Application Form - *.doc 

Call for Applications for the ICSU Grants Programme 2009 - *.pdf 

STATEMENT AND SCHEDULE - *.pdf

The deadline for receipt of applications is 1 December 2008.

Grant applicants must represent communities with historical and likely incidences of elevated blood lead levels. Proposals should include ways to address unique and challenging issues in lead-poisoning prevention, particularly ones that could be replicated i? other high- risk areas.

Applicants should submit written applications on plain paper to regional lead contacts. Decisions will be made on the basis of this informal application; successful applicants will then be required to submit the full application.

The EPA intends to award individual grants ranging from $25,000 to $100,000. The grantees will be announced in April 2005.

Joseph Hanlon of the Open University, UK, who has written extensively on Mozambique for over 20 years, outlines how increasing intervention by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and bilateral aid donors in support of economic liberalization is one of the
primary causes of this growth in corruption.

Adding to the process have been tacit alliances between aid donors and a section of the Mozambican elite.
Corner House Briefing Paper 33
"How Northern Donors Promote Corruption:
Tales From the New Mozambique"
by Joseph Hanlon
is now on The Corner House website on the home page,
[url=http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk]http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk[/url]
and in the briefings section

Please contact us [email]enquiries@thecornerhouse.org.uk[/email] if you would like to
receive a 12-page printed-paper copy.

Best regards

Larry Lohmann
Susan Hawley
Sarah Sexton
Nicholas Hildyard
The Corner House

The bank, Italy▓s largest in terms of assets, declined to name the buyer due to confidentiality reasons.

The FT also wrote ⌠Banca Intesa had expressed concerns about the pipeline sealant. Executives from the bank sought a meeting with Derek Mortimer, the whistleblower who highlighted potential problems with the sealant in an independent report for BP.■

Onc? the BTC is put into operation, a group of banks, which would have included Banca Intesa, was to take over financing of the project. The remaining syndicate members are ABN Amro, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Credit Agricole, HVB, ING, Royal Bank of Scotland, Societe Generale and WestLB.

As Romania prepares for membership in the European Union in 2007, it is introducing and enforcing new environmental laws, and the labs will help ensure compliance, according to the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.

The grant was conferred in a signing ceremony at MEWM headquarters in Bucharest. Mr. Jonathan Marks, Senior Commercial Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest signed the grant on behalf of the U.S. Government. Secretary of State Ioan Jelev, Head of the Environmental Protection Department, signed on behalf of MEWM.

The Government of Romania has 42 regional and local laboratories and one national laboratory that are responsible for testing air, water, soil and various wastes as part of the country?s environmental enforcement regime. The MEWM has proposed the expansion and improvement of its existing laboratory network and the creation of eight new regional laboratories through upgrades to existing local laboratories. The USTDA grant awarded today will fund a study on the organization and structure of the laboratory network?s staff and information flow. In addition, the study will define equipment requirements and standard procedures, develop training requirements, and assist with laboratory accreditation.

The U.S. Trade and Development Agency advances economic development and U.S. commercial interests in developing and middle-income countries. The agency funds various forms of?technical assistance, feasibility studies, training, orientation visits and business workshops that support the development of a modern infrastructure and a fair and open trading environment. USTDA?s strategic use of foreign assistance funds to support sound investment policy and decision-making in host countries creates an enabling environment for trade, investment and sustainable economic development. In carrying out its mission, USTDA gives emphasis to economic sectors that may benefit from U.S. exports of goods and services.

It is a common-sense approach that is harder than it sounds, just like the question it seeks to answer: Does aid really work?

A small band of development economists, who a year ago founded the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have become influential advocates for randomized evaluations as the best way to answer that question. Such trials, generally regarded as the gold standard in social policy research, involve randomly assigning people eligible for an antipoverty program to get the help or not, then comparing outcomes to see whether those who got the help fared better than those who did not.

It is the same approach that has helped drug companies figure out what medicines are effective and Americans decide how best to reform welfare. Advocates for rigorous evaluations hope to make aid more effective, not by directing money to particular countries, but by spending it on programs proven to work. The Poverty Action Lab scholars have made startling discoveries in their own randomized evaluations.

Adding an extra teacher to classrooms in rural India did not improve children’s test scores. But hiring high-school graduates who were paid only $10 to $15 a month to give remedial tutoring to groups of lagging students in a Bombay slum markedly improved reading and math skills.
A series of education experiments in Kenya found that providing poor students with free uniforms or a simple porridge breakfast substantially increased attendance. But giving them drugs to treat the intestinal worms that infect more than a quarter of the world’s population?was more cost effective, with a price tag of only $3.50 for each extra year of schooling achieved. Healthier children are more likely to go to school. “You can’t answer the general question: Doesaid work?” said Esther Duflo, an economist and co-founder of the Poverty Action Lab. “You have to go project by project and accumulate the evidence.”

The World Bank, a lumbering giant that employs more than 1,200 Ph.D.’s, is beginning to listen to critics like her. This summer, it is organizing large-scale impact evaluations, including randomized trials, of programs to upgrade slums, improve the performance of schools and keep children healthy and in class. The programs will be tested in dozens of countries.

Fran+ois Bourguignon, the bank’s chief economist, said he hoped this new effort would help the bank, other donors and developing countries “learn what does and does not work.”

Rigorous impact evaluations should become part of the bank’s culture, he said.

That will require deep change. A recent in-house review of bank projects during the past four to five years found that only 2 percent had been properly evaluated for whether they made a difference, according to Mr. Bourguignon.

When Lant Pritchett, an economist who has spent a dozen years at the bank, pondered why there was so little good evidence on the impact of projects it financed, a tune from an old game show spoof that his Mom used to sing popped into his head: “It pays to be ignorant, to be dumb, to be dense . ..”

Bank economists have recently produced assessments of huge development initiatives that acknowledge weaknesses in the evidence. A critical review of the bank’s $7 billion portfolio of programs that involve local communities in their design and management concluded recently
that “there are, unfortunately, a dearth of well-designed evaluations of such projects.”

Another review of a $1.3 billion initiative in India found similar problems. Bank economists in New Delhi examined more than 200 studies of projects in India that ranged from teacher training to school construction, enrollment drives to textbook revision.

They concluded that none of the studies were rigorous enough to measure whether the initiatives made a difference, except for one that found it increased enrollment by a disappointing 1.3 percent. “The World Bank spent more than a billion dollars without knowing why they were doing what they were doing – that’s the tragedy,” said Abhijit Banerjee, an M.I.T. economics professor and co-founder of the Poverty Action Lab.

But even as aid agencies lagged in conducting stringent evaluations, Professors Banerjee and Duflo at M.I.T., Michael Kremer at Harvard and other economists associated with the lab have been conducting randomized trials of antipoverty programs in India, Kenya, South Africa, Peru and the Philippines. Even they acknowledge that random evaluations are not a panacea. For
example, a program that works in Asia may not work in Africa. Still, they say, the trials offer the best evidence.

“This rigorous testing has made a huge difference in medicine and has improved human welfare due to better drugs,” said Professor Kremer. “If we could use randomized evaluations to really find out what works, foreign aid donors could implement better health and education policies and so could developing countries.”

Mr. Pritchett, a veteran bank economist, tried to explain why rigorous evaluations were such a rarity in the culture of the bank. Its highly trained, well-meaning professionals too often think they know the solutions. “They have too little doubt,” he said.

They also worry that modest, proven gains for the poor will lose out to inflated, unproven claims for, say, tax cuts to the rich or a new weapons system – a concern he shares. “You wan to know what works and what doesn’t, but until you subject the full range of government spending to the same discipline, why are you disadvantaging things for poor people?” he asked.

But Profe?sor Banerjee is optimistic that reliable evaluations will give advocates ammunition to lobby for increased foreign aid. He pointed to the success of a rigorously studied Mexican program that paid poor mothers a small sum if they kept their children in school and got them
immunized. The model has spread across Latin America in large measure because a large randomized trial, published in 2001, showed that the children who participated were healthier and stayed in school longer. “In the development business,” he said, “it would be really good to get away from the need to have people promising miracles.”

Programme:
- limiting climate change
- nature and bio-diversity – protecting a unique resource
- health and environment
- ensuring the sustainable management of natural resources and waste.
In addition to the abovementioned areas, implementation and enforcement of Community environmental legislation and environmental education will also remain of interest.

Who can apply:
The Programme will be open to the participation of European NGOs established (legally registered) in either:
- the Member States,
- Bulgaria, Romania,
- Turkey,
- Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and Croatia.

Financing conditions:
Financial assistance under this call for proposals is subject to the availability of funds.
The rate of overall Community assistance shall not exceed 70 % of the applicant’s average audited annual eligible expenses during the preceding two years, in the case of NGOs based in the Community or in those countries, which have joined the European Union in 2004, or 80 % in the case of NGOs based in the Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey and the Balkan countries, nor 80 % of the applicant’s eligible expenses for the current year. The amount of a grant will only become final once the audited financial statement of the beneficiary has been accepted by the
Commission.

The IFC’s safeuard policies cover a range of critical issues for civil society organizations, including environmental assessment and natural habitats, impacts on indigenous peoples, involuntary resettlement, community health, and labor standards.

Revision of the IFC’s safeguard policies is a very important process. The IFC’s safeguard policies do not just affect the obligations of the IFC and its private sector borrowers. In the past two years, more than 20 commerical banks have adopted a set of environmental and
social standards–known as the “Equator Principles”–that are based on the IFC’s safeguard policies. These banks provide over 75% of all project financing by commerical lenders around the world. So as the IFC revises its own policies, it is in effect undertaking a global standard setting exercise for environmental and social standards for privately finaced development projects.

The IFC has proposed an ambitious plan for the revision of its safeguard policies. Unlike past World Bank policy revisions–which involved review and consultations on safeguard policies one at a time–the IFC proposes to revise all its safeguard policies at once. Further, the IFC plans to quickly conduct regional multistakeholder consultations in five locations: Africa (for representatives from Africa and the Middle East), Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin
America, and the United States or Northern Europe. These consultations are being planned for September through December 2004.

A loose coalition of NGOs is forming to work on the IFC’s safeguard revision process. If you would like to participate in this work, or to stay informed of developments, please contact Bruce Jenkins at the Bank Information Center at [email]bjenkins@bicusa.org[/email]