiding jargon, this paper reviews recent, contending studies of how much foreign aid affects country-level outcomes such as economic growth and school attendance rates. This particular kind of study is ambitious: it is far easier to evaluate a school-building project, say, on whether the school was built and children filled its seats than to determine whether all aid, or large subcomponents of it, made the economy grow faster. Because of its ambition, this literature has attracted attention from those hoping for clear answers on whether aid “works.” On balance, the quantitative approach to exploring grand questions about aid effectiveness, which began 40 years ago, was worth trying and is probably worth pursuing somewhat further. But the literature will probably continue to disappoint as often as it offers hope. Perhaps the biggest challenge is going beyond documenting correlations to demonstrating causation—not just that aid went hand-in-hand with economic growth, but caused it. Aid has eradicated diseases, prevented famines, and done many other good things. But given the limited and noisy data available, its effects on growth in particular probably cannot be detected.”
These are ambitious aims, and although the papers go some way in providing clarity, the author himself contributes, in his own small way, to noisy and limited data, through the all-too-common gymnastics of garnering authority through references to scientific principles. The problem with these principles is that they belong somewhere else and explain other things. The principles of physics and mathematics - as a rule - have no place in justifying social arguments.
By far the most irritating of all is the butterfly story that goes something like this; “the probability that it will rain in London is determined whether a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon forest.” One finds this statement all over the place, to justify and “explain” a surprising number of things, usually completely unrelated to either butterflies or rain. Or London and the Amazon forest.
However much I would like to rant against this stupid habit in more detail, David Roodman does not sink so low as to use it. He does nevertheless make some other statements in a similar vain, and just as insidious:
“in the intellectual revolution triggered by the twentieth century’s encounter with hard limits to human knowledge. Werner Heisenberg discovered that an observer cannot simultaneously measure the position and velocity of a particle with perfect accuracy. Kurt Gödel showed that there are true mathematical statements that are unprovable and false ones that are irrefutable.”
There is absolutely no statement, in science, or in any of the other knowledge generating systems, that unambiguously demonstrate that there are any hard limits to human knowledge (knowledge is the concern of Epistemology, by the way).
Practical considerations aside – lack of information, too much data, too much work, no funding, not particularly important or interesting – the only limit to human knowledge (if there is one) is human intelligence.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which is what is referred to above, belongs in physics, more specifically in Quantum Theory.
It goes something like this: “The probability with which we can know the velocity of a particle is inversely proportional to the probability with which we can know where it is.”
A more accurate, but more obscure, explanation is that the uncertainty in the velocity of a particle x the uncertainty in its position x its mass cannot be less than Planck’s constant.
There is a number of other more accurate but also more obscure explanations of the same phenomenon.
This phenomenon applies to moving particles only and is an inherent feature of reality rather than simply a quirk of Quantum Theory. Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein argued about this for decades. Niels Bohr won the argument.
The ability to know the exact position as well as the exact velocity of a particle would provide us with information at best, not knowledge. It does not affect our ability to know.
Who would want to know such a strange and irrelevant a thing as the exact position and exact velocity of any given particle? Why?
The same sort of argument applies to the theorems of Kurt Gödel. These are, if anything, even more abused than any other mathematical statement, probably because they sound so compelling.
Kurt Gödel made some rather important contributions to the Theory of Relativity but is best remembered, and abused, for his two Theorems in Number Theory. These are the Completeness Theorem and the Consistency Theorem.
Their very names suggest that they must be very compelling.
They are very boring. They consist largely of very long lists of numbers.
They have none of the elegance of the many other mathematical theorems that caused David Deutch, for example, to consider the power of mathematics as miraculous.
Gödel’s Theorems have no application in the real world.
There is no aspect of reality that is a bit fussy because it is incomplete, or places where we are told not to go because it is a bit inconsistent.
Reality likes to live on the edge, it is often the case that our explanations of it must skirt the very edges of completeness and contradiction, but reality itself is always both complete and consistent.
What is more Gödel’s Theorems apply only to axiomatic systems. Axiomatic systems are systems that postulate things that are so simple that they are considered to be self-evident and then build up a number of theorems from those axioms.
The two main axiomatic systems are Number Theory and Geometry.
Number Theory has several hundred axioms, but has no practical application as far as I know. Physics rely on axioms only very weakly, and mostly in that interface where it justifies using mathematics to explain physical phenomena.
Geometry has only five axioms, and a lot of practical applications. It only becomes incomplete and contradictory under very strange circumstances, such as the behaviour of space and time in or near singularities. To fully explain what happens there we can cheat and use algebra. Or something else.
The quirks of mathematics and physics should not be considered to have correlation in all of reality.
Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Gödel cannot be blamed for the weakness of Econometrics.
Econometrics itself is responsible for this. I will cop out at this point in trying to explain it in detail, there is too much of a risk of boring both myself and everybody else.
David Roodman admits to the major weakness when he claims that “Theories are merely nice stories describing reality.”
A nice story about reality is simply that – nice story.
Even the most simpleminded view is that a theory is a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. A theory is only any good if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.
Invoking the limitations of one knowledge generating system to explain weaknesses in another or, worse, invoking a fundamental, inescapable property of unrelated real things (particles for example) to explain systemic limitations, is quite simply making excuses.
One cannot systemically determine what is knowable and unknowable in any particular system if there is no coherent underlying system to do it with and Econometrics is notable, if anything, for its incoherence. It is notable for the way that equations are arbitrarily invented and imposed on haphazardly collected data, its obsession with smoothing out inconvenient little details and its ability to see straight lines and “Ordinary Least Square” graphs when the most logical explanation is the fact that the data is scattered all over the place.
The power of mathematics may be miraculous but it does not and cannot explain everything.
It is impossible to imagine doing Biology without mathematics and without assuming at least the truth of evolution. The results of Biology in fact support evolution and confirm its truth, but the Theory of Evolution itself contains no mathematics. There is no place for it there. There may even be no place for it in Economic growth on large scales and over long periods of time. A purely descriptive explanation may do perfectly well.
03 March 2008
A Truly Frightening Concept
Recently I came across this article published by the New York Times on 05 May 2005 (quite a while ago, admittedly, but still relevant). Its pious message of hope very subtly belies a subtle arrogance, supported by a combination of naivety and stupidity, which is truly frightening.
Here is the article:
A Better Way to Fight Poverty
Kenya has never seemed to be able to live up to the potential of its rich farmland and staggeringly beautiful valleys. Its government is corrupt. Its capital, Nairobi, has become a haven for street thieves and muggers. Some 56 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. Malaria, which could be as treatable as strep throat, kills one in five children every year because the government grossly shortchanges its public health system. All in all, it is a classic case of how African governments can squander foreign aid.
But far from the noise, pollution and public and private crooks of Nairobi, the village of Sauri, practically smack on the equator, is an example of a better way to do things. It is one of two test cases for the United Nations' ambitious program to cut poverty in half by 2015. Sauri's story shows how direct aid can largely bypass governments, getting money and help straight into the hands of the people who not only need it the most, but also know what to do with it.
Anne Omolo, the head teacher of Sauri's sole primary school, arrived six years ago to find a student population that was listless, miserable and performing poorly in national exams. Some 500 children were enrolled, but attendance was low. She soon realized the problem. "They were hungry," she said.
So on her own, she started a food program. She went to the village parents who could afford it and asked them to bring in corn and beans. But almost half of the school's students were orphans whose parents had died of AIDS, and they couldn't afford to contribute food. So Mrs. Omolo and the 10 other teachers dug into their own pockets.
Eventually, they scraped together enough to feed about 100 students. It was a terrible choice. "Not everybody could eat," Mrs. Omolo said. So she fed the top two grades - seventh and eighth graders - because they would soon be taking national exams to move on to high school. Students from the younger classes went to the windows to watch their older schoolmates eat.
The result was instantaneous. Attendance among the older children shot up to 100 percent, and their test scores followed suit. Sauri went from 68th out of 353 schools in the district in 2000 to 7th in 2004.
"This year," Mrs. Omolo says, "we will be No. 1."
Part of the reason for her confidence is that this year, every schoolchild will eat. Sauri was chosen last year to be one of the United Nations' test villages - Koraro, Ethiopia, is the other - to show how poverty in Africa can be ended through programs that help villages directly. For the next five years, Sauri will receive $250,000 a year for agricultural, educational and health programs.
Much of the money will go to help farmers improve their crop yields. Farms are already looking better, thanks to people like Patrick Mutuo, a Kenyan soil expert who travels there from Kisumu four days a week to teach the farmers how to get the most out of their land.
Because of Mr. Mutuo and his band of agricultural extension workers, Monica Okech's six acres of corn, ground nuts and beans are lush and green. Mrs. Okech, a fiercely independent 50-year-old whose husband left her in Sauri years ago, has planted leguminous trees and plants throughout her farm. These plants provide natural fertilizer for what was once depleted soil. Mrs. Okech now feeds 10 villagers, and is building a chicken coop.
The United Nations plan, spearheaded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, seeks to expand the program to the entire district, and then all over Africa. But that will happen only if rich countries make good on their promise to ratchet up foreign aid to 0.7 percent of G.D.P. by 2015. Britain, France and Germany have all put out timetables for meeting the goal. The United States, the world's richest country, has yet to do so.
In the meantime, the people in Sauri work on their farms while trying to ward off killers like malaria, hunger and AIDS - some 25 percent of them are infected with H.I.V. But all it takes is for the villagers to look across the valley at the anemic farms and dismal test scores of their neighbors to know that they are still the lucky ones.”
Carefully hidden within an essentially constructive story of hope and a positive example of a community working themselves out of a difficult situation - with some outside help – are a few remarks indicative of the “Millennium Development Jokes” (MDG’s) mentality gone completely mad. The MDG’s is the anti-poverty plan that the article alludes to (and hidden amongst the propaganda regarding this plan there are a few sensible articles pointing out what rubbish it really is).
There are countless cases of African governments squandering foreign aid.
If both the givers of that aid and the ultimate intended recipients of that aid want aid to really make a difference in Africa, it is essential that something be done about this unacceptable state of affairs.
It would help if Africans can have more democratic and accountable governments. Recent events in Kenya has shown that Kenyans (and it is true for the bulk of all Africans) do take democracy seriously. They are even prepared to fight for it.
The events in Kenya demonstrate that the process is not easy - the process can be violent and the tactics used can be unacceptable – but there is a process. Optimists believe that this process will ultimately be successful, and that democracy will emerge triumphant.
The international community can play an important role. There are many, including myself, who firmly believe that they have a moral duty to play a strong and meaningful role. And that is exactly the role they should play: work with Africans and their governments to achieve responsible governance. No more, no less.
The one thing that Africa does not need is charity. It especially does not need the type of charity, described in the NYT article above, continent-wide and specifically designed to bypass African governments.
“The United Nations plan, spearheaded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, seeks to expand the program to the entire district, and then all over Africa,” ostensibly “an example of a better way to do things” that “shows how direct aid can largely bypass governments.”
Jeffrey Sachs is an economist with whom I do not entirely agree, but whom I still expect should know better – much, much better.
One wonders if Mr. Sachs has given adequate thought as to exactly who would keep the tens of thousands of unelected and unaccountable UN officials required for a continent-wide act of charity in check.
This is an organisation famous, not for the quality of its work, but for the quantity and quality of the charlatans, criminals and freeloaders in its midst.
A strong and decisive African leadership is necessary at a time when the continent is facing tough tests, so that Africa does not become a charity case supported entirely by the fickle goodwill of powerful countries, or worse still, become a silent and submissive UN protectorate.
Mike Sidwell of Transparency International has the following to say:
“As part of the United Nation’s (UN) budget discussions at the end of 2007, the General Assembly agreed to extend the mandate of the UN Procurement Task Force (PTF) for a further twelve months.
The PTF hit the headlines in December when the WP published an article detailing a report by the task force, which identified “multiple instances of fraud, corruption, waste and mismanagement at U.N. headquarters and peacekeeping missions, including ten significant instances of fraud and corruption with aggregate value in excess of [US] $610 million.” In addition, the report notes a “collapse of ethical culture and extensive corruption in procurement in the [Congo] Mission which has existed for years,” according to Reuters. Inga-Britt Ahlenius, who, as head of the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, is responsible for the PTF, told Reuters, “We can say that we found mismanagement and fraud and corruption to an extent we didn’t really expect.”
UN spokesperson Michele Montas is quoted in AFP acknowledging that: “We are well aware that there have been problems in procurement…This is why we are moving full steam ahead with procurement reform in order to have a system that is much tighter and transparent, leaving less room for abuse.” According to Reuters, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has told reporters that he wants the UN “to be as transparent as possible in its management and procurement activities.”
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been saying things such as these ever since he came into office in January 2007.
His confident promise of a “worldwide audit of all Programmes and Funds” quickly dissipated into nothing, apparently because he was told exactly how much muck such a thing would dredge up.
He has allowed the scandal driven agency responsible for the MDG’s, UNDP’s Administrator and deputy-Administrator - respectively Kemal Dervis and Ad Melkert - to lead him up the garden path, and subvert the scope and mandate of the Ethics Office created in 2005, presumably so that these two gentlemen can continue running their crime syndicate without undue outside interference.
Very little, if any, of what Secretary General Ban Ki-moon promises should be believed, and his organization, under no circumstances whatsoever, should be allowed to subvert and by-pass African governments, for any reason whatsoever.
Here is the article:
A Better Way to Fight Poverty
Kenya has never seemed to be able to live up to the potential of its rich farmland and staggeringly beautiful valleys. Its government is corrupt. Its capital, Nairobi, has become a haven for street thieves and muggers. Some 56 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. Malaria, which could be as treatable as strep throat, kills one in five children every year because the government grossly shortchanges its public health system. All in all, it is a classic case of how African governments can squander foreign aid.
But far from the noise, pollution and public and private crooks of Nairobi, the village of Sauri, practically smack on the equator, is an example of a better way to do things. It is one of two test cases for the United Nations' ambitious program to cut poverty in half by 2015. Sauri's story shows how direct aid can largely bypass governments, getting money and help straight into the hands of the people who not only need it the most, but also know what to do with it.
Anne Omolo, the head teacher of Sauri's sole primary school, arrived six years ago to find a student population that was listless, miserable and performing poorly in national exams. Some 500 children were enrolled, but attendance was low. She soon realized the problem. "They were hungry," she said.
So on her own, she started a food program. She went to the village parents who could afford it and asked them to bring in corn and beans. But almost half of the school's students were orphans whose parents had died of AIDS, and they couldn't afford to contribute food. So Mrs. Omolo and the 10 other teachers dug into their own pockets.
Eventually, they scraped together enough to feed about 100 students. It was a terrible choice. "Not everybody could eat," Mrs. Omolo said. So she fed the top two grades - seventh and eighth graders - because they would soon be taking national exams to move on to high school. Students from the younger classes went to the windows to watch their older schoolmates eat.
The result was instantaneous. Attendance among the older children shot up to 100 percent, and their test scores followed suit. Sauri went from 68th out of 353 schools in the district in 2000 to 7th in 2004.
"This year," Mrs. Omolo says, "we will be No. 1."
Part of the reason for her confidence is that this year, every schoolchild will eat. Sauri was chosen last year to be one of the United Nations' test villages - Koraro, Ethiopia, is the other - to show how poverty in Africa can be ended through programs that help villages directly. For the next five years, Sauri will receive $250,000 a year for agricultural, educational and health programs.
Much of the money will go to help farmers improve their crop yields. Farms are already looking better, thanks to people like Patrick Mutuo, a Kenyan soil expert who travels there from Kisumu four days a week to teach the farmers how to get the most out of their land.
Because of Mr. Mutuo and his band of agricultural extension workers, Monica Okech's six acres of corn, ground nuts and beans are lush and green. Mrs. Okech, a fiercely independent 50-year-old whose husband left her in Sauri years ago, has planted leguminous trees and plants throughout her farm. These plants provide natural fertilizer for what was once depleted soil. Mrs. Okech now feeds 10 villagers, and is building a chicken coop.
The United Nations plan, spearheaded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, seeks to expand the program to the entire district, and then all over Africa. But that will happen only if rich countries make good on their promise to ratchet up foreign aid to 0.7 percent of G.D.P. by 2015. Britain, France and Germany have all put out timetables for meeting the goal. The United States, the world's richest country, has yet to do so.
In the meantime, the people in Sauri work on their farms while trying to ward off killers like malaria, hunger and AIDS - some 25 percent of them are infected with H.I.V. But all it takes is for the villagers to look across the valley at the anemic farms and dismal test scores of their neighbors to know that they are still the lucky ones.”
Carefully hidden within an essentially constructive story of hope and a positive example of a community working themselves out of a difficult situation - with some outside help – are a few remarks indicative of the “Millennium Development Jokes” (MDG’s) mentality gone completely mad. The MDG’s is the anti-poverty plan that the article alludes to (and hidden amongst the propaganda regarding this plan there are a few sensible articles pointing out what rubbish it really is).
There are countless cases of African governments squandering foreign aid.
If both the givers of that aid and the ultimate intended recipients of that aid want aid to really make a difference in Africa, it is essential that something be done about this unacceptable state of affairs.
It would help if Africans can have more democratic and accountable governments. Recent events in Kenya has shown that Kenyans (and it is true for the bulk of all Africans) do take democracy seriously. They are even prepared to fight for it.
The events in Kenya demonstrate that the process is not easy - the process can be violent and the tactics used can be unacceptable – but there is a process. Optimists believe that this process will ultimately be successful, and that democracy will emerge triumphant.
The international community can play an important role. There are many, including myself, who firmly believe that they have a moral duty to play a strong and meaningful role. And that is exactly the role they should play: work with Africans and their governments to achieve responsible governance. No more, no less.
The one thing that Africa does not need is charity. It especially does not need the type of charity, described in the NYT article above, continent-wide and specifically designed to bypass African governments.
“The United Nations plan, spearheaded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, seeks to expand the program to the entire district, and then all over Africa,” ostensibly “an example of a better way to do things” that “shows how direct aid can largely bypass governments.”
Jeffrey Sachs is an economist with whom I do not entirely agree, but whom I still expect should know better – much, much better.
One wonders if Mr. Sachs has given adequate thought as to exactly who would keep the tens of thousands of unelected and unaccountable UN officials required for a continent-wide act of charity in check.
This is an organisation famous, not for the quality of its work, but for the quantity and quality of the charlatans, criminals and freeloaders in its midst.
A strong and decisive African leadership is necessary at a time when the continent is facing tough tests, so that Africa does not become a charity case supported entirely by the fickle goodwill of powerful countries, or worse still, become a silent and submissive UN protectorate.
Mike Sidwell of Transparency International has the following to say:
“As part of the United Nation’s (UN) budget discussions at the end of 2007, the General Assembly agreed to extend the mandate of the UN Procurement Task Force (PTF) for a further twelve months.
The PTF hit the headlines in December when the WP published an article detailing a report by the task force, which identified “multiple instances of fraud, corruption, waste and mismanagement at U.N. headquarters and peacekeeping missions, including ten significant instances of fraud and corruption with aggregate value in excess of [US] $610 million.” In addition, the report notes a “collapse of ethical culture and extensive corruption in procurement in the [Congo] Mission which has existed for years,” according to Reuters. Inga-Britt Ahlenius, who, as head of the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, is responsible for the PTF, told Reuters, “We can say that we found mismanagement and fraud and corruption to an extent we didn’t really expect.”
UN spokesperson Michele Montas is quoted in AFP acknowledging that: “We are well aware that there have been problems in procurement…This is why we are moving full steam ahead with procurement reform in order to have a system that is much tighter and transparent, leaving less room for abuse.” According to Reuters, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has told reporters that he wants the UN “to be as transparent as possible in its management and procurement activities.”
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been saying things such as these ever since he came into office in January 2007.
His confident promise of a “worldwide audit of all Programmes and Funds” quickly dissipated into nothing, apparently because he was told exactly how much muck such a thing would dredge up.
He has allowed the scandal driven agency responsible for the MDG’s, UNDP’s Administrator and deputy-Administrator - respectively Kemal Dervis and Ad Melkert - to lead him up the garden path, and subvert the scope and mandate of the Ethics Office created in 2005, presumably so that these two gentlemen can continue running their crime syndicate without undue outside interference.
Very little, if any, of what Secretary General Ban Ki-moon promises should be believed, and his organization, under no circumstances whatsoever, should be allowed to subvert and by-pass African governments, for any reason whatsoever.
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