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2nd Call for Papers
The EITD Research State Budget Issues Conference (SBIC) holding in Yaounde Cameroon, April 19-21, 2010, will bring over a thousand (1,000) delegates from many parts of Cameroon and the world together. It is a unique opportunity for all generations of public policy stakeholders to engage one another, investigate and follow-up compliance with legal guarantees of human rights and freedoms and their relations, or lack thereof, with annual finance laws or State Budgets. Much of the recurring crisis in society has to do with the ways in which public money is allocated and used or not, in accordance with law and, sometime, illegally.
Too often, when State Budget Issues of developing countries are discussed, services that tell the scale, pace and quality of human rights and freedoms guarantee, which government pays for or not, scarcely feature seriously. The assumption tends to be that the services so desired or programmed would become operational and deliver as expected if, and only if, money to settle their cost is found and made available, and preferably urgently. The thinking is costing many people in countries such as Cameroon dearly and denying the world much opportunity to further economic growth and prosperity.
Take judiciary services in Cameroon, for example, where recent simple enquiring and advisory letters (from the EITD Research Revival of Justice and Judiciary Reform [RJJR] Programme) to some key judiciary services officials get responses that are mute or harassing, menacing, intimidating, wasting resources and jeopardising public trust in law. Why? What could any new or less money from government or state budgeting for the judiciary services do to deliver improvements, and how?
This predicament is not limited to judiciary services. Almost every public service in Cameroon is facing similar challenges. These include the serious problems in local and central government, water supply, electricity, housing, food, hygiene and sanitation, education, medical care, agriculture, climate change, etc. Cameroon is lagging on its promise to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). People in the country and around the world are hurting from the issues differently, and state budgeting solutions may not emerge for all if the concerns are not being articulated or understood well enough.
Everyone is qualified to help bring to light truth, about what or which service is working well or not, where, how, why, etc., including suggestions of what could or should be done to bring about improvements as necessary. Given the growing depletion of resources and urgent need to combat it, effective ways have to be continually found for government or state budgets to enable people to achieve more with available or less resources. In other words, people in countries such as Cameroon also have to be making or learning to make significant gains in productivity and competitiveness.
Hence this second EITD Research invitation to you and your organisation(s) to reflect on the issues and help meet the pressing needs by submitting your paper(s) for consideration in its forthcoming State Budget Issues Conference holding in Yaounde Cameroon, April 19-21, 2010.
Submission deadline: Please submit abstracts of around 500 words via email to sbic@eitdr.org by January 30, 2010. Full papers should be submitted for distribution to participants by March 10, 2010. Due to budget constraints, we may not be able to pay for papers. We expect participation to be on the strength of the issues.
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