UN struggling to assist middle income Botswana
Baboki Kayawe | Thursday April 16, 2015 11:45
Since Botswana achieved middle income country status in 1992, international development partners have either reduced or altogether ceased monetrary aid, in lieu of ideas.
Moreover, UN development partners feel that, although the government invites them to participate in key planning processes, these invitations come rather late after some important initial planning had been completed.
This is revealed in the 2014 Botswana National Human Development draft report published last month and submitted to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Botswana.
The report, conducted by the University of Botswana , indicates that development partners blamed the failure of their ideas to be adopted by the government on that they are still learning to deal with the country’s middle income country status.
“Nevertheless, many of them find the government to be receptive to the upstream role. The problem is that the government’s middle-level staff has general lack of capacity to implement projects despite the fact that development partners undertook to build their capacity,” says the report. Thus, many policies have been drafted or projects started, but they never got implemented or reach completion stage.
“Some of these weaknesses in implementation may reflect lack of willingness and drive on the leadership. Decision-making is very hierarchical and there is lack of monitoring and evaluation to provide feedback to decisions,” reads the study.
The study states that ultimately this is a waste of scarce resources. “Government should invite input from development partners on key issues, for instance, the annual budgets at the planning stage so that development partners can provide proper advice which would enable Government to make informed decisions.
“A more appropriate involvement would be at the beginning and at the end of the budget process so partners can provide useful input.
“There is therefore need to support Government of Botswana to make smarter decisions,” it suggests.
Another issue facing these partners is inadequate coordination among development partners, in the process of engaging with the government of Botswana.
Infact, many development partners have stated in the study that there was virtually no coordination.
“Meanwhile, the UN agencies indicated that they have close coordination among themselves, with clear division of labour. However, they could not say the same about their relationship with non-UN development partners,” says the report.
Although, all development partners appreciate and recognise the important role Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) play in the country, they lamented their weak role here.
They argued that CSOs are not given a platform to carry out their role, being considered militant hence are not strengthened, and are not viewed as partners.
“It is important to know that some of the development partners provide some financial assistance to CSOs,” the study reads.
The UN partners also decried the lack of frequent surveys to provide feedback that could be used to monitor economic progress, especially in respect of human development indicators.
According to them, not only are data published after a long period of time, but there is another problem of lack of analysis of the available data.
“Analysis needs to be more informative in terms of statistics for policy development and not just presentation of sterile pie charts and histograms. “This is an important area where the help of development partners in providing capacity and or technical assistance would be required,” said UN partners.
However, all development partners concur that the country weathered the 2008 global financial crisis storm fairly well because of the strong economic management and balance of payment that allowed it to finance some of its expenditure even in the worst case scenario.