 Good morning everyone and very welcome to this results meeting that is actually an exchange of results meetings so we would like to exchange with you on the floor and we actually also exchange with all the people out there in the world who are sitting by the web and have written questions to these different sessions and are participating in many ways. Well we will meet I think the world-leading experts in different areas of the social sectors we will hear them we will also discuss with them and I hope that you want to participate in that way we will have microphones on the floor or other people running with microphones on the floor after each mini session you can ask your questions or come with short comments and I would love that first I would like to talk about a very important issue of this meeting it's about to communicate academic results please welcome Mr. Fintharp director UNU wider. Hello everybody thank you very much for your remarks Alina thank you very much to our moderator there's supposed to be some slides showing up on the side of UNU wider we're very pleased to be here today contrary to what some people think we actually do wish to try to share with you our results our findings from our work I've often been asked so what is RECOM? Well RECOM is an attempt to come to grips with what we know and what we don't know about foreign aid you will have seen in this room on TV in academic papers lots of people who claim that they as individuals know everything they have the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth we don't think that that's a productive approach we believe that foreign aid is a complex matter then that it requires a large joint and comprehensive program where we draw on a global network of researchers and practitioners to try to bring together what we as a community as a development community actually know and don't know the program was initiated in early 2011 you can go and have a look at the website which is by now populated with quite a lot of material that has been emerging over the past two years what motivates us well we are interested in one overall and four specific questions I don't think it comes to any but is surprise that there are lots of claims that aid is just a wasted business it doesn't really matter that it's irrelevant that is not modern and in some cases people even claim that it hampers development we have done work that shows that the rate of return on foreign aid during 37 years is 16% per year if I were a private investor you know I'm getting sort of semi-old and I'm sort of starting to think about my retirement benefits if my retirement benefits company had ensured me 16th pretend rate of return on what I have paid into my benefits over the years I could look forward to kite some nice years ahead of me 16% is not a bad number by any measure but that's the overall kind of anchor but it's of course also important to understand what works what could work what is scalable there are lots of interesting experiences out there they're interesting in their own right but can they be scaled up that's what we as development practitioners are interested in and what's transferable what do we know from one area that could be transferred to others are we learning enough from each other across different parts of the world Lena already made reference to the fact that we have had a number of results meetings we are today focusing on the social sectors but we have also had meetings on growth and employment we've had one meeting on governance and we will have meetings on fragility environment and climate and gender equality and all of the insights are going to be distilled in five position papers under these headings but today we will focus on the social sectors so this 16% rate of return has it made any change in the social sectors do things add up do things hang together or have those 16% have they only ended up in the pockets of the rich now what do we mean by social sectors there are lots of definitions out there today when we are talking about social sectors we'll be thinking about health care we'll think about a to education we'll be thinking about aid to water and sanitation and we'll be thinking about aid to social protection I am not saying that there are not other dimensions that are relevant but this is going to be our focus now why is it important to focus on social sectors lots of time aid is seen as just an instrument to promote growth or other things but I think there's something very important to keep in mind here which is that people value the benefits of having a good health people actually do value in their own right to get education sometimes p economists are seeing is some sort of grey people who are sitting in offices or in an ivory tower somewhere we are actually working thinking about people's benefits how they see life what they actually enjoy how we can enrich their lives we're talking about value we're talking about benefits because we want to try to basically increase the welfare of people so social sectors social services they are valuable in their own right because people actually do prefer to be healthy you wake up in the morning and you have a bad health then you're waking up to a tough day if you wake up and you're not undernourished you wake up to a good day it matters in its own right but then of course this is also important because this is a means to promote development and you will see on the one hand you can see that I have put up the poor consistently referred to health and education as critical challenge to escape poverty there is an instrumental app access sorry aspect of this it's a means to try to achieve ends so it's also important in that way an economic theory does strongly associate growth and development overall with what we sometimes refer to as human capital so you invest in human capital you educate people you make sure that they have a good health in order to promote overall growth and development now that then sometimes leads to some very confusing and very disappointing people why because it takes time as a matter of fact if you save some lives today do you know what happens to your average GDP per capita it goes down because those lives that you save today they're not going to be productive tomorrow they are only be going to be productive some way down the road and one of the key results from the Recon program is indeed that the results the return the impact of foreign aid shows up stronger and stronger for every day when you can see it over time when there is time to actually capture the returns to aid that will only come once that child whose life has been improved through better health better education as an adult will then be a productive member of society but that takes 25 30 years the social sectors are also critically in the Millennium Development goals I mean I've listed here just six examples where you can see the social sector aspirations are absolutely critical to the very core of the mgs and now has anything happened in the world well I'm actually pretty impressed by decreases in poverty rates from 1990 to 2008 look here this is not a small achievement so does this translate into anything in the social sectors to people's health well under five mortality rates have fallen everywhere and those fours are not small this is pretty impressive and this is also including sub-Saharan Africa which is the top green one so everywhere you take primary school enrollment I mean when you compare the numbers for 1980 to 2010 and that goes for boys and girls are these improvements that are to not be looked at to not be sort of seen as interesting relevant I would suggest that they are indeed relevant so things are changing there are improvements to be registered there is some sort of reasonable relationship between the overall rate of return I was talking about and changes in the world but let me highlight just so that you don't think that I'm just standing here clapping myself or anybody else on the back the development work is very far from done the fact that there have been improvements the fact that we have traveled part of the way does not mean that the travel is over there is a long way left ahead of us by 2015 there will still be 900 million people in this world who live in extreme poverty there will still be children who get out of school functionally illiterate who can't read and write even if they have completed their primary education the progress in child maternal health care is still too slow and there will still be 2.5 billion people without access to proper sanitation so what are today's questions well they are how effective has for me been in the social sectors what is worked and why what is not worked how much do we know about what works and what else needs to be done to decrease or reduce the knowledge gap how could donor support this and what are the main social challenges for the future I hope that you will enjoy this exchange today I'm hoping that we will all learn and I'm hoping we can exchange information knowledge that we can all participate in this network in this group effort that we come is all about thank you very much for your