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Great Sentiments Mr Kama... Sad to say that majority of the rural folk do get to hear/see the political storm that surround them...2015 is definitely a state of emergency!

Thanks Hutak. I had seen Rudd's new role but very little information was available on it. Good to see that WHO reform is in their remit and interested to see what they come up with. Hopefully they will look at first principles as to what kind of global health organisation the world needs rather than just tinkering with internal WHO processes and office set ups. Will be good to follow it and hopefully someone from the Commission can write a blog for this site to update on plans.

WHO is constrained by the way it is required to work with host governments. Often it cannot act quickly and at times political considerations mean that it does not place public health ahead of other considerations. So it needs to move away from activities that require speedy and relatively independent action. Its core funding is often far too small for the functions it now tries to cover, so like many an NGO it becomes driven by individual donor fixations. It needs to move away from this dependency. Yet WHO does play an important role. It sets policies and standards, and issues good practice guidelines that are internationally recognized and adopted. Its staff provide technical support to ministries of health globally, and the impact of this is often underrated. A good degree of the funding from major donors such as GFATM, GAVI, WB etc. would be ineffective without WHO technical inputs, and in a number of countries essential programs such as immunization and malaria surveillance and control would collapse without WHO technical officers being active in program management. That said, a great failing of WHO at country level is its poor record on local capacity building and transfer of skills. This should be a core WHO function, and one that would have a system-wide impact. That, plus its regulatory and standard-setting functions, need to come to the forefront of WHO's work so that implementation can be left to other agencies. While it is true that its role in relation to data collection has weakened considerably, WHO still plays a key role in surveillance systems and getting up to date information to central decision makers. It should therefore not abandon its data collection role completely, but play to its strengths. In some ways WHO's dilemma is very like that of the ministries of health it supports in developing countries: how to move away from a service delivery role to one that is more focused on policy development, standard setting and health system strengthening through capacity development of health workers.

Interesting and relevant published comments here from @MrKRudd: "The head of a new international commission wants Canada's tough-talking foreign affairs minister to help him reform the United Nations World Health Organization because it responded too slowly to the Ebola crisis. [...] Rudd has also joined other critics who have blasted the WHO for being too slow to respond to the West Africa Ebola outbreak. "In the 21st century, with globalization and mass communication, mass movements of people, we must have a fully competent integrated global health system which can say, 'we have a problem,' and send a red flare up straight away," Rudd said in an interview on Friday. The problem, he said, is not with the leadership of WHO director general Margaret Chan, but with structural problems that give regional federations within the organization a veto over its Geneva headquarters. "That's wrong; that has to change," said Rudd, adding Baird is just the person to help him to "structurally alter the rules" of the WHO. See the article <a href="http://www.cp24.com/world/rudd-asks-baird-to-help-fix-un-bodies-who-in-wake-of-ebola-response-1.2215825" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

Sounds like a plan - let's keep talking

Dear Tess many thanks for your response. You are absolutely right that student migration is another sub-set of intra-Melanesian migration. In my blog, I specifically focussed on labour migration. However, I am planning to look at student migration in more detail at some point. Perhaps something we could do together? Regards Carmen

Great article Bob. You are right that it is embarrassing for Australia that trachoma persists in some of our indigenous communities. As the Chairman of Ninti One Limited (and the Chair of the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP)) Dr Tom Calma AO recently publicised, the health in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia is a global shame. Indeed, for the world’s oldest culture, with all of its unique beauty, trachoma is but one of a long list of embarrassing situations. For example, a woman in the NT has an 80 times chance of being hospitalised due to assault compared to a non-indigenous woman (yes, eighty times) and one-in-eight children born in a group of remote communities in Western Australia's Kimberley region has foetal alcohol syndrome. So, you might ask, why does Australia have such a well-resourced and successful aid program yet we haven’t translated this wisdom to benefit indigenous Australia? More energy needs to be injected into learning from experiences in international development (and vice versa). ACFID is active in this area and they prepared a paper entitled: ‘Effective Development Practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities’, in February 2014. The Practice Note sets out to explain good practice principles for international non-government organisations (INGOs) and other interested parties engaging in development initiatives in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) communities throughout Australia. The ANU Development Policy Centre has generously given me a speaking slot at next week’s Australasian Aid Conference, where I will be delivering a paper on ‘International Development and Indigenous Australia: Learning from each other’. My survey of aid practitioners and people working in indigenous Australia has identified particular areas where we can learn from each other, and I will be describing these at the conference. It’s great that the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust (the Commonwealth) is supporting the elimination of blinding trachoma in Australia – and thank you for bringing it to our attention. Ninti One is helping to improve eye health in remote Australia as part of the ‘Vision CRC’ within the Brien Holden Vision Institute.

Thanks for this post Carmen, There is another subset of intra-Melanesian migration for which it may be possible to obtain figures and that is for study. The USP set up means that there is movement between Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji (although Solomon Islands is not, as yet, a receiving country) plus other Fijian universities are seeking to attract non-Fijian students. PNG has offered scholarships to Solomon Islands to study in universities in PNG. Plus there is a small amount of movement associated with studying at private institutions, predominantly bible colleges. Tess

I think Julie is on the money here. As an example, the UK government’s International Development Committee (a Commons Select Committee) <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/international-development-committee/news/substantive-pakistan/" rel="nofollow">proposed last year</a> that any future planned increases in UK development assistance to Pakistan should be conditional on action by the Government of Pakistan to increase the proportion of GDP it collects in tax from the wealthy. The chair of the committee said” “… the Committee is concerned that not enough tax is raised in Pakistan to fully finance improvements in the quality of life for poor people. In particular, we cannot expect people in the UK to pay taxes to improve education and health in Pakistan if the Pakistani elite do not pay meaningful amounts of income tax.”

Hi Marcus I think you raise a very important issue and one that merits further examination - the positioning of CSO/NGO groupings as between those that are donor-funded and those that aren't (and/or between those that receive core funding and those that don't). Certainly here in Vanuatu we have seen the 'NGO landscape' change significantly with the ramping up of presence and activity on the part of INGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, etc. This has had a range of effects both positive and negative and we are yet to see what the longer term impacts will be. Tess

A pre-print version of Heather Marquette's article (without the pay-wall) can be found <a href="https://www.academia.edu/414923/Civic_Education_for_Combating_Corruption_Lessons_From_Hong_Kong_and_the_US_for_Donor-Funded_Programmes_In_Poor_Countries" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

Hi Marcus, Thanks for your comment - good to hear from you. I don't have any systematic data to answer your question from but the sense I got from the 2014 campaign was that neither type of civil society had much impact on electoral collective action outside of Honiara (aid world funded NGOs may have had other influences via civic education campaigns and the like but these, while useful, won't change the fundamental clientelist nature of Solomons politics, I think). So, to answer your question, I don't think, at this point in time there's much practical difference between aid-world supported groups and more organic locally grown ones; but in the long run, I suspect it will be the home grown groups that bring the greatest hope for transformative change, while at the same time still believing that aid can do good in the meantime. Terence