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The last decade has been boom time for the aid business.
Money and resources have poured in. Britain now proudly claims to be the
second-largest overseas aid donor in the world, behind only the United States.
The amount of money and its “successes” are impressive. The chosen vehicle
for Britain’s “fight against world poverty” is the Department for International
Development (DfID), which enjoys an almost semi-autonomous role within the
Government.
DfID, which was set up in 1997 after Labour came to power, now has an annual
budget of £5.3 billion. By 2010 this will have risen to £7.9 billion. The
Department has a total staff of 2,446 — who are often recruited from outside the
traditional British civil service.
Partly as a result of Tony Blair’s messianic zeal, much of the money has gone
to Africa, where many embassies and high commissions have changed beyond
recognition. They are now dominated by DfID staff and their fleets of new cars
emblazoned with its logos and slogans. “They have the money and the programmes
and they call the shots,” a recently retired ambassador told The Times.
But he also accused them of naivety when dealing with Africa’s notoriously
venal leaders, dragging Britain into unhealthily close relations with countries
such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, which have poor governance records.
“We are constantly faced with pulling the plug on our own programmes or
holding our noses and staying in . . . The host governments know that perfectly
well — but DfID types say you can’t make poor people suffer more for the fault
of their governments. That is oversimplistic.”
In 2005, DfID suspended direct budget support to Ethiopia after its
Government shot dead opposition protestors, but it carried on giving £130
million directly to aid programmes via local authorities so that the
beneficiaries would not suffer. Ethiopia, which faces a new food crisis, has
received an additional £22 million in emergency support since January.
“I simply do not see how the Government can claim this was a rap on the
knuckles,” the former diplomat added.
The entire GDP of Sierra Leone — ranked the poorest country in the world in
the latest world index — is currently put at £400 million. At present it
receives ten per cent of that, or £40 million a year, from DfID despite frequent
and mounting concerns of high-level corruption.
DfID maintains that its aid helps millions of the world’s poorest to survive
and even move out of poverty altogether, and that the Government is honouring
international commitments to increase aid. Britain spends 0.5 per cent of
national income on aid and is committed to meeting the UN’s target of 0.7
percent by 2013 — ahead of the agreed European Union date of 2015.
Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, said recently:
“Every year our aid helps to lift around 3 million people permanently out of
poverty and empowers poor countries to provide basic services such as health and
education.”
In the last 10 years, DfID sources say, British aid has put 28 million
children into primary school, trained hundreds of nurses in Malawi, provided
basic water and sanitation in Ethiopia, and fought HIV/AIDs across Africa and
Asia.
Much of this is true, but a growing band of sceptics say it tells only half
the story.
Many nurses trained in Malawi, where there is a severe shortage, ended up
coming to work in the National Health Service. DfID then ended up financing a
scheme to pay them better wages at home. The “brain drain” was reduced, but is
still high.
In Uganda and Mozambique, DfID trumpets its success in increasing hugely the
number of girls enrolled in primary school. Much less noise, however, is made
about the fact that fewer than 30 percent make it all the way through the
system. “They drop out for reasons of poverty — that makes it all the more
necessary to eliminate poverty,” a senior department official said.
Critics say, however, that it is precisely the money lavished on some of the
most incompetent governments in the world which prevents them taking measures
for higher economic growth.
Nicholas Oppenheimer, Africa’s richest man and the chairman of De Beers,
recently told The Times that the aid approach was in fact an obstacle to growth.
“Far from making poverty history, a reliance on aid has too often guaranteed
poverty’s survival and done nothing for development or democracy.”
Department
for International Development has diplomacy in Africa - Times Online
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