Archive for May, 2011
Monday, May 30th, 2011
Monjurul Kabir
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” We must consider it central to our policy and programming work that human rights contribute to addressing the challenges facing persons with disabilities. There is also a powerful reason for us as UNDP for doing so: it is inextricably linked to our central mandate of human development, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Persons with disabilities are the world’s largest minority, at 10 percent of the world’s population. Studies have shown that around 2.5 billion people around the world are affected by disabilities, their own or that of a family member. Yet persons with disabilities are still one of the most discriminated against and overlooked groups.
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Tags:CIS, discrimination, Europe, Human rights, Monjurul Kabir, people with disabilities
Posted in Development, Human rights, Social inclusion | No Comments »
Monday, May 30th, 2011
Agi Veres
Our current human lifestyle – our production and consumption patterns – is exploiting earth’s natural resources in an unsustainable manner. However, there is a way out of this mess, according to experts at the Roundtable on Climate Change and Development in Slovenia.
The carrying capacity (supporting our human lives) of Earth is between 1.5 and 18 billion people. Yet today we are already 6 billion and predicted to reach 9 billion by 2050. Experts argue that if we all live like Rwanda – one of the least-developed countries with access to the bare minimum of resources, such as energy and water – we can sustain 18 billion people, no problem. However, if we reach the traditional development goals of growth and all aspire to live like the US, experts say the earth can simply not support more than 3 billion. This is only exacerbated by climate change, putting even more pressure on our planet. So what can we do?
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Tags:Agi Veres, CIS, climate change, development, energy, Europe, poverty, resources, Slovenia, UNDP, water
Posted in Climate change, Development, Environment | 3 Comments »
Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Agi Veres
There are many discussions around the “new development paradigm” of sustainable development – the need to promote improvement of people’s life today in a way that doesn’t jeopardize future generations’ ability to also have the same or better quality of life. We have lots of ideas and lots of pilots running, but to have real impact, we need collective action on a larger scale. So how do we get there? The UN can only be a convener and a facilitator. The real work is done by the countries. We can do small steps at a time that will hopefully add up. One of them is the Climate Change and Development Roundtable in Ljubljana, where six Western Balkan countries came together to discuss ways of putting their countries on the path of low-carbon and climate-resilient development.
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Tags:Agi Veres, climate change, Western Balkans
Posted in Climate change, Development | No Comments »
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
Annie Demirjian
I recently came across a thought provoking paper from Lans Pritchett et al. at the Center for Global Development entitled “Capability Traps? The Mechanisms of Persistent Implementation Failure.” The authors focus on what they call “state capability traps”: how is it possible that countries fully engaged in the logic of international development consistently fail to acquire capability? They identify two main reasons for failure: isomorphic mimicry (“the adoption of the forms of other functional states and organizations which camouflages a persistent lack of function”) and “a fundamental mismatch between expectations and the actual capacity of prevailing administrative systems to implement even the most routine administrative tasks.”
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Tags:Annie Demirjian, capacity development, Haiti, institutional development, organizational capacity, public administration, Somalia
Posted in Development, Governance | No Comments »
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Blythe Fraser
I’m sure everybody has seen Hans Rosling on TED. What a great advocate for human development and the Millennium Development Goals!
Everybody here at UNDP’s regional office in Bratislava is excited because TEDx is coming here – to Bratislava!
The neat thing about TED talks is that for eight or so minutes you become completely spellbound by the speakers’ passion and enthusiasm for what they do (everything from the hidden beauty of pollination to engineering the best office chair!).
So it’s a perfect platform for talking about development issues, which people are pretty passionate about already.
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Tags:Andrey Ivanov, Bratislava, human development, TED, TEDx
Posted in Development, Poverty | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
Dan Dionisie
The demise of the Global Intergrity Index has stirred some reactions within the development community.
It is just the latest episode in the trend of international composite indexes being increasingly questioned. There are more and more doubts concerning the usefulness of computing aggregate indicators (that cover complex issues that span over many areas of life, like corruption, integrity, human development and more) for the purpose of country rankings on a linear scale.
I’ll try to add my two cents on this issue. The following considerations only refer to composite indexes; there is much less controversy about ranking countries based on simple one-dimensional measurements like paved roads per square kilometre, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants, or days needed to obtain a business license.
I see two distinct aspects in this debate – one is technical, the other is political.
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Tags:composite index, Dan Dionisie, economic crisis, Francis Fukuyama, human development, transparency
Posted in Anticorruption, Development, Governance | 4 Comments »
Friday, May 13th, 2011
Lyra Jakuleviciene
I led the UNDP office in Lithuania for the last four years – I was 32 back then. This is the highest UN position that you can get as a national staff. And it all started from an internship, when I was given an opportunity to serve as a first Baltic trainee in the regional UNHCR office. Having come back to my country, I worked for the UN since 1997. The internship gave me not only work and life experience in a foreign country, but also lots of self-confidence.
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Posted in Other | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
Monjurul Kabir
One of the issues I discussed with staff from ombudsman offices and national human rights institutions (NRHIs) from Southeast Europe (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo (hereafter referred to in the context of UNSCR 1244), Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia) in last week’s training workshop is how they are addressing the fast development and application of social media and knowledge management 2.0 tools in their daily work. Is it still early for most of the NHRIs in this sub-region, or for Europe and CIS?
As use of social media becomes increasingly mainstream, it is likely to alter the character of rights advocacy and communication around the world, with rights defenders and organizations continuing to refine their online presence and expand their ability to reach a global audience. The Human Rights Commission of Australia embraced social media: It has been an active user of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, You Tube, blogging, and web sites. The Human Rights Commission of New Zealand is using e-mail, an interactive web site, and an online form to receive complaints. The Equality and Human Rights Commission in Britain uses different modes of communication including new and old media. Most mainstream human rights advocates and campaigners now make good use of social media as an integral part of their outreach. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Witness are among the internationally recognized advocacy and research organizations now using Twitter to share information and calls to action. Interestingly, it seems that Amnesty International is looking into the same issues as it explores the future of human rights activism.
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Tags:advocacy, Arab spring, Facebook, Flickr, Human rights, Monjurul Kabir, outreach, people with disabilities, social media, Twitter, Youtube
Posted in Development 2.0, Governance, Human rights, Social inclusion | 3 Comments »
Monday, May 9th, 2011
Patrick Gremillet
As the UN’s global development network, UNDP is, at any one time, involved in over 6,000 development projects in over 160 countries around the world. UNDP uses programmes and projects as the structures within which it plans and conducts work with national governments. Managing and delivering results in development projects is, therefore, at the heart of UNDP’s mission, and UNDP is an experienced project management organization.
UNDP has developed various tools and checklists to assess the implementation capacity of its national partners. But what about UNDP’s own capacity? The assumption is that programme and project management is at the core of what we do, but can we objectively demonstrate our competency and effectiveness in this area?
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Tags:development, maturity models, Patrick Gremillet, PRINCE2, RBM, results based management
Posted in Development | 7 Comments »
Friday, May 6th, 2011
Annie Demirjian
Twice in the last few weeks (thanks to The Economist and the Global Integrity Report) we have been reminded that corruption in countries in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is on the rise. The headline of the Economist read ‘corruption has replaced communism as the scourge of Eastern Europe’. This is after much media and public fanfare that many Eastern European countries who joined the EU, and those who are aspiring to join it, were building transparent and accountable institutions and are on their way to full democracies.
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Tags:Annie Demirjian, CIS, corruption, Eastern Europe, EU
Posted in Anticorruption, Governance | 1 Comment »
