DeLoG Knowledge and Dialogue Days: Showcasing of Our New Members and the CBMS Network
During the DeLoG Knowledge and Dialogue Days 15 session took place during six days with several members and partners involved from five continents - Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. The sessions were moderated and hosted by members from the Global North and South, including Southern Voice, Democracy Works Foundation, ADB, UCLG, NALAS, UNICEF, USAID, VNG, the European Commission, LPSA, ICLD, SDC, FCM, Global Affaris Canada, UN-Habitat, OECD, and GIZ. The sessions focused on a diverse range of topics – from autocratization and gender equality to local finance - highlighting the cases of the Philippines, Ethiopia, Colombia and Peru. In total, around 150 participants joined the DeLoG Knowledge and Dialogue Days. Also, other organisations like the CBMS Network, CIPPEC Argentina, AVINAZ, OCUPA TU Calle, UCLG ASPAC, the Leagues of Cities of the Philippines, Syneigeia as well as the Bureau of Local Government Finance of the Republic of the Philippines took part in the sessions. New members of the DeLoG network, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Democracy Works Foundation and Southern Voice showcased their work.
Women’s Rights are Human Rights
During the session on 29th November 2022 with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), Pascal Lavoie and Lama Sidawi presented their work and discussed about the role of Canada’s Feminist Assistance Policy. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is the national association of local governments in Canada, representing over 2,000 members. The membership includes bigger cities like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver as well as smallest communities with sometimes only four citizens. The primary role is to gather the municipalities around the country and represent their interests with the federal government, because in Canada the municipalities are the ‘creatures of the provence’, as the Director of Internal Programmes, Pascal Lavoie, explains.
Lama Sidawi, Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Specialist of FCM’s Jordan Program, shared her experience in the Jordan Municipal Support Project (JMSP) which helps Jordanian municipalities to deliver improved and inclusive municipal services, with a focus on local governance capacity and solid waste management. She works with 12 municipalities in the South of the country. ‘When working with our municipalities and introducing what gender equality and inclusion is about, the men were always talking about ‘what is about our own rights, women are getting everything’. The Gender-Based Analysis of Global Affairs Canada is a helpful tool, the backbone of our conversation we had with our municipalities to show it is not about women’s rights, it’s about everyone’s rights, needs and priorities. More engagement means better services and satisfied customers’, concludes Lama Sidawi. She also stressed out the importance of dialogue with stakeholders like shop owners, schools, teachers and neighbours at the local level: ‘If you collect those pieces of information and data, you understand the situation. You are doing a gender analysis to see how to fix issues. Once you have that information you are able to communicate with your council members’.
- Resources and additional information:
Feminist International Assistance Gender Equality - Toolkit for Projects
Gender-based Analysis Plus - Women and Gender Equality Canada
Jordan Municipal Support Project | FCM
Filling the Gap: The Southern Perspective
Linking knowledge to the global debate, filling the gap and building bridges: On 30th November, Andrea Ordóñez, Director of Southern Voice, presented the organisation’s approach. Founded in 2013, Southern Voice is a network of over 60 research centers and thinktanks across Africa, Asia and Latin America which are all dedicated to generating and leveraging quality local data and research. The network’s aim is to address the existing ‘knowledge asymmetry’ and ‘participation deficit’ in the dialogue on development. ‘Our goal has always been to rebalance the power dynamics at the global level between Global North and Global South. In the last years there was a growing interest of hearing more Southern perspectives’, explains Andrea Ordóñez.
In the following, Vanesa D’Alessandre and Florencia Caro Sachetti from the Center for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and Growth CIPPEC – a member organisation of Southern Voice based in Argentina - presented the Basic Care Basket Initiative. The objective of the ‘Basic Care Basket’ – developed by CIPPEC, Southern Voice and IDRC – is to guarantee the right to receive and provide quality care and reduce social and gender inequalities. The Basic Care Basket is a synthetic indicator that estimates the cost of producing family care and defines a threshold below which a household is poor in terms of resources to produce quality care. ‘At the local level we are working on three specific points: First, an indicator that estimates the production cost of family care and the care deficit faced at the local level. Second, to create a system of policies to address care deficits at the local level and third to figure out the costing of the care system’, explains Vanesa D’Alessandre. At the local level, the Basic Care Basket informs about the percentage of households with care responsibilities that do not have sufficient resources to produce quality care as well as about the percentage of households with care responsibilities where women provide unpaid work but do not have their own income.
- Resources and additional information:
New economic measures are needed to avoid collapse of families during pandemic | Southern Voice
Bogotá, Colombia | Bloomberg Cities
Democracy Works Foundation: ‘The much-needed Southern African voice’
Dr. Augustine Magolowondo, DWF Regional Director, presented the Democracy Works Foundation during the session on 1st December 2022, moderated by Dr. Thomas Taraschweski-Wiik from GIZ. The Democracy Works Foundation is a southern African non-profit company focused on democracy development in the region operating in eight countries aspiring to contribute to raising the voices of the South in international platforms, in which experience and lessons on democracy are shared. With headquarters in South Africa, the organisation works through its country offices to provide tools to develop resilient democracies and to build and promote inclusive and sustainable consensus democracies. The Democracy Works Foundation opened its doors in 2014 in response to the weakening of public institutions, corruption and declining public participation in South Africa as well as concerns about democratic and development progress in post-liberation Southern Africa. With joining the DeLoG Network, Democracy Works Foundation aims to play a constructive role in deepening the dialogue around decentralisation and local governance. ‘We believe Democracy Works Foundation is best placed to provide DeLoG with the much-needed Southern African voice’, concludes Augustine Magolowondo.
CBMS: A Tool to Address Information Gaps at the Local Level
During the last session on 8th December 2022 - moderated by Rachana Shrestha from the Asian Development Bank - Celia Reyes, Leader of the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS) presented the implementation of the CBMS methodology by local government units in the Philippines. Celia Reyes was the first female president of the Philippine Institute of Development Studies (PIDS) and has served as a president of the Philippine Economic Society in 2011. She specialised in the field of econometrics and has conducted and published numerous research and policy papers on poverty assessment and evaluation of social protection programmes. She provides free technical assistance to local government units in the country in the implementation of CBMS – a local poverty monitoring tool which aims to provide a regular source of information for policymaking, program design, and impact monitoring. It is designed to support agenda of national development plans and complement existing national statistical systems on poverty monitoring by addressing information gaps at the local level while empowering local governments and communities in the context of their roles and accountabilities in the decentralisation process.
- Resources and additional information: