Comments

Hi Joshua, In the past - before the ban on project fees - Provinces set their own maximum project fee limits. Now, the national government's ban on project and school fees has meant that project fees are not meant to be charged. (It's worth noting that the PNG government has back-flipped on this policy a few times). Despite the ban, some provinces, such as East New Britain, are charging project fees because they have their own education act. I can't tell you what the upper limit for secondary schools is, because our research focuses on primary schools. However, during <a href="https://devpolicy.org/in-brief/upng-anu-academics-begin-health-education-research-20160615-2/" target="_blank">recent fieldwork in East New Britain</a> we were told that the official upper limit of project fees was 300kina for upper and lower primary schools. Officially, primary schools did not charge fees in Gulf - though some unofficially charged fees.

I take your point Henry but I disagree that the sort of research I have identified can be left on the back burner while we focus on getting Solomon Islands & PNG better integrated. It needs to be happening now so that the findings can be factored in to any scaling up that is envisaged or planned.

Thanks for the comment Tess. I agree there needs to be a broader discussion on these programs and as you note, the impact of emigration can be significant, meaning it should be assessed alongside any effects from immigration. However before we get to the longer term future of labour mobility for Pacific development, I think there needs to be more focus on those countries struggling to participate in the present. Tonga and Vanuatu have effectively gained access to both the RSE and SWP however other countries have struggled mightily. It's hard to discuss further development, marketing and assessment of the SWP if the numbers from countries with larger populations like PNG and the Solomons are in the tens instead of hundreds or thousands. While there is an argument all of this should be addressed concurrently, there are clearly capacity issues and resource constraints for migration and foreign policy development on an issue as "niche" as Pacific labour mobility. Cheers, Henry

This is a very clear presentation of some important data on this issue. This whole discussion remains lacking in information about how these migration schemes are perceived in labour-sending countries. There is a growing and multi-layered discourse in the region around whether countries should participate, who should have the opportunities (with particular reference to female participation and the rural/urban divide) and (increasingly) the negative effects whether cultural, social or economic. All of this needs to feed into how these schemes are further developed, marketed and assessed if it is to be part of the longer term future for Pacific development

Thanks, Alejandro, for this informative response. I agree multilateral conferences can function as useful platforms for promoting high-level political commitment to various actions, and to some extent the Busan conference did that. However, where such conferences are too numerous or too nebulous in their aims, there is an obvious risk that they won't attract sufficiently high-level participants, that their declarations will recycle each other and that the commitments they secure will be safe/minor/vague/redundant. I wasn't close enough to the Nairobi event to judge where it sat on the spectrum of usefulness but accept your judgement that it helped to keep some momentum going, particularly on aid and financial transparency. On the 'self-assessment' point, I'm familiar with the process (which I think has a lot of potential value, but is hamstrung by the narrow range of subjects on which information is collected) but I think it's unlikely that the OECD or UNDP would allow any particularly harsh assessments to be expressed, at least where those assessments reflected badly on specific actors or groups of actors.

What is the actual School project fee payment for all Secondary Schools in the province?

All over the world in the hospitals Nursing care ( bathing patients, changing their bed linens, sitting them up for meals, turning bed patients and cleaning them up changing their pads, rubbing their backs for good circulations) is done by nurses who are trained to do these jobs. But nursing care is done by poor relatives and wantoks of the patients. Theses people have got no idea, they know nothing about nursing care and they are not train to do NC of the patients. My beloved big sist fasted away 3 wks ago with stroke, she was lack of NC. My niece did everything for her mum. No nurse was there to help my niece in the medical ward. Nurses just come to throw medicines check vital signs and gone. PNG Government should employ more nursing staff or more staff to assist nurses with NC. Thousands of PNGans dying lack of nursing care. Very vital, very important for patients!

What Joseph Cheer mentioned here is right. Working holiday visa should be given to Australia's backyard; Pacific Islands ! What is Australia Government trying to do ? Cleaning up America and Europe's mess ? What a big shame!

Robin, thank you for a carefully thought post. Just a couple of quick reactions from my monitoring role at the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation: - I agree that international talk shows with no action can be a waste of time and resources. However, the Nairobi high-level meeting last December served to extract internationally-agreed commitments on several dimensions, chiefly on transparency, from donors, developing countries, CSOs and foundations. Besides the 22 specific commitments under the principles of transparency and accountability, the word "transparency" is also mentioned 30 times, in other sections, denoting how horizontal this theme has become within all sorts of issues to development effectiveness. Does it matter? Probably not by themselves. Commitments are not actions. But these provide legitimacy to other actors to keep development actors accountable for their achievement: civil society organisations certainly use them to put pressure; at the Global Partnership we use them to keep parties accountable through the country-led multistakeholder monitoring processes that we carry out every other year, and reformers and innovators inside every organisation can count with that international narrative to push for much needed internal reforms in this area. A world without commitment-generating regular platforms, that's it, without attracting political attention, would be a much more fragmented world where global standards would have a rough time to spread. <a href="http://effectivecooperation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/OutcomeDocumentEnglish.pdf" rel="nofollow">Here a quick link</a> to the Nairobi Outcome Document. - My second point is a small clarification. You mention that our OECD/UNDP report "on this and other Busan commitments [...] must be considered a self-assessment,...". Just to clarify that for most indicators that we track, the monitoring data is gathered by 81 developing countries throughout inclusive processes, and we just benefit from those country level processes. In the case of transparency, the international community agreed to present three existing transparency assessments, those of IATI and those of the OECD-DAC secretariat, in parallel. These assessments are objectively produced by the secretariats of IATI and OECD-DAC using transparent methodologies, and we only compile them for the purposes of reporting. But the evaluees (i.e. the donors) do not have a say in the scoring. In fact, as you may see in the annex tables of the 2016 progress report, most donors score relatively low in one or several of these parallel assessments. Although there is an overall upward trend in terms of availability, much more needs to be done. In future editions of the monitoring report, we plan to incorporate the perspective of the users, which, as you rightly indicate, are the best judges on whether the information was timely, accessible, comprehensive, good quality and useful.

Yes, there's not much information around on that rather large program, for which Palladium won the contract, other than the <a href="http://dfat.gov.au/about-us/business-opportunities/tenders/Pages/innovation-for-indonesias-school-children-inovasi-program-design-update.aspx" rel="nofollow">program design document</a> (with provisional budget excised for no good reason, as usual) and a few announcements and advertisements for program personnel. You can at least track how much money the program is spending by looking at the relevant IATI data. <a href="http://d-portal.org/ctrack.html?search&country=ID&funder=AU&publisher=AU-5&year_min=2014&year=2014&year_max=2019&year=2019#view=act&aid=AU-5-INL512-ID" rel="nofollow">Here's a link</a> to a saved d-portal.org query on the program, which shows that it has spent just under $400,000 at this point, and is expected to spend $6.5 million in the current financial year. For some reason, the program's total budget, 2016-19, is given as $56.5 million, whereas DFAT's web site shows it as $49 million.

So PNG will start producing quantity over quality.

Robin, you conclude your Blog by stating that transparency advocates should push forward on both the supply and demand sides wherever the going is good. Thus, your Blog presents a demand-side opportunity to enquire about Australia’s current development initiative in Indonesian education, the $49 million Inovasi project. As you observe, Australia was one among many nations that made commitments at the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011. This includes a commitment to the principal of transparency and accountability to the intended beneficiaries of co-operation, as well as to citizens, organisations, constituents and shareholders. Transparent practices form the basis for enhanced accountability, this commitment asserts. In light of Australia’s commitment to this principal, it is reasonable to enquire about the progress of Inovasi. DFAT and the project manager provide scant publicly available and readily accessible information about this important project. After unaccounted for delays in 2015 and early 2016, all DFAT can tell us on its website about the progress of Inovasi is summarised in 150 words. Why the silence? Where is the transparency and accountability from this limited information?