ICT: Is it helping Mexico?

by Steve Markham

I’m from Mexico and I graduated from Georgetown University in 1991 when a BS in computer science was the only available high tech degree. ICT related careers are now available at most universities in the US and most other countries—including Mexico. So what has this cadre of techies in Mexico done to help a country that, according to several UN and World Bank reports, is still haunted by severe income distribution problems, poverty and corruption?

Mexico now offers highly specialized technical degrees and has many capable programmers, web designers, and computer engineers who have been able to garner the momentum of the internet. Mexico has used ICT successfully to compete in the private sector, but this generation of techies is still looking for a way to use ICT to address the social ills mentioned above. Today’s generation is computer savvy and has the potential to use web 2.0, as a first step, to create greater transparency. However I haven’t seen it reach a stage where ICT is helping to deinstitutionalize corruption by creating greater transparency through online social networks. Maybe the success in the private sector has helped with income distribution problems by creating more high paying jobs, but these jobs will not go to the best candidates or create a stable economy as long as the other problems remain deeply entrenched.

Development Gateway supports a country gateway for Mexico.

Putting on a human face

by Elizabeth Corley

Last week we met in person with one of the co-hosts of the Open Development camp, Sameer Vasta. He’s been hired as the social media strategist for the World Bank—a man whose job entails putting a human face on a large bureaucratic institution.

One step in his strategy was to start a blog to explore the intersection of the Web and the World Bank. I particularly like his Friday reading list posts.

http://blogs.worldbank.org/insidetheweb/

We’re trying to put a human face on Development Gateway. The task is not so daunting for an organization with fewer than 100 staff. One of our strengths is our diversity; we have an interesting mix of development practitioners and IT programmers. Headquartered in DC, we have a corporate office in Brussels and two satellite offices in Africa. Programmers are based in Argentina, Armenia, Georgia, Romania, and Ukraine. This blog is intended in part to serve as window into the organization, one which allows others to view the many facets of Development Gateway.

Like a Cubist painting, we want to show you various perspectives at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach reflects how we work together as team to provide services to our stakeholders.

To shine a light on aid, standardize the info

by Emily Kallaur

There’s a lot of buzz about open source software these days. This week The Economist declared that open source has “won the argument” and is now well respected as an alternative to proprietary software. Openness, it seems, is victorious.

However, the article points out a new threat to openness—that a lack of common data standards will make it difficult for organizations to migrate their data from one system to another. This brings to mind the discussions around the International Aid Transparency Initiative and the need for a common standard for aid information.

There’s a lot of data out there on aid-funded projects and programs. It resides in many types of systems—global databases like AiDA, country systems like the Aid Management Platform, and plenty of other specialized sites. Without a common language for these systems to talk to each other, it’s not possible to aggregate, disaggregate, and compare the information. And that makes it harder to answer the critical question: in development, which approaches work and which don’t?

Countries interpret the global economic crisis

by Emily Kallaur

Although the effects of the global economic crisis are being felt around the world, it’s interesting to hear how different the impact has been from country to country. A conference I attended recently brought together financial management professionals from the public, private, and non-profit sectors to share country perspectives.

In the developed world, the crisis has prompted people to question their most basic assumptions about the roles of governments and markets. There is a sense that there has been a fundamental and permanent shift and that capitalism will never be the same again. This has also created a window of opportunity for dramatic policy reform.

Listening to colleagues from developing countries, I had the impression that although the effect of the crisis has been large, its implications have been more mundane. Export revenues have fallen. Some are worried that development assistance could decline. Many countries are anxious to diversify their economies away from dependence on oil, tourism, or a single commodity like tobacco.

But there wasn’t an overwhelming sense that these problems are fundamentally different in nature from problems faced in the past. Reforms have been underway for some time and implementation of those reforms continues to be relevant.

There is, on the other hand, a more skeptical attitude toward policies recommended by the countries that created the crisis.

Enough of aid ineffectiveness

by Anna Lauridsen

In a recent communication, the EC predicts that the cost of not fully implementing the Accra Agenda for Action adopted in 2008 may amount to as much as € 5 to € 7 billion euro a year until 2015. Such a figure is not only mindboggling, but also utterly indefensible. In the current climate of economic and financial downturn, resources are scarce in both the so called developed, as in the developing, world. Subsequently such a loss of the total EU aid budget due to “aid ineffectiveness” is unlikely to go down well with either the European taxpayers or the aid recipient countries.

Despite the billions of euro that are potentially lost, the Triple Fs, in other words, the three crises: food, fuel and finance, have resulted in calls for increased levels of development aid from the donors. As most governments were already failing to fulfill the target of committing 0,7% of their countries' GDP to Official Development Assistance, even before these financially sour times washed over the globe as a giant tsunami, it is unlikely that aid levels will increase.

One may even be so bold as to ask whether more money is really the answer or if it would merely be a way of throwing money at the problem. If the financial crisis has taught us anything it must be that good management is key, and something which has been lacking for a long while. Why not take advantage of the current situation to look over the regulations and management tools ruling the aid industry (for it is an industry of proportions) just as we are imposing similar demands on the banking and financial systems? Progress has been made; big summits have been held and declarations signed (for instance, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the AAA, and the IATI. Now is the time to take it one step further and put them into practice. That way, we could avoid wasting taxpayer’s money and make sure it reaches those it was intended for.