Friday 31 October 2008

Friday's thought: The role of experts of international organisations

The following sentence I heard during this week at a workshop with national participants and international experts:
"We [the international organisations] are not here to judge [over the countries] but to provide our advice and especially to learn - because if we would not want to learn, we would just send letters, not our experts."
This was one of the better sentences of the day.

Because: Quite often you get the impression that some experts just come to sell their standard knowledge to non-standard audiences, without proper adaptation, without proper awareness of local situations. And the money they receive for this (including travel costs) is quite huge.

Better not to break down the budgets of international organisations to see how much they spend on experts.

1 comments:

Antal Dániel said...

Some international organizations are set up so that governments can give them a budget to take away unwanted experts into faraway countries. At least that was my feeling when we got a lot of pre-accession help from old EU member states in Hungary - we haven't been much targeted since 2004.