Haiti ... back in July this friend wanted action!

Dear Colleagues

Back in July a friend copied me on an email about Haiti. She knows of my interest in Haiti.

Readers of this blow known I am appalled ... disgusted ... furious ... at the cavalier attitude that exists towards the people of Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake last January, almost nine months ago.

Within hours of the earthquake I tried to put an "accountability" dimensions into the post-disaster activities of rescue, relief and rebuilding. I was not entirely surprised that none of the big organizations and high profile people showed any interest whatsoever in "doing" accountability, though they have, in some cases, acknowledged conversationally that accountability is important.

My impressions is that talk is all the accountability there is going to be unless we really stand up and insist. There was a little bit of good news. Many small organizations are very much in support of accountability and are completely prepared to be in an accountability mode. Some small organizations are doing amazing work with almost no resources ... in contrast to the big organizations with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing, and not really clear at all how well they are performing. How can there be ... meaningful metrics are missing!

This is the email ... it is worth reading! She is not happy! It was in response to the slow pace of everything in the 6 months to July ... and now we are coming up to 9 months in October.

Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 3:41 PM
subject FW: Bill Clinton as Envoy to Haiti

We met at the State Office Building this past Friday. Here is a communication that I sent to the Black Caucus.

To: congressionalblackcaucus@mail.house.gov
Subject: Remove Bill Clinton as Envoy to Haiti
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:56:08 -0400

Greetings all Congressional Black Caucus Members, please ask President Obama to remove Bill Clinton as the Envoy to Haiti.

I plead with you this critical hour six months and one day after the devastating earthquake in our First Independent Nation, Haiti. After watching "Democracy Now" and other Independent News (Non Commercial) account of a 6 month follow-up on the clean up of Haiti, I thought, with the a combination of the humidity and the shock of what I was witnessing on the TV, I thought I would expire.

The Parishes that the Host of Democracy Now visited looks the same as they did the day after the earthquake (Six months ago).

What kind are people are we? That can watch so much misery and we act as if it's normal? Have we become so with complaisant with devastation caused by Nature; because of the devastation we have caused in other parts of the world?

With over Five Billion Dollars that was supposedly collected, none of the Earthquake victims have benefited. One resident said no one had visited his parish with help. Buildings still in rubble bodies still under the buildings, people living in tents with no protection from the sun, rain and disease.

Two weeks ago while the people in Haiti was digging themselves out of the mud, during the rainy season, Bill Clinton was sitting at the World Cup in South Afrika telling Wolff Blitzer of CNN, that President Obama should blow up the BP gas spill.

Sean Penn, "He was among 23 honorees, including former U.S. president Bill Clinton and CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, lauded on the site of the presidential palace in Haiti's capital of Port-Au-Prince on Monday (12Jul10)". (I Googled Sean Penn)

I see the work that Sean Penn is doing, pray tell me what has former President Bill Clinton done accept ware the title, "Envoy" and check on his sweat shops that he has set up in Haiti a few weeks before the earthquake. According to another Actor, activist, that appeared on "Democracy Now earlier", the sweat shop workers are not paid enough to afford transportation to and from work.

I AM GOING TO HOLD ON TO GOD'S UNCHANGING HAND, WE HAVE GOT TO BE BETTER THAN THIS!! NO OTHER ETHNIC GROUP WOULD SEE THIS HAPPEN TO THEIR FAMILY WITHOUT VISIBLE ACTION.

Give thanks.

In January and February of this year there was an amazing outpouring of support for Haiti ... and hope that the silver lining to this dark experience would be some new possibilities for the people of Haiti. Coming up on 9 months later, there is a lot of "the same old same old".

It is very difficult to understand the disconnect between some of the very big numbers that have been pledged ... some of the very big numbers associated with money raised ... and the disbursement of these moneys ... and the effectiveness of the expenditures.

Every person I know who has recently visited Haiti has stories that make my blood boil ... some relief workers are doing great things in not very good conditions ... others are doing very little and living very comfortably thank you. Without accounting and accountability this cannot be managed ... there is a need to differentiate between the baby and the bath-water.

At the moment ALL the big institutions need to get their acts together to facilitate accountability ... starting off with the Haitian Government and its advisers, and including the UN operations, the activities being handled by the UN Special Envoys, and the activities of many other bi-lateral actors. At the moment there is really nobody that seems very interested in the welfare of more than 1 million people who are displaced both physically and economically.

I am appalled ... disgusted ... furious! But I am also energized to get a handle on this problem. There is a rapidly growing community that are on the same wave about progress and performance in Haiti and about getting some meaningful metrics in play and using resources to do things that have beneficial impact for people in Haiti.

Peter Burgess

Paul Polak ... seems like someone whose knowledge is worth a damn

Dear Colleagues

I don't know Paul Polak's work very well ... but my early impression is that he makes a whole lot of sense, and is well worth listening to. http://www.paulpolak.com/html/paul.html

His blog is an easy way to get an idea of what Paul Polak thinks about and how he sees things. http://blog.paulpolak.com/

I have not spent a whole lot of time researching Paul's work, but this post with a story from Maputo touched a chord with me. http://blog.paulpolak.com/?m=201009

I have done my own share of work in Mozambique and have experienced something of what Paul describes. In this case the Government official thought of irrigation as "big civil works" rather than being "getting water in the most effective way to plants so they flourish". The government official had his views and was in his office. Paul saw fit to do some visiting of his own and found success where the government saw none.

This is, of course, a big part of the problem with the international relief and development community ... the World Bank, the UN agencies, bilateral organizations like USAID, the UK's DFID and so on ... they are bureaucrats talking to bureaucrats, and very well educated, but God forbid, that reality on the ground should get in the way and that good little things should be encouraged.

Another post starts off:

The single biggest reason that the appropriate technology movement died and most technologies for developing countries never reach scale is that nobody seems to know how to design for the market.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve looked at hundreds of technologies for developing countries. Some provided elegant solutions for challenging technical problems. Some were big and clumsy. Some were far too expensive. Some of were beautifully simple and radically affordable. But only a handful were capable of reaching a million or more customers who live on less than two dollars a day.

This is my experience as well. My perspective is that there is the need to get economic activity so that it is appropriate to the market and the community where it is located. The debris that is littered around developing countries that once were "projects" of the official development assistance (ODA) community is enormous ... and, of course, a disgrace. Worse is that few people in the ODA world really want to learn from it ... the system works quite fine if the goal is simply perpetual existence and a suitable leaky system.

Some years ago, when I was working on an assignment in Africa I was travelling with a very experienced development expert who was about as mad as I was about the way the system had become dysfunctional. He told a story of an assignment (secondment to a developing country's government contracts office) where he had the role of oversight of big international contracts ... mainly to address the issue of over-invoicing on contracts. This practice works so that the business profits are not affected, and there is an adequate surplus to fund bribery. An example he described was a contract invoiced at around $18 million that in this expert's opinion should have been more like $12 million ... and he refused to OK the contract and its payments. Nothing happened ... a delay of a few months, and then a re-billing but this time at $27 million rather than $18 million. The justification for the higher billing now simply that the cost of bribing everyone to progress the contract had gone up substantially. In other words the contract process is highly dependent on the "built in leakage" and not much to do with the technical quality and the price.

I will look a lot more at Paul Pollak's work ... it sounds very much like his knowledge is worth a damn.

Peter Burgess

AAI-H ... great organization ... I think ... but meaningful metrics are missing

Dear Colleagues

I am a member of many Internet communities that have dialog about relief and development including the group "Networking for Development" at Ning http://developmentmatters.ning.com

Many of the people who are members of this group are doing very interesting and valuable work. The following is an example:
http://developmentmatters.ning.com/profile/Caroline798?xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_user

In this profile there is the AAI-H organization's website http://www.actionafricahelp.org/ which shows some interesting activity by this organization.

I downloaded the 2009 Financial Report and the 2009 Annual Report and was totally disappointed in what I found. This is not to say that the organization is good and worthwhile or not ... it is merely to report that the Financial and the Annual Reports are totally useless as reports on the progress of society, and the performance of this organization.

This is not the fault of the organization, it is the failure of the accounting profession and other related disciplines to get to grips with what is needed.

The Financial Report is prepared following all the rules of GAAP accounting and audit ... and in the end says almost nothing about the performance of the organization beyond confirming that they followed the rules. In terms of performance metrics, the financial report is a complete waste of time and money ... though it is good to know that the organization was following the rules.

The Annual Report is a standard picture book about the activities of the organization ... good journalism and following the methods of modern "communications" with pictures and numbers giving a sense of reality for the story. In terms of performance there is absolutely nothing that helps to position the organization as good, bad or indifferent. Clearly the donors "like" the organization, and that is good ... but what the organization does with the money to produce progress and where the organization is efficient or not is ignored completely in the presentation ... both the financial presentation and in the stories of the Annual Report.

As I observed already ... this is not the fault of the organization. They are following the norms of the international relief and development industry which has completely avoided any system of accounting and reporting that addresses progress and performance with meaningful data.

Needless to say ... this confirms again the need to get something like The Burgess Method for value accounting deployed as soon as possible.

Stay tuned

Peter Burgess

Rail ... critical infrastructure and a big global sector

Dear Colleagues

I am encouraged rather than discouraged by the various international media sources that are available ... they carry stories about all sorts of investment possibilities that have the potential to improve the productivity of society in impressive ways. This contrasts with much of the press in North America and Europe which is heavily pre-occupied with the disastrous performance of its banking and finance industry and the essentially bankrupt status of public finance. This link is to webnews from the Gulfhttp://www.arabiansupplychain.com

The following link is specifically about rail transportation in the Emirates ... http://www.arabiansupplychain.com/article-4956-railway-to-link-dohas-education-city-with-bahrain/. There are many others.

Rail was a huge driver of the economic success of North America and Europe in the past ... and rail is not dead in these places, but it is not anywhere near the center of much dialog.

Recently in the UK's Financial Times there was a big story about the role that rail is going to play in the infrastructure development in China ... but their investment in building rail as infrastructure is also going to be a piece of building a big new export sector for China. The rush into China by corporations with expertise in rail engineering ... including from Germany, France and Japan ... is going to end up with China knowing the best practice from everywhere, and in due course this will be the best practice for a Chinese rail equipment industry.

In the Gulf countries there is money ... and a commitment to major investment. Rail seems to be part of this.

The impression is that the USA is getting completely left out of all of this rail investment potential and a global market ... and the building of productivity into its infrastructure. Maybe this is completely valid, or maybe it is simply the pathetic performance the the modern US media in understanding and writing about important issues.

Maybe the fact of Warren Buffett's investment in the BNSF railroad is encouraging. Maybe the efficiency of the modern GE rail motive power equipment is encouraging ... and the huge freight capacity of modern trans-continental trains in the USA is encouraging. Maybe. But the idea that the US will be a true world leader in rail engineering seems like a very long shot at the moment.

I would like to know a lot more about the rail world ... it is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure, and it is going to be very interesting to see who are the global economic beneficiaries in this sector.

Peter Burgess

Talk is cheap ... and there is a lot of it!

Dear Colleagues

I have been an active observer of the UN activities in New York over the past few days. The UN General Assembly is bad enough, but when combined with an MDG Summit and activities like the Clinton Global Initiative and other side-shows ... it becomes a huge circus.

The amount of "talk" is impressive. Sadly, people like me have not completely lost our memories, and much of the talk is a recycling of talk that has taken place over and over again over a very long time.

In health, I am reminded of the 1978 UN Al-Maty declaration about Health for All by 2000 ... and I was very discouraged by the MDG initiative by the UN in 2000 to introduce a whole new set of goals to be achieved a "safe" fifteen years into the future. In 2000, it would have been much more useful to have taken a good hard look at why so little progress had been made in the previous forty-plus years and do something practical to do things better.

My interest in accounting and accountability goes back a very long time. As someone trained professionally in accountancy, I am quite capable of "following the money" and it is appalling that this is so rarely done within the public sector and the international relief and development community. Without control of the fund flows ... anything goes ... and this is a formula for disaster for society as a whole, while perfectly suited to the greedy, corrupt and powerful.

The major personalities in the UN and the international community have made their speeches ... and a lot of big numbers have been thrown out. Where the money is going to come from is less clear. The UN especially is good at talking about big numbers, but less capable of mobilizing the money in practical terms. There is an urgent need for the high profile global leadership to "get real" about the money that is going to be available, and how it can be used to get the most benefit.

The efficiency of the system is awful ... and with rather modest amount of money there could be huge progress if the money was used well. Few of those in power are interested in low resource flows being used well ... for obvious reasons. With such abject system failure and so much deep poverty a results oriented use of funds can have a huge impact and be a step forward to progress out of poverty. There needs to be really clear focus on addressing needs ... but also using available human resources as the major resource to satisfy needs ... not merely mobilizing money and essentially wasting it!

With good management ... good decision making ... there can be better performance. Part of the reform has to be making way better use of data for decisions and accountability.

The e-list message that sparked this not is set out below

Sincerely

Peter Burgess

UN launches $40 billion health drive
By Tim Witcher (AFP) – 2 days ago

UNITED NATIONS — UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday announced a 40-billion-dollar drive to improve the health of women and children, which he said would save millions of lives around the world.

Governments, philanthropists and private groups pledged the cash, giving a spectacular end to the UN summit on eliminating poverty, a campaign that has been badly battered by the international financial crisis. "We know what works to save women's and children's lives, and we know that women and children are critical to all of the Millennium Development Goals," Ban said.

"Today we are witnessing the kind of leadership we have long needed," he declared ahead of the close of the summit when US President Barack Obama will be the keynote speaker.

Ban estimated that his Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health could save 16 million lives by 2015. Of the eight key development targets set a decade ago, cutting deaths of women during pregnancy and childbirth and those of children younger than five have seen the least progress.

Countries from Afghanistan to Zambia -- but also including Australia, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia and the United States -- have contributed to the drive. The foundations of the world's richest men, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, were among the contributors. They joined rights groups such as Amnesty International and multinationals such as LG Electronics and Pfizer.

"Never have so many come together to save the lives of women and children," commented Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, whose country is one of the world's top aid donors.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said investing in women and children's health was "an issue that deserves to be at the top of our development agenda."

A UN statement said the deaths of more than 15 million children under five would be saved between 2011 and 2015 through the initiative.

It added that it would prevent 33 million unwanted pregnancies and 740,000 women from dying from complications relating to pregnancy and childbirth. It estimated that 120 million children would be protected from pneumonia.

It was unclear how much of the 40 billion dollars announced is a new spending commitment and reaction to the announcement was mixed from aid groups. "We have learned to be skeptical of big announcements at summits, and we question how much of this money can possibly be new," said Emma Seery, a spokeswoman for Oxfam.

"What really counts is where the money is coming from, which means leaders going home and putting that money into national budgets." Seery said 88 billion dollars was needed up to 2015 to meet child and maternal health goals.

Several governments in poor nations promised major increases in spending as part of Ban's initiative. Afghanistan said it would increase per capita health spending from 11 dollars to at least 15 by 2020. The UN said that Britain will spend an additional 2.1 billion pounds (3.2 billion dollars) on child and maternal health from 2011 to 2015. The three-day summit was called to rejuvenate the eight development targets set at the 2000 Millennium summit, aiming to be reached by 2015.

The goals set target of cutting by two thirds the number of children who die before they are five, and reducing the number of women who die during childbirth by three quarters.

>From 1990 to 2008 the number of child deaths fell by 28 percent, but there are still almost nine million deaths a year.

The Millennium goals also included cutting the number of people who survive on less than one dollar a day by half, halve the number of people who suffer from hunger, halt the spread of AIDS and other killer diseases, achieve universal primary education and empower women.

The United Nations has estimated that at least 120 billion dollars will be needed over the next five years to meet the MDGs, which most experts predict will not be met by the 2015 target date.

From AFRO-NETS, an e-forum on health research and development in Africa

Haiti ... rain and wind raises big question about the relief and development sector performance!

Dear Colleagues

Rain and wind ... and perhaps a million people living under canvas ... does not add up to a good situation.

I am following progress ... or lack of ... in Haiti, quite closely, and I am appalled at the state of affairs. I am disgusted by the lack of progress and the pathetic performance of the major organizations involved. The essay below is now becoming the norm ... not the exception. The URL is:
http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/oped.php?news_id=1598&start=0&category_id=6

It is really very sad that the funds raised to help with the rescue, relief and rebuilding of Haiti are flowing with near zero transparency and accountability. But why am I surprised ... this is the way money usually flows, with a whole array of big "insiders" doing well while beneficiaries are starved of resources.

I know how powerful good accounting can be. Good accounting serves to keep control of the resources and allocate them to activities with high utility ... but there is nowhere in the relief and development industry where good accounting is the norm ... rather the accounting is sub-standard and does little or nothing to further the goal of performance and accountability.

Yes ... the Haiti situation is heading in a bad direction. But the problem of poor allocation of resources is a bigger problem than just Haiti. The use of resources in developing countries has given rise to phrases like "The Resource Curse" and similar ... there is no "resource curse", there is simply the normal outcome to be expected from corruption, greed and abysmal bad management and bad governance on the part of leadership and powerful elites.

Some of the problem is that the main system of "scorekeeping" is all about money ... when in fact there is a need for a system of scorekeeping that celebrates quality of life. When it is quality of life that is the primary goal, then there can be way better use of resources. With so much resource, the idea that Africa is so poor, is plain ridiculous. My goal is for a system of value accounting to be deployed that will change this framework for scorekeeping.

Sadly ... the solutions that have been promoted by international experts over many years have often been at odds with real progress for the beneficiaries, an issue quite well documented by John Perkins in his book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". And Dambissa Moyo is another writer who talks about failed development in her book "Dead Aid". She talks about 60 years and a trillion dollars and little to be seen for it ... there has to be a better way! "Blood Bankers" is another book that raises questions about the way development is managed ... how international banks do private banking that enables corruption to flourish and the proceeds to move into money centers where they are difficult to recover.

Good accounting ... ubiquitous value accounting ... can make a difference. Hopefully it will get done sooner rather than later.

Peter Burgess

////////////////////////////
Commentary: Haiti a missed opportunity!
Published on August 28, 2010

By Jean H Charles

Haiti, the first and only successful slave revolt experience to become a nation, has been a failed opportunity to polish its raw material and remain the pearl of the islands. After the earthquake of January 12, 2010, Haiti has failed to embark into a mode of development to recuperate the two hundred years of failed opportunity.

Some will say it is too early to tell. Seven months into the process, is not enough for a prediction into the future! Yet it is enough time to indicate the direction of the wind, is it towards change or towards the status quo?

On the ground in Haiti, I am witnessing all the elements are in place for a complete disaster in the coming months as well as the harbinger of years of unrest in the future.

I have developed in this journal, for the past two weeks, the conceptual framework attributing the notion of the failed state business systematically replacing the slaving business. I have also advanced the hypothesis that Haiti was the first nationally and internationally organized failed state entity.

Alexander Petion and his successor Jean Pierre Boyer, in accepting to negotiate the price of French recognition, has set a mortgage so high on the back of the brand new nation, it was designed to fail. When later that mortgage has been renegotiated, it was not to pay the installments but to kill each other in clan politics. This tragedy or that drama lasted two hundred years.

In this modern day era where an event of biblical proportion happened to Haiti, one should expect a new national and international order; it is business as usual in Haiti. Alie Kabbar of the United African organization on CBS today complained that “the American Red Cross that collected 465 million dollars on behalf of the people of Haiti is spending the money on five figure salaries, hotels, car rentals, air-conditioned offices for its staff instead of (or in addition) to spend the money for real people with real needs on the ground.”

Lionel Trouillot, the celebrated Haitian essayist wrote in a piece signed as of today, there is a smell of putrefaction in the air in Haiti. It is the smell of lies, the smell of big salaries of the multinational NGOs mixed with the fetid smell of the camp right across the hotel on the main plaza of Port au Prince.

I would add there is also the smell of resignation, the smell of laissez faire. I was invaded by that smell, because as of yesterday, I could not get myself into writing this essay, I was telling myself, it does not matter to raise the world consciousness about Haiti; things will remain the same.

I have in mind this lady in the camp right across the main hotel of Port au Prince, the Plaza Hotel, who told me not to take her picture. She is tired of people taking her picture and promising to do something for her and for her baby. Nothing has happened.

The machine set by the Haitian government, the United Nations, the OAS and Caricom for a faked election where the three main political parties have been ostracized, with the result, selected by the president, is already in motion. The thousands of NGOs from all over the world faking development initiatives while building mainly latrines and paraphernalia of that sort is suffocating.

The mammoth UN agency MINUSTHA faking support to the people of Haiti with the entire material one can order all over the world used only for its own needs. The city of Port au Prince at night is a ghost town with only the UN complexes lighted as in a developed country.

I am constantly stimulated by the high and down of feeling of anger and bliss – anger, because of the arrogance and the lack of empathy of the UN people vis a vis the displaced Haitians and the populace in general as well as the feeling of bliss for living in a land so lush where the cost of living is so low and the opportunity so plentiful that maybe Haiti is the lost paradise!

Speaking with a an investor friend at the hotel, musing on why Haiti cannot take off, he told me that Haiti needs the creative strength of the United States. I retort that no country in the Caribbean has so many creative people as Haiti! His answer was illuminating:

“They may be creative in arts! They need to be creative in engineering, in machinery, in planting, in soil conservation, in husbandry. Any farmer from the United States can help the Haitian people with those skills you do not need any PhDs for that.

“That is the reason why I am here to show them how to build their own anti-earthquake home. How to recycle the plastic material with scrap wood to produce building blocks stronger and cheaper than the cement block in use in Haiti now.”

He has been looking for an audience with those in authority, so far with not much success. Containers of prefabricated homes have already been secured by those close to the power base!

Will Haiti recover from this devastating earthquake? Or will it surge from its failed state status to an enlightened one? I suspect it will take a critical mass of Haitian people to understand that they have the undeniable right to the pursuit of happiness and to justice in their own land.

The national and international apparatus in place now is ensuring that critical mass of understanding does not occur. I am not optimistic for or about Haiti!

Jean H Charles MSW, JD is Executive Director of AINDOH Inc a non profit organization dedicated to building a kinder and gentle Caribbean zone for all. He can be reached at: jeanhcharles@aol

Top job in CSR should be paying the right amount of taxes

Dear Colleagues

There is something wrong when every government on the planet is short of money to do what needs to be done.

There are some people who are of the view that government has no business doing anything ... but this is a fringe constituency whose views are very much in conflict with the history of humanity as I understand it. Throughout history, people have self organized and created systems of governance ... in recent times it has become central to modern society and all sorts of things and services are delivered via government. Without these things and these services modern society does not work.

These things and these services have to be paid for. Accordingly, I would argue that a top job in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) should be paying the right amount of taxes.

There is a very legitimate debate about what things and what services a government needs to supply ... but nothing is the wrong answer ... and everything is about as bad.

There is another very legitimate debate about getting government to do things efficiently and effectively. There is ample evidence that governments are not very good at doing things efficiently, and there is every reason for society to find this unacceptable.

My work has a focus on socio-economic performance, and the quality of decision making is key to good performance ... as well as accountability. I would like to see the CSR community get interested in the efficiency and effectiveness of government goods and service delivery ... and in having all the stakeholders in the society pay their fair share ... the right amount ... of taxes.

The question about what is the right amount should be the subject of vigorous debate ... and there should be meaningful metrics that inform this debate. Far too many corporate organizations pay too little taxes while consuming the services of government ... and the metrics about these things is totally inadequate.

This is not a local problem ... it is a universal problem. It is a problem that will get worse as time goes on, and is quite irresponsible on the part of the "so-called" corporate leadership of this generation.

I am pretty mad about this ... and would like the emerging Burgess Method for Value Accounting to be helpful in addressing these matters sooner rather than later.

Sincerely

Peter Burgess