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Zach Hongola

Message in connection with the B-Team, and how metrics were gamed in the UN, World Bank and by National Donors

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

I started doing work with the World Bank and UNDP in the 1980s after a pretty successful corporate career helping to improve profit performance. With the World Bank and UNDP I learned a lot about what poverty and deprivation looked like, and how the corporate business model was not going to be very effective in solving these problems with the management tools and especially metrics in use for corporate decision making.

In my view the best accountability tool in the UN system was the Development Cooperation Report (DCR) ... a product of the Development Cooperation Analysis System (DCAS) that was produced annually for each country in the UNDP system. This report identified all the projects in a country being financed with international assistance and was prepared 'in country' where the projects were being implemented.

I am old accountant ... and a tool in my background is a 'reconciliation'. I tried to reconcile the DCR projects being implemented with the OECD data which is built up from what the donor countries say they are doing. In theory these two things should be the same ... but, surprises, surprise, the differences were huge.

In the early 1990s UNDP introduced the Human Development Report (HDR) and ended the production of the DCRs. I have asked over and over again why the DCRs were discontinued but have not obtained any answer. My conclusion is that in the 4 year funding arrangements at around that time countries like France. Sweden, the UK and the USA and maybe others donor countries pressed for the DCR to be discontinued as a condition of their ongoing funding of the UNDP ... and why would that be ... simply put, the DCR gave beneficiary countries that enabled them to have some ability to hold donor countries accountable for what they were and were not doing with respect to development assistance.

Around that time I was part of a 3 man team organized by UNDP to put together the first development plan for Namibia after its independence in 1991. The donor conference held in New York was one of the most successful ever ... but then the funds did not materialize! I was brought in to serve as the Acting Aid Coordinator for the Government of Namibia and got a fast lesson in the ways of the donors but seen from the beneficiary country perspective.

Fast forward ... I have been around the block. Metrics are extremely powerful but almost everyone in power wants to be in control of the metrics and be in a position to game them or spin them to their own benefit. This is dangerous. It was dangerous before computers were invented and now is multi-million times more dangerous.

Honestly ... I don't get the impression that most people in the UN system, the World Bank, in the NGO world and indeed in the business world have much of an understanding how the numbers are being gamed for the benefit of .... those that are in control of the system.

Did you read my recent essay ... if not here is the link again. http://www.truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/MDIA/TVM-Short-Introduction-to-7D-Capitalism-and-MDIA-141212a.pdf

The quantification of everything that matters is the key ... using something like a standard cost in cost accounting. This is the next big step in the MDIA system and with this it will become possible for initiatives like the GRI, IR, SASB and others to have a rigor that for the present is eluding them.

Exciting times ... and very high stakes

Peter