Comment

Comment by Mar on November 10, 2011 at 7:17am

I have a look at the recently added “Good practices SSC” paper and I believe is a great framework to start working on. However regarding the balance on political and technical leadership (pag 4) I´d like to stress the key importance of the engagement from policymakers and public institutions and learn from current failures of international platforms (on climate change). Without a strong and clear sustainable development agenda from developing countries, hence a solid political will we could not success on this kind of initiatives and these two levels: policymakers & practitioners could easily be transforming in a real burden that creates a important slowdown on the process.

 

Comment by Mar on November 3, 2011 at 10:50am

More than “south-south opportunity”, I believe we´re facing the “south-south challenge” in the sense that under the current framework, relationships on development are based on a “north-south basis”. Developing countries depend and expects for learning and a general delivery form developed countries. Therefore, the truly challenge is a change of the current culture, where developed countries would change their role and instead of being a responsible actor of their development become a another partner, collaborating on their empowerment where south countries could share knowledge and experiences from their peers.

Comment by Martin CORREA on May 24, 2011 at 8:42am

Hello, I'm CORREA Martin, engineer in computer science and young entrepreneur. I live in Côte d'Ivoire.
I wish people will meet today in the same field of activity for exchange and sharing

Comment by Luara Lopes on June 7, 2010 at 4:16pm

Hi Aaron, and thank you for your comments!

I don't know if there is a "typical" role NGOs can play, but, as from my experience with SSC and NGOs, I believe they can be active partners in both donor and receiving countries (although this categories are not totally compatible with SSC).

In Brazil, especially since the late 1980's, NGOs have played an important role in many fields of national development, from chidrens' health to adult literacy.
Accordingly, they are also able to play an important role as partners in SSC projects and programs, in countries with similar problems.

On the other end, countries "receiving" SSC should, as often as possible, involve NGOs in their plans of action, so that beneficiaries are multifold and not restricted to governmental personnel. This allows for stronger sustainability and ownership, since activities are not subject to governmental instability.

Comment by Aaron Leonard on June 3, 2010 at 4:34pm

Interesting post, Laura. Could you share some specific examples that illustrate how Brazil does this? How are partner NGOs selected? From where? And what role do they typically play?

Comment by Luara Lopes on May 31, 2010 at 9:19am

In my opinion, the challenge of SSC projects and programs is not only engaging individuals who will learn from the partner cuntry, but also involving individuals willing to share this knowledge within his country or organisation. This is what makes Brazilian SSC so cost-effective: identifying local partners, influential enough to multiply the project´s capacity-building. While Brazilian SSC is certainly intergovernmental, it includes NGOs in cooperation arrangements, in order to increase local ownership and sustainability.

Comment by Steffen Soulejman Janus on October 1, 2009 at 9:40pm

One of the main objectives of the Task Team on SSC is to collect a body of evidence to identify good practice of SSC looking especially at SSC in the context of the aid effectiveness agenda. For now we will have to work on ideas of what SSC "should be", looking at the current implementation reality and emerging patterns in SSC.

Regarding reference materials please check back frequently as we will be building a library on the topic under 'resources'.

Comment by Steffen Soulejman Janus on September 29, 2009 at 9:28pm

Iara - These are interesting thoughts. There is undoubtedly a political dimension to SSC. I do believe however, that SSC and knowledge exchange between Southern partners has also great benefits for both sides from a pedagogic point of you. In a development context learning from peers who have faced similar challenges is most likely much more effective than learning from some northern countries which might deploy systems and institutional processes that are difficult to replicate in a low income country context.

Another dimension to SSC is the benefits of learning on the supply side. MICs sharing expertise with LICs can also greatly benefit from the exchange as well. Partnerships can be developed and fostered, ranging from continuous exchanges of knowledge and experiences to the implementation of economic programs.

I agree with your view that in order for SSC to be successful, both the demand and the supply side should view the cooperation as useful. A well-rounded SSC program will thus be designed in such a way that all partners benefit from the cooperation. This I would then call a successful 'exchange'.

Comment by Sheila Jagannathan on September 24, 2009 at 11:14pm

You'd be interested to know how people responded when promoted for a definition of South south learning. The following is a summary of responses received from a survey conducted by Impat Alliance and WBI in June 2009.

South-South learning includes the concepts and components of mainly:
Sharing of explicit and tacit knowledge as well as skills
Shared understanding and Exchange of knowledge with a view of creating a tangible impact over the world.
Exchange mechanism where information, knowledge, technology, good practices etc are communicated with among countries in the South
Exchange where organizations send people to participate in workshops / seminars or events to present models from their respective regions
Visit model programs/projects
Exchange of experts between people from the S-S
Echange of Resources between people from the S-S
People from the S-S interacting and learning from each other
Direct exchange of experiences, learnings between implementing organizations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, ideally without the formalizing of knowledge into usually unusable 'best practices' or 'lessons learned.' South to South Learning engages individuals and organizations directly, enables,
user-led demand for information. It involves reliance on virtual technology.
Ability of organization and individuals in developing countries to develop best practices based on experiences in conditions somewhat similar to each other
Opportunity to learn from exchange of experiences (from developing or underdeveloped countries

Comment by Nils-Sjard Schulz on September 24, 2009 at 2:46pm

A good starting point for understanding South-South cooperation is to acknowledge its rich, but also complex diversity. The Task Team on South-South cooperation (TT-SSC) decided to focus on South-South technical cooperation (incl. knowledge transfer and capacity development) in order to explore possible synergies with the aid effectiveness agenda (see discussion thread here). There is a shared vision that this type of SSC might entail horizontality, support the reform of the TC agenda and foster Southern knowledge, as well as help to identify the role of middle-income countries in the global development partnership. Other types of SSC, namely financial transfers between bigger players and less developed countries, include similar ingredients (often to different degrees though), but are having also other comparative advantages in terms of impact, leverage, etc. While the TT-SSC will complement its analytical work with other platforms (in particular the UN Development Cooperation Forum), one emerging key question could be: What could other types of SSC learn from South-South technical cooperation?

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