Comments

No doubt this is a good idea in the medium to long term but the urgency of famine in Southern Africa is here now according to media reports aired a few days ago. In one recent report from Malawi, it featured a poor mother trying to feed her four children on roasted lily roots that had no nutritional value and had to be gleaned from crocodile infested waters.Her 'husband' had run away and deserted her. The real issue is the the poor mother was only 15 years old. Before the medium and long term solutions can even begin to be planned and start working, the problem of too many mouths to feed from degraded and poorly managed farm land must be addressed. As a corollary, the leaders of nations like Zimbabwe that used to be a net exporter of food and is now a net importer of food should be confronted with their inability to successfully manage their nation but still personally manage to live in luxury themselves. Why aren't these leaders being held responsible and accountable? Therein lies the real issue. Until there is ethical leadership and accountable government in many African nations there will never be any long term solution that will be allowed to work. Unfortunately, those managing the world aid agencies tend to become rather myopic when this aspect raises it's multifaceted head. That also includes the UN as the chief culprit in this current, farcical situation.

This is a good approach to sustainable land management in most parts of kenya So, please share the training content will roll it out in Kenya

Well written Article - Win Nicholas

The Indonesian administration since 1963 of West Papua (West New Guinea) has caused immense problems diverting hundreds of $billions from Melanesia to Jakarta and western shareholders, introducing unregulated pests and diseases, and a level of corruption and political intrigue that helps no nation. But policy makers and government advisers are so scared of the boogeyman stories claiming Indonesia holds sovereignty and United Nations endorsement of the Indonesian claims, that they have failed to consider or recognised the real option of removing Indonesia from Papua. The source of Indonesia's shadow play are false news stories issued by Reuters in 1969 and 1962 alleging that the UN in 1969 had declared West Papua was part of Indonesia, and alleging the UN was endorsing a Dutch agreement for trading the people of West Papua to Indonesia.These fictions were published a month before journalists could get access to the 1962 agreement or 1969 transcripts, and the 1962 agreement at Indonesia's insistence was intentionally written so that only a lawyer familiar with chapters 11 to 13 of the United Nations Charter would be able to recognise that it was an United Nations trusteeship agreement which was the reason that it needed UN General Assembly approval. Unlike responsibility for other non-self-governing territories, the entire UN membership is jointly responsible for the welfare of UN trust territories; which is the reason that Indonesia told the US in 1961 that it would only agree to the US scheme if nobody publicly calls the trusteeship a trusteeship. And in the case of West Papua, not only is the United Nations caught legally by UN Charter article 85 but it is doubly responsible because the UN chose to send Pakistan and then Indonesia to administrate the new trust territory in 1962 and 1963. Every death and every ounce of stolen gold is on the United Nations hands. West Papua may seem large to Australia and Indonesia but its freedom is a small price for the UN and its members to pay to regain their credibility.

So call young CEOs and bureaucrats should not get excessive publicity for the sack of policy initiatives that are half baked. The SME policy is protectionist in nature as alluded by a number of other thinktank institutions as well. The announcement itself would scare off foreign businesses as already deterred by foreign exchange rationing issue .The local and international professional thinktank bodies in the county are there to provide critical policy analysis, advice and dialogues to ensures policy agendas are fine tune to protect the interest of every players in the market. Your office should critically undertake SME research to find what essentially the local entrepreneurs need at this stage? Does local businesses have the technical and financial capacities to ventures into advance and successful businesses. Is the government robust and find it feasible in assisting local businesses in the area of funding, market accessibility, infrastructures and skills upgrading? In the absence of these and other ranges of important factors, SME policy would not give the desired outcome. These are among many other requirements for effective SME policy implementation.

Hi Robin, thanks for taking the time to write this piece, I found it interesting and informative to read your perspectives. As someone who has spent ten years developing data management and interpretation tools in the private sector, I have often wondered about the opportunities for such work in the aid/NGO space. From reading your article it seems like there are two main problems at present - one is the usability & usefulness of the tools to date, the other is the quality of the data available on which they can operate. What are your thoughts on a system that aims to address these two issues at the same time - that is, a system that actually enhances an organisation's ability to manage its day-to-day operational data, while at the same time aggregating that data across participants and making it available via a suite of tools in a way that generates real intelligence and understanding of what is happening (both historically and in real-time) across a series of organisations, countries or sectors? The appeal to aid groups of using the system would be the removal of the burden of separately reporting on their activities, while at the same time collaborating with and learning from other organisations. For example, an organisation that plans to setup operations in a specific region could look at the data already aggregated for that area and make informed decisions about the most suitable vehicles, materials and so on, based on the experience of others already there. The same system also lets that organisation fulfil its reporting obligations to donors and the public, but importantly they haven't had to duplicate their efforts. The data that they've recorded is just as useful to them for internal management as it is to external users. Obviously there would need to be rules in place about what level of detail can be shared, but the principle would be clear - write once and use in many ways, with collaboration & reporting built into the system itself. Thanks again for your article, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this idea.

Hi Robin, From a structural point of view OECD would make sense, but after talking to a number of people who work around these committees I am not convinced that would work. They don’t really seem understand the technology and the use of technology, and are not prepared to let those that do define and build the next generation of tools. This is a general shortcoming across these relatively bureaucratic organisations. They don't have a good CIO/CTO and a sustainable technology strategy and they think they can do without, which is really not feasible in todays world.

Thanks Jenny for providing this article which is more of an insight to real life process experienced by the so called West Papuan Brothers/Sisters in PNG. The daily life experiences they have in Port Moresby are exactly the same for PNGans migrants moving from rural villages to towns and cities. Everyday they all struggle to live a life on the fringes of towns and cities while competing to access public amenities like health care and schools. So the refugees lived at Rainbow is much the same for PNG migrants moving into towns and cities. Any form of privileges or special treatment provided by PNG government to our brothers and sisters from West Papua in PNG soil will flare up into political vendetta between PNG and Indonesia and it will have its consequences. However, there should be a leeway some where to start with to support our fellow brothers and sisters who lived at places like Rainbow in Port Moresby, apart from citizenship and changing immigration status.

Des What do you mean poorly written article. What Nicholas has written is clearly a descriptive understanding of the whole SME concept, policy and how it should work for PNG context. It seems you lack understanding whilst working in the SME program. It describes how SME ideology works in real world while you seem to be theoretical and focusing on assumptions which will not work for PNG, bulk of the population. We have already seen evidences of what was described in PNG while you are in the assumption. Do you like PNGans to make bilums, do poultry or piggery or run PMVs with SME loans?? SME should do better for PNGans under the policy then these mere high risky chores. You may as well would like to take the useful comments offered by Nicholas for your management purpose and better policy direction. Thanks Nicholas for the descriptive analysis.

Thanks Win for the article, which I think is well put. I note the contributions from Des, Terry and Koima, and that all disagree with the basic point of your argument- that an SME policy for PNG is a very good idea, but that the strong protectionist bias of the current policy is bad. I think the key issue here is governance. In the hands of a state with underlying functional governance and developmental will (e.g. postwar Japan, Taiwan, and the other East Asian tigers), putting industrial policy / aka protectionism in the hands of state bureaucrats and the political apparatus largely worked, because the state largesse and favours that were distributed were done so on the basis of shared public notions of the universalist public good. History shows that when the same discretion is applied in a weak state with dysfunctional governance and a weak sense of the notion of the public good, and weak notions of noblesse oblige amongst its elite, the favours of protectionism are bestowed on members of elite crony networks. The end result in the latter is economic stagnation and the private enrichment and strengthening of the elite based on state privilege, and further marginalisation of the politically weak (AKA "the poor"). Most of early post-colonial Africa and some Latin American countries typify examples of the latter. In such circumstances, universally bestowed and accessible market enablers such as "essential infrastructural services like better roads and bridges, electricity and telecommunication", are far more likely to trigger changes in the political economy that will result in the rise of a genuine indigenous bourgeois, than poorly targeted protectionism.

Thanks Jenny. Just as an interesting aside, I visited an Indonesian village south-east of Merauke a few years ago and was surprised to find a whole bunch of English-speaking villagers there. They were West Papuans who had recently returned to West Papua after fleeing to PNG over a decade before. Economically, they didn't seem better or worse off than any of the non-English speakers in that village. I guess some West Papuan refugees feel comfortable enough to return to West Papua. Others, for political or other reasons, don't.

Siem and Thomas -- Many thanks for responding to the post. I've had a direct message from somebody at D-Portal along similar lines. I think we all agree that not enough resources are currently being allocated to the development of tools for manipulating and presenting IATI data, including data drawn from multiple donors for the purposes of comparison. I think we also agree that such resources should come from the official sector, since such tools are public goods. I hope it is clear that my aim in this post was to reinforce exactly these points, even where discussing the limitations of existing tools. There seems to be a real gap here, and it's my view that the OECD's Development Assistance Committee should be looking to fill it. Siem -- A quick further response on your two specific points. First, it is certainly clear now that D-Portal and the IATI Studio should not be directly compared; my point, as noted, was that from a distance, based on the information available last year, one might have assumed that the IATI Studio suite would include something like a 'souped up' D-Portal. And second, I now see that one has to choose both 'Use native currency' and 'Convert all values to AUD' for the chart builder to do what I wanted it to do, but I would still assert that this is confusing given that the former choice would seem to entail the latter! A very minor quibble, of course.