Projects
NEEDS ASSESSMENT WORK BEGINNING IN BLANTYRE, KISUMU, KUMASI, LOUGA, BAMAKO AND SEGOU
This summer a group of Columbia and Yale University graduate students are conducting MDG-based needs assessments in public health and education in many of the Millennium Cities. The students, who hail from the Mailman School of Public Health, Yale School of Public Health and Columbia Teachers’ College, will be working in Blantyre, Malawi, Kisumu, Kenya, Kumasi, Ghana, Louga, Senegal, and, in the early fall, in Bamako and Segou, Mali.
The needs assessments and costings will help the respective city governments and residents to more readily evaluate the current status and challenges in public health and education in their municipalities and to set their own priorities for development in these areas. The students will be using the MDG-based needs assessment instruments developed and meticulously refined by the former United Nations Millennium Project, now being administered at the national level in many countries by the MDG Support Group within the Poverty Unit of the UN Development Program, as part of the large-scale effort to help sub-Saharan and other poor nations to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by the target date of 2015.
These assessment instruments have effected a quiet revolution in both the conceptualization and implementation of development assistance, by shifting the driving force from decisions made in remote capitals by the official donor community to informed requests made by the beneficiary nations themselves -- requests which are coherent with their own medium- and long-term development strategies and focused on meeting real, carefully measured and budgeted needs on the ground.
A June 13 training session for the students carrying out the MCI assessments, conducted by the UNDP MDG Support Group, was led by Gonzalo Pizarro, Senior Policy Advisor for Water Resources, and Research Associates Brian Lutz and Emily Bosch, all of whom have had extensive experience in using and training others in the use of these thorough needs assessment and costing tools. With the help of MCI and UNDP staff and Millennium City leadership, the students will meet with government officials and staff in the areas of public health and education to gather detailed information regarding the specific costs of improved infrastructure, as well as the requisite materials, equipment and human resources essential to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
Similar assessments regarding access to safe housing, clean water and sanitation, waste disposal, energy, transport and ICT will be carried out in all Millennium Cities in the months to come, enabling stakeholders ultimately to devise City Development Strategies embodying their own development priorities. Such urban strategies will serve to “localize the MDGs,” thereby extending the work of the former UN Millennium Project and the current UNDP team by empowering local stakeholders with the concrete information they need to make responsible choices about how best to insure an economically and socially viable future for their own cities.