Interview with UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) opened its first African regional service centre in Johannesburg on Friday.

UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown, who opened the centre, spoke to IRIN about the Southern African Capacity Initiative (SACI), which will work to overcome the continent's loss of skills to HIV/AIDS in key areas such as agriculture, health and education, and will be run from the centre. Brown also spoke about the Millennium Development Goals and new approaches to tackling the developmental challenges of the region.

QUESTION: How successful has the Southern Africa Capacity Initiative (SACI) been in the nine countries of the region?

ANSWER: It's early days - it's just starting; it's a strategic idea, not particularly an original one.

We may be winning the battle to secure more resources. UNDP has been in the lead with the Millennium project ... with the argument that with the right kind of investment, even countries which are currently very poor ... by 2015 will make dramatic progress towards the Millennium goals. [The] poverty trap, which has to be overcome, can be overcome with the right kind of capacity.

This immediately raises the question, 'is there the capacity to use the resources?' And nowhere is the question more acute than in Southern Africa, where you have the prospect of aid going up and capacity coming down because of the impact of AIDS on the skilled labour force. Not so much South Africa but the neighbours face emigration of skilled workers, which is eroding governance. It makes capacity the new frontier in terms of development, not only in this region, but globally.

SACI is about capacity building. The old idea of capacity building was built around the old British style of ministers and departments, where services are delivered from the national level to the communities ... what we are seeing - and, again, South Africa is the exception - [is that] the loss of skilled manpower has accelerated an already present trend.

The [old] model is failing; it is not delivering services - education, healthcare, let alone rural infrastructure, market development ... the kind of things people might expect from government to make their lives better, particularly in the rural areas.

So, what is the vision of capacity that overcomes that? Firstly, it is a democratic vision. It is a very simple view that UNDP has taken, principally from our advisor, Amartya Sen, which is: when the poor have a political voice - a vote - things immediately start to get better for them. We have taken it a stage further; we strongly believe in a decentralised service, where poor people have control over the local schools, health clinic.

[Once that happens] the transformation of the quality of service is amazing all over the world - big countries, poor countries, middle-income, low-income and even within countries like India, where, in some parts education is very decentralised, the schools function; in other parts of India, where the schools are centralised, the classrooms are empty - the teachers are moonlighting.

The second part of the vision is building partnerships between government, civil society and the private sector. We are moving into an era when things we traditionally expect to be provisioned by the government are being provisioned by a mix of partners.

Quite recently I visited the Lilongwe hospital in Malawi and saw a very overwhelmed public facility: not enough medicines; not enough doctors, just chaotic - a struggling, wonderful director, but overwhelmed. A portion of the hospital has been leased out to a civil society project called the Lighthouse project, which is an outpatient treatment for HIV/AIDS patients. The level of organisation, service, the quality of treatment, is utterly different. By running a very effective outpatient [service, the NGO] is preventing a number of people from ending up in the public hospital.

What you are seeing, without so much government intervention, is a redrawing of lines - public institutions being replaced by civil society and a network of international civil society. So we are going to see a reinvention of boundaries between government and civil society, where government will still be responsible for standards etc., but it is going to rely much more on civil society as a partner in implementation ... I look at these kinds of factors changing the nature of government in the region.

What we wanted to do with this initiative [SACI] was, 'Okay, there is all this fascinating change going on - how can we support it?' ... I saw by forming this initiative we could attract a lot of international support. If we are able to say to international donors, training institutions and others, who lend support to this capacity building: 'Look, we have this framework, through which we can channel your support, link you up with partners, through who you can help them in their training efforts locally'. So we see it [SACI] as a huge clearinghouse - a strategising centre as to how to bring together capacity strategies.

Q: Is it all going to happen through the UNDP's new regional Southern Africa office [in Johannesburg]?

A: It is going to happen at the country offices, but this [the regional office] is where everything gets traded, organised, systemised and pushed out to the country in response to what the governments want. The old UNDP model was: distant headquarters in New York and country offices left on their own; they were like countries of the region, with very little exchange, and I am very consciously - as a kind of a management strategy in UNDP - saying, this is where we wanted to concentrate our intellectual capital - at the subregional level.

We are planning to do a similar centre in Dakar [Senegal]; we have done one in Bratislava for central Europe, in Bangkok for Southeast Asia; after this there will be one in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for south Asia; there is a smaller one in the south Pacific to cover the Pacific islands; later we will do the Middle East and Latin America.

The idea is [that] you can get this critical mass of expertise on political governance, post-conflict, HIV/AIDS. The other areas we look at are our core areas and tailor them to our region. We can offer a kind of support which a country office with one lonely expert [can not]... [the regional centre] works as a team; they support each other, develop best practice. At the same time we have created these sub-regional hubs [the centres].

It has created an incredibly interesting dynamic, intellectual community within the UNDP around these issues, which to me is the most exciting change in the organisation. Five years or so ago, our vision of ourselves was a mundane one of cheque writing: we financed projects; the skills of the organisation were about processing the recruitment of consultants, or the procurement of goods for the projects. Instead, we have decided to become an intellectual organisation, which is contributing [to] our central idea of capacity building and good governance. These are the challenges that the developing world is facing and you know the vision of democratic capacity and governance - it touches on political institutions, it also touches on effectiveness in poverty reduction, environmental management and HIV/AIDS.

Q: Almost all of the Southern African countries are unlikely to achieve their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 ...

A: You are probably right, but not necessarily. We have 10 years to go until 2015. In a space of time rather longer than that, China lifted a number of people out of poverty equivalent to the whole number in sub-Saharan Africa, which is 300 million. So if we did half of that in the next 10 years, we could actually meet the goal.

Now is that likely? Certainly not likely, but possible. We have developed this argument for the Millennium Project, to be launched next month, which is a counterpart to this panel on security reform. [The project] is saying, 'Look, security reform is rich man's security, the MDGs are poor man's security'. The UN needs to champion both and, probably ultimately, do a deal between these two agendas - a grand bargain, as we sometimes call it.

What we argue is: where countries sometimes have the right policies, [they may not have the resources]... In the so-called Asian miracle, what one observed was the government got a lot more efficient and effective and allowed space for the private sector, but then ... because of the basic wealth of these countries, it was able to deploy the wealth to human development and education. Education, particularly, is utterly key to the economic success of that region. It is a 10- to 20-year investment, getting every kid in Korea, Malaysia into school, [which] has driven the human capital to economic success.

Africa, in our view, is moving along the track of much better institutions and policies - better than it has had in any of our lifetimes, frankly. Yet, with the exception of South Africa and Nigeria, maybe, Africa does not, in general, have the resources available to spend its own way out of the poverty trap, the way southeast Asia could.

So what we see is a strategy of substituting international public investment in the absence of domestic capital in these key sectors, such as health and education. So we are proposing, in most of this region, as part of an overall doubling of ODA (Official Development Assistance) in spending on basic services, such health and education, which would triple in the next few years in per capita terms.

We think if that happens - and if it is combined with the development of basic infrastructure, such as rural roads, encouragement of a private sector, allowing informal businesses to grow into a stronger, smaller medium-size enterprises, access capital and all the rest - even in 10 years a dramatic transformation is available. You are not starting from scratch; you are starting from 10 hard years of institutional and economic reforms.

South Africa has [finance minister] Trevor Manuel, there is a new team in Malawi, Zambia - all these countries have much better quality governments than they have had in a very long time, if ever. So now, if we could put some capital in, we could see some very dramatic results. If you look at some of the resource-rich countries in Africa - unfortunately, with the exception of South Africa, resources have co-related with poor governance: Obasanjo [president of Nigeria] is struggling manfully to reform a government whose very weakness is a consequence of oil-wealth - it is not obvious that more resources translate into growth and success.

Since September 11, aid has moved from being a low-priority, relatively marginal area of western governments' spending to an enormously important part of how western governments secure their own economic and political futures. It is an effort to invest in a more harmonious and prosperous world, which will allow their own companies to go on growing and to avert a kind of world where the West feels beleaguered by illegal immigration, the export of health hazards, such as HIV or SARS, economic contraction because developing country markets have seized up and not grown. There is a sense in the chancery and prime ministers' offices in the West that a really big-scale strategic push against poverty is now absolutely essential.