of the consultation is influenced by a deliberate attempt to speak to people outside capital cities and beyond those usually consulted during national development planning and global priority discussions.
HOW GLOBAL IS THE CONVERSATION AT THIS EARLY STAGE? With 36 countries reporting interim results of their ongoing national consultations, approximately 130,000 people have contributed to national dialogues thus far. Almost 50,000 people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and over 20,000 in the Asia Pacific region have taken part in the national consultation process. In Uganda alone 17,000 people have taken part in U-report, a free SMS-based service designed to give young Ugandans a chance to voice their opinions on issues that they care about. While fully disaggregated data are not yet available,
most countries have engaged people in urban and rural areas with a good gender balance. In Jordan, for example, out of 1000 people engaged in face-toface consultations, 43 percent of people are from outside the capital city, and 45 percent are women.14 The Addressing Inequalities consultation commissioned 175 in-depth background papers, over one third of which from Asia, Africa and Latin America, in addition to nine issue-based discussions moderated by experts from the UN and civil society which garnered 1375 individual contributions. In addition to active websites and Twitter conversations, the Water, Education and Health consultations have convened in-person discussions among 800, 700 and 1600 people, respectively, in all regions. People from Brazil have been the most active in ranking development priorities on the MY World survey, with roughly 9000 online votes, ahead of Egypt, USA, Ukraine, UK, Cameroon, Liberia, Mexico and Spain.
MY World ‘Mark a Difference’ (Video: UN)
LIMITATIONS OF THIS REPORT While the final validated results of almost 100 national and thematic consultations will not be available until June 2013, it is already possible to make a preliminary analysis of the partial set of information gathered so far.15 For this report we draw on preliminary data from 36 nationallevel dialogues in countries where the agencies of the UNDG support ongoing programmes. These are being complemented by active regional consultation processes at various stages of completion. Several of the 11 thematic consultations are approaching conclusion, while others have only preliminary outputs at the time of publication. This report is a reflection on the ongoing global consultation process. Looking at a slice in time, it is an effort to reflect a coherent narrative across these consultations. As consultations are organized differently according to national context or thematic purpose, the results are not fully comparable. Countries and themes which appear more frequently in this report are indicative of the availability of interim conclusions at the time of publication. Finally, this report is not a summary of the consultations; each national, regional and thematic consultation will have a devoted report as an accountability measure to the thousands of individuals who have contributed their views, concerns and perspectives to these discussions. 2
10 T H E G LO B A L CO N VERSATION BEGINS: EMER GING VIE WS FOR A NE W DE VELOPMENT AGENDA