To achieve Millennium Development Goals Joint good governance model needed

Giving my full support to this idea I recalled The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Debt Strategy (HIPC) Initiative, which was first launched in 1996 by the IMF and World Bank, with the aim to reduce to sustainable levels the external debt burdens of the most heavily indebted poor countries. And Haiti is not an exception. The UN Millennium Project recommends three mechanisms to deal with the issue - one of them is the necessity to reward strong governance that entails coordinated actions by the international community, including multilateral financial organizations and governments. In this connection we bring to our readers excerpts from my article published in "The Kazakhstan Monitor" (weekly business newspaper) on June 8, 2007 co-authored with Karina Worku, currently graduate of MA in Economic and Legal Studies program in Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Proposal and practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals through
Joint (Twin) Good Governance Model

The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Debt Strategy (HIPC) Initiative was first launched in 1996 by the IMF and World Bank, with the aim of ensuring that no poor country faces a debt burden it cannot manage. The Initiative entails coordinated action by the international financial community, including multilateral organizations and governments, to reduce to sustainable levels the external debt burdens of the most heavily indebted poor countries.

As the Report of UN the Millennium Development Goals Project (UN MDGs) indicated many world leaders in recent years have rightly stressed the powerful relationship between poverty reduction and global security. But progress has been far from uniform across the world, there are huge disparities across and within countries especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The most important among them to our opinion is governance failures, as it was correctly indicated by the above mentioned in the Report of UN MDGs Project.

As the Report concluded "there is no excuse for any country, no matter how poor, to abuse its citizens, deny them the equal protection of the law, or leave them victims of corruption, mismanagement, and economic irrationality".

The UN Millennium Project recommends three mechanisms to deal with issue:

- One of the first international efforts to reward strong governance with increased foreign assistance was the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative to reduce debt burdens.

- A second mechanism that evaluates and validates strong governance as a precondition to aid disbursement is the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). The MCC disburses funds only to countries surpassing thresholds for various indicators measuring governance, investment effort in health and education, and economic policies.

- A third example is the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

Our Know How Idea - Joint (Twin) Good Governance Model

In July 2005 the G8 members agreed to a breakthrough summit deal on spending an extra $50-billion in development aid by 2010, a move that Blair called a sign of the G8's "solidarity" with Africa. But Mr. Tony Blair, British Prime Minister, insisted that "the Africa aid package will help save lives in Africa but warned that implementation of pledges is a key to fight poverty".

In this respect we would like to express our critical views on the issue of "implementation".

As it was envisaged by the above mentioned review, main international players responsible for implementation of distribution of the aid package are United Nations, World Bank and donor governments.

We accept the idea of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative to reduce debt burdens and a four-step approach MDG-based poverty reduction strategy.

We agree with the above mentioned as well as with the view that "aid must be disbursed in ways that align the incentives of donors and recipients to support positive development outcomes".

Governments in rich and poor countries should learn from their past mistakes to design more effective ways of delivering financial assistance to those who need it most".

It is very true that "foreign aid can play a huge positive role in growth and poverty reduction when properly targeted and administered toward vital infrastructure and human capital".

Taking all above mentioned into consideration, we have identified the following shortages:

• We do believe that African Peer Mechanism is still very weak, needs to nurtured and develop, therefore, lacks of addressing an issue of accountability, though it should be developed further.
• As far as United Nations agencies concerned it is not very clear what the UN Millennium Project means by " UN Resident Coordinator with collaboration of the UN Development Assistance Framework should identify the specific ways and ...the establishment of multi-agency, cross-sectoral- regional technical centers''. The role of the international financial institutions which " should work closely with the UN Country Team in support of the host-country poverty reduction programs" needs to be more emphasized and clearly stated.
• Moreover, United Nations with inherited heavy bureaucracy and high turnover of short term and fixed termed staff (which make difficult to follow up long term projects) is currently on the wake of long expected reform changes. It is known that it also suffers from competitiveness of different specialized agencies (including overlapping programs), lacks a comprehensive vision and has no definitive responsibility/incentives in terms of output results.
• Donor governments, development agencies, NGOs and civil organizations still lack proper coordination and mutual agreements about issues of priorities, distribution, often subject to negative trends on competitiveness and short term oriented projects.

In order to overcome these deficiencies and shortages we do offer to your attention our proposal with a strong assumption that the main reasons for slow progress in development in Africa are governance failures and lack of accountable and efficient public administration.

As indicated in many UN reports main areas of attention should be:

The rule of law (needed for security in private property, safety from violence, honesty and transparency in government functions, and predictability of government policies).

Accountable and efficient public administration (which requires transparency and administrators who are qualified, motivated, and adequately paid, efficient management systems, to disburse and track large investments, and monitoring and evaluation systems).

A creation of African government's analytical and administrative capacity at national, regional, and local levels, which is focused on transparency and accountability, is the most important part of the implementation strategy.

In order to do create such a capacity, an issue of accountability is considered the key problem of the whole idea of Debt relief and Aid assistance to Africa. The idea of accountability here is understood not only in the sense of having accountable Aid recipients i.e. African host governments but also donor countries, UN and financial agencies.We do believe that the old approach when there are many donors, agencies and subcontractors focusing on their own projects and not actually seeing the final result should be completely revisited. Not ignoring the role of UN team (with multiple agencies, few of them of having coordinating capacity) we do propose new means of achieving MDGs, Debt relief and Aid delivery through Twin (Joint) Good Governance Model. A principal purpose of this Model is aimed to create accountable governance which will be responsible for implementation, coordination, and accountable for final result in decade ahead time.

According to this Model, each country recipient will be assigned to one Peer (Donor) country to form the Twin (Joint) Good Governance Team under decision of International Board on Aid to Africa, which will consist of G8 representatives, UN Millenium Project team, World Bank and others. Recipient countries can choose voluntarily (or through mutual understanding and negotiations) which Twin partner they prefer to be as their peer, taking into account several social, economical, cultural, religious etc) indicators like size of country, population, language etc. One of important steps to reduce administrative costs, instead of hiring a big team of international staff (UN civil servants with salaries and very attractive benefits) is to involve educated professionals from native of recipient country living abroad (on special contract basis, with salary of less or comparable scale as for ex-patriots but with moral and rewarding incentives of contributing to the development of their motherland).

Functional tasks of the Peer Twin Partner (details need to be developed):

1. Peer Twin Partner will responsible for the overall administration, coordination, implementation, input funds and output results of Aid funds in close collaboration and partnership with other international players like UN, World Bank and NGOs.
2. Peer Twin Partner will lead the National Board on Aid to Africa, consisted of UN Millennium project representatives, UN Country Resident team, World Bank representative and Twin country recipient to achieve the MD Goals" within a 10-year framework of action, including public investment, public management, and financing and a 3-to-5-year MDG-based poverty reduction strategy.
3. Peer Twin Partner will also have main responsibilities in identifying proper staff management strategy in order to train and coach national professionals (including scholarships, fellowship and in house or abroad training), recruiting counterparts (subcontractors), seconded professionals, evaluating their performance and regular reporting (annual, phase based etc) to relevant institutions.
4. Peer Twin Partner will take a new important step to reduce administrative costs, instead of hiring a big team of international staff (UN salaries with very attractive benefits) is to involve educated professional from native of recipient country living abroad (on special contract basis, for example to provide salary of less comparable scale as for ex-patriots but with moral and rewarding incentives of contributing to the development of their motherland).
5. Peer Twin Partner will conduct narrative and financial regular reportingon short-term (6-12 months), midterm (2-3years) and long-term phases (5-10 years) of MDGs project strategy plan, Debt relief and will be fully held responsible for the end result and compiling final report in 10 years time.