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OPINION:IT’S EASY enough to sit at a desk and take a red pen to a budget, chop a few million here, a couple of thousand there, until the desired bottom line emerges. But what does this mean for real people in the real world? As I sit here in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, I am faced with a dilemma, writes ANNE O'MAHONY

We are at the planning stages of our 2010 programme, and my budget has been cut. When the 2009 budget was cut, we discussed as a team how those cuts would be implemented. We agreed that we would do everything possible to prevent programmes being cut.