The reality of aid… is that it
continues to fail to promote human
development for the eradication of poverty
based on the core values of human rights,
democracy, gender equality and
environmental sustainability. This is despite
the appearance of progress in the form of
high-profile debt cancellations, new aid
pledges, and the signing of the Paris
Declaration on aid effectiveness – Caterina Amicucci
Globalization has done a lot in bringing the suffering of the world’s poor directly to the attention of people living in high-income countries. And if the current reports from the United Nations is anything to go by, there is plenty of suffering. According to current statistics, almost half the world population— over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day; about 80 percent of the world’s population live on less than $10 a day; more than 80 percent of humanity live in countries where income differentials are widening; the poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income; 25,000 children die quietly each day due to poverty in some of the poorest villages on earth; around 27 percent of all children in developing countries are underweight or stunted, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; of the estimated 2.2 billion children in the world, 1 billion of them are in poverty. Of these, over 270 million are without adequate shelter, lack access to safe water, and have no access to health services.
In 2004, an estimated 969 million people – more than 18% of the world’s population – lived on less than roughly $1/day per person and were thus classified as “extremely poor” by global standards (Chen and Ravallion 2007). Indeed, outside of China, the developing world has not enjoyed any sustained progress over the past quarter century in reducing the number of extremely poor people. Meanwhile, in some regions the number of extremely poor people has increased significantly. In sub-Saharan Africa, even in the face of population growth, the extreme poor have consistently accounted for 41-48 percent of the subcontinent’s residents since good estimates began around 1980.
Whilst the Paris Declaration calls for ownership, alignment, harmonization, managing for results and mutual accountability, the reality is that many donor countries are still engaging in practices which deliberately contravene good practice expectations.
For decades, there has been a concerted effort to fight the spread of poverty and there have been numerous declarations to that effect from the United Nations (UN) to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Billions of dollars have been committed to this cause but we have seen little gains in terms of seriously reducing poverty around the world from the United States to Haiti; Zimbabwe to Bangladesh; Spain to Venezuela.
William Easterly (The White Man’s Burden; Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and so Little Good, (Penguin Press, 2006), p. 4) put in succinctly:
[A tragedy of the world’s poor has been that] the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get three dollars to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths.
… It is heart-breaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can’t get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children.
The reason is very simple: foreign aid is being channeled through the very same ruling elite responsible for the propagation of deep poverty in the first place; poor governance, corruption and mismanagement, the legacy of colonialism, the support of the rich nations for repressive regimes, the creation of the debt trap, the massive failure of Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank and the deeply unfair rules on international trade. The role of the rich nations in creating the conditions for the poverty crisis cannot be denied.
Secondly, a lot of the so-called aid is directed at projects not directly related to the improvement of the lot of the poor in these communities. As Evan Osbourne noted about donor countries, as well as the U.S., in their aid strategies in past years:
* The US has directed aid to regions where it has concerns related to its national security, e.g. Middle East, and in Cold War times in particular, Central America and the Caribbean;
* Sweden has targetted aid to “progressive societies”;
* France has sought to promote maintenance or preserve and spread of French culture, language, and influence, especially in West Africa, while disproportionately giving aid to those that have extensive commercial ties with France;
* Japan has also heavily skewed aid towards those in East Asia with extensive commercial ties together with conditions of Japanese purchases;
For example, when the United States announces that it spent $20 Billion in foreign aid to Pakistan, there is no mention that the money was for military weapons which will ultimately be bought from the U.S. military industrial complex thus recycling that money back to the North American economy instead of injecting it into the local economy. As the IPS put it:
* Credits for foreign militaries to buy US weapons and equipment would increase by some 700 million dollars to nearly five billion dollars, the highest total in well over a decade.” (This is also an example of aid benefiting the donor!)
* The total foreign aid proposal … amounts to a mere five percent of what Bush is requesting for the Pentagon next year.
* [U.S. foreign-aid plan [in 2005] actually marked an increase over 2004 levels, although much of the additional money was explained by greater spending on security for US embassies and personnel overseas.
* As in previous years, Israel and Egypt are the biggest bilateral recipients under the request, accounting for nearly five billion dollars in aid between them. Of the nearly three billion dollars earmarked for Israel, most is for military credits.
* This militaristic aid will come largely at the expense of humanitarian and development assistance.
In cases where some of the money is spent on domestic developmental projects, corruption and graft seriously depletes the funds and very little trickles down to the needy.
Another example is the Palestinian territories where constant bombardment and the eternal state of siege makes it impossible to see any meaningful gains in the use of foreign aid in the fight against poverty. In Somalia, Haiti, Sudan, and other troubled states that have become the faces of poverty-stricken societies, there is very little to show that several decades of massive infusion of foreign aid is doing much to reduce poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the grinding poverty which is the daily existence of most of the population is largely ignored until there is a newsworthy uprising or bloodshed that temporarily draws attention to the situation in the particular country involved.