Cooperation and Partnership—Harmonizing the activities of Development Agencies for Poverty Reduction

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After such erudite introductions, there is not a lot to add to open this conference, but let me give you some perceptions from the point of view of the Bank and draw on the admirable comments that were made earlier.

Our starting point at the World Bank has been at the global level where we, as you, have become very much aware that the Millennial Development Goals and our task of achieving them is a very daunting one.  It's very daunting, as President Mkapa said, because we need to integrate not just the provision of funding, but trade and global policies in a way that is likely to give us a chance to be effective.

And also as President Mkapa said, there is a gap, to which he pointed, in terms of the availability of resources that are needed to achieve these Millennial Development Goals and the funding that is already in sight.  We're operating at a level of $50 billion or so a year, and the need is probably somewhere between $100- and $150 billion.

And then we've been told, very correctly, by shareholders in the Bank, and by many of you, and by many of your parliaments that there is no way that more funding is going to be provided, unless we can demonstrate that the monies that are already being used are being used effectively. That is at the core of this meeting--a demonstration of how we are using or not using the monies effectively that are being given to us.

And that involves, of course, many things; many things related, as some of the earlier speakers have said, to the strengthening of the capacity in the governments of the countries themselves because all of us are dependent on the countries to be in the driver's seat and be able to administer and carry forward the programs in those countries.

I don't think any of us is thinking any more about running development programs from Washington or other capitals.  It's very clear that local ownership and participation is central.  And we must, as President Mkapa said, give all of the help that we can in building capacity and giving the assistance that the recipient governments demand.

But when we came to take a look at our own behavior, and rather timorously at the behavior of many of our other partners, we discovered, at least that we, as an institution, were perhaps not as cooperative, not as so minded to partnership, and not as good a listener as perhaps we might be, and so we decided that we would have a personality change, a culture change.

And this was not easy, and it's still not easy, in our organization because what we are now seeking to do is to listen, to simplify, to harmonize, to follow, to lead, to do whatever is necessary in the situation involving development, and we're doing it for very simple and obvious reasons.

As you know, we started to try and collect information on what all of us are doing, and we started an entity called the Gateway which, because it was in the World Bank, was doubted by many, both in this room and in civil society.  So we spun it out so that it could be independent.

But that gateway has been very interesting.  In the last 10 years, we discovered that more than 400,000 projects have been undertaken by the collective international community, and we think that something of the order of 80,000 projects are still going on out there--80,000 projects.

If you go into the Gateway, and you press a country, and you say you're interested in that country's activities in education, you'll probably find that there are 20 or 30 competing or parallel projects which are going on, and certainly in the case of our institution, when we present to our Board the programs that we want to get through the Board, we very rarely mention the other 20 projects that are going on.

On the face of it, this is ridiculous.  We're not cooperating, we're not coordinating, and we're not learning from the experiences of others, and in some cases we're not even learning from our own experience.

So we confronted the very fundamental reality, which was that if we go on the way that we're going, we're really not going to make a hell of a lot of progress.  And so we decided that, as a matter of course, understanding what others were doing, both in the multilateral sector, in the bilateral sector, in civil society and private sector, was an essential prerequisite to effective development.

As we thought of the challenge and the problems of the Millennial Development Goals, we also recognized that our looking at issues on the basis of projects was not adequate because there was a huge need for consistency and time in order to be able to reach the goals that we're seeking.  In fact, in the Millennial Development Goals, we're talking about a 15-year time frame in which we have to keep going.

So the issue of management, the issue of bringing all of this together, the issue of controlling it and the issue of harmonization became, for us, central because we were aware that we certainly couldn't do it alone, and we became very much aware that nobody can do this alone.

So that led to the very obvious conclusion that we had to change, and in the last years we have really tried to do that.  But there is a sense of, there is a perception of all of us about each other which is, unfortunately, quite fixed.  The NGOs think that we're terrible.  We think some of the NGOs are terrible.  Some of you think we're terrible.  Some of us think you're terrible.

[Laughter.]

So, you know, we're getting stuck in these old historic perceptions about each other which are difficult to get through.

And so the first thing is to really say, Listen, guys, there's no way we can do it alone.  Let's come together.  And that means a big culture change for many of us, and central to that is harmonizing our efforts.

At my first meeting of the UNDP, the U.N. agency, I remember the then leader saying that he thought, after I'd been at the Bank and was saying this for a few months, that this was a very constructive thing, and they looked forward to coordinating the activities of the World Bank.

I said, Hold up--

[Laughter.]

I didn't say you could coordinate us.  I said we'd cooperate.

And I guess all of us feel the same way, that none of us want to be coordinated.  We all want to have our own independent views, but we must come together in a way that shows some consistency, shows some harmony and some sense of each other.

And so the first people to have to change is us, and that I guess is the purpose of this meeting; to try and see how we can change in order to make more effective the work of people like President Mkapa and his colleagues on the ground.  And so I think this meeting is incredibly important.  My colleagues will explain to you later some of the changes that we've made, and we will discuss some specific examples of activities where we've worked together.  And I pay tribute to the DEC and OECD Working Group for the enormous advances that they've made.

And I think that we and the regional development banks have also made advances, but what I hope might emerge from this two days of meetings is an understanding of each other, that we are prepared to look at each other with different eyes, that we're prepared to come together that we can set some objectives that will emerge in the final statement that can be practical, can be focused and which we can review a year from now in terms of our achievements and holding ourselves mutually accountable.

Because the last point I'd make is that achieving the Millennial Goals, dependent as it is on each of the countries, from our point of view, is a mutual accountability.  We have tried, under pressure from our shareholders, to evaluate what is the Bank's contribution to the Millennial Goals, and I must tell you it's tough to get a framework of measurement of an individual organization's contributions to the Millennial Goals.

I think we'll be able to get some way to that, but the end result is only going to be our collective achievement in moving towards Millennial Goals, and that means harmonization, and that means coming together.

So my colleagues and I are really thrilled to be part of this meeting.  We look forward to contributing, we look forward to learning, and we look forward to coming out of this meeting with a final statement which will be a statement for action, and for cooperation and partnership.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.