OTTAWA — Canada’s G8 initiative to save mothers and children in poor countries is still in labour.
The $5-billion announcement at last weekend’s summit left many loose ends that need to be tied up before the countries can begin to make good on their commitment to save the lives of 1.3 million children under age five, and 64,000 mothers.
The money is supposed to be new, co-ordinated and targeted at the most egregious problems of women and children in poor countries. The funding is also supposed to be “catalytic,” leading to a total of more than $10 billion.
But so far, there are few indications about how those goals will be accomplished — despite widespread expectations that Ottawa would have a detailed plan to present at the summit in Huntsville, Ont.
For many aid experts and non-governmental organizations looking to work with Ottawa on the initiative, the G8 announcement was welcome — but also deeply underfunded and lacking in detail.
“In terms of where we are, I’m not unhappy at all. I’m quite happy with the wording I see. Yes, I need more detail, and yes, we need to know what the implementation will look like,” said Dorothy Shaw, the Canadian spokeswoman for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.
The countries’ individual commitments to the initiative have not all formally been made public. So it’s hard to tell whether the money is new or taken from existing aid budgets or double-counted.
The co-ordination of the funding is also up in the air.
Each country is left to decide how best to spend its contributions, be it through bilateral aid, multilateral institutions, or by giving it to non-governmental organizations.
“There’s no way to co-ordinate it. People can do whatever they like,” said a source.
The G8 communique lends its support to a United Nations joint action plan to improve the health of women and children. But that plan only gives suggestions, and is not a funding mechanism.
It’s also not clear how much of the G8 money would be attached to that action plan.
Over the next five years, Canada has said it will add $1.1 billion in new money to an existing fund of $1.75 billion for maternal and child heath.
The money will be focused on high-risk countries, such as Haiti, Afghanistan, Mali, Tanzania and Mozambique, for programs that ensure healthy pregnancies and nutrition, government documents say.
It remains unclear whether the list of countries and priorities will be much longer than that, and whether the old money of $1.75 billion will be re-allocated to the new priorities.
And there’s no way to make sure other needy countries or other health-care priorities are also able to access other G8 countries’ funding, because no one is co-ordinating the effort.
It’s a work in progress, confirmed Jessica Fletcher, spokeswoman for International Development Minister Bev Oda.
“Canada will be working over the next few months with partner countries, Canadian experts and global and Canadian partners to determine how best to allocate Canada’s $1.1 billion contribution over five years to bring the results we are all working towards: saving the lives of mothers, newborns and children in developing countries,” she said in an email.
Similarly, it’s unclear how the rest of the money will be raised. Canada has already passed the hat aggressively outside the G8, and collected an additional $2.3 billion, most of it from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But now that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is no longer the host of the G8, there is no official commitment from Ottawa to keep pounding the pavement for more money.
Harper does feel a responsibility to deliver, said spokesman Dimitri Soudas.
“The objective of $10 billion over five years is something we’ll be aggressively championing,” Soudas said.
There’s every incentive for Harper to persist, says Rosemary McCarney, president and chief executive officer at Plan Canada.
“Canada has carved out real space that is not occupied, on the humanitarian front,” McCarney said. “We’re in a perfect place to keep leading.”
There should be momentum for fund-raising right now because the United Nations has called for a summit in September to focus only on agreed-upon goals for development. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has made maternal and child health a central focus of the summit.
But leading up to the G8, Ottawa faced considerable difficulty raising just $5 billion, even though it was tapping into the coffers of the most generous donors in the world.
Sources say officials had initially hoped for about $10 billion, but had to lower their expectations as other countries pleaded post-recession poverty. Plus, Ottawa’s plans to introduce and publish an accountability framework specific to the maternal and child health initiative likely prompted many donor countries to think twice before making empty promises.
Canada’s emphasis on accountability means the dollars committed will likely actually materialize, but it also means countries are conservative with their commitments, said McCarney.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” she said, “but I’ll take the hard dollars.”
The Muskoka Initiative is harder to keep track of than other global development projects such as campaigns against certain diseases or projects to promote vaccines, said Shaw. That’s because maternal and child health encompass a range of smaller, interconnected issues that pose logistical difficulties for officials trying to measure outcomes and track donations.
“We don’t have a vaccine to prevent maternal mortality,” Shaw said.