Category: Uncategorized

15–17 June 2013
BRAC Centre for Development Management, Dhaka, Bangladesh

The Commonwealth Foundation in partnership with BRAC are hosting a Partners’ Forum in the wings of the 10th Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministerial Meeting (10WAMM) in Dhaka, Bangladesh this June.

Participants will include Ministers and other Senior Officials and representatives from civil society, academia, the private sector, youth groups and donor agencies.

Under the theme ‘Women’s Leadership for Enterprise’, the Partners’ Forum will focus on: sharing good practices, both local and international, on women’s empowerment and leadership in business and enterprise; women leadership for enterprises in developing countries and opportunities from developed nations; and building South-to-South solidarity.

Advance registration is essential:
International & Regional participants – GBP 120.00 
Bangladeshi participants – BDT 2,500.00

Registration now open: http://www.brac.net/10wpf 

What about the next 999?

April 2014 marked 1,000 days until the start of the post 2015 Millennium Development Goal world. Over recent days and months, the organs of the United Nations, governments, civil society and elements of the private sector, have been pooling data, conducting analysis, modelling, strategising, meeting, networking, and debating to answer two big questions: Were the MDGs useful and if so how can we make whatever comes next, better?

It is right that time and energy is put into a thorough process of review, but voices from the South are asking: ‘What about now?’  Scarce airtime has been given to the next 999 days and what we hope to see accomplished before this 2015 watershed.

With this in mind the Commonwealth Foundation, in partnership with the United Nations Millennium Campaign asked civil society organisations in 14 countries where they would like to see emphasis placed in the coming months to have the greatest impact. These organisations covered a broad spectrum of sectors but they had one thing in common: they weren’t associated with the established voices (whether from multi-lateral organisations or international non-governmental organisations) that have dominated the post-2015 discourse.

Civil society organisations, especially in the Caribbean and Pacific have had little interaction with the MDGs framework over the last 13 years. Unlike their colleagues from larger multinational NGOs, the frame of their work is shaped by the imperative to meet immediate needs and is influenced directly by national and international factors. In this environment they voiced concern that global agenda-setting would take centre stage, literally at the expense of action needed now. They warned of stagnation in development while we grapple with getting what comes next, right.

In attempting to take stock of what remains to be done before 2015, it’s reasonable to ask – how have we done? Yet civil society organisations are pointing out that after 13 years of focused coordinated development, this is a near impossible task due to out-dated, inaccurate, biased and over-aggregated data. This lack of reliable, timely information has made identifying and targeting interventions and exercising accountability harder.

The research we’ve done shows that civil society organisations) recognise the opportunity this period of political buy-in offers to improve the broader development architecture. They identified a number of areas of strategic importance that would enable progress and guard against regression. 

There is immediate concern about the prevailing economic climate and increasing unemployment especially among young people with recognition that the economic downturn has the potential to unravel progress made over the last decade. Small island states, with structural trade disadvantages and high rates of migration have felt the effects of the economic downturn most acutely. Here, civil society organisations are calling for a progressive growth-orientated economic policy with investment in infrastructural projects; specifically roads and housing. This, they argue, must be coupled with adult education and vocational training programmes, and access to credit to stimulate small business. For these organisations, investment in setting minimum living standards to provide a social safety net is an imperative means of complementing progress on specific goals.  

In appreciation of progress made over the last 13 years, civil society is pushing for increased investment in the education and health sectors. But, the big message is that if the previous gains are not to be wasted, the MDGs urgently need to be translated from the global abstract to the well-formed national context, where it is more likely that development strategies have been formulated with the participation of civil society. 

With 999 days remaining it surely makes sense to mobilise all talents and capacities in one final push. The last 13 years has shown that governments can’t do it all on their own, so ways and means need to found to fully integrate civil society organisations in shaping strategy, delivering outputs and monitoring progress. Greater attention must be paid to enable civil society to play a more integral role. This includes: creating the legal and regulatory frameworks for the inclusion of civil society organisations in national development plans as partners for example by institutionalising the right to information.  

In parallel, there is an urgent need to enhance the capacity of civil society organisations to coordinate with each other and cooperate with those outside the sector. This can be done quickly, through the improvement of the structures for civil society – government interaction, and adequate resourcing for civil society, based on established need rather than government direction or donor desires.

The potential tragedy of this moment is that the last days of the MDGs see a split between those focused on what should come next and those rightly concerned with what needs to be done now. The soundings that we’ve taken from civil society organisations in the global South indicate that these two discourses are not mutually exclusive. There are practical steps that can be taken now that will provide the foundations of a better post-2015 landscape.  

The 10WAMM Partners’ Forum is organised by the Commonwealth Foundation in partnership with BRAC, in collaboration with the Government of Bangladesh and the Commonwealth Secretariat. Representatives of key national and regional organisations have also provided formal input into the planning of the Forum.

About BRAC

Spreading solutions born in Bangladesh to 10 other countries around the world – BRAC is a global leader to alleviate poverty by empowering the poor, and helping them to bring about positive changes in their lives by creating opportunity for the world’s poor. It works with a holistic development approach geared toward inclusion, using tools like microfinance, education, healthcare, legal services, community empowerment, gender justice and more. BRAC now touches the lives of an estimated 126 million people, with staff and BRAC-trained entrepreneurs numbering in the hundreds of thousands, a global movement bringing change to 11 countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. www.brac.net/

Partners’ Forum Design Committee

Organisations across the globe are contributing to the designing of the 10WAMM Partners’ Forum. These organisations are working both at the national and international level. 

Women Empowerment Literacy and Development Organisation (WELDO), Pakistan

Caribbean Policy Development Centre, Barbados

Women in Law and Development in Africa (WilDAF)

Naripokkho, Bangladesh

Steps Towards Development, Bangladesh

Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BWCCI)

Ministry of Women & Children Affairs, Government of Bangladesh 

Ricken Patel, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Avaaz
‘Opportunity through Enterprise’

Tuesday 12 March 2013, 6.30pm
Guildhall, Gresham Street, London EC2V 7HH

The 16th Commonwealth Lecture was delivered by Ricken Patel, founding President and Executive Director of Avaaz. In the magnificent setting of the Guildhall in the heart of the City of London, Ricken spoke on the 2013 Commonwealth Theme: ‘Opportunity through Enterprise’.

Avaaz is a global campaigning movement which has rapidly grown since 2007 into the largest online activist community in the world at 20 million members in all 194 countries. “Avaaz” means “voice” in many languages, and has a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.

Ricken was in Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Top Global Thinkers in 2012. He was named a ‘Young Global Leader’ by the Davos World Economic Forum and was listed ‘Ultimate Gamechanger in Politics’ by Huffington Post.

Click here for images

The Commonwealth Foundation facilitated a meeting of civil society organisations working on gender in February, 2013.

This took place ahead of the annual meeting of the Commonwealth Gender Plan of Action Monitoring Group (CGPMG), held in the wings of the UN’s 57th session on the Commission on the Status of Women, in March, 2013.

The meeting reviewed the experience of the four civil society representatives on the CGPMG, the 10th Women’s Affairs Ministerial Meeting Partners’ Forum, held in Dhaka, Bangladesh in June 2103 and looked at how civil society could contribute to the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Gender Plan of Action End Term Review.

The meeting was held in New York City on 28 February, 2013 and was open to civil society to attend.

National consultations for the post-2015 MDG agenda project, Commonwealth Perspectives are nearing completion. The last in the series takes place in Samoa from 21-24 January.

The Foundation will then finalise all 14 national reports and have first drafts of cross-cutting thematic articles ready for the ‘Advancing the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda’ civil society meeting on 20 March in Bonn, Germany and the UN High Level Panel meeting in Bali, Indonesia at the end of March. The aim of the national consultations is to validate and enhance a series of preliminary reports on civil society experience in contributing to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

With 13 consultations complete initial findings are varied. Consultations in Africa have revealed that the MDGs are an integral part of common discourse between government, civil society and the private sector, whereas in the Caribbean MDGs appear not to have taken hold as a mainstream framework. A consistent message from across the Commonwealth has been that greater civil society input is needed in the formulation of new structures to reach development goals, and also that these structures facilitate a closer working relationship between government, civil society and the private sector.

National consultations took place between 10 December 2012 and 21 January 2013 as the second phase of the Commonwealth Perspectives project. The Commonwealth Foundation collaborated with 14 national partners to review civil society’s experiences of contributing to the Millennium Development Goals.

The Commonwealth Foundation, in partnership with the UN Millennium Campaign supported country-level research by civil society organisations to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals in 14 countries: Cameroon, Ghana, Grenada, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Pakistan, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda and Zambia.

The consultations validated and enhanced the findings of a series of preliminary national reports, which were then collated into a global report along with thematic articles exploring common issues emerging from the national research including possible key issues that could be considered at regional level. The global report was published in September 2013.

Where lessons can be drawn from the research, these will be captured as policy recommendations and disseminated to the wider development community for policy formulation and advocacy in the various global processes focusing on the post-MDG agenda and will be used at the country level to undertake national advocacy.

The Commonwealth Perspectives project has focused on reviewing national experiences of civil society involvement in MDG policy formulation, implementation and delivery, and monitoring. The research aimed to address four sets of questions: (1) civil society analysis on progress towards MDGs; (2) usefulness and opportunities of the MDG framework for CSOs; (3) contribution of CSOs to the MDGs attainment; and (4) key lessons learned from the MDG experience for the post-2015 development agenda.