Dear Colleagues, I ought to be pleased that someone with the stature of George Soros is talking about transparency and suggesting that it can alleviate poverty. But frankly, it is not such a big deal unless there is a significant pick up of the idea by a whole lot of corporate, government and relief and development assistance (RDA) leadership. And so far, there has been not much practical change by the big organizations.
The issues of corruption, inappropriate corporate behavior and mismanagement of resources have been around for a long time, maybe indeed for ever. But the scale of economic enterprise of various sorts is now much larger than in the past and the economic distortion caused by a whole range of inappropriate behaviors is far bigger and far more damaging than in past decades. What I find so distressing is that the cost of technology that can help in delivering excellence in accounting has dropped by maybe a factor of one million since the beginning of my career...yet accounting, transparency and accountability are worse now than years back. This is ALL about leadership and the ethics of our modern society. It is time for change, and we can make change happen. I welcome the observations of George Soros, and the initiatives he described, but a lot more is needed. There is a huge need for accountability...it is missing almost everywhere. Organizational leadership seems intent on avoiding transparency and accountability, and to the extent that organizational leadership won't do what needs to be done, then it will have to be done externally rather than internally. There is enough information now in the public domain to be able to build a systemic framework that will make fund flow information much easier to access and understand. It is already apparent that there are some organizations doing amazing work with few resources, and conversely it is becoming clearer and clearer that other organizations consume a lot of scarce resources without doing that much of tangible value. As more and more information is compiled and organized, it is going to be interesting to see which organizations are effective and those that are not. In the relief and development assistance (RDA) community, it is interesting to compare performance from the donor perspective and the beneficiary community perspective. Most poor communities get NOTHING tangible from the official relief and development assistance (ORDA) resource flows...and this is playing out right now in the SE Asia tsunami affected areas and in a lot of places around the world, especially in Africa. There is a lot of talk about much more money for ORDA activities in order to end poverty. It seems to me that first we should do a far better job of getting the existing fund flows to be used significantly more effectively. Management information for RDA is a wonderful way to use ICT. Organized information about great community based activities will help to "benchmark" the activities of the big ORDA organizations and show how costly simple things become when they are done using the prevailing ORDA methodologies. By using "standard costing" we can get a much better idea of the huge value generated by unpaid volunteers and community workers. By understanding corporate value chains we can identify the value destruction in the host communities and countries while super-wealth is being generated for foreign shareholders. There is a lot of work to be done...but it is getting interesting. Peter Burgess Transparency and Accountability a global not-for-profit Network [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: 212 772 6918 ___________ Kris Dev - Tr-Ac-Net in Chennai India [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Tr-Ac-Net.blogspot.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
