p>Right on time to still wish a Happy New Year !
It’s been a while since I have written on the blog. I am thinking the last time I blogged I was on mission in Burkina Faso. The past 2 years, I was very active writing articles on my blog and due to an even more overloaded work schedule I had to reduce my online presence. However, I am hoping to find a good balance this year with about one post a month. That is my online promise for 2017! I did take down Facebook and Instagram as I would like to keep my social presence purely professional. So no more time wasting about where I went for dinner and what holiday I went on. This way I can focus on good articles and keep you guys interested in working for the informal worker rights and microfinance.
The first day back at work:
My face appears on this year’s diversity calendar of the Belgian Liberal Trade Union as slogan - Together for 2017 !
2017 is the year we all must work together - solidarity is the key word to unite people. However, many people including new presidents use these words but will the end result be the same ?? Well looking at our calendar it is easy to see that the union stands for diversity, respect and solidarity.
Solidarity is reflected into our union program MIS Movement for International Solidarity or in Dutch ~ BIS (Beweging voor Internationale Solidariteit). This Year my 2 focus countries will be Congo and Burundi. We have split the tasks of managing East & West Africa. After our mission in Burkina Faso we realized that the workload of combining East & West Africa was too much. I am very excited to soon be traveling to Congo, to see the work of the Kananga union in action. The focus here is on women. I don’t want to go to much in detail on the program as I want to dedicate a post to this particular gender empowering mission soon.
I am writing about 2017 and the plans but how did I close 2016 ?
After Ouagadougou I went on a training about development aid. I thought I knew it all and questioned why I had to go to 11.11.11 for an introduction to development aid. I wrote my master thesis on the fourth pillar of development aid … I have worked in the field and from the desk. Well, I was wrong ! I learnt many new aspects.
11.11.11 took us through the history of development aid. The politics of binding aid and non binding aid. Binding aid is the most common form of development aid in which donor nations only send funds if there is an economic, political or military return for themselves. Yikes ! Dirty … however binding aid policies were a trend once before and are now back again.
Didn’t President Trump say we should have taken Iraq’s oil?… Well, development aid is leaning more towards the 'what is in it for us?'. Meaning what is in it for the Donor States. Development aid has been scrutinized over the years as it hasn’t been working like it should over the past decades, but it isn’t development aid alone. Immensely huge figures of development aid are always shown to the tax payers but how much of these figures are actually real? For example, if a donor country cancels past governmental debt - this figure can be included in the development figures as money spent. Although no actual money was wired; therefore certain amounts are counted for double. I was definitely not aware of this!
Most people think that most African nations depend on development aid while this is not the case. Only the poorest nations do but even then it is not sufficient. A good example is Burkina Faso, the poorest country in Africa that depends largely on aid.
11.11.11 also presented the EFQM quality model of the Belgian NGO sector, a commitment to excellence process for development aid. In development aid we have a lot of reporting. Sometimes even too much reporting. Donor countries want to be able to measure everything and sometimes I wonder if we have entered the era of development aid for reporting ?
Let’s see… I read the 2017 report of the government policies in relation to aid… time will tell!
