As we continue our campaign to protect critical Canadian international development funding, ONE member Sarah Stone, from Waterloo, Ontario, reports back from meeting her local member of parliament.
As a constituent and on behalf of ONE I had the opportunity recently to meet with Peter Braid, Conservative Member of Parliament for Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.
ONE member Sarah Stone and Peter Braid, Conservative Member of Parliament
Mr. Braid had recently returned from a trip to South Sudan as part of his role as the vice chair of the Canada-Africa Parliamentary Association, the main purpose of which is to discuss trade, aid and strengthen ties with African parliamentarians. During this trip, and on previous trips to Africa, Mr. Braid has seen firsthand the benefits of Canadian foreign aid. We discussed my involvement in the Griot Project, and my recent trip to Washington this past December to participate in #ONErocksDC, a lobby day on Capitol Hill and the White House with ONE.
Extreme poverty, the kind that deprives hard working people of their full potential, is an immediate reality for many. It is a real thing, gripping the lives of billions of people. The number is so massive that, for most of us, it loses meaning. Truth is, these are billions of individual human beings with their own unique hopes and aspirations, no different from you or I.
Members of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) take to the streets of Ottawa
At around just 2 percent of the annual federal budget, Canadian foreign aid is achieving real results in the lives of the world’s poor. From providing life-saving vaccines and treatment for deadly diseases, providing food aid to reduce starvation, to investing in agriculture and farming to fight poverty and hunger, it is making a massive difference.
But Canada’s spending on international development has been frozen for some time, and there are now discussions to cut that budget even more as the government looks for ways to reduce the deficit.
Despite significant progress in global food security since the beginning of the 2009 L’Aquila Food Security Initiative, many developing countries are not on track to meeting Millennium Development Goal 1 — halving hunger and extreme poverty. However, next week donor countries have a once-in-three years opportunity to accelerate progress toward this goal through the replenishment of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
And one more update to fill you in on today, straight from ONE’s Nora Coghlan.
Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper just took the stage at the UN. He talked about Canada’s top three development priorities over the next five years – food security, children and youth, and economic development – and highlighted some of Canada’s global development contributions to date, such as its comprehensive food security strategy, the untying of all Canadian food aid and its continued leadership on maternal and child health.
Harper also used his time on the podium to urge leaders at the UN Summit to focus on accountability to existing commitments, rather than making new agreements or “lofty promises.” He highlighted the G8’s G8’s accountability report (which was launched at the Canadian-hosted summit this June) as a critical new tool in helping to ensure donor accountability. He also said that the Canadian-spearheaded Muskoka Initiative would ensure that maternal and child health promises made at this summer’s G8 will be delivered through a rigorous accountability framework.
While the Prime Minister’s focus on accountability is a welcome one, the fact that many of the details on the Muskoka Initiative are still outstanding (read about them here) suggests that we still need clarity on what accountability means or else it will just become the new buzzword at this year’s summit.
Prime Minister Harper also said that Canada would be increasing its pledge to the Global Fund in October, another welcome announcement. But with only two weeks until the Global Fund’s replenishment, the pledge is still too vague to determine whether or not the Fund will have the resources it needs from 2011-2013.
More details have emerged in the past couple weeks on the G8’s commitment to improve maternal, newborn and child health through the “Muskoka Initiative,” but not enough to deliver on the G8’s other critical commitment at the 2010 summit – to enhance their own accountability.
The initiative (which includes a $5 billion in funding from G8 countries, $2.3 billion from non-G8 donors and a handful of qualitative principles and targets) was unveiled by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the first day of the summit and outlined in an annex of the final G8 communiqué. Harper specified that the $5 billion commitment from the G8 would be “additional” funding and that Canada would be contributing $1.1 billion in new resources over the next five years. Advocates and experts alike were disappointed by the G8’s lack of ambition (with $5 billion representing just a fraction of the estimated $30 billion needed from donors to meet maternal and child health targets), and without details on individual country commitments, it was also impossible to applaud the clarity of the announcement.
Last week, an official “methodology document” shed some light on the numbers behind the initiative, with details on how the G8 had calculated their current spending on maternal, newborn and child health (i.e. their collective baseline). To anyone familiar with the tedious business of tracking DAC purpose codes and calculating imputed percentages of multilateral organizations like the Global Fund and the World Bank, this analysis is both incredibly thorough and extremely valuable for advocates and recipient countries.
Yet some of the most critical details on the $5 billion G8 commitment are missing. It’s still unclear what each country is contributing towards the initiative and whether their commitments are truly additional to current spending. The United States, Germany and France have announced their contributions (though not necessarily their baselines) and some additional details have been unofficially reported.
For those of us accustomed to following international summit processes, this story is all too familiar: a vague commitment is made, advocates respond with tepid applause (and a reminder that more is needed), and the following year is spent haranguing governments to clarify what they promised to ensure that it is eventually delivered (if you haven’t seen my colleague Erin Thornton’s recent post on tracking G8 commitments, check it out here).
This year felt different though. Prime Minister Harper put accountability squarely on the summit agenda back in January, and one week before the summit the G8 released a self-evaluation of their progress towards meeting development commitments with the Muskoka Accountability Report. Although the G8 promised to “ensure follow-up” on the conclusions and recommendations of the report, they shunned the first opportunity to actually implement them through the development of a robust, transparent and accountable Muskoka Initiative.
The G8 would argue that advocates can now calculate each individual donor’s baseline using the agreed methodology- a somewhat painful exercise, but certainly not impossible. But by failing to offer up these details themselves, the G8 are not only allowing some countries to hide flimsy, potentially dishonest commitments behind a collective promise, they are missing the bigger picture on accountability.
And everyone loses in this scenario. Advocates are still ill-equipped to hold their governments accountable, recipient countries face another hurdle to planning their budgets for next year, and, in a critical year when the changing global architecture and emergence of the G20 is grabbing the lion’s share of media headlines, the G8 has missed another opportunity to flex their muscle and demonstrate their relevance.
Wondering what the NGO community thought of the G8 and G20 Summits in Canada? Here’s a great round-up of responses from a host of our partners and friends from the online news source The Sherpa.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
Members of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) take to the streets of Ottawa
