I WANT to begin this week by congratulating former President Bharrat Jagdeo for his recent appointment in a dual capacity to International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), as the entities High Level Envoy for Sustainable Development in Forest Countries and Patron of Nature.
I’d also like to congratulate President Donald Ramotar on his first 100 days in office – for any President, the first 100 days is seen as more of a symbolic milestone than anything else, but in this case, I believe that His Excellency’s astute stewardship in as contentious and as trying a political environment as this is for the Executive deserves special applause.
Now last week, in the second installment of my tripartite series on ‘Advancing Intersectoral initiatives, I dealt with what I believe to be the fundamental hurdle facing a greater integration of public policy planning: That of territoriality.  This week, we’ll examine the benefits.
At a fundamental level, it is commonsense – working together in a system that is supposed to have one general common goal is a good thing. There are clear benefits of intersectoral friendship, cooperation, working together, integration, interaction, whatever you seek to label it – of these, I shall expound upon with the most direct.
The first benefit I’ve written about in various ways before but never in this particular context; that is, the reduction of replication of initiatives. In running as complex an entity as a government, there is inevitably going to be two main types of replication: Overlap and parallelism.
I can cite the health sector as one area where both types of replication can occur, particularly, as I’ve noted before, in the specific area of HIV/AIDS programme funding. In this sector, we can have overlap as well as parallelism with regard to one area: Let’s say (for the sake of example only) prevention – from messages focused on behaviour change to condom distribution, there is the danger of several initiatives replicating others.
A Ministry of Health public service message for example could be replicated in a Ministry of Human Services public service message – what we’d have in essence therefore would be two sets of financing going towards the production of what would essentially be one message.  An intersectoral approach, particularly one based on the model I offered in the first installment of this series, would reduce replication, freeing up resources both financially and otherwise.
This brings me to the second direct benefit of intersectoral planning and execution: That of cost saving, both directly and indirectly. A streamlined, replication-reduced operation is inevitably going to save you money; money you can redirect elsewhere. If you’re a breadwinner for a family on a fixed income and you cut your electricity costs down by not having both the chandelier and the floor lamp on at the same time, you now have money from your budgeted recurring expenses you can spend elsewhere, like on a mortgage, for example, considering energy costs these days, or you can put it in the bank for a rainy day.
In the same way, money saved as a direct result of intersectoral planning, specifically the reduction of replication, can be saved so that we can produce an annual budget surplus, a boon for any developing nation; or, it can be strategically directed to areas in which there are serious support gaps.
Then there is the third direct logical benefit of intersectoral initiative planning: Strategic resource allocation. You streamline your programmes, you save resources, and then you allocate them to areas in which there are shortfalls. For example, I’ve written repeatedly on the issue of disaster response and mitigation.  With an increasingly erratic global climate, we have no guarantee that the type of flooding we saw in 2005 would not recur. For example, I’ve advocated for an international disaster response fund, similar to the Global Fund for HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria, as opposed to the cap-in-hand approach the UN has taken in the wake of Haiti and Pakistan and other recent disasters; there is no reason that we cannot establish a similar national fund, to be managed most likely by the Civil Defence Commission.
I can think of about a dozen areas — from music programmes to underfunded public health — that would benefit from greater resource allocation.
Let me repeat what I stated in the first article, since I am certain that some amount of  intersectoral planning is undertaken at the level of the Cabinet sub-committees. The question is: Have we evolved to the point where it is systematic and happens across-the-board? I believe that I am in a qualified enough position to say that this is not the case. The government, for example, could look at certain critical areas of development and mandate that they be undertaken – with regard to both policy and execution – in an intersectoral manner.
The initial steps are not necessarily exhaustive or disruptive. For example, with the new e-governance infrastucture mechanism due to come on board soon, a first-step could be simply a matter of integrating existing websites within specific sectors, so that each carries not only a hyperlink to the others, but substantial information with regard to relevant integrated programmes as well.
As resources become more difficult globally, and as we inevitably become more exposed to the international financial system through our economic expansion, I believe that this model could be used not only to mitigate the disruption of our development process, but to increase yield from our initiatives as well. In an upcoming article, not necessarily next week, I will provide a simulation.
We need to come to think of loss and gain as exponential and not absolute. For every missed opportunity, for every dollar wasted today, we have to account for an exponential number multiplied down the road, a number we can neither forecast nor afford.
And for every dollar we spend wisely, every initiative that we plan as comprehensively as possible, we can expect returns that are both predictable and unpredictable.
Simply put, a stitch in time saves nine; that stitch we need is intersectoral planning and integration.