The good, the bad and the very bad

This is one of may long-running rants but, thank goodness, somebody else said it. In fact, several people from different agencies said it, at a recent inter-agency workshop on the quality of CCAs and UNDAFs.

There are very bad programme documents out there. Not “bad” as in non-compliance with rules and regulations or recommended paragraph length. 

They are the kind of submissions where you need the authors telling you what they meant to say and what went wrong and how the consultant screwed up and how there was no time and money to fix it or start over.

I don’t want to read too much into what may be singular cases. But now we hear from the inter-agency lesson-learned workshop that the CCAs are as much political consensus documents as technical assessments and analyses of a country situation. 

Political consensus on what? Consensus on a document that has as the intellectual vibrancy of daytime television? This is not going to help strengthen the credibility of the UN system. Or help children and the people who are poor. 

Surely we need to achieve consensus on needed actions, and we may have to compromise when we agree on priorities and strategies. But we should not compromise on the quality of our analysis and planning advice.

(16 January 2004)

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