Comments

This blog is an attempt to expose the weaknesses in the PPP Act and it's lack of community grievances resolution mechanisms. One may say that we do have the established processes to deal with any form of organised abuses through these Act but again how effective are those organizations in delivering justice? What is the underlying factor here? Papua New guinea is a country systematically raped of her resources; firstly, her human resources then other resources. The introduction of the Outcome Based Education aided by the funders of Education Aids [AusieAid] of OBE curriculum. Which country introduced that curriculum? Why are they so ignorant of the pleas and complains by the citizens and continually funding that draconian curriculum? They government that promotes that lowlife curriculum are working with transnational crime corporations to keep our people ignorant and keep the citizens poorly educated so that the resistance is reduced to a mere complain. Give my people their quality foundational education (SBE) and they will communicate better and find better solutions! Please....

Kate- very smart linking insights to AFL and the pic - interested to hear if this increases breadth of readership - Heidi

Thank you Alex!

Hi Terry, yes agree re retention. I think I was also hoping that a pilot might demonstrate that by paying compensation national agencies become more financially stable and then are able to pay better salaries. The knock on effect then including better staff retention. Would be wonderful to demonstrate that it can work!

Yes I love those ideas - to my knowledge there has been very little thought put into avoiding highly qualified national staff taking up admin / translator positions, but that would be fascinating to think about. CAFOD have been doing quite a lot of thinking in this space so I can follow up with them to see if they have any further info.

Hi Diane, many thanks for your comment and I am so pleased that you found it practical. I am looking forward to trying to work out how we can create momentum for piloting the approach. I look forward to reading your book - we have a larger research stream on localisation so imagine it will be really useful. Kate

This was by far the most original of the 3 minute aid pitches and should have won. Very interesting idea.

Great piece Kate, this is an important issue. Has there been thought of international orgs putting some mechanism in place to avoid doctors and engineers leaving the country's workforce to be admin assistant type jobs for internationals just because they can speak English? Maybe a salary cap on national staffing so that host nation governments/ hospitals etc can remain competitive? Should ethical international orgs publish salaries of all staff?

Kate, This is a terrific article. Very much to the point, practical and positive. The analogy with football is easy to follow, even for football nongs like me. In our book on community resilience in natural disasters Anouk Ride and I argued that more respect should be given to local ways of doing things and local accomplishments in self help. But we did not go the extra step that you are taking to outline specific positive policies which would help international agencies implement a "fair go" with smaller agencies and more appropriate help. Di. Ride, A and Bretherton, D. (Eds) (2011) Community Resilience in Natural Disasters. USA: Palgrave MacMillan.

Paying compensation to LNGOs when they lose key staff is a great idea Kate. And to take another lesson from the AFL, which subsidised expansionist clubs so they could offer competitive salaries to top players, why not subsidise the LNGOs so they could RETAIN those key staff? It makes sense, especially with all the rhetoric (in the 2016 Grand Bargain and elsewhere) about 'localisation'.

Thank you Maree for those thoughtful comments!

Hi Roden, Thanks for your comment. I gave just a few examples of the 'spectrum' of bad behaviour in this piece. Some of them are from my personal experience, some are cited from other people's research. Nancy Cook's book has been published by a highly prestigious publisher in the US, and the research she did on women development workers in Gilgit is widely appreciated. Coming to the specific instance of women dancing with other girls: I think you have misunderstood the quote. The point here is not about 'with whom', but the fact of 'dancing' itself, to the tune of bee gees, seeing this as a way to import a bit of 'normalcy' in life that seemed extremely hard for them.