A few remarks about IDRC

by Philippe Boucher (2010-05-06)

First thank you for indicating I was at the origin of the story. At the time my main concern was (still is) that IDRC had not managed properly the $5.2 million grant awarded by the Gates Foundation. I checked Barbara McDougall's bio because I wanted to email her directly, as IDRC's Chair to protest the way the grant had been managed: quite an irony.

Of course the fact she was a Director of Imperial Tobacco Canada has become the main concern for the media and nobody has looked seriously at IDRC's performance in managing this grant: the African partners received around 30% of the funds (from what I was able to calculate), what happened to the rest? As this grant was -by far- the biggest ever allocated to fund tobacco control in Africa it was especially important but no serious independent evaluation is planned. The ongoing in house "independent review" appears anything but independent.

At the heart of the McDougall's story is -in my opinion- the lack of transparency and public disclosure.

It is not by chance that this conflict of interest was not shared with the Gates Foundation or the tobacco control community: this grant was awarded right when Barbara McDougall became Chair, in December 2008.

I cannot believe the IDRC leaders and staff did not know about the link with Imperial Tobacco but they did not say anything despite the fact there is a detailed policy about conflict of interest and how they can be processed, including adequate protection for the "whistle blower".

Of course they could have simply leaked the information (and lose the grant?).

To get back to the assessment of IDRC's performance it is very difficult to obtain an "honest feedback" in these matters: the people who receive funding never question their funders, the donors of course never like to admit they made mistakes and in this instance the Gates Foundation itself does not provide any detail: any reference to this grant has disappeared from their website except for the press release about its termination.

What does such a termination entail? Was there money left? What about the evaluation? What's next? No answers are provided to those questions.

There are many lessons to learn from this story but they are not going to be learned if there is not a detailed investigation and evaluation of what has been achieved or not and how the funds were used.

One last word about Barbara McDougall and Imperial Tobacco: I have not seen any official document from Imperial Tobacco stating she was no longer on their board. It is frequent for a Director to receive stock in the company they serve so I wonder if she is a stockholder and/or if she divested from this stock if there was any. Of course it would also be interesting to know what her compensation was: serving as IDRC's Chair is not lucrative (about $10K per year?) but as Pascal Diethelm found in the tobacco archives, BAT had been (in the past) very interested to have someone inside this organization.
Institutions like IDRC should be proactively transparent and one should not have to rely on the Access to Information Act to obtain the information.
Strangely enough I could not even find on IDRC's website the name of the person to contact in reference to the Access to Information Act. Why is that?

Not that this matters much as this name is available elsewhere, as was the information about Barbara McDougall and Imperial Tobacco.



ISSN 1911-2092