Open Working Group on SDGs is ‘getting down to business’

Young people in Brazil also getting down to business (growing towards peace project)

The Kenyan Co-chair, Mr. Kamau, opened the recent session of the Open Working Group (OWG) on SDGs taking place in New York from 17-19 April urging delegates to ‘get serious and get on with the business’. This is great news since the OWG has been a long time coming. Initially expected in September 2012, it only came into being at the beginning of this year. The delay was caused by tough negotiations on modalities that resulted in 70 countries sitting in 30 seats.

While Member States were still busy refining the modalities during the first session in March, the second session in April addressed a couple of central issues head on: What do universality and differentiated targets for country context look like in practice? How should poverty eradication be addressed in the framework – as overarching target or as a goal (or both)?

Poverty eradication as top priority?

I presume the fact that poverty is on the top of the agenda is a sign that it is a top priority, or even outcome number one. In that case there is a risk that this focus on poverty eradication might be lost further down the line during the sessions scheduled over the next ten months, which cover a wide range of topics related to human development, inclusive growth and environmental sustainability. After all, the purpose of the framework should be keeping poverty eradication on the international agenda, focusing on the poorest and most marginalized, while ensuring that all countries take action to keep development within our planet’s natural thresholds.

Inputting to a black hole: what will the HLP report deliver?

I’ve developed a tendency to sit on the edge of my seat. Maybe it’s the tension building as the High Level Panel report gets closer. In under month, on 31 May, the first major input into the post-2015 discussion will be delivered. At the moment, it feels as if there’s a lot riding on it. If it does its job and creates a new vision of development based on solidarity, equity and participation, then it will open up the space for the conversations that will follow.

A day in the life of an advocacy accompanier

As an Advocacy Accompanier, I probably have one of the strangest named, but most interesting jobs in CAFOD. I support CAFOD’s partners to do advocacy on issues like children’s rights, economic justice, land grabs, extra-judicial killings and climate change and in the last year I’ve worked in six different countries. But how can you be an expert on so many different places and issues, my friends often ask me? The short answer is that I’m not. And nor do I need to be. The local organisations on the ground have a wealth of knowledge gained from the work that they do every day that is different from mine. My role is to support them think through the how of advocacy and together we grapple with questions such as: How can you make sure that your land grabs report lands you in the Minister’s office and not in jail? How can make the public buzz about budgets? Why would a sceptical politician choose to attend Stakeholder Dialogue meeting at your community centre and not steak barbecue lunch at the 5* hotel corporate lobbying fest ? I ask these questions because effective advocacy always requires a strategy: it’s not enough to be passionate about a cause, to publish a lengthy report or spend your time convincing those who already agree with you.

The kind of support I give varies: workshop facilitator, mentor, critical friend, sounding board, or researcher – everyone has different needs so there is no one size fits all approach to this job! Perhaps it would be a lot less work and cheaper to run a generic advocacy course in order to disseminate a CAFOD approach to advocacy. However, I suspect that this would be ineffective, out of touch with local reality and risky in the long-run.

So, why this word accompaniment in my job title?

Are Small Businesses getting a Bigger Profile at the World Bank?

The importance of small businesses has been getting more profile at the World Bank (and beyond), if this week in Washington is a good indicator.

CAFOD is pleased to see that this realisation seems to be catching on. At a meeting of a right-wing think tank on the World Bank’s controversial Doing Business project, former World Bank President, Paul Wolfowitz suggested that the project’s flagship report should be renamed “The Small Business Report”.

At a meeting with civil society, Russia’s G20 Sherpa said that she “could not agree more” with CAFOD that small businesses should be central to the efforts of the Development Working Group’s future work plan.

But it is too soon for the Economic Justice team at CAFOD to relax and take a break – even if we think we’ve earned one! We still have our work cut out to turn this emerging consensus into a real benefits for poor entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Take, for example, the Doing Business project. The four top priorities that we often hear from small businesses are: access to credit, corruption, property rights and the need for better education and health services (most poor businesses rely on labour of one or two individuals – so their health and skill set are important to success). Examining how Doing Business rates in helping them to overcome these constraints indicates some important directions for reforms.

Starting with corruption – Doing Business does not tackle the issue, despite its importance to the ability to operate and the success of poor entrepreneurs. The Doing Business team have started to pay attention to the results of enterprise surveys to more closely align their topics with the priorities of firms – but clearly more needs to be done.

Credit, on the other hand, is tackled by Doing Business, but highlights another short-coming of the project. Zambia ranks very highly on the indicator, yet over 90% of firms still cite access to credit as a main barrier to success. This suggests that Doing Business does not, by itself, do a good job of guiding government reforms. The Zambian government, guided solely by Doing Business might think it has done a great job. However, a discussion with local businesses would soon put them straight. This is why we are recommending Doing Business should only be used in combination with such dialogues and other more specific and detailed diagnostic tools and we must be sure to use Doing Business cautiously and appropriately in the policy reform process.

Doing Business also falls down with respect to property rights. This time the failing is that Doing Business is biased towards one-size-fits-all and is not well-designed to support context-specific solutions. For example, Doing Business promotes one kind of property rights and does not recognise the importance of community, collective rights or rights of use and access on which many poor people’s livelihoods depend.

Finally, it is right that Doing Business does not directly address health and education issues in its indicators – it is a specific, limited tool, not a panacea to all problems. There are some things better left to other tools However, Doing Business does promote low overall rates of corporate taxation, which undermines the ability of governments to provide this broader support to their working populations. Examining the impact of specific indicators and revising them according to their impact on poor enterpreneurs also needs to be on the to-do list of the World Bank review process currently underway.

The World Bank needs to take these next steps to support small business if it is to achieve the vision of new World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, presented at these Spring meetings. This vision, to underpin a new strategy to guide the Bank’s work, has at its core goals to achieve shared prosperity and poverty eradication and recognition of the importance of the private sector in achieving these ambitions. Although it does not explicitly mention small businesses, they will be central to this endeavour.

What are the politics? MDGs in a changing world

The political landscape is going to be as important to the post-MDG framework as the theory and policy that goes into them. The MDGs were drawn from a series of high-profile international conferences during 1990s. This meant many goals already had a large amount of political support, although they were inevitably altered somewhat by the grinder of the political process. There are fewer clear priorities this time round.

G20 new directions on development: How the G20 can help poor households everyhwere

Last week, George Osborne had to announce more bad news on the recovery to the British public. He might taken some solace in the fact that others in the G20 group of leading economies are not having an easy time either. The buoyant BRICS economies (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) are set to join us in the growth doldrums according to a new report by the OECD.

But it would be wrong for the leaders of those economies to conclude that they don’t have time to think about the new phase of the G20′s development agenda when they next meet in St Petersburg. Doing so properly would benefit not only the poorest men and women in low income countries, but also back at home in G20 ones.
The G20′s Seoul Development Consensus was launched in Korea in 2010 in recognition of the impact of the global economic crisis on the poorest countries. The consensus was accompanied by a multi-year action plan to support their economic development, which is set to expire during Russia’s presidency of the G20.

This offers a real chance for the G20 to assess its impact to date on development and to think of ways of improving it. Here are five things the G20 should consider.

The Other Side of the Coin: linking gender equality and budget advocacy in Zambia

Gender Responsive Budgeting Workshop in Lusaka

My arms sink as I try lifting the book in the air to show to participants. This huge yellow-paged tome is the Zambian Government’s official budget document. Hoping to pull out a few nuggets of useful information about current spending priorities, I flick through and am dazzled by chains of long numbers dancing across the page. Scanning the subheadings, I search for at least one term that I recognise. But, it’s no use: it would take a stronger woman than me, and someone with a lot more knowledge of accountancy, to make any use of it. For the ordinary Zambian man or woman wanting to know how the government spends its money and how they benefit, it’s clear that this entry point is inaccessible to all but those with the most advanced technical knowledge.

I’m in Lusaka with civil society organisations who are discussing regional initiatives on Gender Responsive Budgeting (or GRB).  GRB is an approach to public budget decision-making which seeks to ensure that spending decisions are aligned to gender equality policies and strategies. In practice GRB means: identifying what the different needs of men and women are; establishing whether existing policies and services address or exacerbate those needs; and monitoring whether public spending is closing this ‘gender gap’. Whilst GRB may help identify the need to budget for women-specific services, such as maternity care, it is more concerned with the needs which arise due to the different social roles of men and women. A woman who missed out on schooling, because as a girl, she was expected to fetch water each morning will have different adult educational needs than a man who, as a boy, never missed class for such household chores. For this reason, GRB advocates that budget decisions should aim to reduce the gender gap, rather than suggesting that resources should be divided equally between males and females.*

Consultation or Conscription? Civil society input on the content of the post-2015 framework

By Amy Pollard (CAFOD) and Dominic Haslam (Sightsavers)

A civil society army – wouldn’t it be lovely.

It would be much more convenient for policymakers if civil society was like an army.  If only we would line up in rows and march neatly in one direction.  If only we would fall under the command of a single general, who could speak on our behalf and bark orders when we fall out of line. Why don’t we just pull ourselves together, elect a leader of the truly free world, give them gold epaulettes and stop making everyone’s lives difficult?

A Civil Society Army could deliver some lovely pithy messages to the High Level Panel on post-2015.  It would be very good at deciding what issues should be the priorities for a post-2015 framework, and explaining them to policymakers in a nice clear and coherent way.  It could even draw up logframes that stuck to a single side of A4.  If we had a disciplined structure telling us what to do and punishing us when we got out of line, life would be so simple.  How could it possibly go wrong?

Post-2015 processes at UN and Beyond 2015

Due to popular demand, CAFOD has updated the colourful post-2015 timeline outlining the current status of UN processes and Beyond 2015 processes.  It is a busy space but the colour code at the top of the chart should help navigating the graphic. To download the graphic click Post-2015 UN and B2015 process overview v07112012

NEW CAFOD Brief – Post-2015: From process to content

The interest in the post-2015 development agenda has surged in recent months, but the debate tends towards more heat than light.

With the official United Nations process up and running, the High-Level Panel on post-2015 and the soon-to-be established intergovernmental working group on sustainable development goals, and numerous national and global consultations as well as a host of civil society-led and other initiatives, attention is moving from ‘process’ issues to ‘content’ ones.

CAFOD believe that the key questions in content discussions are 1) what should the purpose of a post-2015 framework be, and 2) how exactly will it deliver change.

It is not possible to have a sensible discussion on which goals should be included and how they should be designed without clarity on these issues. The rush for priority issues and goals must be framed within a clear understanding of the framework’s core rationale, if the framework is to stand any chance of delivering real change.

The new CAFOD briefing paper sets out CAFOD’s position on the key content questions. It includes our proposal on the purpose of a post-2015 framework; our Theory of Change; principles underpinning the framework as a whole; and three candidate goals that CAFOD are developing.

In addition CAFOD has put together an two-pager on equitable growth, employment and poverty eradication to input to the concrete issues currently discussed at the second High-level panel on post-2015 meeting in London, UK.

It addresses strategies of addressing individual and household poverty through equitable growth and employment. For CAFOD the focus must be on the sector where most people living in poverty are economically active small businesses - often informal,rural and micro. The paper outlines recommendations for equitable economic strategies that foster small businesses and provide enabling enviroments which include equal access to employment for people living in poverty.