Comments

Hi Lindy, fantastic post! It's so heartening to hear your experience, and that you've found a solution that works for you and your family. I'm currently in maternity leave with my first little one, from a development job I love that involves a fair bit of international travel. I'd be interested to know whether your workplace's breastfeeding policies extend to practical (and financial) support for your child and carer to travel with you on work trips? And if so, do you have any insight into how common this is? It could make a big difference to the type of development roles women with young children could take on, with support benefitting women and their families, as well as organisations who struggle to retain their future female leaders.

Thanks, Michelle, for raising this point. We've focused mainly on the dollars and cents in this blog, but there are other aspects of Australia's involvement with the Global Fund that are also important to recognise and pay attention to.

Thank you for an interesting article Nematullah Bizhan. I’d be interested to know if the Deputy Minister expressed any views on how experiences from Australia’s assistance can help to inform the Brussel's conference, especially for regional areas like Uruzgan.

Thanks for the comprehensive wrap-up, Camilla. The other concern with Australia's pledge is the potential threat to our seat on the Global Fund Board (shared with Canada). While I'm not suggesting that this is likely, or even imminent, it is possible, with the major likely consequence being that without a vigorous Asia-Pacific presence at the table, the focus on the burden of these three diseases in our region may diminish.

You touch upon a core problem, but only lightly - the fact that so much of the expenditure classified as capital is not in fact used for the creation of assets (roads, bridges, schools, medical facilities) though it is recorded as having been spent that way. Instead it disappears. In some provinces almost entirely. As numerous PNG audit reports attest.

Check out what Dr. Richard Mckenzie had to say in my <a href="http://shinfujiyama.com/Richard" rel="nofollow">podcast show</a> about the role of orphanages. Episode #19: One man's response to J.K. Rowling's tweet: "Orphanages cause irreparable damage, even those that are well run."

thanks for sharing

Barbara and Keen ask a good question: `This post considers why the rapid growth of cities (in Melanesia) is failing to translate into greater political pressure for urban investment and more equitable representation.' Unfortunately their answer, that it largely has to do with contemporary politics and the weakness of urban political expression, is to put the explanation the wrong way round. They should instead examine the continuing strength of reactionary ruralism in the region and particularly in the most populous country Papua New Guinea: it is this strength which blocks urban industrial development. In PNG the strongest oppositon to urbanisation and industrial manufacturing originated in the immediate post-War II years. Movement off the land into urban areas, and the fear of disorder and unemployment, produced a colonial administration determined to secure village life based upon expanded smallholder production and consumption. Checking urban migration was an extremely successful outcome of this development scheme. The Australian Minister for Territories from 1951 to 1963 Paul Hasluck, regarded the indigenous `wise boys and smart heads' of Port Mortesby and Rabaul with the same disdain as he felt towards expatriate planters. Only in the mid - to late 1960s did this scheme start to unravel and migration to towns accelerate. Enter the academic and political opposition which attacked urbanisation and proposals for import subsituting manufacturing which might have boosted urban employment. (Citations available if required: economists opposed to and geographers in support of urban development will do.) It is not yet clear how deliberate for the over-all direction of opposition to urbanisation was the 1968 introduction of the full adult suffrage: research in the National Archives should show if colonial officials recognised that in a country where the majority of the voting population lived in the countryside, this electoral change would tie the emerging political elite, which was educated and becoming urbanised, to the countryside. Since independence this tie has been strengthened: the allocation of compensation and other forms of revenue from mining hasn't only produced a rentier ruling class but smallholders who rely on whatever funds they can force out of mining companies and PNG governments. Instead of being the locus of agrarian development as occurred in the first two decades after World War II, rural areas have more and more tended to be sponges or soaks of unemployed and underemployed as Michael Todaro noted and aimed to change for Kenya. While economic growth in agriculture has largely stalled, the force of reactionary ruralism has grown under domestic and international advice and pressure. When from the early 1980s indigenous leaders opposed funds being spent on tertiary education, this soon conformed to international advice from the World Bank. Primary first became the first step for little education altogether as academic and other advice urged the importance of balancing the budget. Even the 2010 Garnaut-Namaliu Report on Tertiary education in PNG while advocating a cap on tertiary education expansion maintained the preference for rural development. Only a few years ago at a forum in the Crawford School a World Bank official followed the political policy line which has been most powerful for over forty years in PNG. He opposed all forms of import substituting industrialisation, citing the usual `level playing field', anti-rent seeking arguments. Unfortunately for the official he then shot himself in the foot, stating that if a PNG rugby team could make it in the NRL, then PNG manufacturers should be able to export successfully too. Clearly this economist wasn't aware that the NRL, AFL, NBL and other highly competitive competitions here and in the USA act on ìnfant industry principles, with drafts, salary caps, employment subsidies etc. to support new entrants into the market. (This weekend, only one of the semi-finalists in the AFL is not a major beneficiary of various continuing subsidies. Just ask Collingwood president Eddie McGuire.) So when Barbara and Keen correctly conclude: `The contribution of urban spaces to the nation’s economic vitality is significant, but largely based on small or foreign businesses that don’t lend themselves to organised labour' they should also note why this is the case. The opposition to organised labour was a constant theme of international advice to developing countries since at least the 1980s. Non-developmental ruralism and opposition to industrial manufacturing has been for even longer a united policy focus with international, including Australian, as well as domestic drivers. It is doubtful if `middle class' activism will over-turn this ascendancy: more likely to be important are the increasing demands from local manufacturers for support and changes in the ideas which drive development.

A quick follow-up related to the DFID-Global Fund performance agreement we mention in this post - Amanda Glassman at CGD has a blog about it <a href="http://www.cgdev.org/blog/new-dfid-global-fund-10-benchmarks-achieve-maximum-impact" rel="nofollow">here</a>, including a link to the actual agreement.

Thanks for the per capita breakdown Garth, an enlightening comparison. We've been reasonably positive on the 10% increase in the post just because of the sheer size of the cuts to Australian aid - but I agree we should be doing more. Unfortunately it's pretty hard to do more when we've decimated the aid budget so badly - this is just another example of the consequences. Though as the numbers above show, more of the aid budget will be spent on the Global Fund over the next three years as a percentage - so I feel that's a sign of some support for the Fund from government, but within our constrained ability to contribute due to the shrinking aid budget.

Thank you for this breakdown Ashlee and Camilla. To add to the perspectives you provided, Australians will be contributing US$2.38 each each year to the Global Fund. Americans will give $4.50 each, Canadians $5.76 and the British $7.44 each. Given that these three diseases result in around 3 million deaths of poor people each year, and the Global Fund is proven to be an effective way of cutting these deaths, I am concerned at the low priority DFAT gives to supporting the Fund.

Hi Paul, Thank you for an excellent comment. I think you've done a great job of explaining the complexity of the decisions all NGOs must go through when deciding about advocacy, and when deciding about funding sources. To be clear, we are not suggesting our findings are deterministic. There will also be, as you describe, many other facts that come into play. What we've identified is a trend: on average, amongst all the other stuff, NGOs that get more money from the government appear to devote more web-space to awareness raising and encouraging public action on development issues. There will always be NGOs that buck the trend, and there will always be other factors that have an influence. But there does appear to be a pattern. We've pointed it out and we are eager to explain it. We haven't (as you'll see from the blog post and the paper) drawn too many conclusions yet, other to identify the pattern and offer some possible explanations for its cause. While I think the strength of quantitative work is that it can sometimes identify a signal amongst the noise (what we've done here). I think a comparative strength of qualitative research is that it can provide nuanced explanations for trends and patterns. This, I think, would be a good way of taking this research forwards. Such research could incorporate many of the comments you have made above. Thanks again Terence