The Political Mirror
What's The Political Mirror? It is a column that comes out every Wednesday and Saturday tackling political issues and politics in general, analyzing the same by looking at ourselves, our communities, and our government - and as in mirroring, reflecting on our past, our mistakes, our follies, and our future.
Dateline Bangkok: Conditional Cash Transfers and Corruption, Part I
Ten years ago, world leaders in New York signed the Millennium Development Goals and promised to build a more prosperous, just and peaceful world.
The promise has clearly not been achieved. The review of the MDG Country Reports, including those of the Philippines, has revealed some successes, and also many problems. As a result, an MDG Acceleration Framework, defined by the UN as a “ systematic way to identifying bottlenecks and possible high impact solutions, leading to a concrete plan of action for government” has now been developed to accelerate the realization of specific MDG Goals.
Two social protection programs – social security and social assistance – are now considered as the most critical interventions that can accelerate the achievement of the MDGs by 2015. Social assistance, through the conditional cash transfers (CCT), has thus become vogue in many developing countries eager to placate their suffering poor and at the same time claim MDG success.
It is in this context that I listened intently to the presentations of UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty Magdalena Sepulveda and Christian Gruenber of the International Council on Human Rights Policy in the panel “Setting Anti-Corruption Agenda for MDGs: Challenges and Opportunities” in the on-going 14th International Anti-Corruption Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.
Since evaluation of CCT programs in developing countries are either few or none, I was particularly interested in finding out whether former President Arroyo’s much maligned CCT measured up to international standards, and whether President Aquino’s dramatic expansion of CCT beneficiaries from 1M to 2.5M households can actually work.
Sepulveda echoed many of the arguments being used by CCT supporters in the Philippines. That giving cash to parents for keeping their children in school and improving their own health is an effective intervention to achieve universal primary education (MDG Goal 2), reduce child mortality (MDG Goal 4), and improve maternal mortality (MDG Goal 5).
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