Mismanagement at the CGIAR
Don't say I never warned you ...
I have written about the mismanagement of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (the CGIAR, sometimes called “the system”) [1]and the 15 years it has wasted on unproductive reforms. Among my criticisms of the CGIAR have been:
“Capture by donors has diverted the system from its scientific purpose of generating new knowledge to promoting the personal interests of the system’s managers”; and
“The recent addition of new layers of management, and of political appointees to unnecessary functions, in response to political complaints about voice will further increase transactions costs and damage scientific efficiency”.
Serious allegations about governance, involving the system office and at least two international agricultural research centers (“Centers”), have recently emerged. In those allegations, we see that the capture of a productive research system by personal interests might have led to opaque (at best) recruitments , harassment of working scientists, discrimination based on gender, financial mismanagement, and the forced departure of managers recently hired at great expense.
UN Special Rapporteur for Food, Michael Fakhri (USA), recently received an anonymous letter complaining about CGIAR governance. The anonymous letter, which was also sent to the Chair of the System Council (SC) Assurance Oversight Committee (Muriel Uzan [Spain]): (a) concluded “CGIAR's ethics and integrity functions are in crisis because they are being systematically dismantled”; (b) stated “This dismantling of assurance and oversight functions has coincided with a rapid deterioration in the conduct and ethical standards of the System Board (SB) and the new CGIAR leadership, governance standards, and transparency.”; and [c] requested that Fakhri invoke “the mandate and platform of the UN special procedures to call on the CGIAR System Council” to “commission a fully independent review by external experts … [of the] CGIAR’s oversight and assurance functions”; “ensure standard whistleblowing protections”; and “Empower the System [Council] to review the nominations process for the Integrated Partnership Board …”
The anonymous letter containing the allegations has circulated widely, as has the reply from the System Council (SC) Chair (Juergen Voegele [Germany] of the World Bank). A slightly redacted version of the anonymous letter and Voegele’s reply are attached below.
The anonymous letter listed “45 red flags that require investigation and scrutiny”, [including] multiple questions relating to the following areas:
• Deliberate and systematic erosion of core independent oversight and assurance including whistleblowing functions;
• Board/ AFRC response to the dismissal during maternity leave of a senior woman scientist by a CGIAR Center;
• System Board handling of ICRISAT negotiations & financial irregularities;
• The System Board Chair's role in Executive Managing Director recruitment;
• Integrated Partnership Board nominations: System Board involvement and related matters;
• Additional areas of scrutiny relating to the System Board Chair (conduct, costs, decisions); and
• Executive Managing Director and Deputy Executive Managing Director decisions and conduct relating to the restructuring process and impact on science delivery.”
Juergen Voegele wrote (July 2024) to System Board Chair Lindiwe Sibanda (Zimbabwe) and to the Executive Managing Director (EMD) of the CGIAR Esmahane Elouafi Morocco) stating that the SB had not informed the SC of the complaints it described as “serious allegations involving the CGIAR and its governance”. Voegele’s letter did a rather thin summary of the complaints, without the detail of the 45 “red flags” and with a staged air of outrage that belies Voegele’s lethargic tenure as SC Chair. Sibanda and the chair of the CGIAR Audit, Finance, and Risk Committee (AFRC), Clarissa van Heerden (South Africa), launched investigations of the complaints. The SC asked for a report from the AFRC and the SB in response to the allegations; Sibanda seems to have replied to Voegele on July 14.
The SB Audit and Oversight Committee (AOC) raised concerns about problems in oversight, business conduct, and ethics in a meeting in June 2024; the letter from Voegele flagged these issues and asked system management to submit a report for approval by the Systems Council on July 31, 2024.
A related issue is that the System Office is spending more than ever on itself. The System Board spent about US$49 million on its internal management in 2023 (5.7% of the CGIAR 2023 total of US$850 million and roughly 12 % of the non-project support to the system), compared to US$37 million in 2022 (3.5% of the 2022 total of US$771 million). There is no obvious rationale for overspending on internal management when the system’s funding in real terms has fallen steeply since 2015.
Underlying these allegations is the reality that the CG is run as the private estate of the SB Chair, the EMD, and the Center Directors. Many allegations in the anonymous letter concern recruitment of the EMD, the appointments of various people to Board sinecures, and specific actions taken by system management, of which we know little, and about which there is never any accountability.
An invisible, but dangerous for the unwary, fence around the private estate is the absence of transparent dispute resolution procedures[2]. We see this in the behavior of the Center Directors. They wrote (July 8[3]) to Voegele in support of Sibanda and Elouafi, the System Board, and One CGIAR in general, claiming that some of the allegations had been settled and that others should not be disclosed on the grounds of confidentiality. This struthioniform attitude is not surprising given that their appointments, continued tenure and budgets depend on the personal goodwill of the EMD, of the System Board Chair, and of the System Council Chair. Their funding depends on the donors being unaware, or at any rate confused, about the allegations and their supposed settlements. The Directors in claiming that some allegations had been settled are defending a system of justice in which judge, jury, and executioner are one and the same—the Directors. How convenient.
What is to be done ?
It is uncertain what the SB’s investigation of its own conduct, and that of at least 2 of its member Centers, will find. It is possible that the specific allegations are false. It is also possible that the CGIAR is hiding mismanagement, as it has done in the past. Even if the allegations in the anonymous letter are unfounded—my opinion is that they are well-founded--the AOC raises issues that confirm the problem with the system’s “reforms”—they are a waste of scientific time and money 3—which go well beyond the claims in the anonymous letter.
I support the request for an external, fully independent, investigation of business, financial and ethics practices in the System Board, in the EMD’s office, in the Centers, and of the individual allegations made in the anonymous letter. The System Council, which is led by the World Bank, should not conduct such an investigation because it is heavily implicated in the mismanagement of the CGIAR. The Gates Foundation and USAID should not participate in the investigation because of their tolerance, not to say encouragement, of the people and practices which have made the investigation necessary.
The investigation must, at the least:
investigate the 45 red flags raised in the anonymous letter;
hear from scientists about the effects of system leadership on scientific programs;
investigate the rate of turnover of scientific staff and managers in the past 3 years;
make a public report of its investigation (without redactions except the names of witnesses who request anonymity);
propose a modern dispute resolution system for the CGIAR, based on best practices in the UN system and in the World Bank; and
propose to the System Council a requirement of annual personal financial declarations by CGIAR executives at all levels, including lists of outside activities and compensation.
[1] John McIntire, “One CGIAR is failing (and what to do about it)”, http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.20565.09441; and John McIntire and Achim Dobermann, “The CGIAR needs a revolution”, “http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2023.100712”. The system is described at www.cgiar.org; broadly it includes 15 agricultural research centers, a system office managed by an Executive Managing Director and various Directors (HR, finance, legal, etc.); System Board (which supervises the executive); and a System Council, an apex governance entity. Don’t blame me if this all seems unnecessarily complicated.
[2] An example of what the CGIAR must have—an adversarial procedure, access to electronic records, testimony of witnesses, adequate legal representation for the appellant, independent judges, and binding decisions made public—can be found in the Judgments and Orders of the World Bank Tribunal (https://tribunal.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/judgments-orders/HD%20v.%20IBRD%20697.pdf)
[3]. It is telling that the Center Directors, who command hundreds of millions of dollars of scientific expertise, are too weak to answer even a paragraph of the many published critiques of the CGIAR but can use their time to defend a management culture better suited to the court of Emperor Haile Selassie and in a style that reads as if it had been dictated by the System Board itself.
Yes the Penang document is the usual ugly UN verbiage. One of the slides shows the W1/W2 cuts. I have no idea about W3.
One of my Substacks from a few weeks ago is on how Gates could spend its money. Agricultural research is not a priority.
We have glad tidings from Montpelier. This link no longer works ... https://www.cgiar.org/lindiwe-sibanda/ and hopelessly unqualified Deputy EMD Guillaume Grosso is gone. We hope there will be more good news soon.