The missing millions of Kibera (Where did Bill Gates money went ? ) - Did UNDP told the truth about it ?

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The mythical million comes from estimates built upon estimates that have spread over the years like Chinese whispers through the NGO community and, later, the internet. Paul Currion laid out how this works two years ago, in his essay "Lies, damned lies and you know the rest":

In the absence of actual data (such as an official census), NGO staff make a back-of-envelope estimate in order to plan their projects; a postgraduate visiting the NGO staff tweaks that estimate for his thesis research; a journalist interviews the researcher and includes the estimate in a newspaper article; a UN officer reads the article and copies the estimate into her report; a television station picks up the report and the estimate becomes the headline; NGO staff see the television report and update their original estimate accordingly. All statistical hell breaks loose, and the population of Kibera leaps ever higher.
Every actor at every stage has a motive for using the upper end of that initial estimate, rather than more conservative figures – planning, funding, visibility, and so on – but no single person is responsible for inflating the figure progressively further from reality.

The Guardian’s Ian Williams Lobbied for Bashar al-Assad’s Syria to Join UN Security Council

Click here to read this on UN Watch 

How is it that the Assad regime, led by father and son, was able to retain the international legitimacy needed to retain power over 42 years, despite perpetrating systematic brutality, such as the killing of an estimated 20,000 citizens of Hama in February 1982, and being listed as a leading state sponsor of terrorism?

A key factor was that the world body mandated to hold such criminal regimes to account — the United Nations — turned a blind eye to Syrian murder, massacre and terror.


Prior to last year’s Arab Spring, during the decades that Mideast dictators were strong, neither the U.N.’s General Assembly or its Human Rights Council ever passed a single resolution on Hama — or on any other barbaric Syrian human rights violation.

Worst of all, in October 2001, the U.N. voted overwhelmingly to elect Syria to the Security Council, no doubt acting, as required by the U.N. Charter, out of due regard specially paid to Syria’s contribution “to the maintenance of international peace and security” and “to the other purposes of the Organization.”

One of the figures on the international stage shilling loudest for Bashar al-Assad’s election to the U.N. Security Council was Ian Williams of The Guardian, a long-time contributor to the Washington Report, a publication known for consistently opposing action for victims of Libya, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East dictatorships.

Writing a few months before the U.N. vote, Williams’s role in the well-circulated Washington report was to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s chances of victory by pressuring U.S. State Department officials to drop any idea of opposing Syria’s bid — which is exactly what American diplomats did last year, successfully, to keep Assad off the Human Rights Council.

Using the same methods as the Assads themselves, Williams reframed the discussion away from Syria’s despicable record by pointing at the Israeli bogeyman. It worked: Syria was elected by a huge majority of 160 out of 177 votes.

The massive vote to the prestigious position empowered the Assad regime. According to the BBC, Syria interpreted its election as a sign of international support. “The wide support for Syria constitutes a referendum and a clear message that these allegations [of Syrian support for terrorism] are void and false,” boasted Damascus. “I’m proud for this great success,” said the Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Mikhail Wehbe. “Syria will pray to preserve the peace and security in the world.”

Now is the time to ask: If the lobbying of Ian Williams — who makes sure to portray himself objectively as the former head of the UN Correspondents Association and not as a pro-Assad contributor to a pro-regime publication, or as a regular on Iran’s Press TV propaganda channel — had been rejected, and if instead the Syrian regime’s brutality had been exposed and Assad stripped of international legitimacy, would he still be in power and murdering his own citizens today?

The Guardian: Cleaning up the Global Compact: dealing with corporate free riders

Now there is a realisation that companies must look beyond profit to their environmental and social impacts if they want to ensure long term performance. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

If you want to know whether greenwash is alive and well, look no further than the thousands of companies being thrown out of the world's largest voluntary corporate sustainability initiative, the UN Global Compact. More than 750 businesses, including major corporations in Europe and America are likely to be kicked out in the next six months alone, with hundreds more to follow. These are on top of the 3,100 businesses already delisted in the past few years.

Executive director Georg Kell is on a mission to clean up the organisation and ensure that members are building sustainability into their core activities and not using the Global Compact for PR purposes. While some companies have been removed because of bankruptcies and mergers, Kell says he is dealing with "free riders who joined but had no intention to stay engaged."

Non-governmental organisations have long criticised the Global Compact, which promotes 10 principles in the areas of human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption, because it has no effective monitoring and enforcement provisions.

They also accuse businesses of using it to oppose any binding international regulation on corporate accountability and for benefitting from the Global Compact's logo, a blue globe and a laurel wreath, which is very similar to the UN logo, while continuing to perpetrate human rights and environmental abuses.....

CLICK HERE FOR THIS ARTICLE IN FULL - THE GUARDIAN

The Guardian: - Who is going to pay for the MDGs?

CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE ON GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Aid alone is not enough, but transparency and accountability are essential

if tax revenues are to be used to plug the financing gap

School children receive food in the Makoko slum in Lagos, Nigeria. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP

When the millennium development goals (MDGs) were developed, estimates of their cost were used to argue that rich countries should give more aid. The estimates varied – in 2001, the UN suggested that achieving the goals would cost an extra $61bn. In 2002, the World Bank's chief economist for Africa, Shantayanan Devarajan, argued for $63-$72bn. In 2005, the Millennium Project pushed the figure up again, to between $82 and $152bn.

Yet economists recognised that all these estimates came with serious caveats. Jan Vandemoortele, one of the chief architects of the MDGs, suggested the only correct answer to questions about the cost of the MDGs is "more".

Last month, the OECD Development Centre published a report entitledRevisiting MDG Cost Estimates, in which it estimates that achieving the first six MDGs globally will require $120bn more to be spent every year on health, education and poverty reduction. It also argues that such a price tag is "unaffordable" if it is to be met from aid alone, at a time when donor countries' public finances are in trouble.

Guardian Focus podcast: famine in Somalia

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The Horn of Africa is experiencing a food crisis and the UN has declared famine in parts of Somalia. What does the relief effort look like? And what comes next?

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• Presented by Madeleine Bunting, produced by Vivienne Perry and researched byClaire Provost
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 August 2011 17.48 BST

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According to the UN, Somalia faces the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world today and the worst food security crisis in Africa since the early 1990s. After the worst drought in 60 years, an estimated 12.4 million people across the Horn of Africa are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.

But this crisis was largely foreseen. Why didn't early warning translate into early action? What does the humanitarian response look like? And what comes next?

In this month's global development podcast we look at the unfolding crisis in the Horn and focus in on Somalia, where conflict and political instability pose steep challenges for short-term relief and long-term development.

To discuss these issues, Madeleine Bunting is joined in the studio bySamir Elhawary, research fellow in the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute, David Bull, chief executive of Unicef UK, and Jamal Osman, an independent journalist who came to the UK from Somalia in 1999 and has been going back and forth ever since.