Women in Politics

Yesterday I went to a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) event on Women's political participation around the world. The statistics are staggering--women have a long way yet to come in equality in politics. I won't try to regurgitate them here, but you can get a sense of it from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) memo on women in parliaments.

The most interesting thing about the issue of Women's poltical participation is that it doesn't matter if you are a developed or developing nation... it seems to be that the newer your consitution is the more likely you are to have higher paricipation of women in parliament.

Interesting food for weekend thought.

Transparency

I have been struck by a common refrain I have been hearing from some vocal, if not quite factual, UN : the UN is not transparent or accountable and that we have no idea where U.S. taxpayer dollars are going. The current UN whipping boy is the UN Development Program (UNDP) which these bloggers have taken a special interest in.

I work on a daily basis to support the work of UNDP and as a person of limited means, I can tell you that I would not do this if I didn't know how UNDP was spending my money (both the money of U.S. taxpayers and of my special project donors).

First, a bit about UNDP's budget. There are two types of funds that UNDP has within its almost US$5 Billion budget:

• Core Funds--which are funds voluntarily provided by donors to generally support the work of the organization. Each year the U.S. Congress decides how much money it will contribute to the work of UNDP. The amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars contributed to UNDP core funds has been around $100 million (or about 10% of UNDP's total core funds). To see information on what donors are contributing to core funds, read pages 44 and 45 of UNDP's 2007 Annual Report. The U.S. Government sits on the UNDP governing body (called the Executive Board) that approves the UNDP work plan. The Executive Board also approves each country program once every 3 years (with 166 countries, it would be difficult to review them all each year).
• Non Core Funds--anything that is given by donors for a specific purpose. In some cases a government will ask UNDP to handle the financial management of a program in their own country (locally financed programs). In 2007 almost $1.4 billion of UNDP's total budget came from this. The U.S. government does not do this so none of your tax dollars fall into this category of funds. In other cases a country will decide they want to help another country with a specific project but for some reason doesn't want to provide that country funds directly. In this case, donor nations will provide UNDP funds to carry out the project. U.S. taxpayer dollars contributed to UNDP in this way are reported on to the U.S. government on a yearly basis upon completion of program financial audits. In 2007 the U.S. provided almost $128 millon dollars of donor directed programs (UNDP had around $2 billion in these funds). For those bean counters among you, the other non-core funds that UNDP manages are funds for other UN efforts like the UN Development Fund for Women and UN Volunteers.

Now, the U.S. government gets a lovely audited report of how UNDP is spending all of its funds once a year. However, assuming you are not sitting in the U.S. government, you might have difficulty getting access to this information (apparently, based on comments from some of them during recent hearings, members of congress are not provided this information by the State Department).

So, if you want to see the work that UNDP is doing (and who is funding that work), you should visit the UNDP country office websites from the comfort of their own Internet connection by visiting the UNDP country office website that you are interested in. These websites have project documentation which lists the donors to the project. Where you see UNDP listed as a donor, that means core funds are being used... thus about 10% of that is funded by U.S. taxpayers. For example, in Sri Lanka there is a $200,000 livestock recovery project that is funded by UNDP. Thus, about $20,000 of U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to help buy chickens for farmers working to rebuild their lives after the 2004 Tsunami. There are some exceptions to this where the U.S. Congress has forbade UNDP from using its funds in specific nations (such as Burma), in these cases none of your taxpayer dollars are spent in these countries. I am trying to find the list of these countries and once I do I will update this post!

Today I am trying to learn more about RSS feed and as I flounder around, I was delighted to find this post on the UN Dispatch blog. Thanks Mark Goldberg for your eloquent writting on the subject of UNDP's Activities in North Korea.

I was also happy to find UNDP's responses to these (and other false media claims) on their "For the Record" page.

If anyone can tell me how to get the For the Record page onto my RSS feed, I would be most appreciative!

Fast Company on China's Role in Africa

I was reading Fast Company and in the back found a LONG article on China's expanding role in Africa.

I found the article to be interesting and yet another necessary reminder that what we buy really does impact folks around the world (check out the section on lumber which will make you cringe at that new Ikea furniture you bought).

My only beef with the article is in the beginning where it notes that Africa seems to be:

...a bottomless badland where $500 billion of Western aid since World War II (more than four Marshall Plans) has barely made a dent in the poverty...

Now, while it is true that much aid has gone to Africa, the aid poured into Africa by the USA and others during the cold war was not intended to reduce poverty. It was intended to ensure that those countries were allies in the global war on communism. In fact, even today a large portion of U.S. foreign assistance is for military assistance NOT assistance designed to reduce poverty or rebuild national infrastructures and government capabilities like the Marshall Plan was designed to do. The Center for Global Development's Development Matters website does a good job with explaining how much of our tax dollars are going to poor nations in Africa and elsewhere. Take a few minutes to click around their FAQ particularly to learn where we spend our aid and how much is actually spent in the places we are trying to help. You can even see where we rank in the world as far as generosity with their fun Commitment to Development index.

So, while not factually inaccurate, the author of the Fast Company article unfairly makes efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa seem hopeless and contributes to the most unhelpful view of many in the USA that we pour money into a hole if we provide assistance to Africa. In fact, the story is much less hopeless.

Click here to see what Jeff Wilson thinks about this (its a bit dark, I am still learning the limits of the flip video).

Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy

Today I went to an interesting luncheon discussion where someone was talking about a report called "Implementing the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy in East Africa". The report doesn't appear to be on line yet.

Kudos to Alistair Millar and his colleagues at the Center on Global Counter-Terrorism Cooperation for doing this important work!

Now, to implement the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the UN created a Task Force of 24 UN agencies that is supposed to come together and share information on what they are doing to contribute to the strategy. The UN Development Program is one of a few on the list that focus on poverty reduction. It is on this task force because of the UN's recognition that reducing poverty and increasing democratic forms of governance around the world will help remove the root causes of terrorism.

However, I am a bit miffed at the fact that despite the fact that the UN Development Program (UNDP) participates in the UN's Counter Terrorism Task Force meetings, one of the recommendations in the the Center on Global Counter-Terrorism Cooperation's report (when the report is online look for priority #14) seems to say that UNDP has proven reluctant to engage on the counter-terrorism strategy. This seems to imply that because UNDP is not interested in branding its poverty reduction, governance, and human rights programs as Counter Terrorism efforts that UNDP is not committed to the idea of making the world safe from terrorism.

This is ridiculous. The work of UNDP and its partners is of course helping to reduce the risk of terrorism by offering people hope for a brighter future. While most helpful for raising the U.S. voluntary contributions to UNDP, labeling UNDP's work "Counter Terrorism" work would be unproductive in nations that simply do not see terrorism as their main concern. For example, South Africa might think that it doesn't really have a terrorism problem--but it does have a crime problem. Dealing with the crime problem arrives at the same place a counter terrorism effort would: increased rule of law and hope for the people of the nation.

Since UNDP works closely with governments around the world to help them address their most pressing problems relating to human poverty, it seems to me that the UN counter terrorism task force would do well to let UNDP continue to do it's thing without insisting on the label of counter-terrorism.