The Minister of Labour said yesterday that the administration wants development aid donors to allow a greater level of Guyanese input into the design of programmes.
Minister Manzoor Nadir was quoted yesterday by GINA as saying: “I don’t know if it is the ego of the international bureaucrats or if they are coming with pre- packaged positions on programmes they have solicited on our behalf but we do not accept packages put before us to sign without us having a greater level of input into the design of the programmes.”
He said he had detected a level of obstinacy on the part of donors in “pressing what they have put on the table as their way of helping us” and not wanting to address the issues that “we have to deal with as a matter of policy in our sectors and in our country.”
Nadir said that over the past few weeks he had the opportunity to review a number of proposals coming to the Ministry of Labour from many donor countries and communities, including the International Labour Organisation (ILO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
And he stated that he wanted them to “pay due respect to the wishes and policies of the Government of Guyana and the people of Guyana when they are going to be designing programmes.”
The minister alluded to the current UNDP project on social cohesion, noting that government has been saying to the organisation and some of the stakeholders that they were not happy with the manner they were allocating resources in this sector.
Time frame
At times government agreed on programmes owing to the time frame, Nadir said, but what it found at the end of the programme is that the wishes of the international bureaucrats were advanced more than the needs of Guyanese.
“We had the ILO, US Department of Labour, HIV/AIDS programme a year ago – I was asked to sign for an extension of the programme and was told that the money had only just become available and they had to go ahead and design a programme based on what we had done before and in order to not let the money slip through our fingers, we signed,” Nadir said according to GINA.
He said further government had requested that the programme be tailored more to the needs of Guyanese but was told that the resources were already programmed in certain areas and the request would be looked at in the future.
Further criticising the way donor funds are being designed to be used, Nadir cited the UNDP social cohesion project which was tabled as a successor programme to the first UNDP social cohesion project in Guyana. “After our initial discussion on the project, it came out as a ‘building trust project’. We were to deal with several recommendations that came out of collaboration with the national stakeholders and the government. It was (then) presented to us as a ‘fait accompli’ as a building trust project,” the minister said.
Sources say that a meeting last Saturday on the social cohesion programme saw heated exchanges between senior government officials and members of civil society. One key area of conte3ntion appeared to be a recommendation emanating from the evaluation of the social cohesion programme to support “an independent Guyanese institute or academy for dispute resolution and public policy, devoted to promoting non-partisan politics and revitalized non-governmental channels for policy implementation.
Such an institute, through its forums and policy research would model for all the people of Guyana the kind of policymaking that needs to be done to help get the country on a productive track to development. Its existence and products would stand as a reminder of the norms of civil politics”.
In the GINA release, Nadir also referred to projects the government is working on to enhance social cohesion, like the citizens security programme and the national stakeholders consultation with the President as areas where gaps exist in terms of funding.
The ministry has identified two vulnerable groups: the single female-headed households and early, unemployed school-leavers who are fertile groups for the development of all sorts of antisocial behaviour.
Nadir said that both the Ministries of Labour and Culture, Youth and Sport conduct programmes for these vulnerable youths that need additional funding.
However, several of these programmes are designed in a way that causes 75 percent of the funding to go towards the administrative expenses of managing these projects and what comes to the benefactors is a small fraction of what was provided.
According to GINA, Nadir gave the example of the US$2M Educare Programme which is funded by the US Department of Labour to fight the issue of all forms of child labour. The local programme director has informed the ministry and the Local Committee on Child Labour that there is only about US$30,000 available to work with that committee. The deliverables that they have identified were already programmed by the ministry since 1999 and before.
This, Nadir said, is a waste of the engagement and resources.
The minister represents the policy position of the government and instructions have been given to the permanent secretary not to engage in discussion with the representatives of the donor community unless there were policy interventions with them, GINA reported.
