Sunday, 12 June 2011
A female worker picks tomatoes at the Badam Bagh farm on the outskirts of Kabul. The farm teaches workers better methods of farrming and is funded by USAid, the US development agency, as part of its $2.6bn aid package to Afghanistan. (File Photo)
Do the United States and other Western nations waste billions of dollars in development aid that distorts local economies, keeps the recipients dependent on outside help, fosters corruption and does little to break the link between poverty and violence?
The answer, in many cases, is yes, judging from three recent reports that suggest it’s high time for the rich world to change the way it helps the world’s poor.
Two of the reports were issued in June by American committees and dealt specifically with US aid to Afghanistan. The third, the World Bank’s World Development Report, came out in April. All three questioned long-held assumptions – one being that development in conflict zones helps stabilize them, the other that high economic growth is the most important key to reducing the poverty and unemployment that breed conflict and violence.
Let’s look at Afghanistan first. A huge flood of US dollars over the past ten10 years of simultaneously fighting a war and engaging in development projects has distorted the economy beyond belief – all but 3 percent of the country’s GDP derives from spending related to the presence of US and coalition troops and the international aid community. Inflated salaries paid by international organizations, the Senate report said, are drawing qualified Afghan civil servants away from the Afghan government and created “a culture of aid dependency.”
“For instance, wage levels for Afghan government staff such as teachers, health workers and administrative staff are in the realm of $50 to $100 a month but drivers, assistants and translators for aid projects are paid upward of $1,000 per month,” says the report, adding that perhaps the most important step the US could take would be to agree with the Afghan government and aid organizations to standardize salaries.
Development aid to Afghanistan is based on the theory that it helps win the “hearts and minds” of the population and that poverty contributes to support for radical groups fighting the Americans.
Not so, the report found. There is “a surprisingly weak evidence base for the effectiveness of aid in promoting stabilization and security objectives.”
In a country with an unbroken history of hostility to invaders, from Alexander the Great and the British to the Soviet Union, this probably should not have come as a surprise to those examining the impact of. US development aid, is now running at around $10 million a day, more than to any other country. But the experts’ way of looking at the problem is conditioned by decades of international aid policies build around the concept of the so-called poverty trap.
In that thinking, the poverty trap, for example, catches farmers who know their harvest would be improve by buying fertilizers. They don’t because there are no roads to bring the bigger harvest to market. The solution, aid experts have long argued, is for rich countries to step in and build the road, thus alleviating poverty.
The World Bank report, breaking with much conventional thinking, leaves the reader to wonder whether countries are violent because they are poor or poor because they are violent.
“While much of the world has made rapid progress in reducing poverty in the past 60 years, areas characterized by repeated cycles of political and criminal violence are being left far behind, their economic growth compromised and their human indicators stagnant,” says the report, and it goes on with questions worth pondering.
“How is it that, almost a decade after renewed international engagement with Afghanistan, the prospect of peace seem distant. How is it that entire urban communities can be terrorized by drug traffickers? How is it that countries in the Middle East and North Africa could face explosions of popular grievances despite, in some cases, sustained high growth and improvement in social indicators?”
The answer to the last question is straightforward: Both Tunisia and Egypt had annual growth rates of around 5 percent, enough in theory to bring down poverty. What those growth rates did not do was benefit the majority of the population and address problems such as joblessness, repression and corruption. Conventional aid programs do nothing to solve this.
What would?
First of all recognition by the technocratically-minded international aid community that many of the obstacles on the way are political and cannot be overcome by building roads, schools, hospitals or power plants.
One of them serves as Exhibit A in a report by the US Commission on Wartime Contracting on wasteful aid spending. It is the Kabul Power Plant, a $300 million project that “is little used and the cost to operate and maintain it is too great for the Afghan government to sustain from its own resources.”
Change will come slowly not only because old habits die hard but because the problem is so huge. According to the World Bank, more than 1.5 billion people live in countries where political violence runs high, organized crime is rampant and government is weak.
(Bernd Debusmann is a widely read international journalist and writer on foreign affairs based in Washington. He can be reached at: bdebusmann@aol.com)
The answer, in many cases, is yes, judging from three recent reports that suggest it’s high time for the rich world to change the way it helps the world’s poor.
Two of the reports were issued in June by American committees and dealt specifically with US aid to Afghanistan. The third, the World Bank’s World Development Report, came out in April. All three questioned long-held assumptions – one being that development in conflict zones helps stabilize them, the other that high economic growth is the most important key to reducing the poverty and unemployment that breed conflict and violence.
Let’s look at Afghanistan first. A huge flood of US dollars over the past ten10 years of simultaneously fighting a war and engaging in development projects has distorted the economy beyond belief – all but 3 percent of the country’s GDP derives from spending related to the presence of US and coalition troops and the international aid community. Inflated salaries paid by international organizations, the Senate report said, are drawing qualified Afghan civil servants away from the Afghan government and created “a culture of aid dependency.”
“For instance, wage levels for Afghan government staff such as teachers, health workers and administrative staff are in the realm of $50 to $100 a month but drivers, assistants and translators for aid projects are paid upward of $1,000 per month,” says the report, adding that perhaps the most important step the US could take would be to agree with the Afghan government and aid organizations to standardize salaries.
Development aid to Afghanistan is based on the theory that it helps win the “hearts and minds” of the population and that poverty contributes to support for radical groups fighting the Americans.
Not so, the report found. There is “a surprisingly weak evidence base for the effectiveness of aid in promoting stabilization and security objectives.”
In a country with an unbroken history of hostility to invaders, from Alexander the Great and the British to the Soviet Union, this probably should not have come as a surprise to those examining the impact of. US development aid, is now running at around $10 million a day, more than to any other country. But the experts’ way of looking at the problem is conditioned by decades of international aid policies build around the concept of the so-called poverty trap.
In that thinking, the poverty trap, for example, catches farmers who know their harvest would be improve by buying fertilizers. They don’t because there are no roads to bring the bigger harvest to market. The solution, aid experts have long argued, is for rich countries to step in and build the road, thus alleviating poverty.
The World Bank report, breaking with much conventional thinking, leaves the reader to wonder whether countries are violent because they are poor or poor because they are violent.
“While much of the world has made rapid progress in reducing poverty in the past 60 years, areas characterized by repeated cycles of political and criminal violence are being left far behind, their economic growth compromised and their human indicators stagnant,” says the report, and it goes on with questions worth pondering.
“How is it that, almost a decade after renewed international engagement with Afghanistan, the prospect of peace seem distant. How is it that entire urban communities can be terrorized by drug traffickers? How is it that countries in the Middle East and North Africa could face explosions of popular grievances despite, in some cases, sustained high growth and improvement in social indicators?”
The answer to the last question is straightforward: Both Tunisia and Egypt had annual growth rates of around 5 percent, enough in theory to bring down poverty. What those growth rates did not do was benefit the majority of the population and address problems such as joblessness, repression and corruption. Conventional aid programs do nothing to solve this.
What would?
First of all recognition by the technocratically-minded international aid community that many of the obstacles on the way are political and cannot be overcome by building roads, schools, hospitals or power plants.
One of them serves as Exhibit A in a report by the US Commission on Wartime Contracting on wasteful aid spending. It is the Kabul Power Plant, a $300 million project that “is little used and the cost to operate and maintain it is too great for the Afghan government to sustain from its own resources.”
Change will come slowly not only because old habits die hard but because the problem is so huge. According to the World Bank, more than 1.5 billion people live in countries where political violence runs high, organized crime is rampant and government is weak.
(Bernd Debusmann is a widely read international journalist and writer on foreign affairs based in Washington. He can be reached at: bdebusmann@aol.com)
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