Re: Response to Richard Feachem's letter (2)
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Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for posting the message from Richard Stern and Emily Bass[http://eforums.healthdev.org/read/messages?id=4831]. There is something fundamentally wrong with the official relief and development assistance (ORDA) community of which GFATM is a part. The GFATM had a chance to be different, but it was taken over early in its life by the same mindset that has failed in general economic development, and now is failing in the urgent health crisis and the AIDS, TB and malaria pandemic.

A number of us tried to get the GFATM (pre-Feachem) to embrace transparency and accountability and to really know what was going on with the funds. In the corporate world we call it management information, and it is used to make the corporation more efficient and effective. Instead GFATM adopted the extremely clumsy approach of the UN, World Bank and donors where they study and analyze the proposals, approve or disapprove of the proposal, and then disburse. To their credit they identified the need for something on the ground, and they have local fund agents who are meant to provide something useful in terms of accountability, but as far as I have been able to learn, they do nothing much at all. They certainly do not make it easy to get useful information about GFATM fund performance. I am told, however, that they cost some 42% of the GFATM admin budget, which does not surprise me given the names of the organizations that have been given the job (Crown Agents, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, UNOPS are three of the organizations).

I am not at all surprised by the feedback from Richard Stern and Emily Bass.

It is pretty much the same story in a lot of places around the world. Or worse.

Bottom line is that probably a huge amount of the GFATM disbursements are being misappropriated. The methods will be quite sophisticated. For the past 20 or 30 years the ORDA community has responded to misappropriation in a very gentle way, never with the forcefulness required. This is grand larceny at best and could even be considered mass murder. Stealing resources intended to save lives is, in my view, accessory to murder.

The ORDA community has little or no idea how to manage and control resources. As a result they have set the stage for massive misappropriation.

I often ask the question why the ORDA community keeps asking for more money, when they could do ten times as much good it they used what there is in an efficient manner and stopped the leakage. When there is effectiveness and there is no leakage, then it is time to crank up to much bigger fund flows.

There is a huge crisis ... it is not going away ... and the ORDA community is still in its failed mode of "business as usual". It's a crime.

I am perfectly prepared to be critical of the ORDA community and its accounting. I am an experienced accountant, I know a lot about corporate accounting and a lot about accounting in the UN system, the World Bank and in Government.

The quality of the accounting is a disgrace, but the leadership of these organizations do not have experience themselves in this field, and most of their staff have no experience either. It is the blind being advised by the blind and it is no surprise that the money goes missing. The big question is how many people are actually happy that good accounting does not exist in the ORDA world?

Sincerely

Peter Burgess
Transparency and Accountability
a global not-for-profit Network
peterbnyc@gmail.com
Tel:               212 772 6918       
Profitinafrica@aol.com