G8
Sara Kianpour from our ONE France office reports live from the G8 in Deauville.
The G8 Summit ended yesterday and here’s a quick summary of what we learned:
For the first time, freedom and democracy are headlining and ONE welcomes them. However, we are concerned that the final statements are primarily statements of good intent.
We would like first to refresh the G8′s memory regarding the $14 billion to help sub-Saharan Africa that is still missing compared to the G8′s promises in 2005.
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Sara Kianpour from our ONE France office reports live from the G8 in Deauville.
The Final Deauville Declaration has been made public. It is full of good intentions. Great. However, you must read between the lines to find (or not) concrete commitments, particularly on immunization, from the G8.
At ONE, we wonder if all these good intentions will change the face of the world?
Even if the G8 have expressed support for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and called for its funding, there are no firm commitments regarding the amounts to be allocated by rich countries.
It’s really time for world leaders to take concrete action. Otherwise, children under 5 years will continue to lose their lives due to preventable diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia, 2 of the biggest killers of children around the world.
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Sara Kianpour from our ONE France office reports live from the G8 in Paris.
During two days, the French capital was the world capital of the Internet. The e-G8 gathered the web elite –- from Google’s Eric Schmidt to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Rupert Murdoch — in the Tuileries Park. Their objective? Discuss the web economy and changes happening.
For the first time, a discussion about the Internet has been put on the agenda before the G8 in Deauville that starts today.
At first, ONE welcomed the concept of such a meeting. We have all been witnessing the key role that the Internet played, in particular during the recent Arab revolutions. The web is an effective means to enforce rule of law, to increase transparency and to end poverty.
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Sara Kianpour from our ONE France office reports live from the G8 in Deauville.
The first elements of the final communique were revealed in the press. The Arab spring and democracy in North Africa placed high on the agenda. At ONE, we are delighted. However, we believe it is essential that the G8 efforts affect the whole continent, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
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We have another new face on the ONE Blog, Friederike Röder. She is ONE France’s new policy manager and we are very excited to have her on board. Say hi in the comments below!
Following the tradition started last year at the G8 in Canada, this year’s French presidency prepared an accountability report together with the other G8 countries, which outlines the state of delivery and results of the G8’s commitments on fighting extreme poverty.
Let’s start with the positives: it is commendable that the G8 continues with preparing such reports. Great promises are one thing, but keeping them and proving to have kept them is equally important. This is exactly what ONE has been saying for years (and showing the example for) with the DATA report.
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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.
Somewhat buried in the flow of announcements and press releases surrounding the G8/G20 meetings last weekend, the White House issued a statement Friday that President Obama had outlined his vision for a new US policy on global development. This is especially welcome news as it suggests that we’ll soon see the results of a delayed Presidential Study Directive (PSD) on Global Development, an effort the President launched last September. Not surprisingly, the White House release looks strikingly similar to a leaked draft of the PSD posted in April, although omissions in the June 25 statement point to continuing inter-agency disagreements over some portions of the PSD.
While the press release is important for a number of reasons, it puts President Obama squarely on the record of embracing a series of sound global development principles that will significantly advance his campaign promise to bring coherence to US development programs and to “elevate development as a central pillar of our national security strategy”. The President pledged to issue a new policy directive — presumably referring to the PSD — “in the near future”.
The new development policy will strengthen US efforts to reduce global poverty, promote economic growth, and enhance the impact and results-based approach of American foreign aid, all fundamental principles that ONE has championed for some time. Of particular note, the plan promises to:
- Support sustainable economic development and good governance;
- Meet basic human needs by building public sector capacity to deliver services;
- Hold recipients accountable;
- Be selective in where and on what the US will focus;
- Strengthen multilateral approaches; and
- Install rigorous standards for monitoring and evaluation
While all solid elements, I found one part of the plan a little too vague that hopefully will be explained more fully in the final PSD. The President’s approach stresses country ownership and mutual accountability, critical elements of successful development outcomes. But I would like to see further elaboration of this concept that instead of just focusing on well governed countries, as the White House statement suggests, it broadly includes a direct response to country priorities, whether they flow from national development strategies of the government or those articulated by citizens at the local level.
Much of what we see in the President’s policy statement is not new – many of these ideas have been discussed, and some applied, for a number of years and proven to be successful approaches to more effective development policy. And some are clearly evident in President Obama’s initiatives on food security and global health. But what is different is the effort to codify and consolidate these principles – for the first time ever – into a coherent and comprehensive strategy with clear goals and priorities against which the United States can shape its global development programs, policies, and funding allocations.
As we approach the MDG summit in September, the President has a unique opportunity to lead by example and demonstrate to the rest of the world that the United States is making it a priority to help raise people around the globe out of poverty, giving them opportunity, dignity, and a voice in holding their elected officials accountable to high standards of good governance. Nearly a year ago, President Obama told the United Nations that he would return in September 2010 with a plan to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. With the articulation of a new global development policy, as reflected in a signed and issued PSD, the President will strengthen his call to action in New York with a clear vision of how the United States itself plans to tackle poverty and foster global growth.
