EL BLOG DE LA FIIAPP. Cooperación Española

Rural farmers, African-descended, Raizaland indigenous groups. Families belonging to these four communities in Colombia have resorted to illegal cultivation of plants like coca and poppies (from which heroin is derived) as a way of life. The ease of cultivation offered by the zones where they live or coercion by criminal networks are the main reasons why they get involved in this practice. Since 2003, this South American Country has been working on Alternative Development (AD) for the main purpose of obtaining territories free of illegal crops. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), AD is a process designed to reduce and eradicate cultivation of plants containing narcotic as well as psychotropic substances by offering alternatives such as cocoa, coffee, bananas, edible palms, etc.

“Invigorating the economy of the region and strengthening the culture of legality of these families and organizations”, adds Patricia Meléndez, director of the Programme to Combat Illegal Crops in Colombia. Since its beginnings, AD has helped 190,000 families in Colombia, and in the last two years it has managed to reduce the number of hectares dedicated to coca cultivation from 64,000 to 48,000.

Preventive perspective

This is the goal, and achieving it requires preliminary awareness-raising and basic prevention work. “It’s not just a question of supplanting crops that can be diverted for illegal purposes of drug production but of preventing vulnerable areas from becoming dedicated to the production of these drugs”, explains Claudia Liebers, expert in the Cooperation Programme Between Latin America and the European Union on Drug Policies (COPOLAD). This FIIAPP-managed European programme assisted Colombia in holding onto this perspective from 2011 to last January, when it reached its close.

It did so by creating an exchange network in which AD is referred to other Andean countries like Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. Mexico and Guatemala also showed interest shortly before the close of COPOLAD. This exchange has led to an exchange of best practices between neighbouring countries to halt the spread of illegal crops. The challenge was to combine the different drug policies, since in the case of Bolivia coca cultivation is legal. “That’s where the richness lies: in seeing these differences, but at the same time analyzing the great similarities between these countries and how working together contributes to making progress more effectively”, indicates Liebers.

Forums, workshops, women

The exchange tools between these countries provided by COPOLAD included the holding of regional forums, workshops and working groups, and development of a study and a manual on livelihoods and needs in the cultivation zones. Without forgetting the gender perspective. The programme put together a photographic exhibition and two videos which highlight the role of women in these zones as an engine of change. This is the case of Colombia. “We have some rural zones where the women are the ones leading the Alternative Development process in the territory. They’ve been given a role and they are the ones who become ambassadors in the territory to spread the lessons learnt in everything having to do with the COPOLAD programme”, indicates Patricia Meléndez.

One of the strong points of COPOLAD, which for the past four years has connected 17 Latin American countries with Europe to strengthen their public policies on drugs, has been to promote AD with the clear intention of involving local stakeholders in its development, as well as in the formulation of drug policies. The dialogue between institutions and local stakeholders was an essential part. “The goal is to go beyond Alternative Development”, emphasizes Liebers in conclusion: “achieving comprehensive development in these zones that generates greater social inclusion for these people by providing a dignified standard of living and respect for human rights, so that they do not have the need to cultivate crops or carry out tasks that might be linked to the production of illegal drugs”.

What kind of cooperation do my taxes pay for?, is a question that must have been asked before. Since last year, the Spanish General Secretariat of International Development Cooperation (SGCID) has been trying to answer this question in a simple and direct way on the website “Cooperación en cifras“. There the reader will not get lost in technical concepts and data but rather will find an accessible and transparent view of cooperation.

“Often citizens and the news media do not want to sit down and read a manual to find out how cooperation funds are spent, for example. They just want to know where the money for cooperation goes and what projects are being developed. They don’t need such detailed information”, explains Ana Henche, head of the SGCID’s Statistics Service, in reference to this tool.

According to Henche, Spanish cooperation policy is one of the areas where accountability is most needed. “We are asked to provide a great deal of justification and we are transparent. At least, whenever they ask us for information, we send all that we have”, she continues. And not just by citizens but also by other agents of civil society such as NGOs or the Coordinating Committee for Development NGOs-Spain (CONGDE), which looks into where the taxes Spaniards pay for cooperation goes.

Online since 2011

The department Ana coordinates started to fulfil this transparency responsibility in 2011 through info@OD. This is a system for compiling, analyzing and publishing what the different recipients, such as the FIIAPP, have done with the funds from the general State budgets dedicated to cooperation each year, whether these be government agencies, universities or NGOs. It generates a type of information that is designed for researchers and conducting analyses.

Over time, the Statistics Service of the SGCID has managed to develop communication tools like “Cooperación en cifras” (Cooperation in Figures) and to help everyone understand the information this department handles, which can range from the type of cooperation government agencies, universities and NGOs undertake to the budgets being managed. “With just one click people can learn what projects are being developed in a country or the sectors in which Spanish cooperation is active, summarizes Ana Henche.

The author has sole responsibility for the opinions and comments expressed in this blog

La importancia de coordinar esfuerzos para luchar contra “la creciente amenaza de la ciberdelincuencia” ha sido reconocida dentro de la Unión Europea como “multi-dimensional”, orientada de este modo a ciudadanos, empresas y gobiernos y creciendo a un ritmo vertiginoso.

Pero no hace falta ningún reconocimiento de un organismo oficial o una institución superior para que la percepción y la realidad del cibercrimen se traslade a un fenómeno ya cercano y casi “familiar” para el usuario final. Empezamos con estos párrafos para poner de manifiesto que la ciberseguridad es un problema de todos y esta implicación global hace que de igual forma, cualquier usuario individual, empresa e institución público- privada tenga su parte de responsabilidad, tanto como autor o víctima.

La transnacionalidad e internacionalidad de estos delitos, que por la estructura y dinámica de funcionamiento intrínseco de la Red no conocen fronteras, hacen que el delito online pueda ser cometido a escala masiva y con una gran distancia geográfica entre el acto criminal en sí y sus efectos. En consecuencia, los aspectos técnicos, es decir, los métodos utilizados para cometer los delitos cibernéticos y los métodos de investigación son similares en todo el mundo debido a que los delincuentes suelen conectarse a través de los mismos sistemas de comunicación y redes de información. Es, probablemente, la incidencia en mayor o menor medida de un determinado delito, por ejemplo, el fraude o los ciberataques, lo que distingue los diferentes planteamientos de cada país hacia esta materia.

Por ello, la colaboración y cooperación tanto judicial como policial es crucial y necesaria para que la lucha contra el cibercrimen sea cada vez más ágil y efectiva, adoptando estrategias de trabajo conjuntas y medidas prácticas para garantizar la lucha y prevención contra la misma, siempre adaptada a las necesidades de los países afectados. Así mismo, la adquisición de conocimientos y habilidades por parte de los agentes policiales encargados de su investigación, contribuye significativamente al progreso y éxito de las investigaciones sobre todo en las que existe una implicación internacional.

Uno de los proyectos de cooperación policial internacional y europea es el Hermanamiento que se está llevando a cabo en la actualidad entre las autoridades policiales españolas dirigido por la Unidad de Investigación Tecnológica de la Policía Nacional y las autoridades de esta misma materia en Croacia, gestionado por la Fundación Internacional y para Iberoamérica de Administración y Políticas Públicas (FIIAPP), institución pública dedicada a la cooperación internacional.

El nuevo Código Penal croata, que entró en vigor el 1 de enero de 2013, incorpora plenamente el Acervo comunitario así como las disposiciones de los convenios internacionales relacionados con el cibercrimen que engloban las disposiciones legales existentes. Este hecho proporciona la base jurídica y las herramientas suficientes para la lucha eficaz contra la delincuencia informática. Con el propósito de alcanzar los estándares de la UE y para luchar contra la ciberdelincuencia con éxito, la cooperación policial entre ambos países, España y Croacia, se centra en cuestiones de organización, fortalecimiento las capacidades de los agentes de policía y el desarrollo de procedimientos estandarizados de investigación y análisis forense.

Los sistemas de formación continua de los agentes de la policía deben establecerse teniendo en cuenta el rápido desarrollo de las tecnologías de la información y de la comunicación. Cabe preguntarse si con el alto grado de especialización y complejidad técnica que a veces presentan las investigaciones sobre delitos cibernéticos, es posible el desarrollo de procedimientos normalizados de trabajo. Efectivamente, aunque ciertas técnicas de cibercrimen evolucionen hacia la complejidad buscando nuevas formas de ataque, la motivación y la psicología de los criminales es siempre la misma. En ello se seguirá trabajando.

Silvia Barrera

The author has sole responsibility for the opinions and comments expressed in this blog

We also talk about the project financed by the European Union and managed by the FIIAPP, which in the past two years has sent 20 Spanish experts to the North African country to support the goal of total and comprehensive integration of persons with disabilities.

This project has contributed to improving the educational level of and establishing an inclusive educational model for minors with disabilities in regular educational centres, as well as to promoting access to employment by this population.
In the area of education, 36 professionals, including teachers, physical therapists, speech therapists and psychologists, were trained to enable them to adapt their educational system to the needs of minors with disabilities.

With respect to integration into the labour market, 48 employment office counsellors and social workers were trained to guide members of this group in their job search and in researching prospective companies.

You can read the entire interview with the Minister of Social Affairs here and hear from the beneficiaries of this project on our radio programme ‘Public cooperation around the world’(Radio 5, all news).

Unfortunately, in the world of development programmes, we’re closer to the former situation than to the latter. Every year thousands of programmes designed to fight underdevelopment are carried out, yet we know very little about their effectiveness. Do vocational training programmes reduce unemployment? Which programme is the most cost-effective for preventing children from dropping out of school in Africa: scholarships or antiparasitic pills?

The truth is that to find this out, as in the field of medicine, study is required. Impact evaluations are tools that measure the effects of programmes compared to their final development objectives. For example, thanks to impact evaluations like this one in the Dominican Republic, this one in Colombia and this one in Turkey, today we have evidence that vocational training programmes have positive effects on the quality of work, but that they have very modest effects on reducing unemployment. In addition, thanks to evaluations like the ones summarized here, today we know that for every 100 dollars spent on deparasitization programmes in Africa, we increase school attendance in the population by 13.9 years, while the same money spent on scholarships only increases this by 0.27 years.

Only with evidence like this can policy-makers in the public sector have valid tools for establishing the right programmes for combating underdevelopment in order to solve problems faster and waste fewer resources.

To measure the effectiveness of programmes, impact evaluations use control groups. The treatment group consists of a group of persons that received the programme, and the control group consists of a group of persons that did not (just like in drug studies!).

The greatest challenge of these methodologies is finding a valid control group. And that is not always easy. For example, to measure the impact of a vocational training programme, we might think to compare employment levels before and after participation in the programme.

If the difference was positive, would you say the programme had been effective? At first glance, that might seem to be the case, but it might also just be that the economy improved, increasing employment levels, and that the programme was actually totally ineffective. To avoid this problem, we might think to compare a group of unemployed persons that signed up to participate in the programme with another group (affected by the same economy) that did not. If the programme participants found more work, would you say that the programme had been effective? Again that might seem to be the case, but it might also be that the people in the group that signed up did so simply because they were more motivated to find work, and this motivation was the reason they found more work (and not the programme).

Therefore in impact evaluations, for the control group to be considered valid, it must be a group that was subject to the same conditions at the same time as the treatment group (to avoid the first problem) and which, at least on average, is equivalent to the treatment group in every way (to avoid the second problem). The most rigorous way of generating valid control groups is to randomly assign people to participate and not participate in the programme. This methodology, called experimental, simply means assigning people to the programme using a lottery. However, sometimes it is not possible to randomize. For example, the programme may be delivered to the entire population, or delivered based on a poverty ranking, making it impossible to assign it using a lottery. In this case, there are other methodologies that can help us find good control groups. These methodologies are called quasi-experimental, and although they require more assumptions (which makes them “weaker” technically), they are also good tools for measuring impact.

In recent years, interest in measuring the effectiveness of programmes has increased and, as a result, impact evaluations of development programmes have increased considerably. International institutions, such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, are two good examples of institutions in which impact evaluations have become a key for learning about what works in order to provide feedback on project design. In this publication, you can see some of the BID’s lessons learnt in 2013 and here some of the evaluations carried out by the World Bank.

In the academic world, there are also study centres dedicated to searching for rigorous evidence to show which programmes work and which do not. Some of the most important ones are the Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal, associated with MIT), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA, founded by a Yale professor), and the Center for Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA, at UC Berkeley). There are also global initiatives, such as the Network of Networks for Impact Evaluation (NONIE) and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), dedicated to this area.

With each impact evaluation, we learn a little bit more about which programmes work best and why. Nevertheless, we are still a long way from being as effective as doctors when we “prescribe” programmes in an attempt to cure the “disease of underdevelopment”.

The author has sole responsibility for the opinions and comments expressed in this blog

For the first time, there was recognition of the fact that Euro-African migration routes are a complex phenomenon that requires close collaboration between all the states involved: the countries of origin, transit and destination for migratory flows. The work in Rabat established, based on the partnership between the states involved, the fundamental pillars of the dialogue: coordination, joint responsibility and the search for formulas that increase the positive effects of migration on development. Thus the Rabat Process opened a new era in the construction of governance over migration: one of regulating the phenomenon of migration for the benefit of all based on policy and public institutions. Currently there are other frameworks for bi-regional agreement and dialogue on migration policies inspired by the Rabat Process, such as the Dialogue on Migration and Mobility between the European Union and Africa, the ACP Dialogue with the European Union, and the Structured Dialogue on Migration between CELAC and the European Union.

The FIIAPP, in close collaboration with the ministries involved, has been facilitating this dialogue since 2007.

The Rabat Process as a space for discussion, debate and experience exchanges was consolidated through the Second Ministerial Conference held in Paris in 2008. Subsequently, European and African countries assumed the challenge of making the policy agreements concrete with the approval of the Dakar Strategy in the Third Ministerial Conference on the Rabat Process (Senegal, 2011). Today, following the successful Fourth Euro-African Ministerial Conference, held in Rome on 27th November, the interest in maintaining this space for coordination and support, unquestionably the most innovative and consolidated experience in the migration debate, is evident.

In Rome, the countries of Central Africa, West Africa, the Maghreb and the European Union, as well as Switzerland, Norway, the European Commission and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) made a commitment to continue working together to maximize the positive effects of migration on the countries’ development. Likewise, the Rome Programme (2015-2017) was approved for the purpose of implementing the commitments with the approval of an action plan with very specific lines of intervention.

Rome will make it possible to take another step towards configuring a bi-regional support space between Africa and Europe. It will also facilitate the transfer of know-how and best practices for migration policies on the fight against human trafficking, employment migration policies and the participation of the diaspora in development actions in their countries of origin.

This is clearly a question of aligning the interests of the two regions to define increasingly specific migration policies in order to take advantage, both implicitly and explicitly, of the development potential of the international mobility of their citizens. The most successful route for encouraging human mobility is, no doubt, through the construction of partnerships, such as the Rabat Process.

The FIIAPP’s Migration and Development Team