EL BLOG DE LA FIIAPP. Cooperación Española

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

By the end of last year, after just nine months of operation, the Turkish Ombudsman had received over 7,000 complaints according to the institution’s own statistics. The main sources of dissatisfaction: the civil service, local administrations, education, access to the university, and social security. “We’re working to assist citizens in matters that concern them. We’re also trying to avoid problems between citizens and the administrations, and help administrations improve their services”, the first and current Turkish Ombudsman, Nihat Ömeroglu, explains to the FIIAPP.

A recently created institution that is independent of the Government and has a long road ahead of it. “I hope it is respected and effective figure. I suppose that a country as large as Turkey, with such an enormous population, is complex, but they will be capable of designing an organization that encompasses the entire territory and reaches all citizens. We are going to show them how we operate, orient them and provide all the necessary information and help to also make it a very effective ombudsman, indicates Spanish Ombudsman Soledad Becerril. This institutionadds 30 years of experience to that of France, which the two countries will work to share with Turkey in the course of this two-year cooperation project financed by the EU with 1.6 million euros.

Assistance to refugees

In addition to focusing on the most common complaints, the Turkish Ombudsman wishes to assist with other types of needs, such as helping the Syrian population migrating to Turkey to escape the civil war that has been plaguing that country for the past four years. According to Amnesty International, a total of 1.6 million Syrians have crossed the Turkish border since 2011, of which 220,000 live in refugee camps. The rest of the Syrian population in Turkey is living in different parts of the country. “They are very interested in talking about immigration with a country like Spain and an institution like this one”, emphasizes Carmen Comas-Mata, head of the Office of the Ombudsman in Spain and the Spanish director of the project FIIAPP is managing. This same institution will make Turkey focus on other issues, such as the prevention of torture in prisons. “We are the national mechanism of torture prevention in Spain; in Turkey, they are not, but they are also able to visit detention facilities, and therefore we are also going to try to help them in this as well, and to tell them how they might do things”, adds the expert.

From paper to practice

The goal is clear: now all that is needed is to take the steps to reach it. Steps that have been materializing since last April with a preliminary identification of needs by the Turkish Ombudsman, followed by theoretical and practical training and experience exchanges from Spanish experts to Turkish ones, in addition to a review of the legislation pertaining to this institution according to that of other countries in the European Union. All for the purpose of strengthening its management.

“The training sessions must focus, above all, on the process of managing complaints, in other words, how the incoming complaint is managed up to when the Ombudsman provides a solution”, explains Arantxa Díaz, the FIIAPP expert sent to coordinate the project on the ground, but she adds, also on the area of the rights of women, children, individuals deprived of their liberty and refugees. Turkish civil servants will also be trained, both in Turkey and in Spain and France, to mediate between citizens and the Administration, and to establish relationships between the institution and Parliament, other public institutions and NGOs. They will also be trained on how to strengthen the channels for publicizing the institution which is, at the moment, not well known—“how to introduce itself on the Internet, social network and in the news media”, explains Díaz regarding her communication plan.

Within this area, the Spanish Ombudsman will review the complete independence of its Turkish counterpart, as without this, the ultimate benefit of the project will not be achieved: protection of the rights of Turkish citizens.