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DEVELOPMENT

Sweden sacks aid agency chief in major overhaul

The Swedish government has sacked the director-general of the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida), Anders Nordström, and announced a major overhaul of the sternly criticised public authority.

Published: 27 May 2010 09:48 CEST
Updated: 27 May 2010 11:02 CEST
Sweden sacks aid agency chief in major overhaul
Sweden's development aid minister Gunilla Carlsson announces overhaul

Development aid minister Gunilla Carlsson on Thursday announced a reorganisation of Sida and appointed Charlotte Petri Gornitzka, former head of Save the Children Sweden, to lead the agency in the interim.

“I am very happy that we have been able to recruit Charlotte Petri Gornitzka as interim general-director,” Gunilla Carlsson said in a press conference on Thursday.

The leadership of Sida will be soon be further strengthened by the appointment of Bo Netz, who is currently a department secretary and former acting head of treasury’s budget division.

The decision to reorganise Sida’s leadership was announced by the government earlier on Thursday morning and the minister used the mid-morning press conference to comment on the reasons behind the decision.

“In order to ensure that Sida will overcome its high-profile business, economic and organizational shortcomings, the government has today decided on measures to ensure an efficient and effective authority.”

The minister penned a deeply critical article on the Newsmill website on Wednesday arguing that Swedish development aid suffers from comprehensive structural problems.

“Unfortunately I have misjudged the extent of the development aid agency’s challenges. The Alliance government’s restructuring of Swedish development aid must therefore be intensified and the control of Sida has to be reinforced. To achieve the ambition of a development aid which optimises its benefits, full-scale changes are required.”

According to Carlsson the straw which broke the camel’s back was when it emerged that Swedish funds had been involved in corruption and fraud within the Zambian health sector over the course of several years, without the agency drawing attention to the problem.

Swedish National Audit Office (Riksrevisionen) has criticised Sida in both 2008 and 2009 for inadequate control of development aid to, among other countries, Zambia and Tanzania. The office was furthermore critical of the government for its lack of management of the agency and Gunilla Carlsson promised then to address the issue.

Sida has been battling with its finances for several years and in 2009 was obliged to seek the help of the National Financial Management Authority (Ekonomistyrningsverket – ESV) to bring order to its income and expenditure.

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UN

Norway ranked world’s top nation for ‘human development’

The Human Development Report 2019 has placed Norway as the leading country in the world.

Published: 10 December 2019 21:58 CET
Norway ranked world’s top nation for 'human development'
Photo: tan4ikk/Depositphotos

The annual report takes into account factors including life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, mean total years of schooling, and gross national income per capita.

A product of these factors is used to calculate a country’s Human Development Index (HDI).

Norway’s overall score on the index was 0.954, moving it from number 5 on the 2018 index to number 1 in 2019.

The Nordic nation was also ranked first in 2017.

Switzerland, Ireland, Germany and Hong Kong (SAR) took the remaining top five places on the index. Nordic neighbours Sweden and Denmark were placed 8th and 11th respectively.

The report also finds that Norway’s HDI score has grown consistently in the long term, with a 0.41 percent increase in the index since 1990 and a 0.16 percent increase since 2010.

But the increase for the current decade was smaller as a function than that for the 2000s, when the HDI grew by 0.27 percent.

Norway was also found to have low inequality. The country retained its placed as the highest-ranked nation in the UN development index after each nation’s HDI score was adjusted for inequality.

“In Norway, Spain, France and Croatia… the bottom 40 percent (of earners) saw their incomes grow at a rate similar to that of the average income,” the report notes.

However, in Norway and France, “the top 1 percent of incomes grew more than the average, meaning that the income share of the groups in between was squeezed,” it added.

The country ranked top of the index for gender development, meanwhile, despite a notable difference in estimated gross national income per capita for men and women.

The HDI for Norway, classified by gender, was 0.946 for women and 0.955 for men.

“While Norway is pleased to top the list, the countries that are at the top must do more to help those at the bottom,” Minister of International Development Dag-Inge Ulstein told news agency NTB.

“For the first time in world history, we have a real opportunity to eradicate all extreme poverty in the world. But after a long period of progress, we now see that the arrows are pointing downwards for many of the poorest countries. Right now. we are not on track to achieve the sustainability goals by 2030. The clock is ticking,” the minister added.

Those views appear to be supported by the overall conclusions of the report, which state that “two children born in 2000 in countries with different levels of human development will have vastly different prospects for adult life”.

“The wave of demonstrations sweeping across countries is a clear sign that, for all our progress, something in our globalized society is not working,” United Nations Development Programme administrator Achim Steiner said via the UNDP website.

READ ALSO: How Norway's schools compare to other countries in global ranking

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