Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Financing for Development Conference Update from William Harry

The keynote address was by Roberto Bissio entitled "The Trends, Challenges, the Financial Crisis and Implications for Development, the Role of the UN and the Significance, Potential and Limits of the UN FfD Process, the Aid Effectiveness Agenda and MDG Summit 2008. As usual the topic was so broad and wide-ranging that nothing of substance could be said on any of the points. Mr Bissio did his best bringing in current examples including some letter sent to Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank's latest comments. I suspect most folks here don't know who either of them are and I didn't quite understand what they had to do with our topic.

Further information and perhaps a different point of view can be read found in the daily updates at www.un-ngls.org/doha2008.

Of course this conference is follow-up to the conference on financing which was held in Monterrey, Mexico in 2002. That conference was similar in size with 2 years preparation. The NGOs see themselves as the engine behind the movement. There has been progress in the negotiations and concrete initiatives are still on the table which will be talked about at the Review Forum following this week's meeting.

Like often happens at the UN meetings, we at times found ourselves to drown in alphabet soup and the numbers game-- Group of 77, Rio Group, CANZ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand), "9 bis" paragraph, "the famous paragraph #58, etc, etc. But an economist, Barbara Adams, was very helpful in clarifying many points and helping us to gain control of the various documents.

Adams explained that creating jobs to eradicate poverty remains the #1 priority. She also pointed out that changes that are being proposed demonstrate huge differences in policies wanted. Sometimes disagreement is more over consequences of policy than the policy itself. (Cfr #8)

During a Q&A it was highlighted that only 5 countries have reached the funding goal of .7%. Those countries which actually reached 1% have fallen back to .7%. There appears to be disagreement on the timetables for some countries.

1 comment:

JFR said...

It's disappointing to learn that only 5 countries have reached the funding level of 0.7%. Is there any discussion on the agenda as to how other countries plan to meet the goal of 0.7% especially in light of today's financial crises?

JFR