Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to two high profile Bangladeshi academics, the majority of climate funds which reach poor countries are being spent on expensive outside consultants who arrive, show a few powerpoint slides, then leave, with very little genuine benefit to the recipient countries.
Stop sending climate consultants to poor countries – invest in universities instead
As we edge closer to global consensus on climate change and the need to reduce emissions, the focus has moved from debating the science or the need for global action to the responsibility of individual countries to provide assistance to those affected.
Not all countries have same capability to reduce emissions, measure and report progress, or increase resilience against climate change. To make matters worse, the countries that do not have these capabilities, such as Bangladesh, are often the ones that suffer the worst effects of climate change. To breach this gap, climate negotiators and officials often refer to “capacity building”.
…
Powerpoint won’t stop climate change
What does capacity building look like in practice?
Our experience in Bangladesh is this: developed countries allocate funds for projects or programs aimed at climate change capacity building, and allocate the money to their own official development assistance agencies. These agencies often go on to assign private consultancy companies from their own country to the programme.
The private companies then send consultants to the designated country to provide short-term assistance which, in most cases, is given in the form of workshops and presentations.
The consultants usually do not know the local language, and so conduct their workshops in their own language, (which, of course, is usually a second language for the audience, who are trying to build their capacity). Often, do not they know the context of the country they are working in.
After this, we see few more visits by the designated consultants, some report writing, and just like that: capacity building has happened. By the end of the programme, a major part of the funding available for capacity building has gone to the development agency and the consultancy company.
…
The academics who made this assertion are Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change & Development, Independent University, Bangladesh and Naznin Nasir, Coordinator of Loss and Damage Program and Communications, Independent University, Bangladesh.
I expected that much of the climate cash which finally made it through the UN bureaucracy was being wasted, but I imagined that it was probably being spent on useless climate related infrastructure – solar panels, wind turbines, that kind of thing. I thought that the UN was at least making a pretence of creating climate related preparedness.
The picture Saleemul and Naznin paint is worse than my lowest expectations – the only locals who are likely to profit from such a ridiculous parade of well paid climate powerpoint consultants are a few rich hoteliers, and possibly a few local providers of post presentation entertainment services.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So, now the cult of Algore-isms are sending out missionaries? How 1984-ish!
Engineers build stuff that is useful to society, climate scientists build models and do presentations
Bangladesh is in the tropics where cyclones, floods, and excessive heat are part of their normal climate. If their climate really changes radically then they will need better insulated buildings and snow removal equipment. Since the science is settled no more money needs to be spent studying it. Instead of sending consultants to such currently tropical countries, they should be sending snow shovels.
Not all countries have same capability to reduce emissions, measure and report progress, or increase resilience against climate change. To make matters worse, the countries that do not have these capabilities, such as Bangladesh, are often the ones that suffer the worst effects of climate change. To breach this gap, climate negotiators and officials often refer to “capacity building”.
_________________________________________
Bangladesh has ruined western textile industries by selling t-shirts for $10 the piece.
After showing our countrymen jobless thei’re asking for money too.
Did I get that right? Duh.
So the ones squawking about it and “spreading the word” are the ones pocketing all the money. Why am I not surprised. I hope this exposure trips deeper examination. This should be properly (and publicly) explored.
Wow are the Bangladeshi so backwards they don’t know how the climate game is played? Er, I mean the climate scam, er, I mean how modern climate science works? How do they ever expect to get on board the lucrative gravy train unless they emulate the power point scam presentations of the enlightened climate warriors who selfishly – uh, I mean selflessly – travel first-class to the third world bringing the true light of climate knowledge to the benighted natives? And they do it for mere thousands and thousands a trip! Oh the nobility is just so satisfying (to their bank accounts)…
Regarding consultants:
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”
The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, “Sure. Why not?”
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep.” says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then the shepherd says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep? “
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”
“You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answered the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don’t know crap about my business…”
“…Now give me back my dog!”
But surely this is good news? Given that the money was never going to be spent on anything useless, at least spending it on consultants does comparatively little harm and puts some money in the purses of the local providers of post presentation entertainment services.
This is so funny I don’t know whether to fall about laughing or hit something.
Sometimes foreign aid seems intended to benefit people in the giving country like Canada or the US. A classic case was providing a diesel genset to people who could not afford the diesel fuel. What they needed most was a manual well pump, which could be maintained by locals. (Some vegetable oil to lubricate, replace the seal with leather made from local animals.) One smart aid agency even managed to convince the paternalistic males in the tribe to keep their hands out of the water system, so the females could run it to support their duties (washing clothes, cooking food, cleaning up babies – they had motivation to manage it properly.
But a major problem is political culture in the country. Look at South America – flipping from one regime to another, up and down economies (not even counting the idiots in Venezuela who voted Her Chavez in to ruin the country).
Worse in some parts of Africa – one tribe trying to murder the other, and once again Islamic Totalitarians trying to take over countries.
People in Bangladesh are capable, it’s leadership that is lacking, voters don’t know how to develop candidates who will be stewards not politicians. Well, culture is a problem, look at ultra-mystical Haiti versus the Dominican Republic next door.
So what’s needed in Bangladesh are schools teaching sound values for human life. Books are available, such as Tara Smith’s Moral Rights and Political Freedom, and Viable Values, and Andrew Bernstein’s narrowly named broadly-written The Capitalist Manifesto, and the ideas taught in some colleges in the US and like countries – which have many immigrants from India, and likely to lesser extent in India – where I know there are friends of Andrew and Tara. Bangladesh I know nothing of, my impression is they don’t have the background that India has, so struggled after the split from West Pakistan, but are learning.