Between 26 April and 5 May 2011, 1,000 people were surveyed in Mozambique by Transparency International. The data were weighted by age, gender and region to represent the population of 5,852,280 Mozambicans. The study found that 68% of people reported having paid a bribe in the past year. Fifty-six percent of respondents believed that corruption had got worse, with the remainder evenly divided in their perceptions of corruption having improved or remained the same. More than a third of those using health services or education reported that they had to pay a bribe in the 12 months before the survey was conducted. Of these about 60% had to pay a bribe to ‘speed things up’, 20% had to pay a bribe to avoid problems with authorities, and the remainder had to pay to receive a service to which they were already entitled. Thirty-seven percent paid a bribie less than US$30, while 42% paid a bribe between $30-99. The minimum annual wage ranges from $54 for farm workers to $173 for financial sector employees.
Governance and participation in health
In recent years, the transparency of foreign aid has received substantial attention among aid practitioners. This analysis shows the impact of political transparency in donor countries on those countries’ formal promotion of aid transparency and on their concrete aid allocation patterns. Political transparency as measured by standard corruption indices not only impacts on the engagement of bilateral external funders (donors) in the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Differences in political transparency in donor countries also explain a large part of their varying aid selectivity patterns. External funders with higher levels of political transparency allocate aid more according to recipients’ neediness and institutional performance.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Steering Committee has approved the creation of a CSO-led working group to discuss application of the IATI standard to the work of civil society organisations (CSOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or not-for-profit organisations. Building on the Accra Agenda for Action and IATI outcomes to date, the working group will examine the IATI standard in the light of existing CSO and NGO accountability frameworks and self-regulatory mechanisms. It will take into account the particular characteristics of CSOs and NGOs as development and humanitarian assistance actors, as well as the different operating environments that shape CSO responses to demands for greater accountability and transparency. The working group’s primary objective is to encourage the participation of civil society and not-for-profit actors in IATI by developing practical proposals on guidelines and tools to assist CSOs who wish to publish IATI-compatible data. Early priorities include the identification of information that is already being shared or could be reported by CSOs in the short- and medium-term and the development of protocols for exclusions of data where appropriate on privacy or security grounds.
With a range of new development actors at hand, such as China and Brazil, Africa’s position has been strengthened, according to this paper. Africans must decide which partner can best serve their various interests. The authors argue that the European Union (EU) is a good candidate to support capacity in financial administration, regional integration, good governance, and peace and security. To be recognised as such, the EU should stand by its partnership approach and avoid unilateral initiatives towards the continent. However, Africans may perceive EU support as coming at too high a price in terms of values conditionality. In that case, it may choose other partners to rely on. Some applaud an EU move to increase conditionality in its overseas development assistance (ODA). The depth of the euro crisis suggests that after a decade of rising European ODA, the world is now entering a period in which EU ODA will stagnate, though some member states may still manage increases. Further details regarding the Green Climate Fund to cover the costs of climate change also need to be clarified. At some stage Europe, along with other developed parts of the world, will need to meet that obligation. Funding requirements for environmental and other global public goods remains high, but the EU is unlikely to be able to contribute as much as in the past. Old certainties therefore are changing and those who have relied on European support will have little choice but to look elsewhere.
The May 2010 adoption of the World Health Organization Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel created a global architecture, including ethical norms and institutional and legal arrangements, to guide international cooperation and serve as a platform for continuing dialogue on the critical problem of health worker migration. Highlighting the contribution of non-binding instruments to global health governance, this article describes the Code negotiation process from its early stages to the formal adoption of the final text of the Code. Detailed are the vigorous negotiations amongst key stakeholders, including the active role of non-governmental organizations. The article emphasizes the importance of political leadership, appropriate sequencing, and support for capacity building of developing countries¹ negotiating skills to successful global health negotiations. It also reflects on how the dynamics of the Code negotiation process is evidence of an evolution in global health negotiations amongst the WHO Secretariat, civil society, and WHO Member States.
The authors of this study evaluated community-based education and service (COBES) programmes at Makerere University College, Uganda, from a community perspective. A stratified random sample of eleven COBES sites was selected to examine the community’s perception of the programmes. Key informant interviews were held with 11 site tutors and 33 community members. Communities reported that the university students consistently engaged with them with culturally appropriate behavior and rated the student’s communication as very good even though translators were frequently needed. They also reported positive changes in health and health-seeking behaviours but remarked that some programmes were not financially sustainable. The major challenges from the community included community fatigue, and poor motivation of community leaders to continue to take in students without any form of compensation.
Led by the slogan ‘People First, Not Finance’, the People’s Forum held in November raised that the G20’s ‘cosmetic’ economic solutions to the global recession in 2008 would do little to ease the cyclical problems of the financial system, adding that much deeper, structural changes were required to address global inequity. It argued that the G20 will only increase the ‘financialisation’ of this world, instead of fundamentally changing it. The forum raised that social movements ranging from the ‘Occupy’ protests in Wall Street in the United States to the ongoing demonstrations in Tahrir Square need to ‘coordinate, exchange views' towards this deeper structural change.
Globally, increasingly vigilant and vocal civil society groups - important actors in the new multilateralism - are demanding openness, transparency and citizen participation in the discourse and practice of governance, which includes the right to information. This movement is facilitated by new technologies in the form of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and sources like Wikileaks. A new generation of technology-enabled applications and innovations for open government is also being developed in the South. Numerous examples are emerging including the use of mobile phones, SMS (short message service) technologies and web-based platforms for providing feedback on services, reporting on corruption, and accessing services. For example, Global Voices, a virtual organization of bloggers, tracks and shares many of the more innovative applications, emerging in both middle-income and poorer countries. Although the impetus for openness comes from civil society, open government is, at its core, an enterprise of government transformation, the author of this article argues. The author believes that, eventually, citizens will be able to participate actively in the governance ecosystem, but only if governments create the right enabling environment for transparency through appropriate policies and disclosure rules for making information available, and if it creates the kinds of processes that enable citizens to participate in policy making.
This Declaration of Commitment by Speakers of Parliament is based on the resolution to the Speakers from the fifth Session of the Second Pan African Parliament held on 3-14 October 2011, in Midrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, urging speakers of Parliament in the continent to prioritise the implementation of Maternal, Newborn and Child Health programmes with country reports on actions taken. The commitment promises high-level parliamentary support to hasten implementation of the Africa Parliamentary Policy and Budget Action Plan on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, agreed by Chairs of Finance and Budget committees of national parliaments in October 2010.
According to this article, the recent G20 summit in France and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Australia were both noteworthy for the continuing lack of substantive action on financial sector reform, climate negotiations, trade and the reform of international institutions. And the prognoses for the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in South Korea and the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in South Africa - scheduled for November 2011 - suggest more of the same will follow. The author argues that COP-17, originally billed as the People’s COP and the African COP, now appears unlikely to live up to either label. Nor, according to the author, does it appear likely that disagreements on the design of the new Green Climate Fund or on a second commitment phase for the Kyoto Protocol will be resolved in time for the conference. What will it take to break the deadlocks and spur leadership capable of responding to the crises, current and impending? As the 2011 movements in the Middle East and North Africa demonstrated, it is argued that civil society needs to challenge the legitimacy of the institutions charged with global governance and demand their radical overhaul or replacement.