(Neil - sorry for making you a guest blogger - without your permission - you raise some very valid points)
Neil:
Thanks for the honour of the new post.
I work for Save the Children and live in Kenya.
My argument is based on logic backed-up by practical experience and is not just theoretical; I hope to give you some concrete examples to convince you and Anonymous.
Your main points are that there is waste and theft of the UK overseas aid, exemplified by what happens in Kenya, that this has led to a hand-out culture, and that therefore aid should be cut.
Further you go on to say in your recent comments that foreign aid is actually holding back development and never works in Africa.
I described the hand-out culture as a myth and would still challenge you and Anonymous to give one example of it. It would help to define what you mean by it; my understanding of a hand-out culture is people waiting around and dependent on the hand-out?
The reason I am so irritated by examples of this very common myth propagation as it plays to a particular view of developing, and particularly African countries, inhabited by an ignorant and feckless population, unable to stand on their own two feet despite the largesse lavished upon them by the West.
This is not what you mean and therefore you must be talking about a hand-out culture amongst the leaders. I think this cuts to the heart of our disagreement:
Who could deny that there is massive and engrained corruption? But sadly if you look at the recent one trillion shilling budget (over 8 billon UK pounds) the money spent previously by DFID (some millions of pounds) on free primary education is not sufficient for the corrupt leaders to be dependent upon it.
In the early nineties there was an aid freeze in Kenya ostensibly to push for political change, and the economy staggered on; with the politcal change (such as it is) largely coming from popular pressure. The leaders didn't bemoan the lack of opportunity to steal from DFID - just got busy with the genesis of Goldenburg, a scam so large that it dwarfed annual gross domestic product let alone aid budgets.
That may be true without making the theft of money from the primary education budgets OK? I would agree, but would like to point out a couple of things:
UK aid in this instance was based on a "sector" approach, which gives more control to the donor and less opportunity for corruption unlike "budget support" which has been used in Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania, with varying success, so there was an intent to contol the situation; second the flow of money was stopped when the theft became apparent - perhaps not early enough, but in sharp contrast to the cold-war era (to which your father-in-law's acquaintance may have been referring) where strategic considerations routinely outweighed any sense or control; thirdly, and most importantly, millions of Kenyan children who would othewise not have gone to school have done so.
neil said... (con't)
Its my turn to give some anecdotes: the DFID funded programme in South Sudan which has enabled the reestablishment of primary education for the first time in two generations and pioneered ways of ensuring girls go to school too; the water and sanitation work in Liberia, where UK aid has funded a consortium of NGOs with several million pounds to establish very successful water and sanitation projects; thousands of lives saved in northern Nigeria (despite the corruption) through immunisation and mother and child health programmes established using British tax payer money; the UKs support to Sierra Leone which is credited with stopping the hideous civil war, and helping it get back on its feet - even though there is still corruption there too; don't you think that children's lives saved and improved is worth the expense and the political commitment of Clare Short and others?
If you call for a cut in UK aid budgets all these sort of programmes would have to be halted; but actually you would be stopping other things too:
Quite a lot of UK aid goes via the European Union, and whatever you think of that, its humanitarian wing ECHO, finances much of the emergency work of NGOs in war zones and disasters across the world.
Some, as I mention, goes in budget support - and you would withdraw that from Rwanda, where despite increasing worries about its human rights approach, they have pretty much zero tolerance to corruption, and have stabilisd the country since the genocide.
The UN system is also a beneficiary of UK aid - and yes some of it is probably wasted and certainly paid on those high salaries you dislike - but you would be withdrawing support just when Kofi Annan has created a new-found relevance of the UN in both development and peace-building.
You would also be cutting some of the money which goes on micro-finance pojects, vocational training, ecouraging entrepreneurship, establishing youth employment programmes and a whole host of things that you would value more than those I have mentioned above.
Unfortunately you would have to scrap the assistance that DFID is giving to developing countries to help them deal with climate change effects, which let's face it, were not caused by them in the first place and are perpetuating poverty.
Last Friday (11th June) in the Standard editorial section there was a letter from the new UK Secretary of State for International Development re-affirming commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI (from 2013) on overseas aid.
He also writes: "In future, when we give money directly to governments in developing countries, we want to earmark up to five percent of the total amount to help parliaments, civil society and audit bodies to hold to account those who spend their money."
Perhaps you can agree that DFID is the best of a bad bunch if you examine some of the policies and procedures of other donors?
I think that despite the theft and the waste it is prejudiced for you to claim that all aid to Africa is ineffective - you really need to give some evidence of this; to go further and say that aid has impoverished Kenyans is nonsensical. What about the part played by the leaders who do the thieving; what about the geopolitical machinations during the post-independence period? What about the debilitating our-turn-to-eat culture that exist?
The argument of looking at waste and theft and damning the whole system and principles behind it is similar to saying that you are scandalised by the expenses that a lot of MPs have claimed and therefore you would like to get rid of them all and be ruled by an absolute monarch and their descendants; its understandable, certainly populist but why not try a bit of reform first?
The diary of a British expat living in Kenya. News, views, debate and a healthy dose of trivia.
Interesting debate. The thing about aid is that those who dish it out always find an ingenious way of taking it back. It is never free
ReplyDeletelink
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Images%20of%20the%20Dying%20African%20border%20on%20pornography/-/440808/952042/-/gcvyrqz/-/index.html
Interesting piece on the sunday nation.
ReplyDeleteImages of the ‘Dying African’ border on pornography
By RASNA WARAH
Posted Sunday, July 4 2010 at 20:13
There is an image of Africa etched in the Western psyche that is hard to erase. It is the image of The Dying African: When not being ravaged by war or famine, this African is prone to die from preventable diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV/Aids.
The Dying African is similar to the Starving African, except that he cannot be saved because he is beyond help. No food aid or relief supplies can prevent his imminent death. No doctor can ease his pain.
The Dying African’s last moments are often captured on film and shown at fund-raisers. The worst images in this genre that I have seen so far are the ones published in the June 14 edition of Time magazine, whose cover story, ironically, focuses on an African success story, namely the FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
In a photo essay, Time has published the dying moments of an 18 year-old woman called Mamma Sessay, who is shown giving birth to twins in a rural clinic in Sierra Leone. Ten images capture Sessay’s slow and painful death as she struggles to give birth to the second twin, nearly 24 hours after the first.
The first image shows her lying naked on a bloody surgical bed, her eyes wild and bewildered as a nurse attends to her. This image is followed by several others showing Sessay’s steady decline: heavy bleeding followed by shallow breath, falling blood pressure, loss of consciousness, and finally, death.
If there was an award for “death pornography”, then these images would surely win a prize. Why is it that death is considered a private, sacred affair when the person dying is not an African, but a public event when the person dying is an African?
As one woman on a listserv called Kenyan Women without Borders put it: “Here, the author and photographer strip Mamma of all dignity, parading her in her very desperate moments for the world to see. Would these pictures have been published if she was white?”
It is possible that this particular photo essay was intended to raise awareness about the high rates of maternal mortality in African countries. The intentions of the editors of Time were probably to sensitise rich nations to do more (i.e. give more aid) for maternal and reproductive healthcare in developing countries.
But while these images might shock Westerners into digging deeper into their pockets, they have the unintended effect of disgusting the very people they are supposed to help. Moreover, they reflect double standards. Americans and the rest of the world are never shown images of dying US soldiers in Iraq, and under President George Bush, Americans didn’t even get to witness their funerals.
But a dying Iraqi is game for any photographer or journalist. Westerners give their own dead the respect they deserve, but strip others – Africans in particular – of this respect at every opportunity. Many Westerners do not understand why these images are so revolting to so many Africans. After all, as Michael Maren, author of The Road to Hell, put it, these images are supposed to edify, sensitise and mobilise Westerners into doing more for Africa.
But, he writes, it is not simply a matter of charities raising more money for starving or dying Africans. It is about self-affirmation: “The starving African exists as a point in space from which we can measure our own wealth, success and prosperity, a darkness against which we can view our own cultural triumphs.”
It helps, he says, if the African is portrayed as both helpless and brave. “Journalists write about the quiet dignity of the hopelessly dying. If the Africans were merely hungry and poor, begging or conning coins on the streets of Nairobi or Addis Ababa, we might become annoyed and brush them aside. When they steal tape decks from our Land Cruisers, we feel anger and disgust. It is only in their weakness, when their death is inevitable, that we are touched.”