June 27, 2013 - Those of us honored to work with the rural poor recognize
the truth of Tip O’Neill’s famous saying: “All politics is local.” If you are a
mother carrying a baby on your back and traveling everywhere by foot, unless
your government is within 10km, it simply doesn’t exist.
The world community, however, has paid scant attention to this truth. In the
year 2000, world leaders created the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) –
eight time-bound goals to significantly cut poverty in all its forms. MDGs such
as access to pre-school, primary education, good nutrition, safe water and
sanitation all require effective local governance. Yet very little was done to
“localize” the MDGs.
Now the world is focused on creating bold new goals for the period 2015-2030.
The UN Secretary-General has launched history’s most inclusive policy process,
and local government associations have demanded a voice, establishing a Global
Task Force devoted to this task. The first milestone in this process is the
report of the High-Level Panel, launched on May 30, and its report mentions
local authorities ten times.
The Panel points out: “Local authorities form a vital bridge between
national governments, communities and citizens…” and “have a critical role in
setting priorities, executing plans, monitoring results and engaging with local
firms and communities.”
My organization, The Hunger Project, focuses on rural areas where the vast
majority of the world’s poor live. From my perspective, here are ten
priority actions the world community can take to ensure that the
Post-2015 agenda adheres to the principles of “Local First.”
- Invest in grassroots
civil society. Women,
youth and small-scale farmers in general need an organized voice to demand
the resources that too-rarely reach them. Local associations are also
critical for mobilizing the “people power” that can overcome local
challenges.
- Have a serious rollout
strategy. The
UN has been brilliant in reaching out to individuals in creating the
Post-2015 Agenda – it must be equally brilliant in getting local
governments on board. Government, the UN System and civil society must
work together to ensure that every village council engages with the goals
and plans to achieve them.
- Guarantee women’s
voices.
No country has achieved significant representation of women in government
without establishing systems of quotas.
- Guarantee revenues. In countries where
poverty persists, local government may spend as little as two percent of
public resources, a far cry from the 20% typical of developed countries as
reported in the 1993 UN Human Development Report.
- Guarantee transparency
and social accountability. There must be mechanisms that ensure that local
governments hold public forums at which they report to the people, and
hear people’s priorities. Many governments have legal mandates for such
public assemblies, yet they are rarely implemented.
- Devolve service
delivery.
Higher tiers of government often control health and education services
with no local accountability, resulting in schools with absent teachers
and health centers with absent nurses. The level of government closest to
the people needs either direct control or regulatory oversight of local
services in order to ensure they are accountable to local people.
- Invest in capacity
building. Local
representatives are elected, but lack access to the basic information on
how to fulfill their responsibilities. For example, if the UN system would
produce a simple language Post-2015 handbook for local governments, it
would be well received.
- Localize targets. Communities need to
know how they are doing. Mortality-based targets such as the maternal
mortality rate are not statistically meaningful at the local level. The
Post-2015 framework should create locally meaningful targets, such as
pre-natal visits and attended births, which can be directly tied to local
awareness, behavior change and action.
- Aggregating data is even
better than disaggregating. The High-Level Panel has called for a “data
revolution” and also for disaggregated progress data. With near universal
access now to mobile technology, Post-2015 data should be universally and
directly collected locally at points of service, and aggregated upward,
rather than basing it only on top-down household surveys.
- Facilitate bottom-up
planning and budgeting. Local government must be able to do multi-stakeholder
long-term planning, and many lack the in-house skills. Brazil, Kerala and
other areas have “gone to scale” to mobilize facilitators for effective
planning processes, and all local government should have access to this
kind of support.
Another critique of the MDG's “get to halfway” goals is that countries have
solved the easiest half of the challenge. The most isolated and impoverished
people have been “left behind.”
These women and men are not the problem; they are the solution. If the steps
outlined above were taken, their skills, hard work and creative intelligence
can be unleashed in a rapid acceleration of progress. People have a right to
development, and participatory local governance is the only way to ensure that
right.