Introduce Yourself : Governance, leadership and finance in africa by Frederick K. Pobi

Poverty has been a disgusting factor on the poor in Africa. Successive government’s efforts at fighting this social evil has not yielded any dividend because of institutional decade which has got to do with the human resource factor and human right violation that inhibit the right regimes to provide services aimed at propelling the aspirations of the people.

This means empowering its people to demand better services through reforms that create more effective systems of public sector accountability thus leading to the improvement in the lifestyles of the citizenry.

Often, many segments of the enterprise and household sectors suffer from lack of access to effective service provision at reasonable cost because of violation of human right thus hindering growth because of Human Resource.

The World economy has recently thrown into a debate aiming at providing lessons on the design and functioning of Poverty Reduction Strategies monitoring systems, based on the experience of public sector reforms through Human Resource Management and right regimes with impeccable human right records.

The focus is on the institutional arrangements of providing the right policies and leadership which put human capital at the fulcrum .The rules and processes which bring the various actors and monitoring activities together in a coherent framework.

Poverty alleviation through Effective Public Service delivery is what has been envisaged as the right way of fighting poverty. Although antipoverty efforts were rooted in concerns about conditions in rural areas, virtually all current policy debates centre on the urban poor. Yet, poverty rates are higher in rural areas, unemployment is greater, and there is less earnings growth than in urban labour markets. This canker could be addressed through the training of quality human capital.

Urban and rural areas have seen similar declines in cash assistance caseloads, rural residents face different hurdles in making the transition from welfare to work. The Rural economy offers fewer job opportunities and jobs are often less rewarding. The need to tailor the current "make work pay" policies becomes critical and Human Resources in Knowledge Society are in no doubt at centre piece against violation of human right.

A strong and effective public service is vital to the world’s efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Public administration systems and institutions are also an essential element in promoting good, democratic governance. Governance that is transparent, accountable, and sensitive to the needs of the public. Indeed, we have all seen the opposite, weak governance, or corrupted public services, that not only serve as an obstacle or hindrance to development, but also waste precious resources and undermine the ethical fibre of society.

Thus we must do all we can to support all countries in building up and revitalizing their public institution through Human Resource Management. Special efforts should be focused on developing countries, on countries with economies in transition, and on Africa, since no other part of the world faces such enormous and daunting challenges, from deadly conflict to pandemic disease.

Individuals who contribute greatly to institutional reforms in public service, the best of whom provide outstanding services to their publics, at times under severe hardship and strain are the only frontiers to the struggle of alleviating poverty. Despite such contributions, public servants in many countries receive salaries that barely enable them to make ends meet.

Public sector institutions must become active “learning organizations”. That means harnessing the power of Human Resource and communication technologies. It means engaging more actively with new partners, from the private sector to civil society organizations. Such commitments to the values of promoting effective services would impact positively on the economic fortunes.

Employee involvement is creating an environment in which people have impacts on decisions and actions that affect their jobs. They ought to be really empowered through reforms aim at committing them to the ideals of providing better services. This involvement is not the goal nor is it a tool, as practiced in many organizations. Rather, it is a management and leadership philosophy about how people are most enabled to contribute to continuous improvement and the ongoing success of poverty alleviation. They provide a continuum for leadership and involvement that includes an increasing role for employees and a decreasing role for governments in the decision processes.

It is not obvious that improved Human Resource will have any extraordinarily high or excess income effects for poor households. If it does poverty alleviation policy might better emphasize the transfer of other forms of wealth or opportunity to poor rural households.

The notion that institutional reforms through training of human resource personals has no special value for poor households can be made easily by reference to a standard economic model of the agricultural extension services provided by qualified people.

Assuming that:

(I) it takes only land and labour to produce agricultural goods;

(ii) there are no economies or diseconomies of scale in agricultural production;

(iii) households can buy or sell any amount of labour they want at the market wage rate; and

(iv) hired labour is as productive as family labour;

then the countries can adjust fully to restricted land access by using the labour market to sell and obtain the full benefit from any extra labour it might otherwise be able to employ on farm. In this case, enhancing a public service access to the grassroots by giving it innovative ideals and rights to a piece of land would simply increase its income by the rental value of land. The same effect could be achieved by giving the household a savings bond or any other asset that has the same return as land - there would be nothing special about enhancing the household's land access.

Correspondingly, increasing the household's access to land by permitting it to rent-in additional units of land would have no affected whatsoever on its income. Given optimizing behaviour by the household both before and after the increase in land access, the increment in income produced with the land would be displaced exactly by the rental price of land (and the reduction in off-farm earnings). If access to Human Resource is to have special livelihood value for households, then it must somehow have a value in excess of its rental price. So what is missing from this model, and is it important? Yes Human Resource Knowledge has a tremendous impact on public reforms and provides the clue to alleviating poverty.

God Help Mother Africa!!!

By: Frederick K. Pobi

-Social Commentator

Follow me on Social Media: @frederickpobi II @kobooko_one