It wasn't me!

I love the word accountability. I love how it conveys such gravitas, being packed with so many syllables and all, and yet is a rather loosely used term with rather indefinable borders. Case in point- accountability in the world of development.
At a side-event during the UN MDG Summit, one highly passionate gentleman stood up and launched into a diatribe on what he called the hypocrisy of the donor countries. He was livid that donor countries routinely blame partner countries for not being accountable to the commitments that were made, when, in fact, the donor countries themselves don’t live up to their own aid commitments. While the man had a point, I grew more interested in the whole idea of accountability. It got me thinking about what accountability really means.

At the micro-level, it’s pretty simple. When in school, you’re accountable for your grades, and you’re accountable to your parents. If your grade slips, so do your evening privileges. When you grow up and get a job, you’re accountable to your boss. If you don’t get the job done, it’s the door for you. Plain as cheese. Everything about micro-level accountability makes sense to us. However, things start to get a lot more nebulous when you reach accountability at the national level. For example, is Barack Obama responsible for the financial mess that the US is in? Or should the blame be appended to George Bush? Or does the malaise go all the way back to Reagan? Or would the current crisis had happened irrespective of who was pushing papers in the Oval Office? Where does the buck really stop? One thing is certain though; whom these presidents are accountable to- their people, the American people, who get the opportunity to keep their leaders honest, at least come election season. Alas, in global health and development, even this facility is lost.

Essentially, there are three stakeholders in the world of global development. There are the donors, who hold the money; the partner (or recipient countries, as the politically incorrect would call them), who need the money, and the delivery agencies, who spend the money. Several times a year, these three groups come together and declare their need to fulfill the commitments that have been made in the past. There is acceptance on the part of the donor countries that more aid needs to be given; there is acceptance by the partner countries that they need to allocate more resources to health and that they aren’t doing enough; and there is acceptance by the delivery organizations that the aid needs to be more effectively and efficiently used. What’s important, though, is to understand how these groups or actors interpret their responsibilities once they take their flights back home.

Each donor country has the best of intentions at heart. I’m sure that when the commitments are made, each intends to honor that commitment. However, fiscal realities are fiscal realities. In the event of financial hard times, of the kind that we are seeing at the moment, there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the donor governments stay true to their commitments. The only entity a donor government is really accountable to is its own electorate. As far as I remember, no election has ever been lost because the government did not honor their international commitments. In fact, the overwhelming incentive is for the government to renege on their international commitments, and instead divert those resources toward their own people which would, no doubt, yield greater electoral success. It’s no surprise then, that international donor commitments have not been fulfilled. If anything, I’m surprised that the donors have actually put as much money out there as they have.

This is all the more surprising when you consider the negative reinforcement that they have been subjected to by the other parties at the negotiating table. The partner countries have hardly lived up to their own commitments. The Abuja Declaration which committed African nations to allocate 15% of their national budgets to health has been implemented by fewer countries than one would like to admit. This is only one of a series of failed promises that partner countries have made to the international community. Yet, in the true sense of the term, partner countries are hardly accountable to their people on their commitments to the international community. Of course, the fulfillment of these commitments would make for, in theory, a more favorable result for the incumbent government in elections; but how many developing countries actually function as vibrant democracies? Too often, governments in developing countries are elected to power not based on their ability to govern effectively, but by the strength of their clan or religious affiliations. No partner government fears being toppled because they didn’t honor international commitments.

Finally, we arrive at the plate of the delivery organizations. These are the entities that spend the money that the donor organizations put into the basket. It includes the policy think-tanks and the implementation bodies. The billions of dollars that makes the world of international development go round passes through their hands. They determine the agendas, design the policies and implement the programs. In effect, they are the ones responsible for ensuring that the aid money is used most effectively and takes the world towards the MDGs. With the dismal performance on a number of the MDGs, it’s evident that we, the “middle” organizations haven’t been doing our job very well. In a corporate setting, heads would have been rolling all over the place; and yet, we haven’t been held accountable to our role in this entire machinery of world-changing significance. In his speech to the UN General Assembly, President Obama said that the international community cannot continue doing things the old way; and, yet, I fear that is how it’s going to be.

It’s going to be that way because our collective accountability is to the weakest stakeholder of all. Our collective accountability is to the 7 year old girl who has no access to education or any form of empowerment. Our accountability is to the pregnant woman who contracted HIV from an abusive male partner. Our accountability is to the poor man who has too much malaria and hunger to worry about global commitments. Our prime stakeholders cannot speak for themselves. They are not in a position to hold us accountable, and perhaps that’s the reason why we, as an international community, take our commitments less seriously than we ought to. Our commitments must be real, they must be enforceable, and our accountability must be tangible and incentive-driven. Much can be suggested about how this can be done. Rather than expounding on those in this post, I’d rather lead you to look at it from another perspective, the perspective that tells us that we are accountable to future generations. The people of the world to come will look back at us and judge us by our performance, and for us to know how we will be judged, we have some wise words from Mahatma Gandhi, “The greatness of a society can be measured by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable.”